BFRO Invades Wisconsin
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on May 19th, 2006
The Phillips Wisconsin Bee is reporting that the BFRO will be descending on undisclosed locations in Wisconsin for 2 consecutive weekends in June-July. The expeditions are scheduled for June 22-25 and June 29 to July 2.
The expedition was spurred in part by the accounts of a local man who claims to have seen a bigfoot on two different occasions in the Lugerville area. Don Young told THE-BEE that the eyewitness sasquatch accounts, which are featured on the BFRO Web site but are not attributed, are his. Young says his most recent sasquatch siting was in September 2003 in a cedar swamp near Rock Creek Road.
Young claims that he and a 6- to 7-feet tall bigfoot creature engaged in a sort of cat-and-mouse game for almost an hour. He had another encounter in a swamp three miles away about a year earlier, he says.
The area where Young says he saw the sasquatch is primarily county forest land. THE-BEE asked Eric Holm, a Price County forester, whether he has ever seen any evidence of bigfoot.
"Well yeah," he said sarcastically. "But I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want people to think I was crazy."
Holm said one of his colleagues wears size 15 boots, and that person might go barefoot in the Lugerville area before the expedition arrives.
BFRO prides itself on detecting hoaxes, according to its Web site.
Have they already forgotten about the Sonoma footage?
I wonder if "Mark Nelson" is planning a trip to Wisconsin?
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
As if Sasquatch research isn’t difficult enough already, let’s bring in the clowns!
Is it a good idea or a bad one? Well I think it would have been a good idea if someone attempted this only to try and see if the BFRO can distinct a good set of hoaxed footprints. But I wouldn’t have announced it. Now the BFRO might be “kind of ready” for such a test.
Maybe I’m misreading this, but aren’t you getting a little catty? Yes, the Sonoma thing was a huge black eye for the BFRO, but this just sounds like a typical investigation. Two reports, including a personal follow-up on the second one, with an opinion both on the environs and the individual making the reports. Seems sound, regardless of what some ‘Price County Forester’ snarks about it.
You guys have voiced very legitimate differences with the BFRO in the past. This one just seems like an arbitrary swipe for absolutely no solid reason I can find. Stick to your own reporting and save the cat fights for Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
BFRO are ordinarily quite a serious organisation with a good website, I think hubris & arrogance led them to screw up on the Sonoma footage. It is sad that they can’t find the honesty to post a retraction & explanation on their goof. Taking the page down was lame, since it is still accessible via google cache.
However, we ALL lose from the Sonoma debacle, so making fun of BFRO is a bad idea. We’re all in this together, & if Hominid research groups start sniping at one another, cryptozoology will descend into the same miasma of internicine bickering that has crippled UFO research for two decades.
Independant reseachers calling into question the credibility of one another only creates an impression that neither one possesses it.
Especially when the subject is already on the margin. Same issue different day-no standard methodology-no common organization that sets practice-no dialog with traditional science-alot of opinions lacking basis-conjecture as a safe assumption. Guess where this is going.
I agree, it’s time to call a truce and try to work together for common goals, or at least keep differences behind closed doors. As Chymo noted, all non-mainstream fields of inquiry tend to fall into this trap.
Cryptomundo is solely a news and commentary site. It is not an investigative organization.
Just as Arianna Huffington has done with the Huffington Post, we have “created an Internet publishing venture featuring an innovative group blog” featuring some of the “names” of cryptozoology, and me.
I am not calling into question the 2 reports mentioned in the article, I just gave links to them so people could reference them easily mrdark. The article mentions the “fact” that the BFRO prides itself on detecting hoaxes.
Chymo, lamarkable and jayman once again, Cryptomundo is a cryptozoology news and commentary blogsite, not a research organization.
Good Morning Craig….
