Last August, two men in rural Georgia announced that they had killed Bigfoot. The claim drew instant, feverish attention, leading to more than a thousand news stories worldwide - despite the fact that nearly everyone knew it was a hoax. Though Bigfoot may not exist, there's no denying Bigfoot mania. With "Bigfoot", Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and woolly story of America's favorite homegrown monster. He begins with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, then takes us to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot's emergence as a modern marvel.
Buhs delves deeply into the trove of lore and misinformation that has sprung up around Bigfoot in the ensuing half century. We meet charlatans, pseudoscientists, and dedicated hunters of the beast - and with Buhs as our guide, the focus is always less on evaluating their claims than on understanding why Bigfoot has inspired so much drama and devotion in the first place.