Philip L Rife. Bigfoot Across America. Writers Club Press, 2000.
Philip L Rife. America's Nightmare Monsters. Writers Club Press, 2001
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This trio of books shows different patterns in the dissemination of monster stories, and how these can be seen to gradually seen to drift away from the paws and pelts cryptozoologists.
The collections reproduce reports from a variety of sources, ALNM's are often from old newspaper clippings, many going back into the 19th century, the, extracts from these reproduced give an air of the quaint phraseology and general style. What portion of these are actual reports of 'real' experiences, and what portion are the product of the local liars' club or of press humour and hoaxes is anyone's guess, but they testify to the antiquity of the Lake Monster Traditions in the US, which clearly antedate those of Nessie, and belong in the older tradition of sea serpent.
By contrast, though there are a handful of older stories, the vast bulk of the reports in BAA come from the 1960's onwards, again suggesting the essentially post war origin of the bigfoot legend, and more evidence that it was based on 1940's anthropological speculation about a 'giant phase' of human evolution. Much more than the lake monsters bigfoot has become a child of the age of the Internet, many of the stories being credited to Internet briefings.
Towards the end of BAA there are stories with a ufological bent. ANM presents a range of creatures that paws and pelts cryptozoology just can't accommodate, including not just such cryptozoological extremes as living dinosaurs, chupacabras, thunderbirds, Jersey devils and mothmen, but wolfmen andlizard men, through to such ufological fauna as 'spacemen' and men in black and supernatural figures like the vanishing hitchhiker and spook lights.
These stories seem to straddle the liminal zone between reportage and folklore, and it is hard to say where any one story might belong. Of course, the newspaper clippings, Fate articles, Internet postings and stories from pulp magazines and paperbacks cannot be regarded as cryptozoological 'evidence' They seem to generated by the interaction between local folklore and the mass media, both being influenced by and influencing B move genres. Many in ANM look as though they have escaped from episodes of the X files. If there is a common theme, at least in BAA and ANM it is that of the creature half seen from the car traveling through the wilderness between inhabited areas. Latter day travellers' tales of the beasts and bogies of the open road.
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