Nice to hear from you…hope all is well…wish I had known about 350 dollar Wildman…we would have loaded him in ole bub’s Tundra and taken him to Jefferson…my treat…check it out…
Wild Bill’s Museum in Durant…had nothing to do with William Hickok of “aces and eights” fame….it was a tourist stop on the long road to Dallas from Tulsa…
ole bub and the dawgs
“Holm said one of his colleagues wears size 15 boots, and that person might go barefoot in the Lugerville area before the expedition arrives.”
THOSE are the clowns to whom I was referring, not the BFRO.
S’quatch researchers have had to deal with fools since day one, plus the fringe “expert” whackos ~ but that’s the nature of this game; something about a serious-minded Bigfoot Investigator or Expedition pushes the Jokester button on these buffoons.
“Where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.” ~ Thomas Gray, “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College” 1742
Personal opinions aside, the BFRO is out there, doing the field work that has to be done, and dealing with the clowns ~ someone on one of their trips will probably capture the images we are all waiting for, and then we’ll see what the clowns have to say.
If anything.
“Chymo, lamarkable and jayman once again, Cryptomundo is a cryptozoology news and commentary blogsite, not a research organization.”
That’s not really relevant. If you’re just a news site, then a) let’s understand that your editorialising will impact on the opinions of readers, & b) HuffPo & other weblogs don’t delete comments just because the content upset the authors.
As far as I’m concerned, the writers here are Bigfoot researchers, irrespective of Cryptomundo’s charter. Loren Coleman represents one of the most legitimate & believable researchers in the field. It is important to maintain a level of discourse that doesn’t bring this field into disrepute.
IMHO, at this point, the only thing saving Bigfoot research from total ignominy are the few researchers who maintain a serious attitude to the work, & the many thousands of people who have had sightings, or know people who have, & who know that the issue is a real one. These people turn to sites like this for legitimate info on the subject.
BFRO screwed up big time, & it will haunt them for a long while. There but for the grace of God go we, my friends.
I must add that I’m not really reacting to Craig Woolheater’s comment in the main article, which is reasonably fair (BFRO need to come clean about the Sonoma debacle), but on potential attitudes of posters who might be tempted to take sides.
Comments are not deleted because they upset the authors.
Comments are deleted when they do not follow the terms of use for the site, as well as when they are off-topic.
Respectfully, if you do not have a horse in this race, quasi-militaristic headlines using words like “invasion” that denotes territoriality to be defended as well as the content which had an editorial edge whether you recognise it or not evidenced by the response to it, mine included. You do not do any research via this blog outside of opinion gathering, but it is an extension of other involvement in the field, is it not?
Meanwhile, nobody from the BFRO has contacted the forestry department about camping permits, Holm said.
Nuff said…
Craig, why is that “nuff said?” The first excursion is more than a month away, and, from what I gather by a quick internet search, there are plenty of federal and county campsites in that area of Wisconsin. From checking out a site that allows one to reserve such campsites online, I find that there are literally hundreds of available sites in the area for that time period as of this morning.
Plus, there appear to be numerous private campsites. Perhaps BFRO *has* already secured tent sites with one of those?
Call it whatever you want Craig. A week or two ago you and the whole Cryptomundo gang were “up in arms” about the audacity of MM and the BFRO commentary. Since then all references to that commentary and even the title of Only research Org has been removed (MM cleary taking the high road). Then hear you are now taking an unprevoked shot. I believe your readers are starting to catch on to the media double standard that you and that gang use with reckless abandon.
1. Step on corn-ouch
2. Poke with stick.
You are not required to have a permit to camp on USFS lands. However, you are required to have a permit to run a “for-profit” guide service on FS lands. Meaning, if you charge folks to provide a service that uses FS lands, you need a Special Use Permit. When the BFRO held an expedition on my forest, I obtained the permit for them in advance. I am no longer with the BFRO.
Thanks for the additional info, Kathy. That being said, though, just because they haven’t applied for a special use permit does not mean a)that they need one for the specific location they’re going, or b)that they do not intend to get one if they do need one. Again, they have a month still.
For those of you who might wonder or care, no, I have no connection whatsoever to BFRO. I’ve visited their website twice to my knowledge, both times from links presented on Cryptomundo.
