Blind Frog Ranch

Well, I binge-watched the first and second seasons of Blind Frog Ranch and I found the series quite interesting.

I think the second season was more interesting than the first, and many of the plot threads hinted to earlier started to play out, such as nefarious parties watching them from black helicopters and drones, and finding concealed remote-controlled cameras of unknown origin watching them work ─ and mystery people even breaking into their camp at night to mug for trail cameras and steal documents and ore samples.

From the beginning of the show the tone is set by the patriarch, Duane Ollinger, who finds that the land behaves or "acts" strangely and it "just don't feel right." That is a great hook but it is more mysticism than science. I don't remember any of my ancestors being very mystical about the land they worked ─ but it could be that this viewpoint has simply been lost with modernity.

If I can remember some of my Grandmother's stories, many of the locals actually paid dowsers for their "opinions" on where to drill for water or minerals than perhaps their descendants would like to admit.

A lot of the show has to do with finding a way into the underground, partially-flooded cave system and where to bore a suitable access shaft. At something like 50 dollars a foot to drill, they are popping a good 20 Grand of the old guy's dough every time they get a hunch, scientifically-based or otherwise.

SPOILER ALERT ─ they eventually do succeed in boring a deep hole from the ridge top down into a strange mine shaft ─ not exactly the flooded cavern that they expected, but somebody has been inside that mountain before. it is also filled with dangerous radon and hydrogen sulfide gases.

One thing is that I like the Blind Frog Ranch characters better than some of those in Skinwalker Ranch. The guy who now owns Skinwalker is a rich Mormon who made a killing in real estate speculation and flies around in a black helicopter ─ and is a really bad actor. He is a former Boy Scout, but a rancher, not so much.

The owner of Blind Frog Ranch on the other hand, is not a rancher nor a local either. Duane Ollinger is a Texan with an accent and made his money wildcatting oil, and is a real hands-on kind of guy who is hard not to like. These kinds of do-it-yourselfers are the way that I remember most of my ancestors.

When I was a kid I read all of the Hardy Boys mysteries under the name Franklin Dixon, which I really enjoyed. The only thing I did not like about the Hardy Boys series was that they got to do all kinds of cool things at age 17 like fly private planes and solve mysteries.

When I was that age or a little younger, my Dad was somewhat put upon that I took some flying lessons with the Civil Air Patrol once in awhile; he was supportive but not actually committed enough to help me get licensed. He just did not see any value to getting certified in skills like that. Plus, he had a longstanding resentment of the Air Force for disqualifying him as a test pilot after he graduated from college as an Engineer after all the work was done in the Air Force ROTC and fully earned ─ all for some kind of made-up medical excuse since they had too many candidates and not enough test pilot slots to fill. My Mom, however, thinks just the opposite ─ that he in fact won the lottery by not making the pilot cut because they certainly would have needed all the pilots that they could get to fly in Vietnam if he had still been in the Air Force a few years later. The only cadet course my Dad did not complete with the AFROTC was the last one, which should have been fun ─ the flight training itself.

Anyway, real kids that I knew did not go on yacht trips to the Caribbean to seek treasure or have private pilot licenses at age 17 and solve mysteries like the Hardy Boys. Maybe those kinds of books are best read at a far younger age, however.

I also read most of the Nancy Drew mystery books authored under the name Carolyn Keene. Sometimes if I mention that fact it gets me a weird look from people, but I thought they were just fine young adult stories. To be honest, I am more ashamed that I have read so many of the Star Wars: X-Wing (Rogue Squadron) novels by Michael Stackpole.

In any case, unless it is a classic that was assigned in school, I rarely do read fiction ─ and being over age forty now, it is harder to actually read the fine print than it used to be, LOL. I do appreciate well-written movies and television, for sure.

In this TV series, the boss' son, Chad Ollinger has icky dreadlocked hair and is covered with skanky tattoos, and is a scuba diver and a private pilot. Oh boy, did Dad buy him a Porsche too? For no apparent reason other than to be filmed for the show, he buzzes the ranch with a twin-engined or a light plane every so often like the Hardy Boys if it were set in the 21st century. Chad has a nice relationship with his Dad and a nice wife and a good-sized family that is camped in a trailer on the ranch while he works with his Dad (and the film crew) solving dangerous ranch mysteries. Not much not to like, really.

The show has a likeable Geologist who is the scientist of the bunch, and a couple of retired police officers who do investigations and ranch security, one of whom is a bonhomme that Duane calls "Charlie Boy."
Most of the drama for the series is the old man repeating for the zillionth time how they have to do everything very, very carefully in order to avoid a funeral ─ and this is true since farm or ranch work or related stuff are some of the most dangerous jobs around. We can relate to this, except that it gets a little repetitive.

Secondly, the ranch is experiencing a security problem with trespassers and pranks or dirty tricks going on. This seems to be contrived drama, because it almost appears as if the hired security guys are fiercely incompetent. Rarely do you see anyone carrying a sidearm, for example, let alone have we seen any readily-accessed long guns. Every rancher that I've even known has a varmint or deer rifle handy at the very least.

Another SPOILER Alert. There are three or so egregious security incidents.

