Bigfoot Book, The : The Encyclopedia of Sasquatch, Yeti and Cryptid Primates (The Real Unexplained! Collection)

Product Information

The last shot of the creature in the video comes just as it stands up, similar to the 2012 Provo Canyon video. Unfortunately, people filming Bigfoot have a tendency to suddenly jerk the camera and run away just as they're about to get a good view of one — understandably fearful if the creature exists, but convenient if they're creating a hoax. This is one of many reasons why skeptics decry such videos and ask believers to produce a body. Hoax bodies: 2008 and 2012 Just curious about the Sasquatch literature. I'm a retired paleontologist, and the absence of reasonably recent (say, in the last 10,000yrs) paleontological evidence for the continued existence of these things is a pretty serious obstacle. Still, not impossible. After all, they just identified a new species of toothed whale recently. Call me a skeptic, but until some gun-toting woodsman brings one in dead (or one gets killed by a vehicle), I just can't believe. Hope to be proved wrong some day. Jump ahead to the 21st century where the continued elusiveness of the Sasquatch is belied by its ubiquity in pop culture — including in books. The Internet helped the formerly fringe topic explode in popularity and enter the mainstream. The nonfiction book offerings on the Sasquatch have multiplied exponentially in tandem. Many of them are by part-time enthusiast researchers. A few skeptics have added their voices to the cascading pile of wildman tomes. So too have those who plug the more esoteric takes on the Sasquatch, insisting the creature is supernatural, interdimensional, and/or extraterrestrial.

Tchernine, Odette. The Snowman and Company UK: Hale, 1961/ In Pursuit of the Abominable Snowman. New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1971. (Like Ivan T. Sanderson’s book, these works contain some of the earliest treatments of North American Bigfoot/Sasquatch reports.) Bigfoot doesn’t need to be real, ultimately. The not-knowing is frightening enough. “In a way I wasn’t before I embarked on this weird adventure, I am now truly afraid of the woods” he says.The late John Bindernagel was a Canadian wildlife biologist and Bigfoot researcher who spent his career trying to convince his scientific colleagues, with little success, that Sasquatches are an unclassified species of great ape. Bindernagel draws connections between the reported physical and behavioral attributes of the creatures with that of other known primate species in Asia and Africa. He tells us why Sasquatches are hard to misidentify as bears at close range, and he includes many interesting eyewitness drawings of the creatures. Later in life Bindernagel argued that regardless of the scientific consensus, the Sasquatch has already been “discovered.” It remains a de facto discovery, he said, because it is neither socially nor scientifically sanctioned. Strasenburgh, Gordon R. Jr. Paranthropus: Once and Future Brother. Arlington, VA: The Print Shop, 1971. So there you have it. My best of the best, fifty Sasquatch/Bigfoot selections for your consideration. Hunter, Don and René Dahinden. Sasquatch. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973. Dahinden, René and Don Hunter. Sasquatch/Bigfoot: The Search for North America’s Incredible Creature. Buffalo: Firefly Books, 1993. A still image alleged to be of Bigfoot taken northeast of Eureka, California in 1967. (Image credit: Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images)

Concept image of a man looking at a Bigfoot-like creature. (Image credit: David Wall via Getty Images) Bindernagel, John A. North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch. Courtenay, BC: Beachcomber Books, 1998.

In a subject area whose works tend to push hard arguments, it’s nice to read a book about the Sasquatch that straddles the line of the exist vs. doesn't exist debate — while also telling a story. Washington State natural history writer and author Robert Michael Pyle weaves an entertaining and insightful yarn that is part travel memoir, part meditation on Bigfoot, and part manifesto on nature. The book chronicles his trek into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens. Pyle navigates landscapes of ecology, geography, and human belief. The book’s philosophical approach fills an underrepresented niche in the Sasquatch literature. Heinselman, Craig (ed). Hominology Special Number I. NH: Heinselman, 2001. Hominology Special Number II. NH: Heinselman, 2002.