I do not belong to BFRO. Based on your commentary-I visited their site. When I returned I found this earlier commentary
from this site
“The BFRO has always taken an elitist Western approach in dealing with Malaysian sources, giving them advice and BFRO “insights” on how the Johor investigations should be conducted. The BFRO, mostly as a front to the opinion of one man, has extended this international “advice giving” recently to Nepal, as noted on April 22. Some of the BFRO’s advice, as we have seen, is neither cautious nor factually-based in historical reality.’
I was unaware of it when I posted my ealier comments. To say I am disheartened as to the contention and disrepute to all this brings to all is an understatement.
jeremyDC,
You can call it an unprovoked shot if you like. I just published the link to the article, highlighting the sighting reports from the area, as well as a comment on the hoax detection claim.
You are a member of the BFRO public use forum, don’t know if you are an actual investigator for the BFRO or not.
Matt is a member here, and has commented before.
However, my membership to the BFRO public use forums was originally approved, and then disabled by an administrator.
You might want to do a little research on the history of Bigfoot research to see how often the high road is taken by Matt.
I’m a skeptic who doesn’t believe in cryptids.
I don’t understand why people here are saying that BFRO should be forgiven. The major infraction here is not that they were hoaxed, but rather that they covered it up. Legitimate scientists do not cover up mistakes. They admit them and give reasons why the mistake happened so that other scientists can avoid making them.
The BFRO covered up the Sonoma debacle because it knows that its reputation is the only argument they have. So it is willing to do anything to maintain that reputation. Legit researchers know that the truth surfaces regardless of the researcher’s reputation.
If you want to be seen as a legitimate scientist, then you want to distance yourself from people who are not. That’s more important that community solidarity. BFRO can still recover from this, but now they not only have to admit to being hoaxed but also to covering up said hoax.
However this doesn’t mean that being hoaxed is OK. The point of a hoax is to show credulity. For example there is a famous hoaxing of Noah’s Ark researchers in the 1980s where a guy claimed to have made a discovery that was instantly believed by everyone despite a lot of contradictory claims. it showed the people’s desire to believe was far more important to them than their skepticism. If BFRO continues to quickly swallow up questionable stories they shouldn’t be brought back in period.
hi craig & loren i hope the bfro does find possible sasquatch footprints and other evidence in wisconsin forests i hope they also have sasquatch experances etc. i also hope they have a great & safe time on their wisconsin expedition. i hope they put nightvision cams in wisconsin forests where sasquatch activity is realy known. thanks bill 🙂
While the “I wonder if “Mark Nelson” is planning a trip to Wisconsin?” comment could be construed as more than a little ‘snarky’ I think some of the commentators here are being a little thin skinned.
The crux of the article above is that, due to pre-expedition publicity, some folks are already threatening to attempt some hoaxing.
While my skeptic alarm goes off just on the fact that our “woodsman” waited six months to submit his second sighting, which doesn’t seem to jibe with the excited tone of the report, that is ultimately irrelevant. The important thing here, and what I think Craig was going for, is a warning to the BFRO to be on their toes in light of threats to hoax in the form of prints from a man with extra long feet.
hey if they find something I hope they share it with everyone. And good luck to them. I do think some things about that group can be questioned but that is not for me to take up. And to anyone out their looking: I hope the best for them and that no harm comes to them in the great outdoors.
More than ever, there has to be a consensus moving forward, especially in rules of engagement. Already hunting postures and behavioral cues such as mimicking, baiting, chasing, herding etc have done incalculable damage, evident in response which is a preexisting determinant in encounters, which are reinforced continually.. Doesn’t one consider oneself a predatory omnivore with unpredictable behavior already
known to prompt learned instinctual behavior in it’s prey? Run. I safely predict if one is cornered, it wont be a Walt Disney encounter. Everyone needs to agree on these things, what is allowed as self protection? Now is not the time to tally scores.
