Wyoming
Viral post misleads about Wyoming fires, rare earth minerals | Fact check
As fires spread in Wyoming, conspiracy theories grow
As wildfires rage in Wyoming, some conspiracy theories are gathering steam despite the lack of evidence behind the claims.
The claim: All ‘major’ Wyoming wildfires are burning on ‘privately owned’ land near site of rare earth metal discovery
An Oct. 8 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows what appears to be a group of elk running through a burning field.
“WYOMING. Multiple wildfires are ongoing near Wheatland, where it’s reported that there is approximately 2.34 billion metric tons of rare earth minerals,” reads on-screen text in the clip, which includes a screenshot of a post on X, formerly Twitter.
The Instagram post also shows a video of a man speaking to the camera about the fires, saying at one point that “these major fires are all in the privately-owned sectors” of the state.
It echoes claims spread widely by former CBS News reporter Lara Logan and other users on X who suggest the fires are part of a land grab.
The Instagram post received more than 10,000 times in six days.
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Our rating: False
The post is wrong on multiple fronts. The major wildfires in Wyoming are burning national forests, not private land, and they are hundreds of miles from the spot where the minerals were found.
No evidence to support land-grab conspiracy theory
Firefighters in Wyoming have been battling two massive blazes that, as of Oct. 14, have combined to burn more than 160,000 acres. The Pack River Fire, which broke out Sept. 15 with a lightning strike and then merged with another blaze, has burned in excess of 75,000 acres. Another lightning strike 12 days later started the Elk Fire, which has burned more than 85,000 acres.
Fact check: Image doesn’t show Smokehouse Creek fire, it’s an illustration from 2017
Taken together, several elements of the Instagram post promote a baseless conspiracy theory that links the fires to the February discovery of more than 2 billion metric tons of rare earth minerals in the state and suggests they are part of a land grab orchestrated by the government. But there is no credible evidence to support that claim, and a closer look at the details unravels the alleged conspiracy.
While the post does not identify the wildfires by name, it makes clear references to the Elk and Pack Trail fires. The U.S. Forest Service on Oct. 14 listed seven fires in Wyoming on its InciWeb website, and those were the only ones that both involve more than 1,000 acres and were not at least 90% contained.
“For active fires, those are the two big ones,” said Tucker Furniss, an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming and leader of the school’s fire and landscape ecology lab.
Post mischaracterizes locations of fires
The post misleads with its assertion that the fires are “near” both Wheatland, Wyoming, and the lode of minerals found in that area.
The city and the discovery site are both in the state’s southeastern corner. But the Elk Fire is more than 200 miles north-northwest of the lode near the northern border with Montana. Kristie Thompson, the forest service’s public information officer for the Elk Fire, characterized that blaze as “not near” the mining site in a conversation with USA TODAY. The Pack Trail Fire is even farther away, in western Wyoming more than 250 miles northwest of where the minerals were found.
The Instagram post also includes a TikTok video claiming, among other things, that “these major fires are all in the privately owned sectors” of the state. That’s not true. The Elk Fire is burning in Bighorn National Forest, while the Pack Trail Fire is in both the Bridger-Teton and Shoshone national forests.
The TikTok video goes on to claim the “worst of the fires” were burning in the state’s southeast corner. But that’s also false. Two of the seven fires listed on InciWeb were in the southeastern quadrant, the site of the mineral lode. But as of the date of the post, both had been 100% contained for weeks or months.
The TikTok begins with a declaration that “Wyoming’s on fire” and a separate map in the background that appears to indicate dozens of fires across the state. However, a closer look at the map – published by a nonprofit group called the Fire, Weather and Avalanche Center – shows the vast majority of those are classified as “small” at 1,000 acres or fewer and have been contained, as indicated by icons of gray flames. Only one fire in the state’s southeastern quadrant was considered large: a 1,400-acre brush fire 20 miles north-northeast of Laramie, Wyoming, and emergency officials said on Sept. 21 that it, too, had been fully contained.
Other claims in the post also don’t add up. The man in the TikTok says the fires “just so happened to get hit by lightning,” But there is no credible evidence to counter the forest service’s conclusion that lightning caused both. And that’s not an anomaly. Lightning strikes are “a common source of ignition,” Furniss said.
“We know basically every lightning strike, when and where it occurs,” he said. “When there’s a lightning strike and then a fire starts right there, that’s a pretty surefire way to know exactly what caused it.”
Even the clip of elk running near flames in the X post is misleading. It has nothing to do with Wyoming, was taken from a video shared by ABC in 2021 and shows a fire in Montana’s Big Horn County.
USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram and X user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response. The TikTok user did not address the claim in a response to USA TODAY.
Our fact-check sources:
- Tucker Furniss, Oct. 11, Phone interview with USA TODAY
- Kristie Thompson, Oct. 10, Phone interview with USA TODAY
- U.S. Forest Service, accessed Oct. 11, Incident Table (Wyoming)
- Forest Service, accessed Oct. 11, Elk Fire 2024
- Forest Service, accessed Oct. 11, Pack Trail Fire
- Forest Service, accessed Oct. 11, La Bonte Fire
- Forest Service, accessed Oct. 11, Pleasant Valley Fire
- Forest Service, Sept. 29, Daily Update Fish Creek and Pack Trail Fires
- American Rare Earths, February 2024, Technical Report of Exploration and Updated Resource Estimates of the Halleck Creek Rare Earths Project
- Google Maps, accessed Oct. 11, Wheatland, Wyoming
- Google Maps (archive), Oct. 11, 101124 Map from Halleck Creek to Elk Fire
- Google Maps (archive), Oct. 11, 101124 Map From Halleck Creek to Pack Trail Fire
- Fire, Weather and Avalanche Center, accessed Oct. 11, Fire Map
- Albany County, WY Emergency Management, Sept. 21, Facebook post
- U.S. Forest Service – Bighorn National Forest, Oct. 7, Facebook post
- ABC, Aug. 2, 2021, X post
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If the Wyoming House and Senate approve its budget changes, then the chambers’ Joint Conference Committee will have helped the University of Wyoming dodge a $40 million cut, while also limiting the Wyoming Business Council to one year’s funding instead of the standard two.