First the patriarch found an unmarked car with the engine still running on the end of his property and having no license plates. When he got close he found a woman in the driver's seat who had apparently shot herself, and apparently she had a gun in her lap and a note that was pinned onto her chest. Oddly, she had her face painted white with black circles around the eyes and mouth like some sort of Skinwalker ghoul ─ and before he knew it an ambulance just showed up and almost without a word hauled the dead woman away.

No police arrived to evaluate the potential crime scene, and I suppose that someone just collected the abandoned car later. While it is possible that some lady did a very theatrical suicide, this is not very typical of what a suicidal woman would do. She also evidently called the ambulance to come and get her before she pulled the trigger. Not too weird, but the investigator could find no evidence of a police report ever filed, nor the local emergency responders being involved in anything like that at all. Nobody had heard anything about this. I doubt there was even a death, here ─ just an elaborate mind game for some reason.

Another incident is a little more disturbing. Black SUVs breached the property and waited ominously while the boys went out there to confront them Road Warrior style, and staring into spotlights until the interlopers just up and left. During this time the trail cams picked up two masked men ransacking their office cabin and stealing documentation and making off with their highly-interesting ore samples.

There is also a regular occurrence where an obese local rancher or claim jumper that nobody knows shows up regularly and threatens to sue them. Weird.

Um, clearly the security guys are in a "no country for old men" type of scenario where they are just phoning it in at their age or just playing along. I think the "Call of Duty" guy at Skinwalker Ranch could have provided better security. At least he wore a Glock on his hip. Plus, any miner or wildcatter that I've ever known would have just walked right up there, rifle in hand, and asked the guys in the black SUVs what in the hell they were doing on his land. These are just Yahoos in unmarked black trucks and not space aliens or Men-in-Black. Maybe it's time to mount a .30 caliber belt-fed Browning on all of your Baha Buggies, guys.

And there was a bizarre incident early on where a trail camera near where the son, Chad's family is camping, and it caught some nerdy coffee commando acting as though he were possessed and was transforming into some lycanthropic creature from the cast of Wolfen. They went chasing after him but somehow he gave them the slip.

At my Mom and Dad's town in Idaho in the early Spring of 1987, there was a local scare about a serial killer loose in the area, and my Dad was out of town working on the Space Shuttle (the Challenger having exploded the year before) so my Mom was mostly alone at the dry farm. So in this context, if there was ever any trouble with Yahoos, I have been known to do similar things with a "warning shot" or two fired across the bow with the trusty old .30-06. Mostly the kegger patrol gets the message and clears out. When my Dad is home he is less confrontational, even if disapproving. He thinks that it is always about dope, LOL. He feels that his hands-off philosophy leads to less vandalism in the long run, and this has mostly been the case. But he regularly picks up trash out where people have been parking at the place that the county road meets the private lane.

A few years ago a local Mexican drug cartel (just some local gang bangers, basically) tried to teach a "Narc" a lesson and whacked his wrists with an axe and then dumped him to bleed to death. The "Ese" told the guy to use his blindfold as a tourniquet, which he did, and then the victim walked alone about a mile in a stupor to my Mom and Dad's place, where they called an ambulance and tended him until the authorities arrived. It was pretty horrific. They always nag me about the comparatively high crime rate in metropolitan Arizona, with Arizona being on the border with Mehico ─ but any sleepy town, whether in Utah or Idaho or anywhere else, has good highways going and coming ─ and these kinds of "demons" will therefore find their way into your town whether you like it or not. It is not the Twilight Zone, just the reality of our times where daily we are told by our betters that fences and borders are racist and that you are not supposed to notice politically-incorrect patterns.

The Paul Ezra Rhoades Serial Killer story is pretty interesting. He was executed in Idaho in 2011 for his 1987 crime spree, brutally killing two convenience store workers and killing, abducting, raping, and mutilating a school teacher, not necessarily in that order.


During his murder trial, after Rhoades had been caught and the scare was over, we found out that he just lived around the corner and he was a guy who I knew (but not by name) who used to come into the store around the corner where I worked and lurk. My girlfriend and I would slowly cruise in the car down the alley and drive by this guy's back yard. I think the killer had been living with his Mom and slightly younger brother, and we would point and stare at the "White Trash brother" in the back yard like from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.





The killer's poor brother then came on the TV news and tearfully asked people to stop doing that because the brutal murders that his sibling was accused of was also hard on their family. Yeah, okay, Beavis. My bad.

The murdered teacher's husband worked with my Uncle as a nuclear engineer, and I had some other connections which got us access to some of the more grisly information about the murders that the police refused to talk about in the media. It was satisfying to know that the state of Idaho finally executed this creep in 2011.






Another local Idaho spree killing (since we're on that subject) when I lived there involved a coworker at the TV station that I worked at, the weekend weather guy, who was cousins with the local paper girl who was abducted, raped and murdered ─ and this killer was also a necrophile who kept visiting the crime scene to defile the corpse some more. That sick puppy died in prison before he was executed. His criminal profile was "disorganized serial killer." Yeah, most criminals in fact are not the criminal masterminds that they portray in the media.

I am not sure how interesting such stories are. These were strange times. During the 1987 Rhoades crime scare, my Mom never so much as went to get the mail without having a Colt .380 Automatic in her pocket. My Mom hates dogs, but she came very close to buying a pricy Timber Shepherd to keep watch at the place while when my Dad was away.