193887515X (N) by Bryan Sykes

Author:Bryan Sykes
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781633410275
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Published: 2016-03-01T07:00:00+00:00

16

The Guru

The majority of hair samples donated to the collateral hominid project came from North America, and I made sure I visited and interviewed most of the donors. I also spoke to a lot of people who had encountered Bigfoot in one way or another, either through a sighting or an ‘experience’ such as you will read about in the coming chapters. The Bigfoot enthusiasts were a fascinating bunch, all keen to help with collecting the evidence to identify the creatures that they never doubted for a moment were living in the forests and mountains. As I travelled around I became absorbed in their community, no longer debating whether or not these creatures existed but rather learning about the finer points of their social structure, even their language and culture. As time went on I, like the enthusiasts, began to take it for granted that we were discussing a real creature, only very occasionally pausing to remind myself that there was no proof. The time and energy that the enthusiasts put into their research was impressive. Days or weeks spent in isolation deep in the forest staking out a Bigfoot hotspot, hours on the Internet catching up with the latest sightings, or just to gossip. They were the nicest bunch, charming and open, but were they all deluded? I will let you judge for yourself.

Many people have spent years involved with Bigfoot research, but none for quite as long as Loren Coleman. He studied zoology and anthropology at Southern Illinois University and Brandeis and had lectured at universities in New England until 2004. He now lives in Portland, Maine where he established the International Cryptozoology Museum in 2003. I had two good reasons for wanting to meet and interview Loren. First, he had written a thoroughly researched biography of Tom Slick Jr, the wealthy Texas businessman who financed so many of the yeti and Bigfoot expeditions in the 1950s and 1960s. Coleman calls him ‘The Howard Hughes of Cryptozoology’. And second, with a lifetime spent in and around cryptozoology, I wanted his assessment of the current state of affairs.

I had arranged to meet him in Portland in April 2013, travelling up from Boston where I was speaking at the annual meeting of the New England Historical and Genealogy Society about my recently published book on the genetic history of America, DNA USA. On Monday 15 April two bombs exploded near the end of the course of the Boston marathon. This awful event, which killed three people and injured a further 264, happened in the week of the genealogy symposium. My wife and I arrived on Thursday 18 April and booked into the Four Seasons hotel on Boston Common where, despite the bombing, the genealogy event was scheduled to take place. Almost as soon as we checked in, news came that two local residents of Chechen origin, the Tsarnaev brothers, had shot and killed a policeman in Watertown, a suburb of Boston. One of the brothers was dead, but the other had escaped.

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