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by B. Ann Slate & Al Berry 
The Many Faces of BigfootIf the poet Wallace Stevens had known of this book, he might have titled it 7 Ways of Looking at a Bigfoot, after his famous poem about blackbirds. This text describes several entities, all similar in appearance, but none of them identical from one chapter to the next: in one, Bigfoot is a shy but inquisitive humanoid creature living in the Sierras, communicating by growls, roars, whistles, and light flashes; in another an Indian legend come to life. The creature then becomes, in successive chapters, an ape improbably living in San Bernadino and Oklahoma; a voice of the ecology movement, telling us to live according to nature; a visitor from another world, a research animal sent out by those who pilot UFOs, a phantom who vanishes on being shot, yet leaves footprints; and one of many unexplained phenomena observed on the Yakima Indian Reservation. Though all these entities appear as huge, hairy anthropoids-like beings, their differing characteristics make it unlikely that they represent a single phenomenon, at least not a material one. It is the first book of its type that I know of. It appeared at roughly the same time as John Keel's Mothman Prophecies, in which Keel posits that UFOs and other strange phenomena are manifestations of intelligences from another dimension. Similarly, Slate and Berry portray Bigfoot in many ways, material and paranormal, but with an emphasis on the data which has been ignored by materialist cryptozoologists, who see Bigfoot as a primate not yet recognized by mainstream science. As they emerge from this work, then, these creatures are monsters of the id, or phantoms from another dimension, spirits of the earth speaking to us, or psychic anthropoids. Adherence to the paranormalist approach is the greatest strength of this study; it is admirable that they review the accounts in this book on their own terms, rather than trying to shoehorn them into the expected materialist paradigms. Its only weakness is an inconsistency of voice: the chapter titled "Terror in a Mountain Resort," for example, seems to have been written for another, less professional publication, though the evidence presented is consistent with the rest of the book. Still, the book is a valuable archive of information ignored by mainstream Bigfoot researchers. It is recommended less for those who want a narrow interpretation of the Bigfoot material or a hard look at the physical evidence within mainstream scientific terms, and more strongly for those who want to read paranormal, psychic, and New Age narratives centering on our hairy fellow traveller. |
