I have chosen to write a book about hairy hominids for a number of reasons, two of which stand out above the rest. Firstly, while many researchers have examined the aboriginal legends of North America and Australia, few have delved deeply enough into the pool of ancient evidence to see what lies beneath the surface. In researching my novel The Hunt for Bigfoot, I scoured the archives of ancient knowledge to uncover little-known facts about human history and our relationship to hairy hominids, a kinship that goes back at least as far as the last ice age. Secondly, only a handful of American researchers have investigated the connection between hairy hominids and UFOs. As I will demonstrate later, that connection dates back thousands of years and has much to tell us about our own origins.

As I wrote this book, a new sighting occurred north of Winnipeg in the Canadian province of Manitoba. On April 16, 2005, a ferry-boat operator living on the Norway House Cree Nation reservation caught on video a dark-colored creature that walked upright across the far shore of Lake Winnipeg. The sighting ignited a bonfire of attention around the witness, Bobby Clarke, who became a bit of a recluse due to the overwhelming attentions of the media.

On April 20, four days after the sighting, talk-radio host Glenn Pelletier of Toronto's 570 News asked me to appear on his show to discuss the Bigfoot phenomenon in light of the new sighting. At that point, no one had seen the video, save for a smattering of people who had paraded through the Clarke household to view the footage. Clarke's brother also appeared on Pelletier's show to explain what his brother saw and how it affected him. According to the brother, Clarke was so shaken by the incident that immediately afterward he took his ferry boat out into the middle of the lake, where he stayed for the remainder of the day.

A bidding war ensued for the rights to the footage. Two weeks later, Clarke licensed (as opposed to selling outright) the video to an American tabloid show called A Current Affair¸ for an undisclosed sum. Speculation ran rampant that Clarke had netted six figures for the rights to his video, but no one knows for sure how much the show paid. In the meantime, the Canadian media scrambled to keep the story afloat. They even went so far as to find a zoologist who would debunk the video, sight unseen. One article quoted a Canadian Bigfoot researcher as saying the video was a hoax, though he made no mention of actually having seen the footage.