Where the Wild Things Are: Yakshas

Where the Wild Things Are:  Adventures of Max, illustrated and written by Maurice Sendak

Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness

Our forests seem to be hiding something much more complex than an "undiscovered gorilla."

Sasquatch or "Bigfoot" may be howling from a mountaintop, but the phenomenon is revealing big secrets...if we will but listen.

Eyewitnesses and investigators (called cryptozoologists) worldwide contend ample evidence exists supporting the survival of large, hairy, apelike creatures lurking in the wilderness alongside humankind today.

• What are Sasquatches in Buddhism: Yakshas?

By all appearances, these beings seem wholly natural, interacting with their surroundings and leaving behind physical evidence: hair, blood, fecal droppings, and, of course, big footprints.

Yet, despite their apparently physical nature, Bigfoot and its hairy hominid kin consistently appear mired in High Strangeness — the peculiar, ineffable, and nonsensical absurdities so often encountered in paranormal phenomena.

Some sightings seem more consistent with mythology than biology. Bigfoot often present supernatural attributes, like luminescent eyes or the ability to pass, ghostlike, through structures. Anomalous lights are regularly seen in areas of frequent Sasquatch activity.

Footprints persistently, if rarely, display odd numbered toes. And — most bafflingly — Bigfoot trackways suddenly end in the middle of open, untouched terrain. They simply vanish, as if passing out of this dimension like interdimensional beings.

In Volume 1 of Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon, authors Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner carefully examine not only the intersection of hairy ape-people with global folklore of:

American Cryptids (Irish)

• poltergeists,
• faeries,
• extraterrestrials,
• magic,
• witches,
• ghosts, and
• archetypal women-in-white.

They question the fundamental assumptions underlying contemporary cryptozoological beliefs surrounding Bigfoot.

Reviews

Passport to Magonia: Folklore to Flying Saucers

"Impressively, even exhaustively researched, Where the Footprints End should give all students of the anomalous pause for thought.

"By documenting both the high strangeness that surrounds Bigfoot sightings and the deep folklore in which they are embedded, Cutchin and Renner so far broaden the context of Bigfoot encounters that it is no longer possible to credit any single theory or literalistic interpretation concerning their nature.

"Indeed, one begins to suspect that the reality of Bigfoot is less a problem to be solved than a mystery to dissolve our view of reality itself. Here at last is the book that dear old Bigfoot deserves."

—Patrick Harpur, author of Daimonic Reality

"This book poses a danger to the foundations of cryptozoology. While mainstream Bigfoot investigators would have you believe that people around the world are merely encountering a lost ape, Cutchin and Renner dig into the details they've swept under the rug, excavating countless Bigfoot reports involving glowing orbs, telepathic communication, and paranormal phenomena that have more in common with tales of ancient gods and alien abductions than they do with primatology.

"Meticulously researched and backed up with a treasure trove of footnotes, Where the Footprints End is poised to do for Bigfoot what Passport to Magonia did for UFOs."

—Greg Newkirk, director of The Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and the Occult and executive producer and star of Hellier