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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Belated Appreciation, May 14, 2005
I have a had strange relationship with this book. Years ago, back in the 1970s, I was immersed in Bigfoot/Sasquatch material.
I was into Ivan Sanderson and John Green, John Napier and Rene Dahinden, and anyone else into "Sasquatchology". Even searched out an old edition of Theodore Roosevelt's "The Wilderness Hunter" at the University of South Carolina's Thomas Cooper Library to read the "Ghost Story" chapter, which is the famed "Baumann Recollection" of trappers attacked by a bipedal "whatsit" in Idaho's Salmon River Country circa the 1840s. Wanted to read the story as Roosevelt wrote it, and a chiller it is.
Throughout all this period of bigfoot fascination, however, I always stayed, as I thought, "grounded in reality". This was some sort of primeval survival, I believed. This is an ape-man.
This is a pithecanthropus or a gigantopithecus or some relative to one of these. It is smart and it lives in the forests and it avoids humans as much as possible. Everything I gleaned from anecdotes about Ape Canyon, Albert Ostman, the Ruby Creek sightings, William Roe and others convinced me we were dealing with a biological creature here. (And, in MOST...but not ALL...cases, still do).
Then one day I spied on a bookshelf a slender little paperback volume with a greenish "impressionistic' cover that announced itself as "Bigfoot", by B. Ann Slate & Alan Berry. I thought, "Alriiiight!" and made the purchase. Took it home and began reading it and started scratching my head. Thought "Whaaaaat?". Paranormal bigfeet? Interdimensional manifestations? Three-toed sasquatches? Invisible ape-men? My "rational" self recoiled at such notions as reported therein.
I thought "This is utter crap" Complete rubbish" and pitched the book into a box somewhere. Later on I heard more such "blather" from another writer named Eric Norman. I decided he was as full of it as Slate and Berry were.
When the "Six Million Dollar Man" started encountering Bigfoot as a cybernetic "bodyguard" to space aliens on television, I decided I knew then who else had bought Slate & Berry to read, the six-mill producer! And figured their claptrap married up perfectly with his own.
But, over the years, as I kept sticking my nose into such things, I kept ENCOUNTERING these three-toed, paranormalist-friendly accounts of bigfoot(with no Steve Austin attached to them).AND stories of sasquatch sightings in "window" areas with associations to UFOs and "spooklights".
I started getting perplexed then. Why? Because little by little I started seeing/hearing incident patterns that harkened back to that "stupid" book I had so blown off years earlier.
So what did I do then? I started LOOKING for the cussed book, fruitlessly. Finally tracked it down through a used book service and ordered it. THIS time I read it with a lot more of an open mind than I had back in the mid-70s (as well as with much more knowledge of corroborating material and testimony)...and found myself completely blown away by it.
I would have to say, right now, that I believe "Bigfoot" by Slate and Berry to be one of the true CLASSICS in this area of research. AND, as one earlier reviewer very aptly put it, it WILL give you the "willies" (note: if anyone here is too young to understand this reference, it refers to the great African-American character actor of the 1940s, Willie Best. See Willie do his thing with Bob Hope in "The Ghostbreakers", when the spectre of the old Spanish grandee walks through his Cubam castle. Willie made a career out of being so frightened by the supernatural that he would shake and shivver hilariously, go bug eyed...MUCH better than Don Knott's as "Mr. Chicken"...and mutter his famous signature gag-line "Feets don't fail me now!". Because of Willie Best, anyone finding themselves in nervous agitation over "something strange" was said to have a case of "the Willies").
Other people have reported on this type of thing (paranormal-like sasquatch associations) in the years since "Bigfoot" was first published; Loren Coleman, Brad Steiger, John Keel, and Scott Corrales, to name but a few. Yet another is Texas writer Rob Riggs, whose "In the Big Thicket" is an excellent compendium of bigfoot/ghostlight mutual phenomena.
It also should be said that Gian Quasar, the author of the excellent "Into The Bermuda Triangle" is completing a book on Bigfoot/Sasquatch that brings a great deal of new research into line that indicates these "things" are NOT cuddly-wuddly "Harry And The Hendersons" type play-pals. That they are quite dangerous in certain circumstances...maybe more dangerous than the average PETA-phile would like to believe. And THAT is ANOTHER thought that might provoke a case of the willies.
But, back to the subject volume here...the Slate/Berry paperback...thirty years ago I would have told you, "Don't bother with this stupid book. Save your money." TODAY I tell you, don't MISS this wonderful, insightful MILESTONE in the literature.
Seemingly proof of the old adage, "With age comes wisdom".
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Veritable Jewel of a Book, November 21, 1999
When I read Slate and Berry's book in 1976, it finally helped the Bigfoot phenomenon "make sense" within my mind. The psychic/interdimensional component of this phenomenon has been sadly overlooked since the 1970's and even then, no book summarizes this approach better than B.Ann Slate and Alan Berry's own look into the subject. I would urge all researchers to spare no resources in finding this book. No library can be said to be truly complete without it.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A skeptical but creepy account, June 5, 2000
First off, this book gave me the willies. It has a lot of information on the subject especially the events that took place near the Sierra's in the late 60s early 70s, but it relates the information in a well crafted narrative with atmosphere. Good at presenting possible supernatural/extradimensional aspect of sasquatch phenomena
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