On a wet weekday morning in early November, I met Coleman at this giddy lair, hoping to understand the causes of his belief. I found not a far-eyed ranter donned in faux safari gear, but an exceedingly sober, generous 70-year-old gentleman with insistent white hair and beard, so composed and easy-spoken that he could offer succor to the damned. Coleman’s likability is immediately apparent, and indeed this father of three sons has an extensive background in social work and behavioral health. His duty to those sons when they were young prevented him from completing his PhD in social anthropology at Brandeis. But Coleman can hold forth in all the relevant fields, from zoology to anatomy to paleoanthropology.

Coleman knows the genesis and data on each of the hundreds of items in his museum, from the casts of footprints and the supposed yeti scat to the hair of unidentified beasts and the always-on Patterson film. As he walked me down both floors, I thought it noteworthy that although he’s given this tour perhaps hundreds of times, he didn’t at all seem exhausted by it. No: He was an authentically enlivened chaperone, still taken after decades of study and not a nod from science. He even snapped a selfie of us standing in front of his eight-foot model of Sasquatch.

We sat at a table near the museum’s entrance, watched over by a life-size bust of Gigantopithecus, the extinct ape some believe is Bigfoot, the largest primate ever found, 10 feet high and 1,200 pounds. It had a head like a wrecking ball but not brains enough to weather the weather. After a stint of 6 million to 9 million years in Asia, climate change killed it during the Pleistocene.

“Much too big for Bigfoot,” Coleman told me. Referring to the work of Bernard Heuvelmans — the French researcher who became the inaugural president of the International Society of Cryptozoology, and who was, along with Ivan Sanderson, the father of the field — Coleman said, “If you see a hairy creature in the woods, in the dark, and you’re scared, you overestimate size by one-third. So people are seeing Bigfoot that are six-and-a-half feet tall, and they’re saying they’re nine, 10 foot. Bigfoot are not nine to 10 feet tall,” Coleman said. “They’re probably a little over the human range.”

Probably. And by the way, there’s no agreement in the “Bigfoot community” — that’s a real thing — on what the plural of “Bigfoot” should be, so you hear “Bigfoot” plural, “Bigfoots,” and “Bigfeet.” I rather like “Bigfoots.”

I asked Coleman how he handles the fusillade of mocking and scoffing that must daily harass him from every direction. “I don’t spend a lot of negative energy arguing with skeptics and debunkers,” he said. “I try to share with them my passions, my interests, my patience, and it’s up to them to accept what I’m doing.”

He isn’t kidding: Coleman doesn’t appear to have a zealous strain anywhere in him. He can be critical of those proselytizing Bigfooters, and he refuses to lend his name or experience to unrepentant charlatans out for their 15 minutes and a buck.

“People overdramatize how frequently encounters with Bigfoot occur,” he complained. “TV programs, YouTube, and all of that have created a mess in which there’s what I call the sociological Bigfoot. There are not Bigfoot running all over Rhode Island or Virginia. They’re just not out there. Because of the show Finding Bigfoot, every state needed to have a Bigfoot so that the film company could go there. That’s not helpful.”

The promise of the American dream, like the promise of finding Bigfoot, runs on a childish idealism forever rubbing away against the unhappy facts.

As a kid in Decatur, Illinois, Coleman began reading the work of Charles Fort, the early 20th-century popularizer of the paranormal and “anomalistics,” a faux scientific endeavor that aims to explicate what seems inexplicable by scientific method (ghosts and UFOs and all manner of abracadabra). Then, in 1960, at 12 years old—Coleman even recalls the day, a Friday—what happened to me had happened to him: He saw a movie and, right then, his route in life unfurled before him.

The movie was called Half Human, a Japanese drama about the abominable snowman. The next morning, Coleman watched it again, as kids do, and on Monday at school, he asked his teachers about this Himalayan man-beast. That didn’t go well.

“They had three answers,” he told me. “They don’t exist, get back to your studies, and leave me alone. That meant I got very motivated to get answers to my questions. I got very curious and went from yeti to Loch Ness monster to Bigfoot to understanding that there was a real relationship there in terms of animals being just beyond discovery.”

Seeing that movie was Coleman’s road to Damascus, the psycho-emotional activation of a brand of passion often indistinguishable from obsession. Recall, too, that reverberant line by Graham Greene in The Power and the Glory: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” That movie was Coleman’s moment.

When he first became smitten with cryptozoology, it was called “romantic zoology,” which has quite a nice timber to it and also should tell you something, that slightly condescending use of “romantic.” “I would ride with game wardens to check out panther sightings or giant snake sightings,” Coleman said. “Before I was 14, I had 400 correspondents around the world. Remember letters? For me, this interest became the gateway to my dreams.”

