The Bigfootmania continues here at The Portly Politico, and after going back with Audre Myers about the big lugs whereabouts, I asked her to write a piece about the books on Bigfoot.

I imagine there are quite a few cranks out there who are, uh, cranking out click-bait-style eBooks about the hide-and-seek world champion (I’ve long encouraged my Ph.D.-wielding, tenured older brother to write some hack book about ghosts or the like, using his doctoral degree as a way to sell books via the fallacy of authority).  Audre’s book list does note include those kinds of cheap money grabs.

Indeed, one is a Ph.D. (there’s the authority fallacy!) who has endured considerable professional scorn for his research on Bigfoot (perhaps that’s why my brother never took me up on the ghost book suggestion).  The other is a YouTuber who is not even convinced that Bigfoot exists, but who is looks at every bit of footage of the creature with a critical eye.

Perhaps belief in Bigfoot is wishful thinking, but we’re limiting ourselves intellectually if we don’t hear out the reasoned conclusions and evidence of the true believers.

With that, here is Audre’s brief bibliography of Bigfoot books:

In an email chat with ours Portly, I mentioned books written about bigfoot which spurred Port’s curiosity. He asked … I answered.

Let me preface this article by re-emphasizing that to believe in or in any way support inquiry into bigfoot is a two-edged sword; it will get you notoriety rather than any excess of fame and can ruin a person’s reputation.

Jeff Meldrum is a Ph.D. in anatomical sciences. He is a Full Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University. Here is his Wiki page for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Meldrum. At 60+ years, this is not his first rodeo. He has three books on Amazon that have bigfoot as the topic [here, here, and here, and a Bigfoot-themed field journal; thanks to Audre for the links! —TPP]. He also has an amazing personal collection of plaster casts of bigfoot feet that is often used by the bigfoot community for various research purposes. You can also see Dr. Meldrum in various programs that have to do (or episodes of) cryptozoology. You can see the listing of programs in the ‘external links‘ portion on his Wiki page. Complete transparency here, I’ve not read any of Dr. Meldrum’s books. No particular reason, I just suspect his writing style may be in line with J. I. Packer’s and that’s some pretty stiff going. My apologies to Dr. Meldrum if I’m wrong.

I’m in the process of reading Thinker Thunker‘s book, How to Find and Film a Bigfoot: An exercise in critical thinking. Thinker Thunker is Jed White’s YouTube channel name. The channel is, if I recall correctly, 10 years old and his eye and his talents have grown with the years and the channel. He has a mechanical background as well as being an artist, fully versed in several computer analysis programs, and he’s an ‘equipment geek’, which is good for us, his viewers, followers, subscribers, and Patreon members. Through countless hours of research and manipulation of thousands of bigfoot videos, he has created fairly simple but correct criteria with which to debunk or defend the videos. He, like most people when asked, will not say definitively that bigfoot exists. No one will say that ’til habeus corpus (present the body). But it doesn’t take long, viewing of his channel, to understand that he fully supports the idea of bigfoot.

The purpose of How to Find and Film a Bigfoot is two-fold. Since its inception, Thinker Thunker channel has been the target of every mean person on the internet. If the devil is bad, Thinker Thunker is ten times worse, according to comments under his videos. In Find and Film, he is answering all the critics who have called him everything but a child of God, as well as explaining the whys and the wherefores of bigfoot video – like why they aren’t nice and clear and close up in the sun, on a beach, sitting in a beach chair drinking a piña colada. He’s got quite a wry sense of humor and is never mean-spirited when answering the critics.

What he has done is explain what should be perfectly obvious to anyone. Go with me here … you’re walking your dog, or you’re looking for mushrooms in your local State Park. You wander deeper and deeper, taking pictures of this outcropping, that surprising flower … when you suddenly hear something that immediately catches your attention. You’re not sure what it is, or even sure where the sound came from. You put your cell phone to your eye to get a better look and there before you is something that has never been in your paradigm. What you see is completely foreign to you and yet a word flashes in your head and you’re instantly terrified. Ask yourself, “Just how clear and steady a picture would I take if such thing happened to me?” Now you know why bigfoot videos are so bad, for the most part. Unsuspecting people meeting an unexpected challenge to everything they know and understand.

How to Find and Film a Bigfoot is available digitally – my old Galaxy Tab A handles it just fine. Included in the text are various videos Thinker uses to support and enhance for the reader the bullet points he explains. I’m enjoying it. I suspect that others might, also.