THE SECRET ORIGINS OF BIGFOOT by Warren Smith

Zebra Books presents The Secret Origins of ... not Bigfoot exactly, but what appears to be a seal's head pasted over a rather hirsute male model! Adding insult to injury, the text within is riddled with typos, misprints and formatting errors, making this the most slapdash release we've seen so far from those cheap bastards at Zebra. It's a shame, because this is one of Warren Smith's strongest works! It's basically a rewrite of his Strange Abominable Snowmen that drops the fractured Fortean format of that volume in favor of a more unified through-line, which proves much more engaging that the disconnected (and often too brief) discrete entries that made up the original. Smith cheekily lifts multiple anecdotes, as well as an entire chapter (!) on THE VICIOUS WILD MEN OF ASIA, from Eric Norman's The Abominable Snowmen - which, of course, is his frequent collaborator Brad Steiger writing under their shared pseudonym. 

Smith opens and closes with The Bigfoot News, Peter Byrne's clearing house of Sasquatch news and views that he ran out of The Dalles, Oregon for some number of years. Many then-modern sightings are gone over, including those good ol' Bigfoot boys Momo the Missouri Monster and the Fouke Monster. The "Secret Origins" of the title involve potential Bigfoots from Biblical, mythological and historical sources as seen in pages 146-147, also lifted from Steiger's book. There's a good spread of foreign sightings, including those omnipresent Almasti, the Yeti, and as stated earlier a copy/pasted swath of Southeast Asian hominids who seem to have an especially nasty disposition.

In Strange Abominable Snowmen Smith had rewritten THE CANNIBAL CREATURES OF ASIA from a segment in Steiger's book, giving the tale a darker turn with a fatal encounter instead of a near miss. This time he simply copies the original text and the poor sentry lives through his encounter with a "Mouth Man" creature. The Secret Origins of Bigfoot is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Table of Contents:

1.  Bigfoot: The Mystery of the Mountains (5)
2.  Canada's Elusive Sasquatch Creatures (21)
3. Bigfoot Behind the Iron Curtain (39)
4. The World-Wide Magical Monster Tour (57)
5.  Bigfoot: The Evolutionary Enigma (71)
6. The Gentle Giants Are Alive and Well in the Wilderness (86)
7.  Bigfoot With a Southern Drawl (101)
8.  The Maurading (sic) "Mouth Men" of Malaysia (117)
9.  The Mysterious Men-Beasts of Ancient Times (134)
10. Bizarre Bigfoot of Asia (151)
11. The Mysterious Wild Ape-Men of South America (174)
12. A Note to Readers (190)

Zebra Books, 1977