This book chronicles unexplained disappearances of North Americans, many of them in national parks, that the author believes can be explained by sasquatch abduction and sasquatch murder. He doesn't ever say outright that sasquatch are responsible for these disappearances, but given that his book is sold by the North American Bigfoot Search , it doesn't take an ex lawman like Paulides to put two and two together.Full disclosure: I'm convinced that sasquatch are a real phenomenon, an extant, unrecognized North American ape that's in all likelihood a relict hominid. I came to this conclusion based on a preponderance of evidence, mostly eye-witness reports from qualified observers who ought to know a bigfoot from a black bear, but also a wealth of physical evidence in the form of footprints, hair, stool, and (soon, soon) DNA analysis. If you're on the fence, read the BFRO's FAQ of common objections such as "where are the bodies?" If you've already convinced yourself that sasquatch cannot exist, that the hundreds of sightings and physical evidence recorded every year are all the product of hoaxers and crazies, then there's not a lot I can say in this review to change your mind.But even if you're in that camp, there are cases in this book that will leave you scratching your head with your hair standing on end. The ones that gave me the willies involved missing children who vanished in the middle of the wilderness while their parents' backs were turned, then were found upwards of 10 miles away and a couple thousand feet uphill about 24 hours later. Most of these children were two or three years old, and in almost all cases they were found with some or all of their clothing removed, but in the cases where the clothing is recovered it's undamaged. Many of the abducted children were either not wearing shoes when they vanished, or reappeared without their footwear, but inexplicably had no cuts or scratches on their feet despite having traveled miles over rough terrain. The obvious implication is that they were carried, then deposited where searchers eventually found them.There are dozens of stories of this kind of disappearance in the book, and they constitute the most compelling part of Paulide's thesis. Most of the children chronicled were recovered within a week either alive and shaken, or relatively unmarked but dead from exposure to the elements -- but in either case, minus some of their clothing, which was often not recovered by searchers. In the most extreme cases, these toddlers traveled over 10 miles off-trail, over mountains and valleys, and ended up thousands of feet uphill from where they started all within the space of 24 hours. It beggars belief that these children walked these distances, over this terrain, on their own. Furthermore, many of them disappeared in the space of a few minutes in an area very far removed from civilization, where they were camping alone with their family. This makes an abduction by a human predator wildly improbable, and the lack of violent injury rules out wild animals such as bears or wolves. You're forced to conclude that either very stealthy hill people or sasquatch have been stealing children from under the parents' noses for at least the last century. My vote is for sasquatch, and Paulides makes a compelling case for this conclusion without explicitly stating it.That's the good part, and if you're interested in sasquatch and can find this book used somewhere, it's enough to recommend it. Sadly, there are many not-so-good parts thrown into the mix. As a sasquatch enthusiast, I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did and ended up vaguely disappointed in the entire venture.First, Paulides states early on that he "doesn't believe in coincidences." OK, fair enough. But I do. They are a demonstrable fact of our reality. So where Paulides notices a geographic cluster of three disappearances of toddlers twenty years apart that happened to all take place in June, he sees a pattern. I see pareidolia . If you hang out on the sasquatch-enthusiast portion of the internet, you're familiar with the ability of believers to see a sasquatch in any random pattern of light and shadow in the bushes. This tendency to view the facts in a light favorable to one's predispositions is a universal bias in human thought, and I don't begrudge Paulides for falling prey to it. The problem is that he seems unaware of this pitfall in his thought process, and is always quick to draw weighty conclusions (though always implicitly) from scant evidence.The majority of the disappearances cataloged in the book go like this: a person went into the wilderness by themselves and didn't come back, and a search by local authorities (often involving dogs, planes or helicopters) failed to locate them. These searchers express bafflement that they couldn't locate their quarry. While I have great respect for search and rescue volunteers and don't doubt their dedication, I also don't doubt their fallibility. An extensive wilderness search for a missing person that yields no results is mysterious -- and nothing more. It doesn't indicate that the missing person wasn't still in that wilderness somewhere, that they didn't have a heart attack, fall and break their neck, or meet with some other misadventure, and somehow, through sheer chance, wind up in a place that made it difficult for tired volunteers to find them. It doesn't indicate that they were removed from the search area against their will by a sasquatch. I won't say that's not what happened in some cases -- just that in most of these cases there is insufficient evidence to finger sasquatch as the perp.Many of the narratives are filled with speculative statements such as "the person was an experienced hunter / dedicated son / trained boy scout and would never have left his horse tied up / left camp without his gun / wandered off without a water bottle." Sorry, but people act irresponsibly out of character all the time, for reasons we don't understand, and using deviation from habit or character as evidence of extra-special spooky mystery in an already unsolved mystery is, in my opinion, pretty problematic. Fact is, we don't know why these people acted as they did or why they disappeared. If we did, these cases wouldn't be included in the book.Even worse, Paulides takes a decidedly paranormal bent in some of his writings. He mentions the opinions of psychics consulted in some of the disappearances, as if their thoughts could be of any relevance whatsoever. He also makes much of the fact that many of the disappearances were closely followed by bad storms, implying that somehow the coming foul weather caused the unsolved disappearance, or that people are more likely to vanish when a storm is coming,But all logical fallacies and motivated reasoning aside, the book commits one sin more egregious than all the others put together: it bored me. Some of the cases, especially those where a body was recovered, are shockingly titillating, but the majority are mind-numbingly routine after you've read a few of them. Paulides tries to spice up his case narratives with folksy introductions, along the lines of "camping with your friends is the perfect way to spend a summer vacation from college." For the most part, this effort is groan-worthy and falls flat on its face, and the bare facts of each case, enumerated in a relatively bland and straightforward style, eventually drone on and on. This problem isn't helped by the fact that for many of cases, we know next to nothing about the circumstances of the disappearance. In these instances, even Paulides' two paragraphs of summary feels like too much. Towards the end of the book, I could feel my eyes glazing over. As a rule, I'm not a skimmer, even for non-fiction, but the temptation to get this book over with was very strong.Overall, I'm glad that I picked this book up to satisfy my burning curiosity, and maybe that satisfaction just barely pays for the time and money I spent. But just barely. I can really only recommend this for the truly die-hard, and only then because it's basically the only book on the topic that exists.