In the introduction to Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, Coleman writes: “I grew up with dreams.” Yes, I did too; we all did. The difference for the rest of us is that uncaring reality rushed in to dampen those dreams or else extinguish them altogether. The wonder is gone, and with it, portions of the hope we had for extraordinary things. For most of us, adulthood requires the ceaseless handling of disappointment and dream-death.

Not so for Coleman and his fellow delvers into the untamed. All the great Bigfooters of yore and lore were dogged dreamers, and some had trouble keeping those dreams from morphing into mania and obsession. Though Coleman himself comes across as too poised or placid for mania and obsession, Bigfooting both attracts and begets those traits. It’s hard enough to respect cryptozoology, but pour mania and obsession into the mix, and it becomes well-nigh impossible.

In the slate light of the Portland morning, rain like BBs on the glass door, Coleman grinned at and welcomed each visitor who passed us, sincere greetings prompted not by a proprietor’s self-interest, it seemed, but by a willingness to encourage reception to the extraordinary.

I almost hitched “childlike” to “reception” just then because, after all, is that not what we’re really dealing with here? Childishness? The compunction to believe in magic because magic is so much more exciting than all the world’s staid facts forced upon us? And what could be more childish than the belief in “alternative facts”?

Childhood anguish is key here, because when I asked Coleman about why the movie Half Human caused such heat in him as a child, he said, “As soon as I saw it, it just lit a spark in me, a spark that allowed me to escape from the mundane and the abusive. I wanted to get out of that. Even at 12, I knew that was the escape from my family.”

Reader, bear those sentences in mind, the terms “escape” and “mundane” especially, because they are of central importance to our discussion here. All obsession is a species of escapism polluted by idealism. And for all of our swaggering might and influence, and despite a history splashed with gore, the promise of the American dream, like the promise of finding Bigfoot, runs on a childish idealism forever rubbing away against the unhappy facts.

VI. Lost Boys

Bigfooters believe they are questing for bipedal apes in California, but they are really questing for their own lost boyhoods, their Boy Scout days, those formative experiences in the woodlands of fancy and faith, and for the thrill of certain belief as it was before the adult world broke in to bludgeon it.

Remember that preadolescent frisson, the dread-tinged excitement of knowing, absolutely knowing, that monsters were real, not the myths, folklores, and allegories that adulthood insists they are? If Wordsworth laments adulthood’s injection of sobriety and rationality into the childhood sublime, Bigfooters aren’t having it. They’ve found a means of resurrecting that boyish wonder, of plugging back into the child’s reciprocal, imaginative bond with nature. If it comes at the cost of evidence — to say nothing of dignity — since when have children ever bothered with evidence? These scientists and their mocking, scoffing facts are a drag. What did John Keats says about Isaac Newton’s achievements with light? “He destroyed the poetry of a rainbow by reducing it to a prism.”

In concert with their wish to plug back into their boyhoods, these men, loose in the woods, are searching for the approval and acceptance of other men.

As you can see for yourself on YouTube, and on Animal Planet’s documentary series Finding Bigfoot (which ran from 2011 to 2018), monster hunting is mostly the province of male yahoos in need of brotherhood with other male yahoos, man-boys out romping through the wilderness to reassure themselves of their machismo, all of them exuberantly ignorant of the basal tenets of evolutionary biology and ecology. Here we see the sylvan shenanigans of the determinedly gullible, those blue-collar dupes with, maybe, too little to live for and nothing much else to hope for.

In Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (2009), the most culturally comprehensive of recent Bigfoot studies, Joshua Blu Buhs, writing of the great Bigfooters of the 1960s and ’70s, refers to them as “hunters who hoped to find a better world and never did… working-class men who bet their dignity on a beast that never existed.” They went to monsterdom after having floundered in life’s normal ventures, all that humdrummery that includes having a job, rearing a family, earning a degree — getting ahead, as it’s called, though ahead never comes. They tried to flee the mortification of their social defeats and ended up being laughed at anew.

In concert with their wish to plug back into their boyhoods, these men, loose in the woods, are searching for the approval and acceptance of other men. No optional male group endeavor, none, is exempt from this law, one that hearkens back to the mastodon hunt, during which a male proved himself worthy of the clan and thus worthy of the protection and resources the clan controlled. That male urge to belong among other men, to prove themselves, has never left our double helix. In his book Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot (2009), Michael McLeod makes the adroit observation that the Bigfoot phenom coincided with the apex of the TV Western’s allure: For many men, Bigfoot “represented a powerful, self-reliant symbol of the frontier that had nourished the American dream,” a symbol Americans could adore, “big and strong and afraid of no one.”

