Mysterious Creatures : A Guide to Cryptozoology

imported, “which,” he wrote, “turned up in a
university in the south.”
Hansen claimed that the iceman was the
property of an anonymous millionaire, who
later withdrew the real specimen from public
view and substituted a model, made from latex
and hair, that went on the carnival route for several
years afterward. His account of where the
original came from varies: Russian seal hunters
(or Japanese whalers) found it floating in Russia’s
Sea of Okhotsk, already entombed in ice;
Hansen shot it himself, near Whiteface in
northern Minnesota; or he purchased it from an
exporter in Hong Kong.
Possible explanations:
(1) A synthetic fake, manufactured by
Hansen or a Hollywood special-effects
expert he hired. In 1981, it was claimed that
the late Howard Ball, who made models for
Disneyland, had created the original with
his son Kenneth, based on an artist’s
conception of Cro-Magnon man.
In 1973, I worked for two individuals who
were formerly associated with Hansen in the
carnival exhibition business; they told me
(with a certain amount of calculated
reluctance) that Hansen had a model made
“on his living-room floor.” However, this
information is still hearsay evidence, and
although I had, at the time, established a
limited amount of confidence as a “carney,”
I probably would not have been told the
truth if Hansen had actually imported a
Wildman from Southeast Asia. My sources,
after all, were in the business of exhibiting a
Brown agouti (Dasyprocta variegata) as a
“giant rat from the sewers of Paris.”
(2) Heuvelmans believed Hansen, who was
a captain in the U.S. Air Force during the
Vietnam War, had shot or at least acquired
a Nguoi Rungin Vietnam in the mid-
1960s and smuggled it into the United
States in a military body bag. The creature
cannot be a normal human of any race or
even a composite produced by assembling
several species. However, Heuvelmans’s
identification of the animal as Neanderthallike
(Homo neanderthalensis) misses the
mark, since there is no characteristic
browridge or sloping forehead; the robust
arms and legs do match, though.
Heuvelmans apparently obtained
photographs showing the face before and
after it was thawed out for a short time.
(3) Mark Hall considers the iceman to be
closer in form to Homo erectus, which he
thinks is represented by the Ksy-Gyik,
Alm as, or Bar-Manu of Central Asia.
Sources: Bernard Heuvelmans, “Note
préliminaire sur un spécimen conservé dans la
glace d’une forme encore inconnue d’hominidé
vivant: Homo pongoides (sp. seu subsp. nov.),”
Bulletin de l’Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles
de Belgique 45 (February 1969): 1–24; Ivan T.
Sanderson, “The Missing Link,” Argosy, May
1969, pp. 23–31, on line at http://www.
n2.net/prey/bigfoot/articles/argosy2.htm; Ivan
T. Sanderson, “Preliminary Description of the
External Morphology of What Appeared to Be
the Fresh Corpse of a Hitherto Unknown
Form of Living Hominid,” Genus 25 (1969):
249–78 (reprinted in Pursuit, no. 30 [April
1975]: 41–47, and no. 31 [July 1975]: 62–66);
“Bozo, the Iceman,” Pursuit 3 (April 1970):
45–46, and (October 1970): 89; Frank
Hansen, “I Killed the Ape-Man Creature of
Whiteface,” Saga, July 1970, pp. 8–11, 55–60;
John Napier, Bigfoot (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1972), pp. 92–107; Bernard Heuvelmans and
Boris F. Porshnev, L’homme de Néanderthal est
toujours vivant (Paris: Plon, 1974), pp.
209–467; C. Eugene Emery, “Sasquatch-
Sickle: The Monster, the Model, and the
Myth,” Skeptical Enquirer 6 (Winter
1981–1982): 2–4; Russell Ciochon, John
Olsen, and Jamie James, Other Origins: The
Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory
(New York: Bantam, 1990), pp. 230–233; Dao
Van Tien, “Wildman in Vietnam,” Tap Chi’
Lâm Nghiêp, 1990, no. 6, pp. 39–40, and no.
7, p. 12, at http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/
wildman/tien.txt; Ian Simmons, “The
Abominable Showman,” Fortean Times, no. 83
(October-November 1995): 34–37; Mark
Chorvinsky, “The Burbank Bigfoot,” Strange
Magazine, no. 17 (Summer 1996): 9; Mike
Quast, The Sasquatch in Minnesota, 2d ed.
(Moorhead, Minn.: Mike Quast, 1996); Mark
MINNESOTA ICEMAN 339