Leaderboard

Wife and I took a walk to go check out a potential hunting area in George Washington Nat'l Forest. Mostly just a chance to get out, scout out the layout of the land, check for animal sign, etc. Wanted to get an opinion on what we saw. My wife noted red berries along the trail, but did not see anything that resembled a berry bush. We then noted some branch breaks right at the water's edge. The area does have beaver, whitetail, and black bear present. BRFO also turns up several reports in the area. No tracks found and the branch breaks look older but that would make sense to me as rifle season ended not too long ago and I found several empty shotgun shells (bird shot, we assume they were hunting squirrels) about 50yds away.

not really... I was there on the Omaha Reservation with Igor and have my own audio recording. I know that many of the 'clicks' were nothing more than people making sounds, distorted by the heavy filtering of Audacity. However, there was definitely something going on that night.

Now I'll be lusting for a Browning 30-06.........

Stop it. Those are beautiful bucks. They'd taste great. And I love the rifle. What caliber is it?

@norseman @BlackRockBigfoot I'm considering the Emerson Bag and thought I would get your long-term assessment of it. There are times when I carry my large-bore revolver which barely fits in the HPG OKB if I squeeze it in. The Emerson Bag would afford an extra 1" of space which would be great. I also like the molle straps on it too. I'd like to rig a GoPro to it if possible. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks, SwiftWater, and welcome to the BFF

Thinking it was when Rok was lonely, had too many mushrooms, and the cave closing time was near.......

The Most recent information seems to be here: https://www.woodape.org/index.php/apes-among-us-episode-12-hadrians-wall-an-area-x-update/

Slow running ghost hunters is one of their favs. They are omnivorous so being a vegetarian would not help. Seriously, there are seasonal, regional favorites. PNW: bear, deer, elk, salmon, trout, frogs, rabbits, pika, berries, leaves and more. We learn animal inventories in our respective search areas. The funniest comment made to me in the woods was when a camper came up to me and said " there is something wrong with these woods..... there are no animals!" He was correct in a way. Most were scared away. So, we have animal presence and 'no animals' to work with. Prey animals get eaten / migrate away. The constant is the water supply. Finding the hidden watering holes / artesian wells is a factor to work on.

Welcome to the forum Believer57. The Falcon Project was air and words......nothing to see there. I remember Googling the main players. Not much to go on. The poofy bag never existed. The website for the designer/builder, Stephen Barkley, Remote Aerial Tripod Specialists, (RATS), had nothing. The Aurora MKII airship was simply 'air'. The promoters were unhappy that the public did not throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at them. There is a thread called "is a drone worth getting?" in the "In the field" subforum. Comments touched upon drones, kites, balloons, helium assist. Before powered small drones, we had kite photography and balloons. KAPshop has a selection of aerial equipment. RC vendors have a huge selection of supplies for builder/operators. There are an estimated 2 million plus drones in the US. Drones have a limited flight time. Less than 30 minutes. The specs on your DJI S900 list a hover time of 18 minutes with a take off weight of 15lbs. The Parrot thermal drone claims 26 minutes of flight time with no load. I have not researched the Parrot drone sales info to compare day and night thermal images. Not very sneaky since flying at night will require the Nav lights and anti-collision strobe to be on. Drones are location sensitive. UAVs are not allowed in or over Wilderness Areas. I am in National Forests with Wilderness Areas. One has to have a map with the Wilderness Area boundaries. Flying in restricted areas is a VBI ( Very Bad Idea ). Many drones use a persons smart phone as part of the controller. You are/ will be tracked by the phone company. Use of a drone is a 'roll of the dice'. Choosing a 30 minute time period for flight during daylight requires patience, good guessing and luck. Extra batteries will add a little time. At the end of the day, boots on the ground is still the main game. Eyes and ears.....batteries not included. And Arvedis, what happens to the Audi when the headlamps fly away and don't return?

As Norse wrote, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin proved a half century ago that film isn't going to cut muster. It is simply a colossal waste of effort. It has to be a carcass. Nothing else will do, including (IMHO) the supposed Holy DNA Grail. With ghosts, nobody expects you to shoot one down and lay it out on a slab. With sasquatchery, that is precisely what the High Priests of Science demand.

Speaking of monitor lizards, this guy is my favorite!

