Book Reviews

Bigfoot and his followers

In preparation for this month’s sQuatch Fest at the Cowlitz County Expo Center, you might bone up on the legend and lore of the big, hairy guy with this recent (2024) book by John O’Connor, which offers “the secret history” of Bigfoot—as against, what, the standard, well-known history? (One suspects the influence of a marketing department.)

O’Connor began by reading Robert Michael Pyle’s 1995 Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, judging it “far and away the most literate of the Bigfoot literature.” “It was the first book I’d read during my research, which was probably a mistake, as it seemed to have said it all.” (We’ll return to this point.) O’Connor starts his own exploration by visiting the sage of Grays River, finding the good gray poet-naturalist to be a delightful, entertaining raconteur.

From Grays River, O’Connor begins a wide-ranging trek that takes him to Maine, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, northern California, as well as familiar parts of the Pacific Northwest.

He recounts the first documented Bigfoot sighting, called “the Barrington Beast,” in colonial Massachusetts in 1765, and follows the many later sightings of “wild men,” including Native American legends of the mythical being. He revisits well-known accounts—Fred Beck’s tale of the creatures attacking a cabin-full of Skamania miners in 1924, and the famous Patterson/Gimlin film from 1967.

His field notes go far afield, discussing delusions, mass hallucinations, the enduring attraction of pseudoscience, the flexibility, malleability, and fallibility of memory; cryptozoology (the study of legendary, unknown, or extinct animals), as well as individuals like Peter Matthiessen, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Donald Trump (he’s not a fan), and devotes an entire chapter to the ivory-billed woodpecker (once thought extinct) that seems a long and puzzling detour.

As intriguing, colorful, and controversial as Bigfoot himself are the “Bigfooters,” who comprise a fascinating sub-culture of believers. He brings a skeptical, though generally open mind to the stories and the people who tell them.

Carl Sagan notably threw down the challenge that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Unfortunately, in our current age of alternative facts and FAKE NEWS, “evidence” is pretty much in the eye of the believer, or non-believer.

For a “secret history,” there is not much that’s new here, though O’Connor is an enjoyable and humorous companion. But if you’re going to read only one book on Sasquatch & Co., it’s still best to stay with Bob Pyle’s—at least until truly extraordinary evidence turns up.

Turns out the “kooks” were right

We here at the Pentagon would like to clarify our denials of the past seventy years regarding Unidentified Flying Objects. We staunchly maintain that UFOs do not exist, but, ahem, well, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) do. We apologize for any confusion.

For more than a half century, UFOs have been the Pentagon’s best kept non-secret. They have debunked and dismissed hundreds of credible sightings and discredited witnesses as kooks or frauds or crazy. What’s surprising is that it was done so brazenly. Over two weekends in 1952, multiple UAP were seen in Washington DC, including over the White House. They were viewed by hundreds of eyewitnesses and appeared on the front pages of major newspapers. Air Force pilots pursued and even fired at them. A thorough investigation found that it was “flocks of birds.”

In March 1966, Michigan neighborhoods saw multiple strange craft over several days that “dove, hovered, climbed, and disappeared—only to reappear.” Government investigators announced it was “swamp gas.”

Oh, and that Roswell incident in 1947? Turns out there was a crash, and bodies were recovered. So, it wasn’t “weather balloons” as the Army reported (Our bad!) Even during World War II, Allied and Axis pilots reported mysterious “orbs of light” around and in their craft so regularly that they were nicknamed “foo fighters.”

You mean they’re real? was Luis Elizondo’s first reaction when he became head of

the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2010. Prior to this position, he had overseen counterespionage and counterterrorism investigations for the Department of Defense and worked for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. You’d think someone would have told him.

Imminent recounts Elizondo’s efforts to uncover and then reveal the extent of UAP encounters, not so he could finally get on "Oprah," but from his concern for national security. He fears we may be “playing checkers against an enemy who (has) already mastered three-dimensional chess.” The technology—and the physics behind such extraordinary technology—is far beyond anything we possess or even fully comprehend.

