Are BFRO expeditions a money-making scheme?

Below is a post I published on BFRO's discussion board. I posted it twice, and each time it was deleted by an administrator within a minute or less. Then they deleted my account and barred me from posting! Are they trying to hide something?

Here's the post:

"I've noticed the BFRO charges people $300 to attend one of their expeditions. First off, why is it so expensive? Attendees are required to provide their own camping equipment, transportation, and food. The $300 is supposedly for overhead costs, but at $300 a person and 20-40 people are attending, that's $6,000-$12,000! They'd have to be extremely inefficient to have outrageous overhead for each "expedition."

And second, the BFRO bills itself as a research organization, but no one can seriously claim that taking 30-40 people out into the woods for a weekend constitutes a scientific investigation.
So, what's really going on? Is this a money-making scheme?"

Asking Bob Gimlin

Has there ever been any pressure put on Bob Gimlin to take a polygraph (lie-detector) test? If not, I think its imperative. The Patterson-Gimlin video is obviously the most substantial evidence to date. If the video is really a hoax, and Gimlin is lying, then that information would be of huge importance to bigfoot researchers.

However, my impression is that the bigfoot community is head over heels in love with Gimlin, and it seems unlikely that anyone has really held his feet to the flame, so to speak.

What are your thoughts?

Bigfoot body

There's been a lot of commotion lately after some alleged pictures of a dead bigfoot surfaced in the internet. Read the CNN article here. Supposedly, some dubious characters, one of them a police officer, claim to have found a dead bigfoot in Georgia. They are holding a press conference this Friday (Aug. 15) at noon PST to display more photos and present DNA analysis. However, there are many reasons to think this is just another hoax.

If it is a hoax, I wonder how they'll get themselves out of the hole they've dug. After all, they'll have to explain why they were unable to display the body to the general public, or at least to some reputable scientists. My guess is that they'll either claim 1) they sold it to an anonymous buyer, 2) it was stolen or lost in transport, or 3) they selflessly destroyed it in order to protect bigfoot from being exploited.

I've had the misfortune of seeing the videos these guys posted on You Tube, and they seem like a couple of half-wits to me. I'd hate to live in a community where someone like that is a police officer and has authority over other people. If the bigfoot is real and they've discovered it, it is sad that fortune smiled on these guys and not someone more deserving (or someone who would handle the situation with more dignity, reservation, and intelligence).

We wait just a few more hours to see how this whole thing plays out.

The Problematic Secrecy of Bigfoot

Summary of Points

1) What motivates bigfoot to avoid humans?
2) If bigfoot has special behavior to avoid humans and covers its own tracks, then this would require constant vigilance on their part, requiring significant energy and limiting their movements.
3) From an evolutionary perspective, its seems dubious that bigfoot would evolve such intricate behavior to avoid humans because their are no significant, fitness-reducing effects of encountering humans.

Many bigfoot proponents believe that bigfoot actively avoids contact with humans. Even more remarkable, many believe that bigfoot will go to great lengths to avoid leaving tracks, even covering or obscuring tracks. If this is true, it would require extreme vigilance for bigfoot - they would have to be acutely aware of every movement they made, by making sure they weren't stepping in soft substrate that would leave a print, constantly scanning the horizon to make sure no human is around the corner, etc. This phenomenal behavior would require a fair amount of energy, and more importantly, it would result in significant opportunity costs, i.e., it would surely limit where bigfoot could go to forage, find mates, and how fast they could travel.

As would be true for all wildlife, such a unique and energy intensive behavior must be beneficial to the organism, and it must be subject to evolutionary principles, including natural selection. For a trait to evolve and persist, there must be a natural, selective force that reinforces the beneficial nature of the trait. For example, imagine a mouse that has evolved a special trait that causes the mouse the suddenly jump the moment a snake strikes. Mice that have this jumping trait survive more snake attacks, live longer, and reproduce more - in other words they are more fit. As long as snake attacks persist, evolution will favor the mice with the jumping trait. But if snakes suddenly become extinct, then the trait no longer provides a benefit to the mouse and natural selection no longer favors them over non-jumping mice. In fact, if the jumping trait requires the mouse to devote more energy to muscle development and sensory perception, then this energy is wasted and the mouse becomes less favorable in the eyes of natural selection. In that case, the theory of evolution tells us the jumping trait will gradually vanish from the population.

In the case of bigfoot, one has to wonder what evolutionary force is maintaining their special, secretive behavior over thousands of years. For bigfoot to evolve a trait that makes them spend significant effort avoiding humans, then there must be some detrimental cost of encountering a human. But what is that detrimental cost? We don't hunt or otherwise kill bigfoot. We don't harass or maim them. There are no historical accounts of Native Americans hunting or harassing bigfoot. And because we hardly ever even glimpse them, let alone come in close contact with them, I can't think of any routine, negative effect that would maintain such a complicated and energetically costly behavior. And while we can envision that potential encounters between humans and bigfoot could be costly to them, this doesn't mean that bigfoot can make the same conclusion since to date there are no negative costs to human-bigfoot encounters. Simply put, from an evolutionary perceptive, there is no basis for bigfoot to take such drastic actions to remain secretive.

I'm not arguing that bigfoot doesn't exist, I'm merely contradicting those that claim that bigfoot goes to great length to remain hidden from humans. The more likely explaination for the scarcity of bigfoot sightings is that they are extremely rare and prefer isolated, wilderness habitat.