Book Review: The Hoopa Project by David Paulides

The Hoopa Project: Bigfoot Encounters in California by David Paulides
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A trained law enforcement professional turns his skills to investigating Bigfoot incidents and sightings based on witness interviews. The Hoopa Project: Bigfoot Encounters in California by David Paulides provides the results of a years long investigation in a specific area.

Paulides’ years as a police investigator shows early with his matter-of-fact recounting of how he got interested in the search for Bigfoot and what convinced him that it might be worth his time. This straightforward approach continued throughout the book especially in what led him to selecting the Hoopa Valley in northwestern California to be the focus of his search and how he gained the trust of the residents of the Hoopa Indian Reservation to get interviews and asked for signed affidavits. Paulides’ use of affidavits and the hiring of law enforcement forensic artist Harvey Pratt, a member the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe, to draw sketches based on interviews with witnesses gives this book extra weight for those believers and skeptics that read the book. Unfortunately, it appears the later editions, one of which I read, reproduces the images only in black and white thus making maps hard to decipher for the information that were included to provide. While Paulides straightforward writing can seem dry it provides evidence of his law enforcement background which makes it attempts at engaging the reader with more personable language jarring. As part of each witness interview Paulides gives the reader a description of the location based on his personal research in the area, however his attempts to connect a location to other witnesses comes off awkward due to referencing accounts that appear later in the book while not identifying where said account could be found in the text. Yet while these writing decisions are annoying, they do not take away from overall effort.

The Hoopa Project is the first to two books David Paulides wrote in the late 2000s before going on to his more well-known Missing 411 series. Overall, it’s an intriguing read for those interested in the search for Bigfoot.

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