POCATELLO — Academia is a lonely place for Sasquatch hunter Jeff Meldrum.

Meldrum, who teaches anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, might be the only college professor in the U.S. researching and publishing work on Bigfoot — or at least the only one putting his name to the subject.

Meldrum brought attention to the subject with his 2006 book, “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.” Nearly all of the 13,000 copies of the book have been sold.

The Sasquatch limb is a thin branch to venture out on, and in the academic world, some would say it’s more akin to thin ice.

“People say, ‘You are paid by Idaho State and you are doing this?’ ” Meldrum said. “But this is legitimate research. This could be one of the most outstanding questions in natural history and human anthropology that we have today.

“I’ve gone to great lengths to go about it in a very objective, very professional manner in order to cultivate credibility.”

The work will pay dividends if 54-year-old Meldrum or someone else proves the existence of a bipedal hominid that isn’t a human or known primate, something Meldrum thinks will happen in his lifetime.

Meldrum’s research lives in two realms. The first is anthropological, taking into account the fossil of many species of hominid distinctly different from the primates on the human evolutionary track or our extinct cousins, Neanderthals.

With one species as modern as 11,000 years ago, the crux of Meldrum’s argument is that we can’t be sure a species hasn’t persevered in some remote corner of wilderness. This doesn’t mean Sasquatch exists. It means he could.

Meldrum’s second realm is field work. His office is filled with molds of footprints taken from all over North America. He said the molds, some 16 inches or bigger, indicate creatures more than 7 feet tall and weighing 700 pounds.

A desktop contains microimages of hair of bear, deer and other forest animals to compare to supposed Sasquatch samples.

In the realm of field work, Meldrum says he is certain Sasquatch lives. He’s a solitary creature with a lifespan of at least 20 years, rarely reproduces, and finds remote places to curl up and die.

Meldrum’s career isn’t built on Bigfoot. He hardly mentions the creature in anatomy and evolution classes.

But his legacy certainly is. Meldrum’s lonely perch as Sasquatch academic has made him a media darling. He’s appeared on TV more than 20 times and featured in national magazines and newspapers.

He estimated that he’s been the subject of more than 150 interviews since 1996, when he investigated his first set of footprints. He drove to Walla Walla, Wash., expecting a hoax. Instead, he found tracks too big to be human that left an impression that indicated too much flexing to have been made by a prosthetic pressed into the landscape. He’s been hunting the creature ever since.

Notoriety helps Meldrum’s funding. Unable to go to the usual money spouts for scientific research, Meldrum turned to private foundations and donors. Many found him, including a Texas oil man who experienced what he thought was a Bigfoot encounter while hunting.

The oil man flew to Pocatello and agreed to pay for Meldrum’s field tests — camera traps and hair snags designed to catch a piece of DNA that, if verified, would give Sasquatch instant credibility.

Meldrum’s notoriety also brought attention to ISU, which not everybody saw as a good thing.

A physics professor, Douglas Wells, sounded off to the L.A. Times for an article in 2006.

“One could do deep-ocean research for SpongeBob SquarePants,” Wells said. “That doesn’t make it science.”

Meldrum said he fought an uphill battle for tenure and full-professor status, saying the situation nearly became litigious.

He chuckled while recalling a 2006 Associated Press article and paraphrased the opening line, “Dr. Meldrum, something of a hulking figure himself, lurked in his dimly lit laboratory, shunned by faculty and students alike.”

“You’ve obviously got to have a sense of humor and a thick skin to do this,” he said.

But Meldrum does admit that Bigfoot too often falls into the paranormal camp with the Loch Ness monster, Area 51 aliens and ghosts. Quests for such creatures attract people who harbor feverish beliefs that something mysterious lurks in the shadows waiting to be discovered.

Yes, Sasquatch shares legend status with other creatures, and yes, Meldrum believes. But criticism that he’s “faith-based” or too much of a “true believer” to maintain scientific objectivity aren’t fair, he said. His belief stems from the footprints and not the other way around.

Meldrum hates that his book appears in the New Age section of bookstores more often than it does in the Natural History section. He will tell you the Bigfoot camp is full of nutjobs. He’s careful not to affiliate with Bigfoot groups based on enthusiasm rather than science, which are pretty much all of them.

While there are some scholars interested in Bigfoot, including the editorial board of his research group, the Relict Hominoid Inquiry, many of the Bigfoot hunters Meldrum runs into are quite different from him.

A man once told Meldrum at a Bigfoot conference that he’d encountered Sasquatch. The creature asked him, “Are you scared?” The man replied that he was.

The strange thing, the man said, was that Bigfoot knew he was scared from more than a half-mile away.

Meldrum asked the man how he communicated with the creature if they were a half-mile apart, to which the man answered he was psychic.

While lecturing at the convention, Meldrum told the crowd the story about his conversation with the psychic.

Half of the audience laughed. Half didn’t.