<p>Residents here gathered around television sets Sunday night for the airing of National Geographic's documentary on Hogzilla, the tusked, south Georgia super swine that was killed last summer on a nearby farm.</p><p>A picture of the alleged 1,000 pound, 12-foot animal hanging from a backhoe made international news. However, many wondered if the giant hog that hunting guide Chris Griffin claimed to have killed was nothing but a giant hoax.</p><p>Despite that chance, the south Georgia town of 680, located 180 miles south of Atlanta, adopted the Hogzilla theme for its fall festival, with a parade featuring a Hogzilla princess, children in pink pig outfits and a float carrying a Hogzilla replica.</p><p>Eager to uncover the facts, National Geographic brought in a team of experts last fall to exhume the behemoth's remains. Wearing yellow biohazard suits, they studied the smelly carcass and took DNA samples that showed Hogzilla was part domestic and part wild boar.</p><p>Ken Holyoak, owner of the 1,500-acre fish farm and hunting preserve where Hogzilla was shot, claimed the hairy heavyweight weighed 1,000 pounds, measured 12 feet and had 9-inch tusks.</p><p>But the National Geographic experts estimated Hogzilla's length at between 7 1/2 and 8 feet and its weight at about 800 pounds.</p><p>Hogzilla's tusks, one measuring 17 and 10-sixteenths inches and the other 15 and 13-sixteenths inches, set a new Safari Club International North American free-range record, said Nancy Donnelly, who produced the Explorer documentary.</p><p>Darlene Turner of Jernigan's Trustworthy Hardware hosted a Hogzilla party at her home while 11 guests watched the 8 p.m. episode of Explorer on the National Geographic Channel.</p><p>"Our insides were just bubbling," she said. "At first, I was afraid it might be an embarrassment. But now I wish everybody could see the documentary. It would take the doubt out of people's minds."</p><p>Holyoak issued a "rebuttal" Monday morning after seeing the documentary.</p><p>"Let me start off by bragging on the tremendous job that the National Geographic crew did," he said. "I need to stress that they did not have that much to work with, seeing as how the poor beast had been underground for nearly six months."</p><p>Holyoak said Hogzilla weighed in at half a ton on his farm scales and that he personally measured the hog's length at 12 feet while the freshly killed beast was dangling by straps from a backhoe.</p><p>"As with any organic being after death, tissues will decompose and the body will atrophy, making actual measurements change over time," Holyoak said. "Have you ever seen a raisin after it was a grape?"</p><p>But Donnelly said, "We allowed for some shrinkage in the final measurements."</p><p>While the forensic exam may not have confirmed Holyoak's claims, it did show that Hogzilla was unusually large.</p><p>"He was an impressive beast," Donnelly said. "He was definitely a freak of nature."</p><p>Mark Hall, a south Georgia native who now teaches English at California State University in Chico, Calif., donned his Hogzilla T-shirt Sunday evening and invited about a dozen friends to watch the documentary.</p><p>"We had a number of pork-related dishes," said Hall, who spent his childhood in Albany, Ga. "I'm not sure what folks expected, but they learned a lot about south Georgia," he said. "Most of my friends know I'm prone to exaggerate when I tell a story, so these folks weren't surprised at all to see that these fellows in south Georgia may have stretched the truth."</p><p>For Hall, getting the scientific facts on Hogzilla was somewhat of a letdown.</p><p>"Now it's not a legend, not a myth," he said. "I thought it was a much more interesting story when we could just imagine and just retell the story.</p><p>"Anybody from the Deep South knows that ... a believable story starts with a kernel of truth," he said. "It starts there, but it doesn't necessarily end there."</p><p>The documentary left open the possibility that some of Hogzilla's offspring may be getting fat in the cypress swamps near Alapaha, but it could be years before there's another a legendary hog like the one buried beneath a white cross on Holyoak's farm.</p>