And his concern seems legitimate: There are multiple reports of UAP hovering over US nuclear missile silos. And not just hovering. In March 1967, at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, its intercontinental ballistic missiles “went offline, one after another.” Even more disturbing, similar UAP appeared over a Soviet missile base in Ukraine in 1982, where the launch sequence switched on (!) without any humans entering the launch codes.

He notes that each time a nuclear reactor has melted down (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) UAP have been witnessed in the areas for days or months afterward, even calling nuclear reactors “UAP magnets.”

In the 21st century, it has become harder to deny UAP. In November 2004, the US Navy’s Nimitz Carrier Strike Group encountered a number of objects descending from high altitudes, hovering, then zipping away at theoretically impossible speeds. Over several days, these egg-shaped, noiseless vehicles were “seen by six naval aviators, tracked by multiple radars on multiple platforms, and videotaped by an advanced military infrared targeting system.” Swamp gas did not seem likely. (You can watch the government’s declassified UFO videos on YouTube.)

Other nations have been more forthcoming in investigating and publicly acknowledging these encounters. For example, between 1977-1978, the Brazilian military compiled more than 3500 case files on UAP in their northern Colares region.

Largely by the efforts of Elizondo and courageous colleagues, the truth about the frequency and nature of these encounters has become public. He openly admits, “You might be thinking this all sounds crazy. I’m not saying it doesn’t sound crazy. I’m saying that it’s real.”

We are left with the puzzling mystery that first prompted his concerns: We know that they are. We just don’t know what they are. Are they extraterrestrial? Extradimensional? Intelligent beings from the future?

The implications are immense and profound. In a foreword to the book, Christopher Mellon, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, writes that these revelations “may soon cause humanity to reframe its view of itself and our place in the cosmos.” We may be on the cusp of a paradigm shift unlike any other in human history. And it may be imminent.

Stay tuned.

Horrors of both supernatural and natural kinds.

In 1950, 12-year-old Robert Stephens, Jr., fights off a teenage boy who is making aggressive sexual advances on Robert’s sister. Robert is black, the older boy is white and the son of a prominent citizen in the Jim Crow south. You know immediately it’s not going to go well for Robert. He’s sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory notorious for its brutality and from where some boys never return. This is where the horror begins.

Robbie enters the cruel system, quickly learning rules for survival from his friends Blue and Redbone—how to not-see what they witness, how to avoid the sadistic Warden Haddock—and adopts the dread the boys feel at being sent to the “Fun House.”

What adds to the horror is that this reformatory is based on the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, operated by the state of Florida from January 1900 to June 2011. Hundreds of men have testified to the cruelty, gruesome beatings, and rape they suffered while youths at the school, often sent there for minor offenses or for the crime of being orphans. In recent years, researchers from the University of Florida have found the remains of at least 55 boys buried on the grounds.

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) is also based on the Dozier School, a tense, gritty novel with a jaw-dropping twist at the end. Tananarive Due is a major writer of Black horror and speculative fiction, author of such works as The Between (1995), The Good House (2003), and The Living Blood (2001), which won the American Book Award, and she adds a supernatural element to the “natural” horrors of the school: Robbie is able to see the ghosts, or haints, of the boys who died there, and through them, he learns the full extent of the horrors that have been committed, and why many boys have gone missing. Their spirits are now seeking revenge for the injustices that were their lives.

For readers, supernatural horror is easier to live with. We can put the book down when finished, knowing it’s fiction. It’s much more discomforting when realizing the horror actually happened.

Both Colson’s and Due’s novels are riveting and disturbing mirrors to the racial injustice that is part of our nation’s history. But for Due, there is also a more personal connection. The Reformatory is dedicated to her great uncle, Robert Stephens, who was killed at the Dozier School for Boys in 1937. He was 15 years old.