Something else (and they’re going to hate me for this, though they hate me already): If you find Bigfooting a bit homoerotic, you aren’t alone — mighty, hairy, rugged men lusting after a mightier, hairier, more rugged beast, tenting and bathing together in rusticated seclusion. It’s no accident that the heyday of Bigfoot hunting happened in the 1960s and ’70s, during those volcanic disruptions to culture, the overdue victories of civil rights and feminism, victories which further humiliated and ostracized the white working-class male — not just the cadre of core Bigfooters, but the millions of men who saw in the beast a chance to return to the austere purity of the wilderness, the austere purity of each other, many miles from the hysterical requests of womanhood and the defeats culture kept dishing them.

Which isn’t to say that time in the woods is idyllic. Believer and journalist John Green, the grandfather of Sasquatchia, once wrote, “The average sasquatch hunter is so pig-headed that two of them together are pretty sure to have a falling out before long… People who will go hunting for an animal that is rejected by the world of science and almost everybody else are bound to be people who don’t pay much attention to any opinion but their own, and expect not only to have an opinion but to act on it.”

VII. America the Unserious

In a certain mood, one has to admit that the Bigfoot spectacle is so much silliness, another outcrop of the American aversion to the serious. Why do we give this nonsense our attention? Why all the books and documentaries and organizations? Isn’t all this Sasquatch japery just harmless obsession by a gaggle of eccentrics?

But in Abominable Science!, Loxton and Prothero want you to pause before you think so:

Rather than merely wasting time and resources, the widespread acceptance of the reality of cryptids may feed into the general culture of ignorance, pseudoscience, and anti-science. The more the paranormal is touted by the media as acceptable and scientifically credible — rather than subjected to the harsh scrutiny of the scientific method, the rigor of critical thinking, and the demand for real evidence — the more people are made vulnerable to the predations of con artists, gurus, and cult leaders. The more the creationist cryptozoologists manage to damage the understanding of science, the worse off we all are.

We come to the crux of the matter. We are, alas, a profoundly unserious nation, and have been for the larger part of our history. One need only peek at Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, or The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, or Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen to see just how unserious we are.

We do a lot of believing in America but not a lot of knowing. Nobody knows how anything works: light, motion, gravity, biology, evolution… feet.

In a 1959 essay, James Baldwin put down these memorable lines: “What passes for serious effort in this country is very often nothing more than the inability to take anything very seriously.” We have, says Baldwin, “the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life… The trouble is that serious things are handled (and received) with the same essential lack of seriousness.”

Our abysmal science education in this country fuels unseriousness and quackery of every stripe: We do a lot of believing in America but not a lot of knowing. Nobody knows how anything works: light, motion, gravity, biology, evolution… feet. We take classes in self-help but not in logic. John Napier believed that we can easily use reason on what is reasonable, but he admitted the difficulty in using logic on the illogical. Remember Jonathan Swift: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.” The voices of frenzy too often prevail over the voices of reason; promiscuous emotion and preposterous hope get more airtime than patient logic.

Anti-intellectualism, radical individualism, masculinity and emasculation, capitalism, con artistry, golden-age nostalgia, and the irrepressible urge to belong and believe: These factors that have established Bigfoot as a permanent fixture in American cultural life have coalesced into the cauldron of our current political moment. When our current president monsterizes the brown Other, be they Muslim or Mexican or African American, he is mobilizing the Paleolithic human malfunction of inflating our sense of threat in the same way that a dark wood puts us on the watch for Bigfoots. That fear creates its own reality. If you want to see disease-bearing hordes storming across our border with mayhem on their minds or Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11, you will.

“You don’t have to see a hairy monster to be able to remember seeing one,” writes anthropologist David Daegling. “This is not my opinion; it is a fact of human psychology… When people find themselves in an environment where they feel they ought to see Bigfoot, the monster is prone to make an appearance.”

Throughout myth and folklore, many monsters are part human, because in life, many humans are part monster—violent ones with the wish of ruin, sociopaths who will club you for gain or fun or some mad want of blood. We think that if our heroes can venture forth to vanquish or tame the beast — Heracles and his labors with the lion, the hydra, the boar; St. George and the dragon — we might gain control over our own societies and lives; we might be free from a hamstringing fear.

But no: The true monsters dwell inside us, and there’s often no clear demarcation between the heroic and the monstrous. This is the lesson of Bigfoot in America. All monsters mean what we need them to mean at the time and place that we need it. The obsolete symbols are forever finding new garb to don; the ancient monsterizing impulse is forever finding new delegates to circulate its paranoia. Imaginary monsters might be necessary for our psyches, but our current troubles remind us that the true monsters are pure hell on our society.