Geo-caching item causes brief scare

Posted By: Sarah Fili

sfili@klkntv.com

It started out pretty scary at 84th and ‘O,’ but ended on a good note. This isn’t Lincoln Fire and Rescue’s first time with geocaching, so they’re working on a way to prevent these types of calls in the future. Especially since there’s nearly 11,000 geocaches around Nebraska, 800 in Lincoln alone!

Around 12:30 Wednesday afternoon construction workers near the Aldi at 84th and ‘O’ saw a person slip a suspicious package under the plastic cover of this parking lot light pole. Turns out, it was a geocache, part of an online treasure hunt.

"It’s just the world we live in people are always paranoid but we’d rather come out and find a geocache or something that’s not credible than somebody get hurt for sure," Campos said.

Investigator Rick Campos says the department gets about a dozen of these calls a year. We got a few emails this afternoon from viewers identifying the item as a geocache, including one from the man who was at the package at 84th and ‘O!’

"Me and my son over lunch break were out caching today, that was one of them that we hadn’t had was the one on the Aldi parking lot, we were there a little after noon, found 6 others on the day, came home, on Facebook a friend said hey this was just reported and I thought.. Oh that may have been us because we were there just a few hours ago,” Coby Boring, a six year geocacher, said.

So what is geocaching? Glad you asked!

"No bombs, nothing like that, just kids toys and a piece of paper. So they’ll place the coordinates and then everyone else can go find that cache and they can write their name on the piece of paper that’s in there and go to the website and log that they found it,” Boring said.

Boring says he enjoys geocaching so much, he built one in his own backyard. When people are driving down I-80, they often stop by to find the item. He says in the year he has had it up, around 90 people have visited it. He says one of the logs is even from a German couple!

He says when the suspicious package article was shared online his stomach sank.

"When I seen that report it really hit home, that’s not what we want to be known for, is placing these containers out that people are worried about that’s why we mark them that they say geocache on them,” he said.

It’s also important to note, geocache’s come in all shapes and sizes. After the scare, Campos says he’d like to start something with the Nebraska geocachers; like a log system where someone who places an item registers it with the department. That way when calls come in about it, they can save resources. Boring says he’s on board.
 

If you’d like to learn more about geocaching, click here: https://www.geocaching.com/play