You summed up the difference between the not so romantic reality of field work (eating moldy pancakes) and rolling in to talk to the press and sleep in a comfortable hotel bed with a belly full of beef steak, and you did it in a really funny manner.

Loren is correct I shouldn’t have made an analogy between a bona fide researcher and a carnival barker.

One Eyed Cat…I agree…however rather than trying to fund a single venture perhaps crypto folks should support the researcher or organization of their choice….broadening the scope of our search…JMHO

I listened to an excellent interview last night with Kathy Strain by Brian Brown…it’s available at BFF…well worth a listen..IMHO

No Bucks…No Bigfoot…

ole bub and the dawgs

Now if he would just take that and do something real he just might hit paydirt.

Yanno a bunch of BF interested people putting a little aside for a while then putting it all together to pay for a quality expedition just might get good results, instead of waiting for another Tom Slick.

enough is enough with this joker..

-the truth is swampy

Anyway, as Harold Stephens reports today on my blog here at Cryptomundo, Rick Noll is over in Malaysia, specifically in Johor, filming a documentary on the situation over there…

Agreed. What needs to be done is to organize (and fund) a long term in-field study.

My girlfriend is a macrobiotic chef/teacher and we have had some conversations about the best way to sustain (nutritionally) a long-term field study. She is of the opinion that any preserved foods you could take in with you would need to be completely sealed from moisture, pests and spoilage, etc. and that probably one of the best ways to both sustain themselves, and get out in the field where one is more likely to see these creatures, is to forage for a significant portion of your fresh food.

This, of course, would make a specialist in the local flora of the region to be studied absolutely necessary. This person’s assistance would be invaluable not only in helping supplement a diet of dry rice and canned beans with “Russian asparagus” (young cat-tail shoots) and the like, but also in determining if the areas plant life could support the foraging of a large mammal, what it is they would be likely to eat, and where one should focus their attention based on the seasonal availability of different plant food sources.

Perhaps some light container gardening at the base camp could be used to supplement diet as well, but the big thing with any long term field study is to get in as light as possible and be able to spend as much time as possible in the field before disrupting things by calling for more supplies to be delivered/driving out for supplies.

I appreciate people like Rick (who I believe Loren’s last post noted is in SE Asia right now) for having the fortitude to withstand moldy pancakes and I wish I had the money of a Tom Slick to support the efforts of Noll and others.

Perhaps something else that is needed is a more coordinated effort where those with more media savvy do the “dirty work” of dragging attention off the Biscardi’s of the world and focus the spotlight instead on the efforts of those in the field.
Much as we sometimes hate the press and their disrespectful treatment of our field, more attention means more web-site hits and associated ad revenue, more books sold and more potential involvement in those organizations, like the TBRC, trying hard to verify these various sightings.

Much as we all malign the media, and much as the media play up the “kook quotient” for ratings and writing to an “eighth grade level”, my time with newspapers has shown me that, 9 times out of 10, readers appreciate and respond to well thought out, intelligent discussion.

I hate to even say this, but maybe we should take a page from the TB play book here, and I don’t mean spending a couple hours tromping past the fence-rows of a subdivision, calling it an expedition and moving on to the next rube willing to shill out one thin dime for a chance to peek at “the Hand of Unknown Origin”. I mean dedicating some folks to field research, real field research, and others to parlaying the media attention of the “silly season” into potentially fund generating opportunities to support that research.

JMHO.

And besides, it isn’t like we’d have to look too hard to find someone more telegenic than TB.