Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology
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The RELICT HOMINOID INQUIRY 1:72-80 (2012) Book Review Searching For Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology. By Brian Regal. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011. 249 pp. ISBN-978-0-230-11147-9. $85.00 (hardcover). Searching for Sasquatch is Bigfoot, the Minnesota Iceman, the Patterson- an important, entertaining, Gimlin film, the Bossburg tracks – where the but at times confusing new two groups frequently engaged each other. book by Brian Regal, an The “traditional heroic narrative of monster Associate Professor of the hunting,” he says, “situates mainstream History of Science at Kean scientists (the eggheads) as the villains University. The book rejecting the existence of anomalous primates essentially deals with the and cryptozoology as something unworthy of hunt for Sasquatch – more study. The narrative gives a privileged place specifically, the hunters of Sasquatch, to untrained, but passionate amateur scientists and amateurs alike – beginning in naturalists (the crackpots) who soldier on the late 1940s. As such, it joins the ranks to against great odds, including the unwarranted some degree of Robert Michael Pyle’s obstinacy of the mainstream against bringing elegantly written and surpassingly wise Where knowledge of these creatures to light.” He Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide further plots the basic template of the (1995) and Joshua Blu Buhs’s Bigfoot: The frequently hostile dialogue between the two Life and Times of a Legend (2009) as studies camps, with the egghead/academics of those seeking to find the creature. Through dismissing the claims of the crackpot the use of books, archival materials, private naturalists as scientifically unacceptable, and correspondences, and other research sources, the crackpot/naturalists firing back that the Regal is able to provide vivid and insightful egghead/academics are all armchair skeptics depictions of many of the major figures who’ve not bothered to even examine the involved in the hunt for Bigfoot and he raises evidence. But Regal aims to show that this an important cluster of questions regarding traditional narrative is too simplistic by a science and scientific methodology along the considerable degree, arguing that “numerous way. academically trained scientists in the United In his Introduction, Regal states that his States, United Kingdom, India, and Russia not narrative will concern the “relationship only seriously believed anomalous primates between the academic scientists and amateur existed, they actually pursued them, examined naturalists who hunt them [Bigfoot],” and he their physical traces, and worked out elaborates this relationship throughout the theoretical and evolutionary explanations for book by focusing on significant events in their existence.” Thus, “while the Bigfoot (and to a lesser degree, Yeti) lore – eccentricities of amateurs and the conflict the 1954 Daily Mail expedition to find the between amateur and professional model Yeti, Tom Slick’s similar expeditions to the dominate the discourse, a record exists of Himalayas in the late 1950s, Slick’s 1959- cooperation between them.” The nature of this 1962 Pacific Northwest Expedition to find “cooperation,” though, will often prove most © RHI WILLIAM POTTER 73 rocky, as the subsequent narrative reveals. In the course of the book, Regal presents, Also in his Introduction, Regal asserts that with some deviation, a roughly chronological his narrative “exists outside of whether history of the search for Bigfoot (and other Bigfoot is a biological reality, a piece of cryptid hominid forms as well), commencing indigenous performance art, or a creation of (in Chapter Two) with the two “godfathers” of pop culture…this book is unconcerned with cryptozoology, Sanderson and Heuvelmans, whether Bigfoot is real or not. I leave that who loom over the later scientists and Bigfoot burden to others. I am concerned with what hunters as Locke and Newton did over the motivates scientists to look for such Enlightenment thinkers. The two scientists – creatures.” In stating this (and the book’s though friends and colleagues who influenced much the better for his neutrality, which leads each other – could not be more different. to thumbnail sketches and descriptions of his Heuvelmans, the author of the ground- characters – major and minor – and significant breaking On the Track of the Unknown Bigfoot events that are sharp, detailed, and Animals (published in the original French in quite fair), Regal relieves himself of the need 1955 and translated into English in 1958), is to either explain away or accept as true the presented as a highly serious scientist whose often ambiguous data as they turn up in his work is distinguished by