Byrne at Bobbie’s Blasts Bob
Posted by: Loren Coleman on April 1st, 2010
April Fool’s Day seems like a good day to post this one. You get to decide who is the fool.
Back in October 2009, Peter Byrne allowed Bobbie Short to use her Bigfoot Encounters to host part of the deconstruction of the Bigfoot hero Bob Titmus. The revelations stirred up Bigfoot discussion boards and debunkers forums by creating a bit of revisionist history with a piece by the former recipient of funding from Tom Slick and Robert Rines, over at Short’s website. It all was happening concurrently with the MK Davis and David Paulides business extending the “murder at Bluff Creek” theories. Clearly camps were forming, and Byrne wanted to jump in with the one that was attacking Bob Titmus.
William Parcher at the Randi forum wrote this at the time: “I have said that Titmus may have been the most prolific Bigfoot hoaxer of the Classic Era. But I had not yet read this humdinger…”
Drew at the Bigfoot Forums noted that Byrne is “calling into question Bob Titmus’ credentials.”
Comments were made aplenty. LAL wrote on the BF: “That’s hilarious. Thanks for posting. It doesn’t, of course, make Bob Titmus a hoaxer….I’ve always liked Peter Bryne’s ascerbic wit. John Green thinks he’s a fraud. I’ve always liked Green’s ascerbic wit, too. Bob Titmus seem to have been unique in that he didn’t write any articles or books.”
Squonksquatch made the observation: “I don’t think I should accept Byrne’s accounts as ‘real’ more than any other BF ‘hunter.’ To go to such lengths to smear someone doesn’t say much about the person doing the smearing (and who hasn’t exactly brought the big guy in for show and tell himself, has he?)….Byrne…may have just been returning the favor if Titmus had said unkind things about him. But I’ve always thought if the BF ‘community’ spent more time actually researching rather than running down the the reputations of others then the mystery of what’s going on might actually get solved one day.”
AlbertaSasquatch added this in: “Byrne was just jealous because he wanted to be portrayed as the great tracker. It’s also very easy to smear the name of a dead man, who’s not going to disagree with you right. Not only that but he throws Tom Slick’s name in there as a witness to all of Titmus’ bumbling. Slick, who is also dead, can’t disagree with him. I find it funny, as in it doesn’t add up, that Titmus could be such an imbecile in front of Slick, yet he managed to keep his job with Slick and kept getting paid by the same man who witnessed all of these bumbling antics?”
…to ask him as many questions as we could about his knowledge of Pacific Northwest wildlife, local conditions, Bigfoot lore and history. We did this because he has been described to us an expert woodsman and a veteran in forest lore (and indeed, was being employed as such by Tom Slick) and we were very keen to gauge the extent of his knowledge and, if possible, of course, apply it to our own work. To this end we managed to detain him long enough to get him to reluctantly agree to a short walk with us down a dusty logging road near our camp, one on which, within ten minutes of walking, we found a set of Black Bear paw prints. The prints, about six inches in length, were old, faded and were typical bear, with the short forefoot print and the elongated “banana shaped” rear imprint. Titmus, however, looked at the prints for two or three minutes and then promptly declared them to have been made by a young Bigfoot……Titmus photographed and measured them and later we heard that he had sent the photographs to Tom and described them as genuine prints of a young Bigfoot.
…What Titmus said he had discovered, his secret project from which we were all excluded, was something extraordinary. It was, simply a place in the mountains where a Bigfoot-and maybe more than one-came to defecate on what appeared to be a regular schedule. In other words, a permanent Bigfoot toilet. As Tom talked, I could see disbelief on the faces of the others. Nevertheless, we listened politely as he went on. The plan, he told us, had been for Titmus to show him the place in question, after which an operation would be designed, one that would include a 24/7 watch on the area and possibly the use of planes and helicopters and additional support teams, including scientists, as needed. We would all be part of it and the object of the plan would be, at the very least, to document any BFs coming or going to the site, via still and motion-picture photography. There could be a possibility, Tom thought, of making face-to-face contact with one and even, farfetched though it might sound, the exciting prospect of communication….
…He said that Titmus was wide-eyed with what looked like fear and as the footsteps got closer and closer, he had to admit that he was not far off panic himself. Then, suddenly, out of the Manzanita brush to their left, a large brown object walked into view. It was not, however, as Tom expected, a Bigfoot, but a medium-sized, brown-colored pony on the back of which sat a medium- sized old man, a Native American, dressed in a leather jacket and a battered felt hat and with a thick black ponytail hanging down his back. The old man rode up to the little tree, got off his mount, removed two small baskets from the back of the pony, tied the pony to the tree and then turned around to stare directly at the two men lying prone at the edge of the clearing….
…Tom told us, the pony made a generous contribution… We never saw Titmus again. We heard that he went straight back to Redding, packed up and then drove his battered old car all the way to Bella Coola, in northern British Columbia, where he took up residence, and employment, as a taxi driver. We did hear, later, that he tried once more to develop an association with Tom, dubiously claiming another sighting somewhere, this time, he said, of two of the creatures. But Tom was not about to have anything more to do with him after what we all laughingly called “The Great Pony Poop Caper.” Nor was I, or any of my associates.
…an analysis by myself and my team of Titmus’ work and behavior produced two conclusions. One, that he had discovered the clearing and the dung pile by accident and that his background and experience in the northwest forests were so limited and immature that he really believed that his great find was something other than what it really was, i.e., equine feces.
Or, two, that the whole episode was nothing less than a clever scam, from beginning to end, one that gave him a year’s comfortable earnings via a healthy retainer and expenses and, in addition, temporarily at least, his longed-for reputation as a master tracker and expert on the Bigfoot mystery.
Of the two, the latter conclusion seems the more likely for it seems incredible that anyone who has spent more than a day in the outdoors could mistake horse or pony droppings for anything other than what they obviously are. Peter C. Byrne 2009
- Similar Phenomena:
The whole bit seems pointless really. Infighting won’t produce anything but more discredit to the field of bigfoot reasearch.