Hoopa Project by David Paulides

Hoopa Project Reviews

• 
  Matt

  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.
• 
  Linda

  This was a very interesting book. Having grown up in the Hoopa Indian Reservation, I heard about the 1958 incident at Bluff Creek and saw the cast of the footprint. I didn't really pay much attention to it for the next 4 years or after I left the reservation in 1962. However, after reconnecting with friends in Hoopa a couple of times in the last few years my interest was peaked. A longtime friend mentioned that her nephews had seen Bigfoot up the hill from where we had been gold panning on the Salmon River. (Not when we were there of course.) The author, a former police investigator, did a great job of interviewing locals about their encounters with Bigfoot. The fascination for me was that so many of the family names were familiar to me. I had gone to school and been friends with members of their families from 1951 to 1962. I am not totally convinced that Bigfoot exists, but the similarities in the encounters, the drawing's done by a forensic artist from the witnesses leaves the door open for further consideration. The author has written another book called Tribal Bigfoot with the same kind of investigations in other areas of the country. That is my next read!
• 
  Mike

  This is one of those unexplained mysteries that won't go away. Is is possible that a small population of bipedal apes roams the pacific northwest?
  
  In the Hoopa Project Dave Paulides, a former police investigator, interviews over thirty eyewitnesses who live on or near the Hoopa Indian Reservation in Northern California. They all claim to have seen an upright walking ape covered in hair that ranges from 5-8 feet in height. What is also interesting is that Paulides hired a forensic sketch artist who worked for the FBI to interview the witnesses and draw what they saw. The results are quite intriguing. There are enough similarities and differences that one would expect in a normal ape population. Who knows? Maybe there are still some undiscovered animals out there that continue to elude modern science.
• 
  Michael

  This one took a long time to get through, but it was still fun.
  
  I did feel the amount of encounters was a bit much and repetitive. I also wish there were some more photographic evidence of the encounters other than the sketches. As much as I loved the forensic sketches, I felt like it didn't really add much to the actual narrative of the book.
  
  Overall it was a fun book, and really liked the in-depth look at the environment and setting of one of the most active Big-Food sites in the US. It did get a bit long and tedious by the end, and there wasn't any real finalized conclusion, which was a big draw back.
• 
  E.A. Padilla

  In preparation for a future fiction novel, I read this documentary style book. Since childhood, I've been interested in Sasquatch. This novel is excellent! The interviews, background information, professional law enforcement and forensic artist drawings takes the research to a whole nother level. For Sasquatch enthusiasts, this book is a must read.
• 
  Jess the Shelf-Declared Bibliophile

  The time, care and passion that the author put into this book is obvious. We get to enjoy the fruits of his labors with an in depth look at the most popular areas for Bigfoot encounters, as well as many firsthand accounts. There was no stone left unturned.
• 
  Claire Miller

  The book reads like a well written text book, and reports the facts, as presented to Paulides. I appreciated his professionalism and straight forward approach to the topic. This is a fascinating read as I have long been interested in the North American large apes that native peoples see and/or acknowledge, but the so-called 'sensible' folk generally ignore up until they view one for themselves. Reading so many first hand accounts of people who had the rare opportunity to see something most people refuse to believe exists was interesting to say the least. The forensic drawings of so many different Bigfoot almost freaks me out, which I'm allowed as I currently live in Bigfoot country, nearby Olympic National Park.
  
  This is an aside to reading this book, that in 2000 I attend a Passports in Time event in Orleans, CA, where I attended an Ethno-botany class taught by Josephine Peters. She is amazing and so knowledgeable. To see her Bigfoot experiences in this book was exciting. I wish I'd thought to ask her about Bigfoot at the time but instead I recall bombarding her with questions on native uses for plants. Sooo... cool! Also at a later date I had the pleasure of going on a birding trip on the Hoopa Reservation where we searched for and found my first ever Ruffed Grouse. It was wonderful having the rare pleasure as an outsider of being able to have been to some of the spots mentioned in the the Hoopa Project book.
• 
  Kent

  An interesting look into Bigfoot investigations by a retired police interrogator and nationally renowned forensic sketch artist. Paulides interviews all of his witnesses after they sign legal affidavits. He has a forensic sketch artist run a round 2 with the witnesses to draw what they saw. It adds a lot of credibility to investigating the Bigfoot mystery and he does make the case that Sasquatch has more human qualities than non-human qualities. I also think his work into defining a habitat for Sasquatch was quite well done. However, he lost me at the end when he in so many words says that he thinks that Native American war deserters took to the mountains and mated with North American primates to make these newer, more human-looking Sasquatch. It was kind of disappointing to read through this tight-fisted and professional work only to have wild predictions wrap the book up. The journey was still fun, and I learned a lot about what it means to live, work, and visit a Native American reservation that isn't a casino in today's world. All in all it was a good book but he seemed afraid to leave his book as a simple investigation so he satisfied the nutbirds by giving them a bananas theory about hot hot ape sex Nor Cal.
• 
  Pamela K.

  Great book if you're interested in Bigfoot, which I am! I even took a trip to this area this past September just to see how remote it really is...gorgeous country, very remote and seemingly many untraveled or barely traveled roads there! I can see how Bigfoot could reside here, but unfortunately...no sightings...ha ha ha, but nice to have the area in my mind for future readings about this creature! Stories in here are well documented and believable, most folks do not even want to tell their story for fear of reprisal, that is what made this book so very interesting...the trust they put in David Paulides to print their stories, some NEVER being told to another human being since their sighting many, many years ago!
• 
  Michael Delaware

  One of the most fascinating and intelligent books I have read on this subject. David Paulides used a professional investigators approach to categorize and collect witness accounts of Sasquatch in a specific geographic area of California. He used a forensic artist to sketch the witness sightings, and bring together a collection of drawings that off insight into what people are seeing in the forests around North America. A brilliant unbiased approach to researching an often controversial subject.
• 
  Sean Kennedy

  A no nonsense paranormal researcher you can get behind.
• 
  S.E. Ellis

  I had to deduct one star as this style of dry writing leaves me parched.
  
  But nobody comes close to the hard work and integrity of David.
  
  If you like this, you should get Tribal Bigfoot too.
• 
  Ryan Klein

  Not a trained writer, but the passion and commitment to his research and craft is unbelievable
• 
  Wes

  Very interesting and informative.
• 
  Vasilis St.

  The author brings the police procedure in his investigation of bigfoot. (His former law enforcement background is unverifiable.) First of all, eyewitnesses must sign affidavits. An affidavit is a written statement from an individual which is sworn to be true. It is an oath that what the individual is saying is the truth. In our case the only way to prove definitely that someone is lying, you must prove that bigfoot does not exist. The witnesses also must provide enough information for an artist (who as claimed by the author has to be a believer) to sketch their "human" suspects. Human because all the drawings have typical human traits, Native American, like the witnesses. Coincidence? Even female witnesses describes female bigfoot! According to the author all these people are genetically related with bigfoot. This is fairy stuff, little people, big people living in a parrallel world with humans. Every year we hear about hunters killing other hunters because they thought they were bears. If somebody (with or without gun) is so positive that a human can be a bear, the opposite could also be true.
• 
  Jess

  I beeeellliiieeeeeve.
• 
  Richard Turgeon

  A thorough, focused and fascinating evolution in Bigfoot research by a former police officer. This book might make anyone a believer.