"Sasquatch, The Apes Among Us" by John Green (an Excerpt)

The following excerpt is from "Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us" by John Green.

This was written back in 1978 before the Internet, before Bigfoot forums, before the BFRO, or even Finding Bigfoot was on TV. This was written before Sasquatch became the Kardashian it is today. So it's nice to read something that isn't spoiled or tainted with people projecting their religious beliefs and "forest friends" approach on Sasquatch. We here at The Crypto Blast highly recommend you buy this book.

Expeditions and Institutions

To watch the sasquatch hunt you really should have a program, but there aren't any. Without one there's just no way to follow what is actually going on. Reading the newspaper and magazine articles or watching the interviews on television, a person with a casual interest in the sasquatch must get the impression that the woods of the West are overrun, in season and out, by teams of scientists and expert hunters, equipped, directed and supported by major scientific institutions of infinite resources and international repute, pursuing elusive hairy giants round and round the mountains. Then as if that were not enough, there are the people who are forever being visited in their camps by such creatures, people who have found the caves where they live, people who can take a movie of one almost any time they feel the urge, and people who find footprints so often that they have to keep rubbing them out to hide them from the gun-happy hordes.

The Interplanetary Wildlife Conservation Society has thrown all its resources into the search. So has International Wildlife Research. You can read all about it in the papers. The North American Anthropological Foundation is active. The Monster Information Center and Exhibition has its top men on the job, "evaluating" reports for the guidance of those less knowledgeable than themselves. American Yeti Research was recently in the field, parading the support of a national wildlife organization. (Those names are changed just a little. I hope I didn't name any actual organization by accident.) In earlier years the Northwest Research Association was in the forefront of the search, and back at the beginning there was the Pacific Northwest Expedition. Nor have those mighty organizations been half-hearted in their efforts. They have flung in their leaders and their deputy leaders and their co-deputy leaders. Their directors and their executive directors go bravely into the field, even their presidents. It is just as well, because if they didn't there would have hardly been anybody there.

The British Columbia Expedition, besides the leader, deputy leader and co-deputy leader, had a cook. There's nothing stopping people from calling themselves anything they like. There have been lots of other names, not so all-embracing: Vanguard Research, Project Discovery, South Mountain Research Group, to mention a few. The thing to remember is that the name doesn't tell you anything. There may be an actual organization there, as was the case with the California Bigfoot Organization, or there may be just one man. Behind the name may be a dedicated effort to contribute something to human knowledge, a con job aimed at a fast buck, or something in between. There is no way an outside observer can tell which is which. What he reads in the papers or sees on TV is not likely to be any help, since the self-seekers, not the honest plodders, are most likely to bring themselves to the attention of the media.

The fact of the matter is that no institution with the kind of personnel and resources that could be expected to achieve anything has ever shown the slightest interest in investigating the mass of information already available indicating the existence of hair-covered manlike animals in North America. A few individual scientists have volunteered to attempt to identify hair or droppings, and a few have written something on some aspect of the subject, but those are strictly private efforts. There have also been some people taking part for a month or so in one or other of various "expeditions" who had scientific degrees. That has made it possible to issue truthful press releases referring to "expedition scientists", but I am not aware of any case in which such a person had a scientific training giving him any particular qualification for what he was actually doing on the "expedition."

A biologist, for instance, may be concerned with cell structure, or enzymes, or algae. He is much more likely, in this day and age, to be trained in something like that than in animal behavior in the wild. If what he is actually doing is blundering through the bush hoping to catch sight of an apelike biped, his real qualifications are those he acquired through any hunting experience he may have had. If he is not a hunter, then he hasn't much going for him—but to the press he is a scientist on a scientific expedition.


You can buy "Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us"  by John Green here.