his “methodology of narrative. Rather, his concern is with depicting eliminating obvious misidentifications and the personalities and interactions of the hoaxes in order to find a core of reliable various characters that drift in and out of his descriptions.” Heuvelmans, Regal tells us, story, and out of these depictions gradually believed that the search for cryptids “must be emerge some important questions: who or rigorous and scientific, since the object is to what shall mediate the physical world, and look not only for physical animals in the field whence the authority for this? Which topics but also for the folkloric nature of such are worthy – or ought to be worthy – of creatures. Heuvelmans insisted the scientific examination, and which topics are cryptozoologists must plow through the not? Is science – specifically zoology – mountains of artwork and legends that primarily a theoretical or empirical endeavor? wrapped the animals like cultural In the ensuing pages we meet a very diverse camouflage.” and entertaining dramatis personae: the But just as significant, Regal argues, is that tirelessly peripatetic and always financially Heuvelmans injected a note “of intellectual strapped Scottish nature writer Ivan conflict with the [scientific] mainstream” into Sanderson, the former Nazi POW, French- his writings, and herein we see the beginnings Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, the of the eggheads versus crackpots model. delightfully irascible Swiss-Canadian Bigfoot According to Heuvelmans, sometime in the hunter Rene Dahinden, the curmudgeonly, nineteenth century science became entrenched long-suffering Washington State University in a theoretic/dogmatic stance not unlike a anthropologist Grover Krantz, the suave and religion’s, and beholden to its own theories worldly Irishman Peter Byrne, and the quietly and truths (what Sanderson called “the whole sagacious Canadian journalist John Green gamut of orthodoxies”), it remained deaf to (none of whom, Regal tells us, ever actually alternative possibilities. (Regal devotes a good saw a Bigfoot). Many other significant figures part of the book to presenting the speculations – scientists and amateurs – play smaller roles put forward by such scientists as Krantz and to be sure, but Regal concentrates his Sanderson as to what Bigfoot/Yeti could be discussion on the often contentious interplay [relic Neanderthal or Gigantopithecus] and of these main players. the swift rejection of these theories by REGAL – SEARCHING FOR SASQUATCH 74 mainstream science, since these explanations denied. For Sanderson, this leads to what run counter to theory.) The maverick scientists Regal describes as nothing less than “an (who choose to investigate the Bigfoot erosion of our democratic society.” phenomenon) and amateur Bigfoot hunters are But the stakes were even greater. In an thus confronted with a monolithic, unyielding unpublished tract entitled “The Race for Our intellectual community (what Heuvelmans Souls” (which Regal characterizes as called “the dictators of science”) that regards “apocalyptic vision and shaky logic”) the subject of their pursuit as absurd. Sanderson argues that the Soviets are way By contrast, Sanderson is presented as a ahead of the West in the search for much more complicated figure: brimming Bigfoot/Yeti – “they appear to be a lot more with sunny confidence, enthusiasm, and even pragmatic and a lot less squeamish than we arrogance on the one hand, while full of deep are” – and that it is imperative for Western resentments and insecurities (due to his lack of scientists, and the West in general, to stop graduate degrees and academic affiliations, being close-minded about the subject. The and the fact that many in the mainstream Soviet scientists were backed by their considered him a mere popularizer) on the government and had much more funding for other. He seemed to be always in a state of their effort than did the brave Western near-financial disaster and thus had to individual scientists, who had to find their frequently take on writing assignments that own backing. (This argument is essentially the were somewhat peripheral to his true interests same one made by the American chess player (such as Bigfoot) and which were sometimes Bobby Fischer throughout the 1960s as he published in magazines and journals tried to take on the mighty phalanx of Russian somewhat lacking in scientific prestige (one of Grandmasters alone in his quest for the top the major and ongoing difficulties for the position in chess; of course, he eventually maverick scientists confronting the monolithic succeeded, becoming World Champion in scientific community lay in trying to get work 1972.) The problem for Sanderson lay in the published in respectable venues). He was a fact that the Soviets could possibly find a tireless campaigner for cryptozoology,