April Fools Joke Becomes Law

...or bigfoot can put you in jail.

On April 01, in 1969 Skamania County, Washington was the first official U.S. governmental body to legally recognize Bigfoot as a species. By passing of Ordinance 69-01, Skamania County declared the killing of bigfoot illegal; punishable by a $10,000 fine and 5 years in prison. Although originally an April Fool's joke, it sat in the books for over a dozen years before becoming an official statute with legally binding consequences.

In 1984 the ordinance was repealled and amended as ordinance 1984-2. The new ordinance reduced the fine and jail time to “gross misdemeanor” status. Don't be fooled by the lighter misdeameanor status, due to an exception written into the ordinance, if the animal (Bigfoot) is found to be humanoid, the person who killed the Bigfoot will be tried for homicide.


Even more interesting, the more recent ordinance sets up all of Skamania as a “Sasquatch Refuge.” The reason – Bigfoot is an “endangered species” in Skamania County. Skamania does not claim Bigfoot is endangered overall, just within its own county lines.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Skamania County's official Ordinance Listings (look for 1984-2)
The entire ordinance text

Pinky Finger Reveals New Hominid

Thomas H. Maugh II of the Los Angeles Times reports DNA evidence extracted from pinky finger indicates that at least four species of human-like creatures walked the Earth at the same time.

More hominids strengthens the argument for the likeliness of a yet undiscovered primate lurking the hidden landscapes of the world. An exerpt from the article is below.

LOS ANGELES -- DNA from a 40,000-year-old pinkie finger, belonging to a child and found in a cave in Siberia, indicates that the bone is from a previously unknown family of human relatives that lived among Neanderthals and modern humans, German researchers reported Wednesday.

The discovery, if confirmed by research already under way, would mark the first time that an entirely new species of hominid has been identified solely on the basis of DNA sequencing, the team reported online in the journal Nature. It also suggests that other currently unknown species could be similarly identified.

With the recent, and still controversial, discovery of the Hobbitt-like species Homo floriensis that survived in Indonesia until about 13,000 years ago, the evidence now indicates that at least four species of human-like creatures walked the Earth at the same time. The find suggests that "40,000 years ago, the planet was more crowded than we thought," wrote evolutionary biologist Terence A. Brown of the University of Manchester in an editorial accompanying the report.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Read the whole LA Times Article

Time Magazine Takes on Bigfoot--Kind of.

Techland is a time.com technology site in partnership with CNN, which is owned by Time/Warner, formerly AOL Time Warner, and formerly two separate corporations until Warner Communications, Inc. and Time Inc., (along with the assets of a third company, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.) formed the current Time Warner.

All this corporate back-story is important, otherwise they wouldn't have turned a regular logo (as seen above) into a black book branded with every media corporation it slept with.

What about Bigfoot? Okay let's get to it. Doug Aamoth is Techland's gadget reviewer, and blogs about gadgets. Today he picked Bigfoot. Ah ah ah, we know Bigfoot is not a gadget, but that does not stop Doug from reviewing him.

The story is nothing new; it has a link to BFRO.Net, ponders the paranormal aspects of bigfoot by quoting Dolores Cannon's book, The Convoluted Universe, Volume 1.

“Any mountainous area where there are snow-capped ranges has this creature. And this creature is extremely shy and afraid of men. It's psychic in the way that it can sense other creatures from a great distance. Usually they hide whenever they sense other creatures. These are related to man in a way. They're kind of like man's little brothers. They are developing intelligence and this planet is capable of supporting more than one intelligent species, if the currently dominant intelligent species will allow it…

…When this species reaches its full potential, it will be equally intelligent as man, but in different ways. And both species will have to do a great deal of adjustment to deal with each other. Because this species is lacking the violent streak that is in man, they are extremely sensitive and shy…

…But they do a good job of hiding. They live all over the planet. They are in the very high remote mountains, as well as the deep rain forests of the tropical areas of the planet. They have adapted to differing climates and altitudes, but they prefer the isolated areas.”

He quotes Dolores Cannon a second time and concludes Bigfoot's elusiveness may be due to ESP. you can read all this good stuff at the links provided below.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Doug's Techland Post
The Convoluted Universe, Volume 1