Book Review: Where the Footprints EndVolume 1
Cover art by Timothy Renner
“She was about seven feet tall, and from examination of her tracks later, we estimate her to weigh in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds.”
I grew up with Patty.
I first met her on “In Search Of.” There, accompanied by Leonard Nimoy’s mellifluous voice, she strode across our television screen, pausing to glance over her shoulder with a look that said, “Follow me,” before disappearing into the California forest.
By now, I reckon you know I mean the subject of the film shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in 1967—a mysterious female hairy hominid popularly known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch. My first look at Patty left me breathless. There I was, twelve years old, sprawled on the living room floor, with a shiver going up my spine, my eyes wide. I -knew- in my bones that I was seeing a real, live unknown great ape. I sat up and looked over my shoulder at my Dad, and he nodded at me. His eyes were, for him, kind of wide, too.
I grew up watching nature documentaries, and rambling around in the woods around my grandparents’ farm in West Virginia. I knew how animals moved and behaved in the wild. And having seen every film in the “Planet of the Apes” film franchise, I knew what a man in a good ape costume looked like and how he moved. And there was no comparison. Her legs were shaped differently and you could see muscle movement under that fur. That fur was attached to the muscles under them. That’s how it looked.
My Dad concurred. It looked awfully real. And even more than looking real—it -felt- real. It made our hair stand on end, and our hearts speed up.
So, of all the cryptids, of all the supposed unknown animals out there in the world, Bigfoot, I was certain, was real. A real, living flesh and blood wild hominid out there in the forests, living far from the haunts of man.
Now, I was an avid reader, and John Keel’s book, “The Mothman Prophesies” had come out two years previous to my introduction to Patty and her kin by the voice of Mr. Spock. I read that book, and liked it so much that the next time we went to the library together, I picked up two of his other books, “Strange Creatures from Time and Space” and “Our Haunted Planet.” In those books, he discussed Bigfoot, the Yeti and other hairy hominids, and from those books, I learned that such creatures had been sighted all over the country, and not just in high mountains and dense forests, but also cities, towns and suburbs.
Often, in the presence of UFO’s.
But I clung tightly to my belief that Patty’s tribe was a fully biological, non-paranormal member of the Great Ape family that has managed to elude humanity’s efforts to capture and codify it in a Linnean fashion.
Until very recently, that is.
And this book really put the final nail in the coffin of my staunch and unyielding belief that Bigfoot is fully physical and non-supernatural.
Where the Footprints End by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner is an in depth, thoroughly researched dive into the folkloric underpinnings of Bigfoot. They find connections not only to UFO’s, but to fairy lore, ghost lore, Native American spirit lore, poltergeists, and the extensive Wild Man traditions of Europe.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Well, that’s all well and good, but those folktales are just explaining the mysterious sightings of real hominids in a way that people in those older, less scientific societies could understand.”
Yeah, I used to think that too.
But the authors pull a Jacques Vallee on us, and weave those traditions in with modern encounters that mirror those old folktales. Not just once or twice, but over and over and over. (I’m referring, to Dr. Vallee’s groundbreaking 1969 book, Passport to Magonia where he took a deep dive into the fairy traditions of Europe and compared them with modern UFO sightings—particularly those sightings that involved UFO occupants. He found many compelling correspondences between the old fairy stories and modern alien encounters. We’ll talk more about this book, later.)
The correlations come thick and fast as a sudden snow squall off of Lake Erie, and before you can say “boo,” you find your tightly-held preconceptions falling away, and there you are waving goodbye to them.
My belief in Bigfoot as -only- an undiscovered great ape was already wavering before I read this book. Now, it’s crushed, crumpled into a ball and tossed into the waste bin of rejected theories that lives in my hind brain. There, it rattles around with the rejected Extraterrestrial Hypothesis to explain UFO/UAP sightings, and the likelihood of Nessie being a relict plesiosaur. Damn.
Well, at least the Cryptid Theory of Bigfoot will be in good company back there. They’ll have people to play Scrabble with in there. Give ‘em something to do.
No, seriously, Where the Footprints End is eye-opening and just as important a book to the discussion of Sasquatch as Passport to Magonia is to the discussion of UFO’s. I’m not sure why no one had written this book before, really—except that most cryptozoologists so are desperately seeking legitimacy in the eyes of mainstream scientists, that they have taken to committing the cardinal sin of leaving evidence out of their narrative on Bigfoot.
Because there’s a metric butt-ton of weird elements to Bigfoot sightings and experiences. And there always has been. Researcher Stan Gordon can tell you all about it. John Keel wrote about this stuff, too., way back in the 1960’s. Little lights, UFO’s, Bigfoot disappearing in front of people, footprints disappearing in the middle of a field—-that sort of thing.
These oddities have always been there—it’s just that most Bigfoot researchers have ignored them, because….well, you know why. Because they wanted to believe that Patty and her kin were real live apes. But the fact that they are seen not just in remote forested mountains, but in suburban subdivisions means that isn’t very likely.
I mean, how does something that big hide out in narrow strips of second and third growth forests abutting the cookie cutter houses with two car garages on Timid Deer Lane?
The likelihood is that they don’t hide out there, at least not all the time.
Now, neither I, nor Joshua nor Timothy are saying that these creatures aren’t physical. They’re certainly physical enough to leave behind footprints and hair. But, I think that they are only physical sometimes—sort of like how a UFO can leave behind a burned circle of grass after landing, then disappear into thin air after taking off. Or, poltergeists can fling objects, even though you can’t see the hand that does the flinging. Or, how ghosts have reportedly been solid enough to stroke a child’s hair and then melt away into a wisp of nothingness.
You know. That liminal betwixt and between stuff that makes paranormal investigation both infuriating and fascinating.
Yes, there will be a volume two. I heard that it is finished being written and Tim is busy doing the illustrations for it.
I can’t wait for it to come out. I want to know what other fascinating material these two have up their sleeves.
John Keel would have liked this book. He’d probably have read it and shaken his head and laughed saying, “I told you so.”
Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomena Volume 1 is available on Amazon.
Prints of the cover art shown above by Timothy Renner are available from his Etsy Shop.
