By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

On a warm night about two months ago in the Pennsylvania mountains, a remote camera snapped a picture that has set the Big Foot believers of the world on fire.

A quick search of the Web can show you the pictures I’m referring to. They were taken by a motion-triggered camera set up in the woods by a hunter trying to get picture of some of the game animals using a particular area. Within a week of the pictures being retrieved from the camera, the basement computer room “Big Foot Experts” of the world had deemed this a confirmed big foot sighting and even went on to let us all know it was a juvenile big foot, which I guess they determined through all the other photographs they have of adult, baby and adolescent big feet.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission, which is made up of old sticks-in-the-mud like biologist and zoologists, commented on the photographs and deemed the creature in the pictures a skinny and mange-ridden black bear. The internet big foot experts have “reverse de-bunked” (I don’t know if I coined a new term there or not) the Game Commission’s mangy bear claim using some experts they know who are into “primates and stuff.”

These experts claim the creature in the picture is for sure some kind of monkey-like critter and for sure not a bear. I’m not here to berate you if you believe that there are big feet or sasquatch roaming the hollers of Pennsylvania, actually I do want to berate you but I don’t have the space here, but I just want to offer some other insight that creature in the picture may not be yeti or yogi.

The first look I took at the pictures my gut reaction was that this thing has to be John Rhys Davies. Davies is the guy who played the character Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies and most recently swung an ax as Gimli in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. He has a jib cut much like the creature in the Pennsylvania pictures.

If Davies can confirm that he was working in British television, like acting in some boring Masterpiece Theater production, I’ll give him a pass on being the creature and move on to my next logical explanation, Star Jones. Follow me here, the big foot experts are claiming the creature is too skinny to be a bear, so who do we know has some new found free time and has lost a bunch of weight, has a pretty big head and might be game to show off her new figure while streaking through the woods of the Keystone state…survey says Star Jones!

Maybe I’ve been looking at the pics too long now, but I’ m seeing another possibility. To get you to see what I’m talking about you may need to add a red chef’s hat or a lime green tam to the creature in the picture, but with either of those additions you can see that there is an 83.7 percent chance the creature is actually Dom Deluise. You’ll say, “Sean there is no way that emaciated creature is one portly Dom Deluise.” and I’ll answer when was the last time you saw Dom? What if on a trip to the Poconos this summer he was lost in the mountains and now he is just a frame dripping with skin searching the backwoods for the ingredients to make a tasty pizza?

I’m not trying to debunk the big foot claim just for debunking’s sake; I’m just saying in this wild mysterious world there may be other less pedestrian explanations to controversial images than “it is just another big foot.”

Next week onto ghosts and the possible Hollywood waifs that might be mistaken for apparitions.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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