Indian Ivory-Billed Elvis Sightings!

Authorities in India are looking into sightings of a giant, hairy, "jungle man" in Northeastern India. The report notes - apparently with a straight face, that the beast may be a lowland variant of a yeti.

The creatures have apparently been spoken of, and occasionally spotted, for years, but a rise in the number of sightings over the past month has prompted authorities to look into the matter further.

The bizarre sightings have reportedly been made in the Garo hills area of Meghalaya state, close to the borders with Bangladesh and Bhutan.

Villagers have dubbed the mysterious creatures "Mande Burung" — or Jungle Man.

"A team of wildlife officials and other experts will conduct a study to find out if there is any truth in the locals' claims about these hairy giants," said Samphat Kumar, a district magistrate in the West Garo Hills district.

One local farmer, 40-year-old Wallen Sangma, claimed he had seen an entire family of the creatures — possibly a lowland relative of the Himalayan Yeti, or perhaps a distant cousin of the North American bigfoot known as Sasquatch, or Australia's Yowie.

"The sight was frightening: two adults and two smaller ones, huge and bulky, furry," he told an AFP reporter who visited the remote area on Thursday and Friday.

"Their heads looked as if they were wearing caps, and their colour was blackish-brown," he said, adding that the four "monsters" were about 30 to 40 metres (100 to 130 feet) away from him as he looked for firewood in a forest area.

"The four of them quietly vanished into the undergrowth," he said of the recent sighting.

Now, here's what should give this story away for what it actually is. One of the lead groups "investigating" the sightings is - wait for it - a group that promotes tourism in the region.

One Garo Hills group, the Achik Tourism society, has been trying to verify the creature's existence for the past 10 years, photographing footprints and thatched "nests" reported by locals.

"The descriptions given by people who saw the creature point to Mande Burung," said its head, T.K. Marak, a zoology professor at the state-run university in Tura, 323 kilometres (200 miles) from state capital Shillong.

We just love a good tourism scam.