Although Hansen wanted the discovery kept quiet, both Heuvelmans and Sanderson wrote scientific papers on the creature within the year. Heuvelmans named it Homo pongoides. Sanderson, who was a well-known nature personality on TV, mentioned the Ice man on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during Christmas week of 1968. Bozo was out of the bag.
The body then disappeared under mysterious circumstances. U.S. Customs became involved when Frank Hansen exhibited the carcass in Canada. During one of these border crossings Hansen said he had replaced the original with the model made in Hollywood, and Customs let him go back to Minnesota. Had Hansen made up the story of the model to get it through Customs? Was he still showing the real thing? Or did the switch take place when the FBI came around Hansen’s place in the following days? We will never know.
Anthropologist John Napier, then of the Smithsonian, interested Smithsonian president S. Dillion Ripley in trying to relocate the original carcass for official study. When the Smithsonian Institution got involved, Hansen explained that the creature was owned by a millionaire and declined to have it examined further. Later, sometime after February 1969, Ripley wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, asking him to get involved. Hoover was not helpful or interested. He said that as there was no violation of a federal law, the FBI would not officially pursue the matter.
In any case, at some point, the model replaced the original, with various Hollywood makeup artists claiming to have created the Iceman. How do we know that a model replaced the original body? Thanks to photographs of the traveling exhibit that Mark A. Hall and I took, Sanderson and Heuvelmans would later be able to enumerate at least fifteen technical differences between the original and the replacement. They held these in secret in order to differentiate a model from the real thing.
I saw the “exhibit” at the Illinois State Fair in 1969. I wondered at the time whether this was the real thing or the copy. I photographed it extensively and sent copies of those photos to Ivan T. Sanderson and Mark A. Hall. From those photos, Sanderson told me I had seen a copy. Mark A. Hall in Minnesota had a similar experience in 1969, photographing Hansen’s exhibit as it traveled around the upper Midwest, and exchanging those photos with me and Sanderson. Hall would later go on to be director of Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained and become the main chronicler of the Minnesota Iceman mystery.
The Mystery Continues
Some skeptics have shelved the Minnesota Iceman as a joke, a carnival display to fool people. But the Iceman was never a “carnival” exhibit. Carnivals have a certain reputation, personnel, and level of exhibitions. The exhibition milieu in which the Minnesota Iceman was shown was not that of a carnival. Throughout the Midwest, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Minnesota Iceman was shown at stock fairs, state fairs, and shopping malls. Hansen had also shown antique tractors in these shows. He was not a “carnie.” The elitist practice of labeling the Minnesota Iceman a “carnival exhibit” is a way to immediately diminish the possible significance of this evidence even before another word is spoken.
Some of this evidence has never seen the light of day—especially in English. Early in 2000, French researchers Jean Roche and Michel Raynal reminded the cryptozoology world that Bernard Heuvelmans’s detailed color slides of the Minnesota Iceman had never been published. Remarkably, much of Heuvelmans’s work on the Iceman remains outside of an English-language readership as well. Bernard Heuvelmans and Boris F. Porchnev, in L’Homme de Neanderthal est toujours vivant (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1974), wrote a single-spaced, five-hundred-page technical overview of the Minnesota Iceman that should have been translated into English years ago. It has not.
The Smell of a Mystery
One of the pieces of evidence in support of the reality of the Minnesota Iceman is the smell of rotting flesh that Heuvelmans and Sanderson mentioned in their discussions of the Iceman. Here’s how Sanderson noted it: “Let me say, simply, that one look was actually enough to convince us that this was—from our point of view, at least—‘the genuine article.’ This was no phony Chinese trick, or ‘art’ work. If nothing else confirmed this, the appalling stench of rotting flesh exuding from a point in the insulation of the coffin would have been enough.” Debunkers have said this is an old “carnie” illusion, wherein one puts a piece of old meat underneath the exhibit, discouraging people from staying long, so that more people can get in. But it’s not such a simple matter with the Minnesota Iceman.
The entire putrefaction episode is well summarized in Hall’s book Living Fossils: “In the course of the inspection Heuvelmans touched a hot lamp to the top pane of glass, causing cracks in it. The result was the smell of putrefaction came through the cracks.” The smell was the result of an accident during Bernard Heuvelmans’s close-quarters examination, not the result of something that Frank Hansen could ever have foreseen.
When I saw the model in exhibition in 1969, there was no smell manufactured to distract or fool people. The Minnesota Ice-man was exhibited in a glass coffin, as was the original, with no smell coming from the exhibit. If this was a faked model that was supposed to reek with reality, more than ever a manufactured smell would have been called for in such a showing.
What Is the Minnesota Iceman?
Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans disagreed over the exact nature of the Iceman. Heuvelmans’s scientific paper of his description of this new form of living Nean dertal, which he named Homo pongoides (i.e., “apelike man”), was published in February 1969, in the Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium. Few anthropologists today have read it, of course.
