Customer Reviews

The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot

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When I came back from helping my cousin on a kind of working vacation just outside of Happy Camp, California, my head was full of questions about Bigfoot. That was July, 1969. No, I hadn't seen one or found any strange tracks but I did talk with the other bridge builders there and they told me many stories about finding huge tracks and having equipment moved about. Looking into the forested hillsides and sleeping under the stars at night on the sand banks of the Klamath River had me excited with the thoughts of actually seeing one.

I came back that summer wanting to know more about Bigfoot and as luck would have it I found John Green's On the Track of the Sasquatch and Year of the Sasquatch at a local supermarket. I must have read those 4 or 5 times before I decided that I too wanted to go on the hunt for this legendary man-like creature. John produced a mental map for me, to aide in my search. He gave me the history behind it.

Written not so much as real chapters found in most books, this ex-newsman produced very readable material. It was like a compilation of newspaper articles on a common theme. The books were rustic, over sized 8 x 10. Eyewitness and hair raising encounters abound within. I am sure they inspired many like minded people, as it did me.

Now, Hancock House has reincarnated these two books into one book, "The Best of Sasquatch / Bigfoot" and added some up to date material that has since made national news. Re-reading about the Ruby Creek incident still sends shivers along my spine... tracks made in a potato field, squashing them under the soil, leading up to an old house where fish in a salt barrel was rummaged through is truly more visual then I could imagine coming from the written word.

Seeing the forensic skeleton reconstruction from the Patterson/Gimlin film for the Discovery channels "Sasquatch: Legend meets Science" details out the differences between this creature and man, other than just being hairy, tool challenged and gigantic in stature. There is more here than any other crypto zoological entity. Thousands of eyewitness sightings including those made by trained police officers. Hundreds of casts and tracks, some sporting friction ridges on their surfaces just like all other primates. And then there is the film. A film that has held up for 30 plus years as being the real deal.

Want to get excited about going into the woods and camping again? Read this book. Take it along with you and read it around the camp fire. Experience all the wilderness around you and you'll understand. It really is the best place to read it.

Written by foremost sasquatch authority John Green, who has studied the legend for more than 40 years and assembled more than 4000 reports, The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot is a compilation that reprents his previous titles "On the Track of the Sasquatch" and "Encounters with Bigfoot" along with 16 pages of brand new material. Black-and-white photographs, maps, extensive reports of amazing incidents, and just about every possible speculation concerning the mysterious Bigfoot packs this anthology, which is neatly supplemented with an alphabetical index for quick lookup. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in exploring the mystery behind this wildly popular legend.

John Green is one of the alleged most authoritative names in bigfoot research and is classified as one of the Big 4 alongside Dahinden, Byrne, and Krantz. The "Best of Sasquatch" is the reprinting of Green's early books, "On the Track of..." and "Encounters with..." bigfoot/sasquatch. There is also an 'update' segment in the book to help bring it up to speed.

It's great to see the books reprinted and the cover art for the book is well done. The update section is all too brief and Green spends little time or page space to give any really gripping information or update material, but this is standard with both of the books republished here also. Keep in mind, Green is a newspaperman by choice and trade, he's a 'bigfoot researcher' in his spare time. The books of course cover the classic stories of Ostman, Baumann, Ape Canyon, Patterson film, William Roe, and the Chapman's Ruby Creek. These are found in nearly all the books on the subject. The important thing here is that these are among the first real bigfoot/sasquatch based books sent into circulation so is actually some of the earliest printed tellings of the stories. Throughout the rest of the books are very brief encounters, incidents, sightings, etc.. that are convoluted and crammed together with little sense of flow or smoothness. It's like reading a newspaper that has a certain amount of space to stuff in as much info as they possibly can.

The books are very quick reads and give a wide range of compacted stories. As for people calling John Green the authority on bigfoot research... collecting newspaper stories and dropping some money to go look at old tracks does not an expert make (but then what is a "bigfoot expert" anyway). Green has simply collected a massive amount of stories from a variety of sources, compiled them into his "computerized database", and then dropped enough of them together to form a few books. He offers no real theories on the creatures or makes any serious speculations, he's simply a newspaper guy that rounded up his favorite stories and put them into an order to form a book.

But I digress... overall, very well done for being on the forefront of sasquatch material, it gave people a large scope on the range and variety of sightings/encounters. These books have probably been the most influential in the various books that have been published since. Green's best work is "Sasquatch, the Apes Among Us" but this book is still absolutely necessary for any bigfoot collection.

This book along with John Greens other excellent "Apes among us" are the Bibles on the entire Sasquatch subject as far as im concerned. If you were to only own two books on the subject, these two would be it.