At some point last year I came across an article on the New Yorker's website called Weeding the Worst Library Books. It interviews two Michigan librarians who created a popular blog called Awful Library Books, which features old and outdated library books that should be removed ("weeded"). One of the books featured on their blog, and mentioned in the New Yorker article, is this:
I don't know about you, but when I saw this cover, I laughed out loud! It is so ridiculous, it takes the cake in just about every possible way. It's not just a book about sasquatch, it's about psychic sasquatch! And not just any ordinary, run-of-the-mill psychic sasquatch, but psychic sasquatch connected to UFOs!!!
It was so ridiculous I knew I had to have it. So I asked for it for my birthday last year, and Wendy bought it for me. I knew it would be awful, I was just hoping it would be hilariously awful.
Well, I finally got around to reading it a couple of weeks ago. And to my incredible surprise, the joke is on me! Instead of being a hilariously awful book, it turned out to be a fascinating and intelligently-written one! It's authored by an anthropologist, Jack Lapseritis, who's spent much of his life investigating sasquatch reports, and was finally forced to accept what many people have reported, and what he eventually experienced himself: telepathic communication with sasquatch creatures! And in a number of cases, UFOs were observed at the same time as the sasquatch!
To say that I was stunned by this book would be an understatement. I have never been interested in sasquatch before; I've always thought "So there's a big ape deep in the remote wilderness that's eluded researchers. Big deal!" But this book has opened up an entirely new area of research. After reading it, I've subscribed to blogs of other sasquatch researchers, and noticed a few of them have come to similar conclusions as Lapseritis: sasquatch, UFOs, and the paranormal are all intertwined. How interesting!
Here are a few points made in The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection:
- At the time the book was written (late 1990s), the author had interviewed 76 people who reported some level of telepathic contact with sasquatch, and/or observed sasquatch and UFOs at the same time.
- He claims sasquatch are extremely psychic, and can read people's minds, which makes them so elusive. They know who's coming and why.
- They are inter-dimensional beings, who can shift in and out of our reality, which is why their footprints suddenly disappear, or why no footprints are observed when they're seen walking over muddy ground.
- The sasquatch are people with their own culture, who want to be left alone. They are not animals to be hunted and killed. (Apparently this makes some Bigfoot hunters angry, since their goal is to kill a sasquatch and bring in the corpse as proof of their existence.)
- Sometimes they're seen being picked up or dropped off by UFOs.
There's much more in the book, of course; that's just a small sample. One other interesting point: the preface is written by R. Leo Sprinkle, a counseling psychologist. He's worked with clients who have had sasquatch/UFO encounters and says his clients were not crazy people; they just needed help dealing with experiences they couldn't explain. He also urges scientists to take the study of the paranormal seriously, and mentions the Society for Scientific Exploration as one such example. I was thrilled to see the SSE mentioned, because I joined that society way back in this blog post, when I discovered their journal, the JSE!
Finally, getting back to the Awful Library blog, I was pleased to see that not everyone thought Psychic Sasquatch was the type of book to be weeded. In their blog post on the book, a librarian comments:
I almost can't believe it, but thanks to this book, I want to learn much more about sasquatch!As hokey as this book is, I’d keep it in my library unless the condition was awful. There’s a huge audience for Bigfoot in my community, and one of the most well-attended programs we’ve had was from a group of Bigfoot ‘researchers’!