You pay your quarter and follow the cramped line of
fairgoers into the striped canvas tent. It’s dim and sweltering inside. The air
is filled with the mingled scents of popcorn, sugar-coated fry bread, generator
gasoline and the occasional whiff of dung from the nearby pens of llamas,
donkeys, and sheep. You can still hear the tinny calliope of the fairground
drifting through the dirty tent walls. Before the crowd, a long horizontal
freezer hums. You lean in, looking down through the glass at a supine, hairy
figure encased in a block of cloudy ice. Is it a weird-looking ape? A rubber
dummy? A hirsute human? Could it really be The Missing Link as the sign outside
proclaims in gaudy red letters? Perhaps even a surviving Neanderthal? You have
little time to ponder as the crowd starts to shuffle out to allow the next
gaggle of gawkers to enter.
Such is the typical way most people would have first
encountered the oddity known originally as the Siberskoye Creature but nowadays
more popularly called the Minnesota Iceman. The mysterious cadaver had toured
county fairs across the Midwest under the care of its owner, Frank Hansen,
throughout the 1960s but gained wider fame in 1968 when young aspiring
naturalist Terry Cullen saw the body at the International Livestock
Exposition’s Chicago Fair and brought it to the attention of cryptozoologists
Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans.
The researchers paid a visit to Hansen and examined the
corpse through the ice since its owner would not let them thaw it. What they
saw looked remarkable man-like, though he was covered in short but thick hair
like a great ape. His feet and hands were large and splayed. Under a prominent
brow ridge, one of his eyeballs hung from its socket, apparently the result of
a gunshot wound to the back of his head. The creature’s left arm up in a
defensive posture and bore a strange bend that indicated a broken radius and
ulna.
Sanderson and Heuvelmans concluded that the body was genuine
based on the fine details of the hair, nails, and skin and because of a putrid
rotting-meat smell that emanated from a crack in the glass display case.
Sandersn wrote an article about the creature for the magazine Argosy, while
Heuvelmans published a paper on the creature in the December 1969 issue of the
Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural Science of Belgium. In it, he
described the Iceman as a new species of hominid, Homo pongoides. He
even wrote a book about the discovery, which was recently translated into
English as “Neanderthal”
The origin of the Iceman’s body is murky and several
possibilities have been put forward. Hansen frequently changed his story about
how he acquired it. Initially he claimed
that he’d shot the creature on a hunting trip in the Whiteface Reservoir area
in Minnesota. Later he said that Japanese whalers had found the body frozen in
a block of ice in Siberia and sold it to a famous Hollywood actor who had
entrusted it to Hansen.
Heuvelmans formed his own theory about the body’s origin,
connecting it with a story about a strange ape that had been killed in Vietnam
during the war and preserved before being brought to the US.
At one point a woman, Helen Westring, told a tabloid
magazine that she had shot and killed the creature when it had attacked and
tried to sexually assault her.
Heuvelmans and Sanderson asked John Napier, a primatologist
at the Smithsonian, to examine the body. He concluded that it was nothing but a
latex model. Hansen tried to explain this by claiming he’d recently switched
out the real body for a replica. The two cryptozoologists backed up Hansen’s
story, claiming the body Napier had examined was clearly different in several
ways from the corpse they had initially examined.
The investigation led to someone at the Smithsonian actually
contacting the FBI, reasoning that if the body was genuine, it was possible a
type of human being had been murdered. Though the FBI didn’t end up looking
into the case, the incident did give Hansen the opportunity to put a sign above
his creature that said: “The Near Man… investigated by the FBI”
Hansen continued to tour the Iceman at county fairs and
shopping malls for a few years after 1968, but interest gradually died down, At
some point, he claimed to have gotten rid of the body, either burying it or
returning it to its original owner.
In 2013 a latex model of the creature– allegedly one of the
props Hansen had used, if not the original creature itself- was put up for sale
online. It was bought and currently resides at the Museum of the Weird in
Austin, Texas.
Since the Iceman became famous, people have reported seeing
beings resembling Homo pongoides all over the world. While these sightings
may seem like good anecdotal evidence for the existence of a still-living
nonhuman hominid, it should be noted that such tales are part of a larger
folklore about “wild men” found in every culture and at all times throughout
the world.
So what was the Minnesota Iceman? While some still wonder if
it was a late-surviving non-human hominid, or even a species of Bigfoot, the
skeptical view is that it had always been nothing but a latex dummy all along.
A carnival curiosity that briefly caught the attention of the cryptozoological
research world.
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