“For the first time in history,” wrote zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, the Father of Cryptozoology, “afresh corpse of Neanderthal-like man has been found. It means that this form of Hominid, thought to be extinct since prehistoric times, is still living today. The long search for rumored live ‘ape-men’ or ‘missing links’ has at last been successful. This was not accomplished by expeditions to faraway places and at great expense, but by the accidental discovery, in this country, of a corpse preserved in ice…. This specimen is a contemporary representative of an unknown form of Hominid, most probably a relic of the Neanderthal type. The belief, based on strong testimonial evidence, that small, scattered populations of Neanderthals survive has been held for years by some scientists, mostly Russian and Mongolian.”
In Sanderson’s 1969 paper for the Italian scientific journal Genus, he wrote that the Minnesota Iceman “most certainly should not be assigned to the Neanderthals race or complex.”
Several notable Heuvelmans followers disagree with Sander-son, of course. One is the recently murdered Jordi Magraner, a French-Spanish zoologist who did fieldwork in north Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1990s in search of the local wildman, the Barmanu. He collected more than fifty firsthand sighting accounts, and all eyewitnesses recognized the reconstruction of Heuvelmans’s Homo pongoides. They picked out Homo pongoides as their match to Barmanu from Magraner’s ID kit of drawings of apes, fossil men, aboriginals, monkeys, and the Minnesota Iceman. Magraner agreed this may be a Neandertal. Of course, this only proves the Barmanu looks like Homo pongoides, not that it is a Neandertal.
Helmut Loofs-Wissowa, an anthropologist at Australian National University, also thinks Heuvelmans was correct. He too points to the Neandertals, represented by the Minnesota Iceman, as the source of relict populations of wildmen he has studied in Vietnam. Loofs-Wissowa’s creative work links the semi-erect penis of Homo pongoides with what he sees as Paleolithic cave art and other evidence he connects to Neandertals. His scholarly considerations are worthy of a close reading by all interested in this question.
Mark A. Hall, after being close to the investigation for the last quarter century, is not bothered by the assignment of Homo pongoides to the Asian examples that these scholars have focused on. He merely thinks they have the wrong fossil ancestor linked to the accidental American, the Minnesota Iceman. Hall considers the more proper prehistoric candidate to be Homo erectus.
Or Was It a Bigfoot?
We should also consider the possibility that the Minnesota Iceman was an example of the Eastern subspecies of Bigfoot.
Jean Roche, a French cryptozoologist and the author of Sauvage et velus: Yéti, Sasquash, Almasty, Barmanou, Bigfoot, tends to believe some of what Frank Hansen said about the origins of the Minnesota Ice-man—that he had shot the creature during the 1960 deer-hunting season while he was staying in a small resort on the shores of the Whiteface Reservoir, at Aurora, Minnesota. He was hunting with Lieutenants Roy Aafedt and Dave Allison, and Major Lou Szrot, when the Iceman was killed.
Hansen reported that the Bigfoot he killed engaged in predatory behavior. As Roche points out in his 2002 theory, that was not known at the time of the peak Iceman media attention (1967-70), but it is well-known now, including the extensive records of these beasts in the Great Lakes area (e.g., Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota) where Hansen said he killed the Iceman.
But clearly, Roche is careful, and he writes me, “Hansen has told several other stories about the case. But I believe he lied just in order to protect himself.”
We may never know what became of the Minnesota Iceman. Until one of these mystery primates is discovered, we will not understand the true role the Iceman should play in the history of hairy-hominoids studies. But for now, we must accept that the enigma of the Minnesota Iceman remains as one of the most hotly debated episodes in hominology. And, indeed, it may belong in the classic Bigfoot file, after all.
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10 On the Trail in the Midwest
I grew up in Illinois and did many field investigations there in the 1960s and early 1970s. During this time, I heard what people claimed was a “Bigfoot” cry and I discovered some “Bigfoot” footprints. But I have never seen a Bigfoot—not in my four decades of searching. I’ve put the word Bigfoot in quotes with reference to my experiences, as Illinois gives us a good example of the differences between the classic Bigfoot of the Northwest, the shorter, more aggressive Eastern Bigfoot, and the much more apelike Southern Bigfoot, which is sometimes seen on the fringes of the Midwest and which I will discuss in detail in the next chapter.
One highlight of my field research came early on for me—the finding of decidedly anthropoid prints not far from where I lived. In the spring of 1962, I, along with my brothers Bill and Jerry, came upon apelike foot tracks in a dry creek bed (a side branch of Stevens Creek) near Decatur, in south-central Illinois. The best print from the series was about ten inches long, with a clearly visible, large opposed toe, the hallux, sticking out to the right of a left-foot impression. The dipping creek bed did not allow much movement on the part of this apparently upright primate, but about thirteen inches in front of one print was another partial footprint. The complete track is very much like those found throughout the South.
