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pineislandI heard about The Secret History of Bigfoot: In Search of an American Monster on this episode of American Hysteria where the author, John O'Connor, gave an interview about his book.
I'm not a cryptid person. I have my own woo🔒 but it's not cryptids. I don't believe in any of them but in a different way than I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts but I've seen one (three, actually, not counting the cat ghosts that appeared when Turtle was sick) and I believe when other people tell me they've seen or experienced ghosts; cryptids, on the other hand, I'm like, "uh-huh, sure." I think because there's really no evidence for or against ghosts, except eyewitness testimony; surely a 7', 350+ mammal would at least leave behind bones? or poop? (This doesn't include oceanic creatures. If you want to tell me that there's a fucking fire-breathing serpent hanging around down there waiting to boil the seas when the Antichrist comes then you know what? sure, why not. It's not worse than anything we've found down there.)
So I don't believe in Bigfoot but I'm glad there are people out there who do. It makes the world a more interesting place.
Anyway… This book is very funny. Sometimes I think O'Connor tries a little too hard to get a chuckle ("Dinner that evening was, as my students might say, Gucci") but I've highlighted a lot that literally made me laugh out loud, like "a pika - a short-eared and pissed-off cousin of the rabbit - scampered from its ferny den to eyeball me" and "Assembled around the fire, we gave the lie to Bigfooting's alleged lack of diversity. We were old white guys, young white guys, middle-aged white guys" or "(there's a joke to be made here about a sausage party that's quite frankly beneath me)."
It really feels like O'Connor is spinning a yarn and it might be affected but it is genuinely funny and I'm impressed at how seamlessly he weaves 'having a beer and telling a story'-style humor with deep research; I didn't expect to see Saint Augustine cited in a book that makes a joke about not making a joke about sausage parties, but there he is: "Saint Augustine… took monsters of the distant East so seriously that he devoted an entire chapter of his fifth-century City of God to the question of their salvation." (I love this stuff, like, how do you fast for Ramadan in space? and is lab-grown pork kosher? like sci-fi religious questions.)
I also learned the concept of "half-belief" which, as someone with OCD, really resonated with me.
Something I want to follow up on later is research by Dr. Gary Wells, cited by O'Connor, that "when given misleading information under questioning, people 'remembered' entirely fictitious events." Given my own history of believing things that aren't real🔒, this is a study I want to track down. The bibliography is frustratingly incomplete; it jumps from "Walls, Laura Dassow" to "Wiseman, Frederick Matthew" with no "Wells, Gary." Rude! Not to mention, none of these things are cited directly; there's no footnotes or parenthetical citations that would make it easier to cross-reference the texts that even make it into the bibliography… which I guess might be too "academic" and potentially distracting for popular nonfiction but it is annoying to me, personally.
… all that said, I'm ~50% of the way through this book and I am really enjoying it so far. It's fun reading and well researched and a good romp.
I wrote more about this book after I finished reading on 3/6/2025.
I'm not a cryptid person. I have my own woo🔒 but it's not cryptids. I don't believe in any of them but in a different way than I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts but I've seen one (three, actually, not counting the cat ghosts that appeared when Turtle was sick) and I believe when other people tell me they've seen or experienced ghosts; cryptids, on the other hand, I'm like, "uh-huh, sure." I think because there's really no evidence for or against ghosts, except eyewitness testimony; surely a 7', 350+ mammal would at least leave behind bones? or poop? (This doesn't include oceanic creatures. If you want to tell me that there's a fucking fire-breathing serpent hanging around down there waiting to boil the seas when the Antichrist comes then you know what? sure, why not. It's not worse than anything we've found down there.)
So I don't believe in Bigfoot but I'm glad there are people out there who do. It makes the world a more interesting place.
Anyway… This book is very funny. Sometimes I think O'Connor tries a little too hard to get a chuckle ("Dinner that evening was, as my students might say, Gucci") but I've highlighted a lot that literally made me laugh out loud, like "a pika - a short-eared and pissed-off cousin of the rabbit - scampered from its ferny den to eyeball me" and "Assembled around the fire, we gave the lie to Bigfooting's alleged lack of diversity. We were old white guys, young white guys, middle-aged white guys" or "(there's a joke to be made here about a sausage party that's quite frankly beneath me)."
It really feels like O'Connor is spinning a yarn and it might be affected but it is genuinely funny and I'm impressed at how seamlessly he weaves 'having a beer and telling a story'-style humor with deep research; I didn't expect to see Saint Augustine cited in a book that makes a joke about not making a joke about sausage parties, but there he is: "Saint Augustine… took monsters of the distant East so seriously that he devoted an entire chapter of his fifth-century City of God to the question of their salvation." (I love this stuff, like, how do you fast for Ramadan in space? and is lab-grown pork kosher? like sci-fi religious questions.)
I also learned the concept of "half-belief" which, as someone with OCD, really resonated with me.
Something I want to follow up on later is research by Dr. Gary Wells, cited by O'Connor, that "when given misleading information under questioning, people 'remembered' entirely fictitious events." Given my own history of believing things that aren't real🔒, this is a study I want to track down. The bibliography is frustratingly incomplete; it jumps from "Walls, Laura Dassow" to "Wiseman, Frederick Matthew" with no "Wells, Gary." Rude! Not to mention, none of these things are cited directly; there's no footnotes or parenthetical citations that would make it easier to cross-reference the texts that even make it into the bibliography… which I guess might be too "academic" and potentially distracting for popular nonfiction but it is annoying to me, personally.
… all that said, I'm ~50% of the way through this book and I am really enjoying it so far. It's fun reading and well researched and a good romp.
I wrote more about this book after I finished reading on 3/6/2025.
