Chance Encounter
Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 9th, 2009
I am getting reports from a couple people that Bigfooter Bob Chance’s court appearance has occurred.
“Bob Chance is just out of the courtroom on his sentencing today and received 18 months probation and 120 hours of community service – with no jail time unless he breaks probation or fails to complete his community service,” reports one informant.
Now there is mainstream media coverage of the outcome:
‘Santa Bob’ sentenced for growing pot on Christmas tree farm
Harford County ecologist earlier pleaded guilty to two drug charges
By Jonathan Pitts
11:55 AM EDT, March 9, 2009
Robert C. Chance, a 62-year-old Harford County ecologist and former high school teacher, was sentenced today to 18 months of supervised probation and given a two-year suspended sentence in Baltimore County Circuit Court for growing marijuana and possessing psychedelic mushrooms last year on his 7-acre Environmental Evergreens Tree Farm.Chance, known as “Santa Bob” to the children who flocked to his Darlington farm to buy Christmas trees each winter, pleaded guilty in December to two drug charges. Prosecutors and Chance’s attorney, Augustus Brown, had previously agreed that he would serve no more than six months in jail. He had been charged with five counts, including possession with intent to distribute marijuana, and faced up to 20 years in prison had he been convicted on all of them.
He was sentenced by Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge John G. Turnbull II, who handled the case after it was transferred from Harford County. Judges there recused themselves because they are acquainted with Chance, a member of the Harford school system’s educators’ Hall of Fame who also served as a Bel Air town commissioner in the 1970s.
Chance, who retired from teaching in 1999, has run nature camps for children as Ranger Bob, a name he also used years ago in appearances on the children’s television show Romper Room. He was an early advocate of recycling, wrote a nature column for a local newspaper and taught courses on nature through the Harford County Public Library.
Harford County detectives and investigators from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration raided Chance’s farm in May and found 19 growing marijuana plants, more than a pound and a half of packaged marijuana in freezers, and about 33 grams of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
The federal government then filed a civil complaint to seize Chance’s house and farm under a law that allows the taking of land used for illegal drug dealing. After paying a $35,000 fine in December, he was allowed to keep the property, said Brown, Chance’s attorney.
Brown had argued for leniency on several grounds, including his client’s standing in the community and the fact that he had “faithfully completed” a 26-week outpatient recovery program at Father Martin’s Ashley treatment center in Aberdeen.
A fellow patient in the program, Michelle Short of Perryville, testified today to Chance’s “substantial character” and said his “grandfatherly presence” had helped others recover.
Turnbull told the courtroom he was convinced that Chance took his rehab seriously. “I certainly don’t believe he poses a threat to the community,” the judge said. “If anything, he poses a danger to himself.”
After the hearing, Chance, dressed in a blue blazer and khaki slacks, fought tears and declined to comment.
As part of his probation, Chance will perform as yet unspecified community service in Harford County and continue in the recovery program.
When Bob Chance was first charged, a couple stories about him mentioned the “Bigfooter” part of his bio, and then most focused on the “Santa Bob” aspect of his personality.
It’s worth noting that the first paper that initially reported on Chance’s arrest and blared “Bigfoot Hunter” on its front page – The Baltimore Examiner – ceased operations on February 15, 2009.
Thanks to fuzzy and goodman.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Damn shame that the case was ever even brought to trial, if the only evidence of ‘criminal activity’ was the marijuana and mushrooms found at his home. Now the court has been tied up for months determining a sentence and this eminently harmless man is out $35,000 that I suspect he can hardly spare and branded a criminal for the rest of his life.
RANGER BOB from ROMPER ROOM, folks.
If marijuana had been legalized (and taxed) 40 years ago, the world today would be a better place.
It’s ridiculous to jail people for growing marijuana while subsidizing other people to grow tobacco. But that is exactly what our country did for decades. Now we’re paying people not to grow tobacco. But we’re not fining and jailing them if they do grow it.
Most people who use marijuana are otherwise law-abiding citizens. It’s time to lighten up and allow them to have their weed,
I’m glad to hear that Chance doesn’t have to serve jail time. He sounds like a very good man that anyone, with any good sense, would be a better person for knowing. He also sounds like he has done many good things for his community and elsewhere (kids TV show), it would have been a shame for a person like that to spend time in jail.
I personally have known Bob Chance for over 35 years. At one time, he served as Mayor of Belair and was a well-known & respected high school teacher, who regularly took students on nature outings along Deer Creek in central Harford County, MD, to show them that “truth is stranger than fiction”.
Bob was a confirmed believer in the presence of Bigfoot Creatures across Harford County, Maryland where he led hundreds of Bigfoot expeditions from late 1960s thru late 1990s. He and I both worked several Bigfoot Creature cases in the mid-1970s. The most outstanding one was when a motorist driving near Rocks in Harford County late on a foggy night, struck ‘large creature’ standing on the 2 lane road. During the field investigation, the news media jumped at the idea, the motorist had hit a ‘sasquatch-type” creature.
However after careful field evaluation, we found the wooden fence surrounding the farm pasture had been breached, allowing for several black angus cows to wander onto the Rocks Road. In the fog, the driver mistook a 1,200 pound black angus cow for a “bigfoot type creature” & struck it. Hair from the cow was found stuck under the car’s bumper. After analysis at the Pikesville MD State Police Headquarters Lab, the hair was determined to be from the bovine species, meaning a cow was involved, thus solving this strange case.
However, as a 30 year volunteer investigator of strange phenomena for the MD State Police & dozens of other law enforcement agencies across the east, we conducted hundreds of field investigations which led to conclusions of Sasquatch creatures & one specific incident of a UFO exploding over a north-central Maryland field.
Hundreds of cases involving strange phenomena were investigated across Maryland & nearby mid-Atlantic States by our group known as Odyssey Scientific Research, whose Field Researchers included News Director Louis E. Corbin, Bob Chance, Courtney Jordan, Tex Byers & this writer (John A. Lutz) along with assistance by Zoologist Dr. Ted Roth, Chief U.S. Air Force Investigator, who was Northwestern University Prof. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, University of Arizona Phyicist Dr. James McDonald & world-renown Naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson from late 1960s to late 1990s.
Our true life adventures across Maryland’s roads & countryside will never be forgotten.