Just a few observations....
The submission rate to the BFRO can be calculated by anyone on the outside of the organization. I've done it before, but I'll save you the search for my post.
Report 24646 was submitted on 8/31/08.
Report 22890 was submitted on 1/10/08.
24646 - 22890 = 1756 reports
Divde that by 235 days from 1/10 to 8/31 and you get 7.5 reports submitted a day, or about 2,750 per year in 2008.
Most of that is trash ('I saw Bigfoot and he was [insert grotesque and puerile remark here] ROFLMAOOOOO!!!') or has no contact information. Some of it is requests for information that come through the report page.
Assume 15% of the 2,750 has good contact information and is serious at least on the face of it. That's 410 contacts to make each year.
A handful of those will be clearly bogus after just a simple phone interview. Many will be folks reading into experiences--correctly or not--that scared them silly. There's no way to provide an absolute litmus test for these stories, and the resources to thoroughly investigate them are scarce. Volunteer investigators do all of this out of their own pockets. Additionally, it's rare that a report comes in that is hot, meaning that little time has elapsed since the incident. Why go investigate a report in the field if it's 30 years old?
If contact can be made and it's not obviously a hoax, it will be published with a few exceptions. By far, the biggest thing that holds back a "legitimate" report is the request of the witness. If someone says, "Please don't put this on your website," they don't. Sometimes info is deleted to protect identifying the witness. I only recall a dozen or so reports that were held back for anything other than that, and many of the reasons were idiosyncratic to the particular situation (From "This person is insane" to "Hey, we're monitoring this right now, and publishing this will give away the location.")
It has been many years since my BFRO days, but the big thing holding reports back by default was a backlog of thousands of submisssions--again, most of it being trash. The harvest was plenty, but laborers were few... not that membership was lacking... it just wasn't a priority for folks. No one was generating those submissions internally. The backlog was an enormous headache for many of us, but perhaps that problem has been whipped.
I've never seen any evidence of hoaxing on BFRO expeditions. I've seen lots of folks very eager to believe and read into things, both paying participants and BFRO members. There are also a great many who do have their heads on straight, both paying participants and BFRO members.
