While (Robert Michael) Pyle had contempt for the Trumpers and magical thinkers, he was equally contemptuous of those who dismissed Bigfoot out of hand. “How can you say, ‘This cannot be’?” His voice, I noticed, suddenly became more forceful. His palms were upturned in the manner of someone addressing a jury. “I’m a scientist. I know what a null hypothesis is. I know how to establish deniability. I filter everything through parsimony, and Bigfoot passes the test. Not only is it parsimonious to think of the animal evolutionarily, but biogeographically it’s not a problem. And the food dynamics — a big hairy ape surviving on what’s available — hold up. There’s also Native American traditional knowledge of great depth. Very few areas of doubt cannot be confronted with parsimony. Not to mention that parsimony does not easily admit a hoax of such grand design and coordination. Talk about a conspiracy theory!”
First time author John O’Connor teaches journalism at Boston College, and from what he writes in The Secret History of Bigfoot, he comes across as an adventurer, a thinker, and an engaging storyteller. In his efforts to follow along with Bigfooters as they go on the hunt, O’Connor meets many folks (among them former police officers, soldiers, and park rangers) who all swear that they’ve come nose to nose with a Sasquatch in the wild — some of whom were forced to leave their jobs in the wake of their experiences — and in the moment, he completely believes their testimony. Later on, O’Connor speaks with experts who insist that without physical evidence (bone, hair, spoor, a clear photograph), it’s nonsensical to believe that there’s a large mammal running around the wilds of North America, evading capture. It’s a fascinating story, told from an engaging POV — this is as much about O’Connor’s experiences and reactions as it is about the legendary Sasquatch — and I enjoyed the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
While I had my doubts about Bigfoot, the point wouldn’t be to prove or disprove whether it existed but to try and set aside my own convictions, unpeel the oniony layers of belief, and understand something about Bigfooters and the culture that shaped them. Knowing as little as I did, I thought America itself might even poke its head out from behind Bigfoot’s shadow.
Just as UFO sightings originated in the lingering trauma following WWII, O’Connor points out that the modern Bigfoot craze started with the Patterson-Gimlin Film of 1968: just six months before the assassination of MLK, 1968 is considered a “fulcrum point” in American history, “a time of dwindling social and economic fortunes for Bigfoot’s fan base.” It might not be surprising, therefore, that there’s a lot of crossover between those who believe in Bigfoot and those who believe in stolen elections, pizzeria sex trafficking, and the propriety of wearing a sidearm to a convention. Rust belts, outsourcing, opioid epidemics: when folks are under pressure, they tend to look for meaning in the metaphysical; and with the decline in church attendance, people aren’t necessarily looking for God. Although several countries have wild man myths, this is very much the story of how the legend of Bigfoot has evolved alongside American culture in the last few decades.
As O’Connor recounts his (mis)adventures following along with the Bigfooters, he quotes from a wide range of material: Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. More than once he references the movie Predator, eventually calling it, “An ancient drama of sin and redemption played out on a biblical stage with doomed warriors battling an elusive monster from the infinite darkness of space, Predator is something Joseph Conrad might’ve written had he been born one hundred years later and huffed mescaline with Philip K. Dick. It shows us not only the ultimate chaos of nature but — and this is its genius — how randomly its phantoms materialize.” Walking through true wilderness at night — experiencing that common human reaction of enticement and dread in the face of the untamed dark — O’Connor makes the valid point that we want/don’t want the mythological to be out there (but I haven’t seen the movie Predator, so the instances of fanboying whooshed over my head).
There is, to be sure, some nontrivial convergence, well apart from the Gandalf beards and Buddha paunches, between Bigfooters and Trumpers: extreme reactionary views, a tendency toward the sensationalistic, a fetishization of traditional masculinity, a hard-bitten mistrust of urban elites generally and the federal government and its scientific minions specifically, coupled with an inverse, reflexive flag waving and suspicion of “protestors” and “kneelers,” as well as a depth of commitment we used to reserve for the church. That’s not consistent among all Bigfooters, obviously, any more than wokester inanities like defunding the police are among self-hating liberals. But there seemed to be a disproportionate number of Trumpers in Jefferson, amounting almost to a homogeneity (it was Texas, after all). A key characteristic of both is that they trust themselves and themselves alone to parse fact from fiction, while at the same time, the language they share often doesn’t register a difference between the two.
There is plenty of social commentary in this book, and although the individuals that O’Connor met with all seemed to be good and open-minded folk, the author used the name “Trump” twenty-eight times, usually derogatorily (along with cheeky sobriquets like “the Orange Lord” or “the Tangerine Tornado”), and even though I’m a Canadian with no dog in that hunt, it stood out to me as maybe…obsessive? Puerile?
On the other hand: It may have amounted to padding, but there was a long section that I enjoyed on experts who announced that they encountered the presumed-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in 2005…and the other experts who insisted that without physical evidence (bone, feathers, spoor, a clear photograph), it’s nonsensical to believe that there’s a distinctively marked bird flying around an Arkansas hinterland, evading capture. The woodpecker debate illuminates and enlarges the Bigfoot debate (not that I'm convinced that Bigfoot exists) and made for fascinating reading.
The ties that bound together flesh-and-blooders with the woo’ers and idly curious had everything to do with pursuit of the extraordinary and in turn with a desire to understand the world. A commonality, it seemed to me, that hitched them to the rest of us and to the great folkloric heroes and heroines of the past. And even, in a sense, to scientific tradition. Up to a point.
Ultimately, O’Connor provides a comprehensive overview of the quest to find Bigfoot, along with the social circumstances (economic hardship, internet echo chambers, the hope that there are mysteries beyond our dull existence) that prompt people to believe in “alternate truths”, and as we follow along in his careful footsteps — both through the woods and through the research — there is plenty that this quest says about us and about our culture (and I will use “us” because, although I am Canadian, I have met people who swear they have had a Bigfoot encounter, and it’s hard to know what to think about that.) This was fun and informative and does not call for a tinfoil hat.
