As I'm sure the entire GTA V hunting community knows by now, the Goatman has remained one of the most controversial pieces of evidence of all time. I've spent a lot of time showing how the Rockstar Social Club photos provided where hoaxed, but that couldn't completely disprove the myth. For a long time, even I considered that the original photo of the Goatman was un-debunkable and had to be true. That changed for me today...
Just this week I had discovered the original source material for the North Yankton Creature hoax, found here. Today, out of curiosity, I returned to the same Google Images result and clicked on the "View More" tab for related images. As I scrolled down, I got instant deja vu from one of the photos:
A cropped version of the artwork "The Pope Lick Monster" that I found on a website related to cryptozoology.
I realized that it looked extremely similar to the original photograph of the Goatman. The shape of the head, the light chest area, the dark area on the crotch, the position the beast was standing in. Almost everything seemed to match. This is no surprise to me, considering Boomer has made hoaxes in the past using common photos of monsters (like the North Yankton Creature shown above, or this photo for The Swamp Monster.)
I opened up Paint.net and instantly began to experiment with different sizes, and I was shocked at what I saw. No matter what quality or size I would use to resize the image, each result would appear exactly identical to the Goatman spotted by Boomer. The only differences I could spot was the color (I admit, I could have deduced this myself, but because of how many different mini-versions of the Goatman I had made and the vast amount of possibilities for saturation and brightness/contrast changes, it's just too much work) and the horns of the creature.
As you can see, the recreations are too similar for it to be a coincidence. Surely, I could have invested more time to get a more accurate color scheme, but I feel that's unnecessary as the similarities already show enough proof for a hoax.
So what can we extrapolate from all of this? The Goatman photograph is a hoax, made using an image of the Pope Lick Monster with minor saturation changes and custom horns added by the hoaxer. Case Closed.
Thanks to Indep for some minor help during this case.