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A new look at bigfoot - Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in North America - Book Review
Skeptical Inquirer, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Benjamin Radford
Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in North America. By Loren Coleman. Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York. 2003. ISBN 0-7434-6975-5. 278 pp. Softcover, $14.
Loren Coleman has been investigating mysterious animals for decades, and is author of several books on the topic, including Cryptozoology A to Z and The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide. His latest is Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in North America. The book is light on hard evidence--there are no in-depth discussions of hair fibers or footprint finds--and instead deals with the general phenomena of Bigfoot, including the creature's cinematic history and a survey of Bigfoot researchers.
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Coleman discusses the famous 1967 Patterson/Gimlin Bigfoot film and its circumstances, though some of his descriptions are a little subjective. For example he says Roger Patterson's pony "smelled the creature and reared, bringing both pony and rider to the ground" (p. 82). (We know the pony reared, but there's no way to know if it was because it smelled a Bigfoot, as Coleman matter-of-factly states.) This subtle shift from reporting to advocacy appears in other places as well.
Coleman says of the Patterson creature that "this filmed Bigfoot does not lock its knees; this would be extremely difficult for a hoaxer to do and yet look as smooth as this creature's walk" (p. 96). Yet experiments conducted by David Daegling and Daniel Schmitt (and published in the May/June 1999 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER) found it was instead quite easy to duplicate the smooth gait seen in the film.
Coleman includes a chapter on the Minnesota Iceman, a "man left over from the Ice Age" exhibited in a block of ice as a sideshow attraction. The Iceman's background is too fantastic and involved to go into here, but suffice it to say that it involves an anonymous millionaire, a creationist conspiracy, a Bigfoot shot and killed in Minnesota, a showman known for spinning wild tales, and a fake Iceman/Bigfoot that was deviously switched for the "real" one. Despite its thoroughly dubious provenance, two respected cryptozoologists, Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, were certain it was not a sideshow illusion but a real, modern human ancestor. (Heuvelmans believed it to be a Neandertal killed in Vietnam.)
One of the questions surrounding the Iceman is, if it really was a Bigfoot (and not a faked dummy), why hadn't anyone else noticed it during the years it had been on public exhibition in many states? Coleman answers by quoting Sanderson: "Just how many people with proper training in any of the biological sciences ... go to such shows? If any do, how many are trained physical anthropologists or primatologists? ... The answer is: practically no one who attended the exhibit (p. 112)." Yet this simply begs the question; one could as well ask how much Sanderson and Heuvelmans know about carnival exhibits and illusions. They would not be the first scientists to be fooled by tricksters.
Coleman claims that the Iceman "was never a carnival exhibit," (p. 115) and that it was instead shown at shopping malls and state fairs (as if the latter did not have midways). "The elitist practice of labeling the Minnesota Iceman a 'carnival exhibit' is a way to immediately diminish the possible significance" of the Iceman, Coleman writes. Yet Sanderson himself seems to suggest that the venue was less than respectable when he asks how many educated, trained biologists would "go to such shows." If it was not displayed as a carnival attraction, that would be news to Verne Langdon, a longtime special effects artist whom the Iceman exhibitor approached to make a life-sized fake. Langdon claimed in a recent article in Cult Movies magazine (number 38, page 69) that the Iceman was to be used for appearances "on carnival midways." In fact, Senior Research Fellow Joe Nickell saw the exhibit first hand at a carnival midway--at Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition on August 19, 1973.
Coleman delves into new territory with a chapter tided "Sex and the Single Sasquatch." Jokes about large feet aside, Bigfoot sex is a legitimate avenue of inquiry--the creatures would have to have a large enough breeding population to survive through generations. (Though apparently not all of them breed; Coleman writes that some Bigfoot might be gay and more randy males are said to have a bent for bovine buggery.)
In chapter 2, Coleman discusses "The Strange Cast of Skookum," a mud impression discovered in Washington state in September 2000 by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO). A large cast was made of the impression, said to contain the body print of a reclining Bigfoot. Hair, saliva, and waste samples were also collected, raising the possibility of DNA analysis. If authentic, this find has the potential to reveal a trove of useful information.
The BFRO has repeatedly refused to provide outside investigators--myself included--access to the cast. In stark contrast to open scientific inquiry, the experts who were allowed to examine it were hand-picked by the BFRO to be filmed for a documentary. Those who wish to see their "evidence" can pay $35 for the documentary on DVD available through a company called Whitewolf Entertainment. The fact that supposedly scientific findings must be purchased though an entertainment company instead of appearing in peer-reviewed journals reveals much about the BFRO's credibility.
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