| Description |
1 online resource (xv, 279 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Preface -- 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 laughter 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 -- Index |
| Summary |
Last August, two men in rural Georgia announced that they had killed Bigfoot. The claim drew instant, feverish attention, leading to more than 1,000 news stories worldwide-despite the fact that nearly everyone knew it was a hoax. Though Bigfoot may not exist, there's no denying Bigfoot mania. With Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America's favorite homegrown monster. He begins with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, then takes us to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot's emergence as a modern marvel. Buhs delves deeply into the trove of lore and misinformation that has sprung up around Bigfoot in the ensuing half century. We meet charlatans, pseudo-scientists, and dedicated hunters of the beast--and with Buhs as our guide, the focus is always less on evaluating their claims than on understanding why Bigfoot has inspired all this drama and devotion in the first place. What does our fascination with this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media? Writing with a scientist's skepticism but an enthusiast's deep engagement, Buhs invests the story of Bigfoot with the detail and power of a novel, offering the definitive take on this elusive beast |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-267) and index |
| Notes |
English |
|
Print version record |
| Subject |
Sasquatch.
|
|
BODY, MIND & SPIRIT -- Unexplained Phenomena.
|
|
Sasquatch
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780226502151 |
|
0226502155 |
|
1282239759 |
|
9781282239753 |
|
9786612239755 |
|
6612239751 |
|