"The leaves are antiseptic, astringent, carminative and hypoglycaemic]. An infusion of the leaves and sugar have been given to a mother after childbirth to help her regain her strength. A decoction of the leaves has been used in the treatment of diabetes." Florist's Huckleberry. https://pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Vaccinium+ovatum

Marty, While I can sympathize with your frustration concerning lack of clear video, like Norseman said it's apples and oranges to compare ghost hunting techniques with those of most Bigfoot researchers. For a few reasons... You are dealing with video and audio which are orders of magnitude more complex than investigating a potentially haunted house. How long is your average ghost hunt? 6 hours or so? Usually indoors, I would assume. Ceilings, walls, mostly level floors. Maybe even power, if you are lucky. Vehicles parked just right outside. When we go out, we are in rough terrain and miles into the woods and mountains. At the mercy of the weather and limited to what we can carry on our backs. Any video, thermal, audio, casting materials, etc. has to fight for space with food, first aid, water, firearms, and the other usual hiking/camping supplies. Just keeping the equipment charged is a struggle. Cameras eat batteries like nobody's business, especially in night vision mode. Same thing for SD cards when you are recording in 4K. No matter how you arrange it, it is difficult to keep video going constantly for several hours a night...night after night...just with what you can carry in your pack. We are not among the lucky ones who can just set up stationary right off the road and start recording. It just doesn't seem to happen that way in this area. We have gotten the vast majority of our activity while we are on the move at night. If we stop and try to set up a quick base to record, it seems that things will quiet down. You can run audio constantly, and that has been one of the goals that we met this past month. We now have several small audio recorders that we can run constantly. However, trying to film around you continually is difficult...moving through the woods at night, usually not on an actual path...you spend a lot of time just making sure that you are not going to break your neck. We have been experimenting with ways to be ready in case we have a close encounter with a Sasquatch at night so that we might be able to get some sort of video evidence. I even picked up an action cam that has been converted to night vision from a ghost hunting shop. I wear it on my chest rig and try to keep it running as much as possible. The range is limited, even with an external IR source. Battery usage is still an issue. We are experimenting with external power sources, but keeping a USB plug into a chest mounted camera while pushing through the brush at night is easier said than done. Then, factor in that (at least in my experience) smaller groups seem to have better luck encountering activity than larger groups. That leaves two people to juggle video, audio, thermal, etc. The whole time trying to maintain some sort of situational awareness and not become overly focused on the equipment itself. We try to stay aware of what's around us at all times, because I don't have a warm and fuzzy feeling about these creatures like many on the forum do. The tendency for activity to occur at exactly the wrong moment for us is maddening and frustrating. That frustration has nearly caused me to walk away from all of this on more than one occasion. When you guys see all of my gear go up for sale on the marketplace here you will know that it has finally gotten to be too much and that I have just taken up bird watching. The clearest 'Sasquatch" howl (I put that in parenthesis because I didn't see what made it, but it closely matches other audio that has been posted here) that we ever heard happened a few seconds after we turned out camera off to change batteries, regroup, and get something to eat. We got a Zoom H4N Pro after that to keep running in a central location in order to capture any future howls. That still doesn't do anything about the howl that we heard. We are just left with anecdotal accounts and video of the aftermath...no real evidence at all. Clear video can be obtained, and I hope that we are able to get something compelling ourselves if not something quite a bit more tangible. But, at the end of the day we are trying to capture video of an unknown biped with unknown abilities and unknown levels of intelligence...in its home habitat where it is able to apparently move much easier than we can. It's aware of us and, at least according to some accounts, aware of at least the basics of how photography works. It's a tall order. Now, compare all of this to a group of people who can just roll up in vehicles, unload their boxes and boxes of gear, walk a few yards into a structure, and set up for a few hours to try and catch an EVP or hear a door slam. My partner is a lot more into the paranormal side of things than I am, and she enjoys doing ghost hunting type stuff in the abandoned ruins of old settlements that dot the mountains through this region. Even doing that sort of research is easier than what we do concerning Bigfoot...if nothing else for the stationary aspect of it. Even though you are still hiking your equipment in, you are able to set up in one spot for most of the time. Looking for Bigfoot is like looking for an intelligent, stealthy, physically superior needle in a giant, wet, rocky, remote haystack.