some kind of tabloid joke?
Now they are, but when their tracks were first being taken seriously in the early 1950s, they were studied in great detail by several highly qualified scientific researchers, Ivan Sanderson being the foremost among that group. Unfortunately for scientists, after a decade or so it became obvious that they could not easily explain what hominoids were or where they fit into the scheme of higher primate life on Earth. That being the case, they shunted discussion of them into the tabloids to spare themselves the continued embarrassment of having to confess their inability to explain the phenomenon.
