THE SECRET HISTORY OF BIGFOOT

From the shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest to off-the-wall cryptozoological conventions, one man searches high and low for the answer to the question: real or not, why do we want to believe?

In 2005, Peter Matthiessen, the National Book Award-winning author of The Snow Leopard, hiked into a remote corner of the Cascade Range, in northwest Washington State, and set up camp on the south bank of the Suiattle River. With him were two friends, Jeffrey Meldrum, an anthropologist who specializes in bipedal relic hominoids - or the term he prefers, "Wild Men" - and John Mionczynski, an eccentric big-game biologist for the U.S. Forest Service. They were looking for Bigfoot. Although Matthiessen was skeptical of its existence, he harbored a decades-long obsession with Bigfoot. While researching The Snow Leopard, he had caught sight of a mysterious "dark shape" on the Tibetan Plateau, a figure "much too big for a red panda, too covert for a musk deer, too dark for wolf or leopard, and much quicker than a bear," he decided. What could it have been? For the next 30 years, he worked on and off on a Bigfoot book, mounting expeditions like this one in the Cascades to gather material and, he hoped, find evidence of the elusive creature. In THE SECRET HISTORY OF BIGFOOT, journalist and writer John O'Connor takes readers on a narrative quest through the American wilds in search of Bigfoot, its myth and meaning. Inhabited by an eccentric cast of characters - reputable men of science and deluded charlatans alike - the book will explore the zany and secretive world of "cryptozoology," tracking Bigfoot from the Wild Men of Native American and European lore to Harry and the Hendersons, while examining the forces behind our ever- widening belief in the supernatural. By turns an ardent, philosophical defense of nature, an investigation into what Kurt Andersen calls our peculiar "American appetites for immersive make-believe," and a gonzo trip into alternative reality, THE SECRET HISTORY OF BIGFOOT is the story of our Bigfoot obsession - where it comes from, what it means today - and the men and women driving it. John O'Connor is from Kalamazoo, Michigan, the original home of Gibson guitars. His writing has appeared in the journals Open City, Post Road, Quarterly West, and Creative Nonfiction's True Story series, as well as in the New York Times, Boston Globe, GQ, Saveur, Men's Journal, and the Financial Times. For two years he was a foreign correspondent for Japan's largest daily newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun. He teaches journalism at Boston College.