I think that my interest in cryptozoology began with my grade-school library. I always wished that dinosaurs and sabertoothed cats still lived. I used to pretend to be a Smilodon and my younger brothers were the “prey” to be attacked . And then one day I stumbled across a book called “Investigating the Unexplained” by Ivan T. Sanderson. Reading that book was a mind-expanding experience. I checked it out over and over again and drew pictures all the time, of the animals it described. It was the beginning of my seeing cryptid animals as possibly really existing, and not just wishful thinking.

I particularly loved the paintings of extinct species by Jay Matternes, the Picasso of Paleontology. And while we’re on him: the Life Nature Library – probably the seminal zoological texts of my childhood – had a really good volume, “Early Man,” with some fine paintings by Jay – among numerous he produced for that series – of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus.

It actually sounds (“It Starts With Animals”) like this could be the “inspiration” thread. Because Bigfoot has always been an animal to me, nothing more, and more than intriguing enough, just as that. (We do seem to have an odd species tendency to inflate critters into monsters.) My first exposure to the Big Guy wasn’t “The Legend of Boggy Creek,” but a surprisingly even-handed article, in a conservative (small-c) wildlife mouthpiece, National Wildlife (the publication of the namesake Federation), which came out the spring after Patterson’s film did.

On the book rack of the old Hudson Bay Outfitters in Kensington, MD, in the early ‘80s, I saw a trail guide by John Hart, “Hiking the Bigfoot Country,” which focused as one might surmise on Omah’s Northern California haunts. Intrigued, I told my new girlfriend that sure we’d go to California this summer (1986). But not to surf down south, like she wanted, but to backpack, for a week, up north, Hart’s book as our guide. (“But I have never seen a mountain lion either, nor a wolverine – species known to live in these same woods.”

Few roads; fewer trails; few people who even knew where the place was we were going (we asked directions, at one point, in a self-designated “nuclear-free zone” that just happened to be just over the line, in Oregon). But there were, on the second day, tracks. A line of them, in an old road bed. Deeply indented, in ground we didn’t dent with our heavy packs on. Couldn’t make out features, like distinct toe prints. But I mean, they looked like tracks to me; and I’ve never seen anything that looked so much like tracks that, well, wasn’t tracks.

And if they were tracks: a biped with human-like feet, considerably bigger than us, made them.

Wish I’d taken pictures. But the forest was so dark that I couldn’t take a handheld shot, on a sunny day at noon. I had a monopod but not a tripod.

And who would look at them anyway…?

(Oh. We’re still married. I actually have to tone her down a bit when those tracks come up. She’s convinced.)

Part of the problem is so many people believe virtually all the land surfaces on this planet have been explored. The United States is a good example, sure airplanes have flown over every square inch of the country and there are probably aerial photos of almost all of it. However there are still a good many places no white man has set foot and plenty of forest area so dense there is no way to have any idea what is beneath the trees.

Loren made a good point here - it DOES start with animals. For me as a kid it started with a library visit and Louis S. B. Leakey’s book “Animals of East Africa,” which does include a couple of oddities like off-color zebras. That book was so influential with me that I hunted down a used copy for myself 20 years later. I still read it every couple of years.

(That could be a separate thread, I guess. So many of us got started in this business by reading one book or seeing one movie - it would be interesting to see what “the inspiration” was for everyone.)