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^^ Cat, In all seriousness, the questions you're asking shouldn't be answered (in a legal sense) on a blog. The question of what is required will depend upon the entity (private, state, Federal, tribal) that owns the land. The question of how few or how many people in an organized, sponsored group will depend on the liability insurance policy of the organizing group. The questions of revocation for a medical professional would depend on the licensing entity in each state. I'm going to go out on a limb here and state with a high degree of confidence is that not a single person here is qualified to answer all of those questions.

Since I'm currently reading Lee Berger's book on the discovery of A. sediba and H. naledi, it has been on my mind to see what the lessons of those discoveries might bring to this debate. It has some points to ponder on a couple of issues shared with the BF question, and the point of this thread. Fossil Remains: I of course always knew this on some level, but Berger's book really brings home the reality of just how small the entire fossil record is for our ancestral hominids and those collaterally related to us. Vanishingly small...like (up until the discovery of H. naledi) you could pretty much put it in a good sized shoebox, or at least a small suitcase. And this is presumably the total record of multi-species comprised of possibly billions of individuals over millions of years. Think about too about the thousands and thousands of man-hours invested in trying to find just this small amount of bones. The greater point being, of course, BF science has never had that kind of effort brought to bear on it. The places that effort has been expended is not (as far as we know) where BF fossils are likely to occur either, so the serendipitous find is off the table as well. In fact, we don't even know where that place is, if it exists at all. It is sort of obvious, but in order to find something, it has to exist. Might BF exist, but the fossil record for it does not? Or, if it is so small a record, could finding any trace of it be virtually unlikely to ever occur? Either way, you get no bones. Lack of a Body: Another lesson from the discovery of H. naledi. The only conclusion the team of scientists could reach about how the multiple individuals came to be all together in that remote chamber of the Rising Star cave is that they were deliberately placed there after their death. They were put there systematically, over a long period of time. This was done by a species with a brain 1/3 the size of ours. It took considerable effort and intention to do that the first time, and afterwards it became a cultural process they obviously did over and over again. Maybe the species had been doing it for millennia, or maybe they were unique and this was aberrational behavior, we just don't know at this point. But only due to a chance encounter by a caver who was looking for bones like those do we even know about it. Most fossil caches occur in Africa due to animal predation and scavenging, especially by leopards. These naledi bones were out of reach of animals, which might have been the purpose for their interment. Even more remarkable, somebody had been in that chamber of that cave in modern times...they found a cave survey marker attached to a wall...but made no note of the bones lying around. This goes to show you... not only do you need to have a person in the right place, but they must also be looking for what is there. That, and also that hominids are sneaky. You never know what they might do, probably something you don't expect, and it will take you a long, long time to figure it out.

A little update from Chicagoland. I got out to the forest preserves a couple times this weekend, Edgebrook Woods on Friday and Sidney Yates Flatwoods on Sunday (basically the same patch of woods). I found some wood sign at Edgebrook of the more subtle type, but it encouraged me to return: e.g. (sorry for poor photography skills throughout) So returning yesterday to the larger patch of woods, I took a deer trail off the main path and immediately found this: (side view) (view from below) There were some other interesting things along this path, I can post pics if there's interest but I don't want to go too crazy with embedded images here. Suffice to say, arches pinned by downed trees in ways that would be hard to occur naturally, as well as line drawing in the mud of the river bank: an X intersecting a + forming a triangle. I didn't actually photograph that because I was hesitant to associate it, but now I kind of regret it... Anyway, a little walk further down the main path, found this guy: I know there's varying degrees of skepticism over this kind of sign here, but for me these are a pretty good indicator of a stop on a travel route. Have you looked at where I was on a map yet? The BFRO Chicago sightings show a route up and down the Des Plaines River, but this is further East along the North branch of the Chicago River. Let me back up a little further and remind you of those teepees that appeared mysteriously overnight in the rain on UoC campus. I didn't get pics because I was late for a conference, but on Saturday May 6, there were two small stick structures in a similar location; a four-stick free-standing teepee, and a mini-lean-to, both maybe 2-3 ft high, right next to each other. These were across from the elementary school, so it's easy enough that it's kids playing around, I know.... it's also a stone's throw from the Metra tracks. Now, what about this: Sorry it's small, I took this sitting in morning traffic on Lakeshore Drive near the Lawrence exit. This was end of March. Sorry, but.... more homeless making a tent frame for their tarp...?? The location of this makes it audacious for Sasquatch, even moreso than UoC, but.... this thing stood there for probably 2 weeks through some serious wind and weather. I just don't know anymore. The slightly crazy, audacious idea that's still kind of kicking around my head that connects all of these things is that they use the North Chicago River forest preserves as a travel route, and actually get up there from the South directly through the heart of Chicago, using a combination of the Metra tracks, lake front, and river corridors.

Nah.You're making the common mistake of equating squatch to an animal, (in the bear, wolverine sense) and by doing so going down the wrong path. This is why people who try and locate/photograph/trick them as if they were just another animal fail..ALL THE TIME. He doesn't need to be a "ninja-wood-ape". Do YOU need to be a ninja wood ape to avoid being hit by the one car within 30 miles? Of course not. Think more along the lines of homonid, and intelligent one at that, and then you have your reason why we don't have road kill. That's not to say one won't get hit by a logging truck while playing around one of these days, just think of how much difficulty you'd have avoiding a car...not much. It's human arrogance that upholds the belief by some that this is an "animal" in the common sense of the word. "It couldn't possibly be as smart as ME, I'm a HUMAN for crying out loud!" The salient point being, that the "we have road kill of the rare and secretive wolverine, therefore we should have roadkill of squatch" argument falls apart as soon as you stop seeing squatch as just another animal. It still stuns me, after all this time, and all the reported encounters, that so many still view squatch simply as an ape. That has to be the most implausible, ridiculous contention I've heard, yet even the TBRC goes employs research methodology as if this were so. If it were an ape, simply a North American ecological analog to an Mountain Gorilla, we'd have been filming them regularly years ago. We'd at least have a single kill...SOMETHING. Something much more intelligent is all that makes any sense. That, or they simply are not there, which doesn't seem plausible at this point either. IMHO, it's either one or the other.