LosGatosObserver.com

David Paulides, a Los Gatos author and former detective, poses with his new book “Tribal Bigfoot.” Photo by Mike Anderson.

People have it all wrong about Sasquatch, says Los Gatos resident and Bigfoot researcher David Paulides.

According to Paulides, a former Santa Clara Valley detective who now researches and writes about Bigfoot full time, the mythic forest-dwelling biped is not a dumb, hairy ape. He says that Bigfoot is far more human than mainstream culture is willing to believe.

“These aren’t things swinging in trees. These are people living on the ground that have a grounded base. They have communication skills and they have organization skills and are a lot smarter then most people think,” he says.

About 50 people gathered at Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton Sunday afternoon to hear Paulides speak about his Bigfoot investigation, as well as sign his newly released book on the subject, titled “Tribal Bigfoot.”

Paulides made a presentation to a diverse crowd about the eyewitness interviews and forensic sketches he and his Los Gatos-based organization, North America Bigfoot Search, have collected over the last five years.

“Some people from Los Gatos are fans and have showed up at book signings and other places. I’m like, ‘I didn’t even know you knew,’ and they say ‘oh hey, we think this is great.’ They are closet Bigfoot fanatics that just don’t want to say it, because they don’t want to be embarrassed by anybody else. There are a lot [of people] out there who are interested.”

Both “Tribal Bigfoot” and Paulides’s first book “The Hoopa Project” focus on the connection between Bigfoot and Native American peoples.

He says that North America Bigfoot Search formed five years ago after several members had unexplained Bigfoot experiences in the woods. They began tracking sightings in California, and found consistent patterns in sightings around the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in Northwest California.

Paulides, a 1974 graduate of Monta Vista High School, says he and his team-spent years assembling eyewitness accounts, and then brought in a forensic sketch artist to draw the first person descriptions. Most of these drawings, he says, differ from what mainstream culture considers a Bigfoot to look like.

“These people’s descriptions were drawing something that had full body hair, but had very little facial hair, and had a very human face, which went against everything that the public has knowledge about Bigfoot,” he says. “There is no ape in this, it looked human. As we did 100-plus of these sketches, we started to realized that 99 percent of these look human, they don’t look animal.”

While “The Hoopa Project” is a mainly a collection of interviews and sketches from the Hoopa community, in “Tribal Bigfoot” Paulides has expanded its Native American Bigfoot eyewitness interviews to include tribes in Minnesota.

He says that the North America Bigfoot Search is one of the only groups in the United States that is studying and collecting Bigfoot sightings fulltime.

“There has never been a group of full time people with dedicated resources to research this,” he says. “They have never had the up close and personal perceptions and sightings [of Bigfoot] that these Native Americans have had for hundreds of years. The Native Americans kind of giggle and laugh about what the public thinks of Bigfoot, people that don’t live in the mountains and around this thing.”

Paulides claims his organization has DNA evidence from hair they have collected that shows Bigfoot is very close to humans on the evolution scale, with full details included in “Tribal Bigfoot.”

“We think that this thing is much more human then anyone wants to agree too,” he says. “The public has to realize that this is a real entity. There has been a lot of other hoaxes about this in the past. But, the reality of this is that this exists, and there’re larger qualities across the U.S. than people realize, and that sightings are a daily occurrence.” 

Paulides said that he and the North America Bigfoot Search will continue to investigate Bigfoot, and their next book will probably focus on the DNA evidence they have collected.

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