OK, I hate to be the one to do this, but what in the heck does this mean:
“Already hunting postures and behavioral cues such as mimicking, baiting, chasing, herding etc have done incalculable damage, evident in response which is a preexisting determinant in encounters, which are reinforced continually..”
It reminds me of circular “management talk” where people use “power words” but aren’t clear in what they are trying to say.
I want to understand what you are saying here lamarkable, because I feel like there is SOMETHING in there about the impact of human/Bigfoot encounters, but I just ain’t following.
I tried to telegraph the general idea-there is no short response if I want to give you a respectful answer.
Look at the behavior that consists of fleeing-hiding-walking away when territoriality would likely mandate a defense, or when fear is interpreted as aggression causing a defense in other creatures-given intelligence, the behavior changes to avoidance. In species has intelligence, as we understand it in ourselves in addition to instinct, we have memory. Perhaps, for the sake of our scenario-this behavior is not an instinct-it is a learned behavior that is taught based on both observations and prior encounters. Can you predict human behavior? We have more unpredictability in our behavior than most. Perhaps this known and a path of avoidance is a social recognition. We know to avoid some categories of other species because they are unpredictable. As simple as that. Precautions-if there is intelligence-I would rather err on the side of caution-avoid some of the behaviors that could be recognized as a hunter after prey. Bad mimicking-artificial-electronic etc of vocalizations could be seen in this light as a lure-which is what it is. Chasing is more obvious for prey. I have seen some use Indian style herding techniques used to drive them to a predetermined spot. If there is a certain level of intelligence –how does this appear? Any creature when cornered will attack-one with intelligence could as well. They are not going to walk up and shake our hands and vocalize a greeting. Most of the recordings I have heard evidence the opposite. For good reason. I see nothing to view this otherwise. So-what do you do when one is corned in your quest, to defend yourself-shoot it? What do you do to protect both parties? I see a horrible event coming soon-I wish I could see it otherwise. We need protocols-in addition to ethical ones -well thought out in advance. Do we make it up as we go along as we do now?
Everyone makes mistakes. They have been left with a blackeye recently, so I wish them well in their research. Despite their troubles, they may be the first to give substantial proof of the animal’s existence.
lamarkable raises an important point:
“We need protocols -in addition to ethical ones -well thought out in advance. Do we make it up as we go along as we do now?”
Unfortunately, with the random nature of cryptid encounters and the uncontrolled components of most well-intentioned expeditions, establishing sighting parameters and protocols, while ethically, morally, scientifically, intellectually and otherwise admirable, may be an exercise in frustration.
Methinx that, in the adrenalin-fueled excitement and confusion of an actual cryptid confrontation, all bets are off and the cow-chips will fall where they may!
There is danger in the field…
We also need an advisory board of sympathetic university level experts- a conference or symposium sponsored by a learning center with multi-disciplinary
topics. Long overdue. Time to grow up as a field. Beyond safety protocals-disclosure protocols-alot of energy is spent saying-look its over here-look its over there. It takes a leader in the field to step up to the plate. We might not get there-but this topic can be brought forth in a sincere call to open minds with these concerns in mind. In this case,nothing exists if it isnt written down.
Agreed…sasquatch needs a well thought out set of Protocols…”Rules of Encounter/Engagement”…widely distributed to as many field folks as possible…JMHO
Regarding self-defense…only in protection of others and then something less than lethal….pepper spray as an example….you chose to encroach upon them….”mess with the bull….you get the horns”…JMHO
seeing is believing….
ole bub and the dawgs
OK, now I understand, and agree to an extent. However, it depends on just what cryptid we are dealing with.
For instance do we stick to the same set of strict protocols and rules of engagement we have established for hominids if we are tracking one of the giant monkeys? What about an unknown pongid?
My suggestion would be to follow the example of other primate field researchers, such as Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. However, when we see what Fossey’s reluctance to financially exploit mountain gorillas may have earned her, and consider the increased pressure that would be placed on anyone studying the “legendary” Bigfoot, it does give one pause, especially when considering how soon to go public with any information on studies either planned or in progress.