NEWS: Bigfoot in India?

Terrified villagers’ claims that “Bigfoot”-like hairy giants are roaming northeastern India’s remote jungles have prompted the country’s government to begin an investigation.

Villagers are referring to the humanlike creatures as Mande Burung and have reportedly spotted the “Jungle Man” several times in the Garo hills region of Meghalaya state, an area of India that borders Bangladesh and Bhutan, according to the Agence France-Presse (AFP)

One local farmer, Wallen Sangma, told the AFP that he spotted an entire family, saying, “The sight was frightening: two adults and two smaller ones, huge and bulky, furry.”

And while it seems a big step for a country to undergo a government-endorsed investigation, it’s not the first country to conduct one. Malaysian authorities  looked into Bigfoot sightings in 2006, leading many critics to call it a ploy to attract more tourism.

Perhaps, pointedly then, the A'chik Tourism Society in Garo Hills claims to have hair samples of the creature and say they have photographed footprints and “nests.”

"Since 1997, we have been documenting Mande Burung sightings and telltale signs such as giant footprints," Dipu N. Marak of A'chik Tourism Society, an adventure tourism group, told the Hindustan Times.

Bigfoot is a common figure in rural folklore worldwide; called Sasquatch in North America, Yeti in the Himalayas, Yowie in Australia, Almas in Siberia, and Hantu jarang gigi in southeastern Asia.

British explorer David Thompson is widely credited with the first discovery of a set of Sasquatch footprints in 1811, and hundreds of alleged prints have been discovered since then. Roger Patterson’s grainy 16mm clip of a beast loping across a meadow in northern California in 1967 (see video below) added to Sasquatch-believers claims in the United States.

Some say Bigfoot is an elusive remnant of the Neanderthal, others say it is a decent of the gigantic 1,200-pound ape known as Gigantopithecus blackii, and others say it’s a giant myth fabricated like Nessie the Loch Ness Monster.

Then again, the colossal squid was considered a mythical sea-dwelling beast until its discovery by a Russian trawler in the Ross Sea in the early 1980s. There’s no word yet from Bollywood whether they are going to make a film with the working title Harry & the Parikhs.