Did the Henry County, Virginia, Sheriff's Office confirm images of a bigfoot? No, that's not true: Capt. Scott Barker with the sheriff's office confirmed to Lead Stories on the phone that their department has not seen or validated any images of the mythical creature, nor have they seen the creature in their county.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) where it was published on Facebook on July 28, 2021 by Daniel Hanks. It opened:
UPDATE: the Henry county sheriff's department just validated the photos, and the finding Bigfoot team has been deployed to Henry Country. I will update as information comes in.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Jul 29 17:32:18 2021 UTC)
The person who posted the images appears to live in or near Martinsville, the county seat of Henry County, Virginia, so Lead Stories reached out to the Henry County Sheriff's Office for confirmation that they had seen and validated the images.
A bemused Capt. Barker quickly called Lead Stories on July 29, 2021 and confirmed that their agency had not seen the photos, nor had they been directly approached to validate them, although they were aware of images making their way around on Facebook. Barker confirmed that their agency had not seen any "bigfoots," images of a bigfoot from their area, or anything of the kind.
According to an article in the Stillwell, Ohio, Democrat posted on July 28, 2021, the images may date back to a similar claim made in 2013. Lead Stories has been unable to independently confirm whether those images are indeed faked as the Stillwell Democrat author declares.
