By Genevieve Morrison (A&S '27)
At a bookstore in Seattle last winter, a big, bearded man wearing head-to-toe camouflage marched toward John O’Connor, author of The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster. The man had some feedback about O’Connor’s book.
O’Connor, who teaches travel and food writing in the Journalism program at Boston College, sized up the gentleman and gulped.
“I read your book,” O’Connor recalled the man saying. “I loved it.”
It was people like this man—the typically white, conservative, and male believers that call themselves Bigfooters—among whom O’Connor spent a year embedded to craft his book. To learn their ways of life, O’Connor lurked with expedition groups in the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest, looking for signs of the monster. O’Connor published his authoritative look at Sasquatch culture in February of 2024. In the year since the book’s release, O’Connor said he’s gotten warm reception overall, winning both status on best-of-the-year lists and firm handshakes from the Bigfooters themselves.
As the paperback of the book hits shelves (Sourcebooks, May 2025, $17.99) O’Connor’s hoping it will continue the conversation the book has prompted, both about why people believe in the Sasquatch and what that belief says about American culture.
Before O’Connor’s book, he said there was little journalistic inquiry into the world of Bigfoot believers, so he was pleasantly surprised that major newspapers weren’t scared off by the seemingly wacky subject matter—he attracted reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
“The topic is not one that typically splashes across the book review sections of our major newspapers,” O’Connor said.
And most of his sources, he said, were receptive to their portrayals. One local Bigfooter, John Wilk, even appeared with O’Connor at a reading in Brookline.
“I think they like that somebody who was not one of them is taking it seriously,” O’Connor said. “I tried really hard to be fair to their beliefs.”
To O’Connor, that fairness includes a healthy dose of doubt.
“If we're to take Bigfoot as claims seriously, I think we should also take seriously our cognitive biases that might lead us to hallucinate a Bigfoot in the woods,” O’Connor said.
All it takes for a conspiracy theorist to enjoy the book, he said, is an open mind.
“If they want just validation of their ideas, then they're probably not going to like the book very much,” O’Connor said. “But if they're open to possibilities and open to doubt, then I think they do.”