Bigfoot
The Life and Times of a Legend

- Contents
- Review Quotes

Dramatis Personae
1 Wildmen
Wildmen through History
What-Is-It
The Abominable Snowman
The Life and Times of Bigfoot
2 Yeti: 1951–1959
Sensation
The Yeti, Science, and Zadig’s Method
Britain Hunts the Yeti
America Hunts the Yeti
What the Evidence Told
3 Sasquatch: 1929–1958
The Great Sasquatch Hunt
The Kidnapping of Albert Ostman
“Occam’s Razor Cuts on the Side of the Sasquatch”
Slick Eyes the Sasquatch
4 Big Foot: 1958
The Folkloric Origins of Bigfoot
Big Foot Makes the Papers
The Confirmed and Converted Confront Bigfoot
Humbug!
“Maybe Bigfoot is Lost Relative of Old ‘Sasquatch’”
5 ABSMery: 1959–1961
The (Weird, Wacky) Wonderful World of Ivan T. Sanderson
ABSMery
The Pacific Northwest Expedition
Enter Peter Byrne
The Wipe: Or True’s Trouble with Truth, and Ivan Sanderson’s
6 Melting the Snowman: 1961–1967
Melting the Snowman
Sanderson’s Failed Debunking of the Debunking
The Quiet Years
Big Foot Daze
7 The Return of Bigfoot: 1967–1980
Bigfoot Filmed!
Making Sense of the Movie
The Return of Bigfoot
Bozo, the Minnesota Iceman
Bigfoot on Tour
The Secret of Sasquatch
8 A Contest for Dignity: 1969–1977
The Bigfoot Community
Cripplefoot
The Center that Wasn’t
Hoaxing, the Unconquerable Problem
The Laugher Curtain
9 Cryptozoology: 1978–1990
Grover Krantz, Sasquatch Scientist
Anthropology of the Unknown
Cryptozoology
Science Police
“Definitive Proof”
Arrested by the Science Police
10 The Death of Bigfoot? 1980–2002
The Green Man
The Death of Bigfoot
“The Most Abominable Hoaxer”
Bigfoot is Dead! Long Live Bigfoot!
Not The End, but An End
Curse of the Sasquatch
Bibliography
Archival Collections
Select Bibliography
Index
“The mistaken assumption of past Bigfoot investigation is that the phenomenon is best understood from the perspective of natural history. Joshua Blu Buhs has written an original and engaging book that tells us the meaning of the hairy beast that won’t go away yet we cannot seem to find. Bigfoot is the definitive history of the legend’s social and cultural context, and it offers an explanation for the phenomenon that will be pondered and discussed for years to come.”
“While Bigfoot researchers have grown weary of skeptical treatments of the topic, Joshua Buhs’s examination of the Sasquatch is refreshingly crisp and insightful, as opposed to demeaningly debunking. His grasp of the popular cultural significance of Bigfoot is outstanding and his overview of the legacy of these creatures is topnotch. Highly recommended.”
“Thoroughly discredited hoaxes regarding seeing or shooting an actual Bigfoot notwithstanding, media interest in whether giant wild humanoids exist is readily re-ignitable. In 1962, Robert Hatfield struck the match when a ‘half-man, half-beast monster’ chased him into a cabin but ran off before Hatfield trained a gun on it. Good for Hatfield, maybe, since the gun wasn’t loaded, but fortuitous, anyway, for keeping the Bigfoot legend going, since once again there was no physical evidence of the fabled creature. Buhs undertakes the telling of ‘how the modern myth of Bigfoot emerged” and uses the terms Bigfoot, Yeti, Abominable Snowman, and Sasquatch more or less interchangeably throughout, since all refer to not-quite-human creatures living in the wild that are preternaturally elusive. Proceeding era by era and place by place, Buhs evaluates the stories of encounters with the giant creatures, deconstructs hoaxes, and evaluates genuine studies in service of tracking down the truth. His conclusions seem well-founded but are highly unlikely to end debate.”
“The value of Buhs’s book is in its synthesizing of the many historical Bigfoot/Sasquatch stories into one readable narrative, and its summing-up of the state of Bigfoot research and belief today.”
"Adroitly researched and well-documented. . . . Much more focused and thorough than G. Reece’s Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs and a very suitable cultural history complement to the anthropological focus of C. Daegling’s Bigfoot Exposed. Highly recommended.”--Choice
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