STILWELL – Whether there’s anything out there or not, a lot of people are definitely out there looking for it.

But not all the people searching through the woods of eastern Oklahoma for Bigfoot are big-city video documentarians. And not all the people who experience sightings are actively looking for a big, hairy creature: They just happen to see one, and may not even want to talk about it.

Members of an organization based in Stilwell are hoping folks who may have had a Bigfoot encounter will let them know, so they can put the information in their database, and hopefully use it to prove the existence of a creature that, so far, has been pretty difficult to find.

“We’ve been doing this since 2000,” said D.W. Lee, senior field investigator for the Green Country Bigfoot Research Center. “A lot of sighting go unreported, because the people who have the sightings are afraid people will think they’re crazy.”

Lee said GCBR investigators are local people who aren’t interested in making a public spectacle out of Bigfoot sighters. They’re just trying to gather data.

“A lot of people feel better about talking to local people rather than strangers,” said Lee. “If someone sees a Bigfoot, we’re not going to ridicule them or laugh at them.”

Lee said the GCBR often takes field trips to search for Bigfoot, using call blasts of recordings and fruit bait to attract the beasts. They record sounds that respond to the calls.

Members of the group have actually seen primate-looking animals through night vision scopes, and have recorded sounds that have been identified as primate vocalizations.

“We’ve actually got three different recordings of something screaming,” he said, adding that a researcher at the University of Texas in Austin has analyzed the sounds.

“He actually identified it as a primate.”

Lee said members of the organization usually stay in Oklahoma – specifically Green Country, or the northeastern corner of the state – on their Bigfoot expeditions, but occasionally go into Arkansas as well.

In addition to night scope sightings and Bigfoot calls, the group has also had encounters with rock-throwers – rock-throwing Bigfeet, according to Lee.

“We’ve actually had one of them hit the vehicle we were in,” he said. “And we’ve had one of our researchers almost hit in the head.”

Lee suggests that folks who want to go on a Bigfoot expedition of their own not carry firearms, so they don’t get mistaken for illegal hunters by game wardens.

He also recommended wearing boots (there are a lot of rattlesnakes out there) and carrying a camera and an audio tape-recorder.