During this time I was also interviewing many local residents about the Bigfoot-like creatures they were seeing. For instance, I spoke to Steve Collins and Bob Earle, who had an encounter with a grayish creature in 1962. They saw it in Stevens Creek, just off of East Williams Street Road, Decatur. The monster stood upright in water, glaring at them. Its strange features, humanlike and animal-like at the same time, told them this was no bear. The beast then disappeared into the woods. Later, the witnesses told me it was “like no other animal” they had ever seen.
On September 22, 1965, the local newspaper, the Decatur Review, carried a sighting report, from four young people who were parked in a car at a “lovers’ lane” area outside Decatur called Montezuma Hills, near Stevens Creek. They were sitting in the car when a massive, black, manlike shape came toward their vehicle. They rushed off in a panic, but after dropping off their dates at home, the two young men returned to the area for another look. As they searched around the same parking spot, they suddenly saw the monster again. It began to walk up to their car as though it was curious. The youths were too scared to get out, but even with the windows closed, they could smell the monster’s terrible odor. They immediately left to get the police, and several officers made a thorough, but fruitless, search of the woods. The police on the scene said they had no idea what the young people had witnessed, but they were obviously frightened by whatever it had been.
Into the Bottomlands
While at Southern Illinois University, I dug up folklore and old news articles and also interviewed witnesses—old and new—of hairy-creature encounters. One series of sightings I looked into involved the round-headed Chittyville monster. In late July and August 1968, residents of Williamson County began noticing dogs barking loudly and “carrying on” at night. Then on August 11, 1968, at 8:30 P.M., Tim Bullock, twenty-two, of West Frankfort, and his girlfriend, Barbara Smith, seventeen, of Carterville, sighted a “creature” while riding northeast of Chittyville, near a wooded, bottom-lands swamp, just three miles from the Big Muddy River. Bullock reported the creature threw dirt at them through the window. Smith saw it and started screaming. She described it as “huge”—about ten feet tall, with a head as large as a steering wheel. It appeared to be black, with a round, “hairy” face. They left the area and reported the incident to police. Bullock returned the next day and found a depression in the grass, as if a large animal had rested or slept there. A week later, the creature was seen again near Route 148, also near the Big Muddy River.
Farmer City Monster
Then in 1970, I looked into a new series of monster sightings. It all started in Marion County, where twenty-four hogs disappeared during the last three weeks of May 1970. In the three preceding months, there had been forty-four “hognappings” in the Salem-area farms. In the central part of the state near Farmer City, three sheep turned up dead in the early spring. Officials assumed it was all the work of “wild dogs”—until July 9, anyway. On that date Don Ennis, Beecher Lamb, Larry Faircloth, and Bob Hardwick, all eighteen years of age, decided to camp out on a wild, ten-acre, buffalo-grass-covered piece of land a mile south of Farmer City near Salt Creek. Their campsite, which I discovered was often used as a lovers’ lane, was isolated. Before the night was over, they would realize just how isolated.
About 10:30 P.M., as they sat around the campfire, they heard something moving in the tall grass. When “it” moved between them and their tent, Lamb decided to turn his car lights on. The thing, with widely separated eyes gleaming at them, was squatting by the tent. It then ran off—on two legs. The young men left in such a hurry that Ennis, who had one foot in a cast because of a broken ankle, left his crutches behind.
Soon word about the Farmer City Monster spread. On Friday, July 10, more than ten persons said they had seen a pair of glowing eyes near the site of the first sighting. And on the twelfth and fourteenth, at least fifteen persons swore they had seen a furry creature in the same area. Witnesses I interviewed all said that it seemed to be attracted by the sound of loud radio music and by the light of campfires.
Police Officer Robert Hayslip of Farmer City decided to check out the stories. When he went out to the campsite/lovers’ lane area early in the morning of July 15, between two and three o ’clock in the morning, he heard something running through the grass. Soon after the sighting, he told me, “Out of the corner of my eye I could see these two extremely bright eyes, just like it was standing there watching me.” But as he turned toward it, it disappeared.
Hayslip returned to the site about 6 A.M. He found that the heavy steel grommets in a tent that had been intact
at 3 A.M. now were ripped out. A quilt lying nearby was torn to shreds. The Farmer City police chief, who had earlier expressed the curious view that the so-called monster was nothing more than a Shetland pony (evidently one of the bipedal variety), now decided to lock the gate that led to the ten-acre area.
The creature apparently moved on. Or at least the witnesses to it could no longer get to the area where it was being seen, and the Farmer City flap ended.
Then during the first week of August, Vicki Otto contacted me to let me know that she had sighted something near Ireland Grove Road three miles southeast of Bloomington. She figured everyone would think her crazy, so she wrote me a letter about it. She said she saw a pair of eyes reflecting her automobile headlights as she approached what she at first thought was a dog. Then, she told me, “I saw this ape running in the ditch. The thing I saw was the size of a baboon.”
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