Longtime Bigfoot chronicler, advocate, and field researcher John Green has died. Green was so renowned within the Bigfoot subculture that he was elevated to a vaunted “Four Horseman” status, along with Peter Byrne, René Dahinden, and Grover Krantz—the latter two also deceased. His book On the Track of the Sasquatch was a seminal work; though not the first book on the subject, it was popular, and many of the arguments in support of the reality of Bigfoot were cemented there. The book, published in 1968, included an analysis of the centerpiece of Bigfoot advocacy, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film. Green later wrote two similarly short books, Year of the Sasquatch and The Sasquatch File. A much longer work, Sasquatch, the Apes Among Us, was published in 1978.
As well as an author, Green could claim credit as a legitimate Bigfoot field researcher, having participated in the Pacific Northwest Expedition following track finds in Northern California in the late 1950s. That expedition proved fruitless and was noted for fractious personal infighting among the participants.
Given that decades of searching for Bigfoot have yet to produce a definitive somatic sample in the form of a carcass, bones, or even hairs, Green and others were forced to argue the merits of other types of evidence. Green’s books were largely composed of anecdotes (some of which pushed the limits of credulity, in the sense that they could not be written off as cases of witness mistaken identity). Green strongly advocated that the Patterson-Gimlin film depicted a real animal. Here we see the genesis of memes within Bigfootery that continue to this day, one of which being that the film subject has arms impossibly long for a costumed actor to emulate. Indeed, Green doubled down on this claim, writing in a 2004 introductory preface to On the Track that “paradoxically, this silly attempt to prove that Patterson hoaxed his film led to the discovery that the movie itself has always contained proof that it does not show a man in a suit.”
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