The Joint Conference Committee adopted numerous changes to the state’s two-year budget draft, but didn’t formally advance the document to the House and Senate chambers. The committee meets again Monday and may do so at that time.
Then, the House and Senate can vote on whether to adopt that draft by a simple majority.
First, UW
Starting in January, the Joint Appropriations Committee majority had sought to deny around $20 million in exception requests the University of Wyoming made, while imposing a $40 million cut to the university’s block grant.
That’s about 10% of the state’s grant to UW but a lesser proportion of the school’s overall operating budget.
The Senate sought to restore the $60 million.
The House sought to keep the denials and cuts, ultimately settling on a bargain to cut $20 million, and hinge UW’s retention of the remaining $20 million on its finding and reporting $5 million in savings.
The Joint Conference Committee the House and Senate sent into a Friday meeting to negotiate those two stances chose to fund UW “fully,” Senate Majority Floor Leader Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, told Cowboy State Daily in the state Capitol after the meeting.
But, $10 million of UW’s $40 million block grant won’t reach it until the school charts a “road map” of how it could save $5 million, and reports that to the Joint Appropriations Committee, she added.
“A healthy exercise, I think, for them to participate in, while the Legislature still allows them to receive full grant funding,” Nethercott said.
“I’m hopeful people feel confident the University is fully funded,” she continued, as it’s “on the brink of receiving a new president, having the resources he or she may need to continue to steer the leadership of the University, our state’s flagship school into the future.”
Hours earlier in a press conference, House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, said the Legislature has been clear that UW should avoid “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI programming, and that it’s the position of the House majority that the school should tailor its programming to Wyoming’s true business needs – so UW graduates will stay in the state.
Within an earlier draft of the budget sat a footnote blocking money for Wyoming Public Media — a publicly funded media and radio entity funded through UW’s budget.
That footnote is gone from the JCC’s draft, said Nethercott.
Wyoming Business Council
The Wyoming Business Council is set to receive roughly $14 million, confined to one year, for its internal operations, said Nethercott.
“Both chambers have decided to only fund the operations,” Nethercott said, “not all the grant programs.”
She said that’s to compel the Legislature to revisit the concerns it has with the agency, then return in the 2027 legislative session with a vision for its future.
The Business Ready Communities program is “eliminated,” she said.
JCC member Rep. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, elaborated further.
Of the appropriation, $12 million is from the state’s checking account, plus the state is authorizing WBC to use $157,787 in federal funds and nearly $1 million from other sources.
“We’re going to take it up as an interim topic in appropriations (committee) and how to rebuild it and make it work the way we think it should work,” said Pendergraft. But the JCC opted to fund the Small Business Development Center for two years, along with Economic Diversification Division for Manufacturing Works, and the Wyoming Women’s Business Center, Pendergraft noted, pointing to that language on his draft budget sheet.
Pendergraft made headlines last year by saying he wanted to eliminate the Wyoming Business Council altogether.
But Nethercott told the Senate earlier this month, legislators have complained of that agency her entire nine-year tenure.
She attributed this to what she called communications shortfalls that may not be intentional. She cosponsored a now-stalled bill this year that had sought to adopt a task force to evaluate WBC.
The Wyoming Business Council’s functions range from less controversial, like helping communities build infrastructure, to more controversial, like awarding tax-funded grants to certain businesses on a competitive application process.
Wyoming Public Television
Wyoming Public Television, which is not the same as Wyoming Public Media, is slated to receive the $3 million it lost when Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Nethercott said.
It will also receive its usual $3 million from Wyoming.
The entity will not receive another $3 million it had sought to upgrade its emergency-alert towers, said Nethercott, “because we received information from them… they have another source to pay for the replacement and maintenance of the towers.”
Like the Wyoming Business Council, the Wyoming Public TV’s functions range from less controversial to more controversial.
The entity operates, maintains and staffs emergency alert towers throughout Wyoming.
Wyoming Public TV also produces entertainment and informational movies. Its state grants run through the community colleges’ budget.
State Employees
Nethercott noted that the JCC advanced to both chambers an agreement to pay $111 million from the state’s checking account to give state employees raises.
Those raises would bring them to 2024 market values for their work, she noted.
Because that money is coming from the state’s checking account, or “general fund,” and not its severance tax pool as the House had envisioned, then $111 million won’t impact the $105 million investment another still-viable bill seeking to build an “energy dominance fund” envisions.
That bill, sponsored by Senate President Bo Biteman, R-Ranchester, seeks to lend to large energy-sector projects.
Biteman told Cowboy State Daily in an interview days before the session convened that its purpose is to counteract “green” compacts investors have adopted, and which have bottlenecked energy projects.
Wyoming’s executive branch is currently suing BlackRock and other investors on that same assertion.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
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