Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 8
I wanted to look at a sample of Heuvelmans' correspondence, so I lifted out a suspension file in which his letters had been preserved between thick layers of acid-free paper to prevent fading. As I had a particular interest in his correspondence with the Mongolian scholar Yöngsiyebü Rinchen, I chose the folder marked ‘R’. At the front of the file was a small sheet of writing paper embossed with an extravagant crest. It was from Prince Rainier of Monaco, himself a keen marine biologist, thanking Heuvelmans for a copy of his latest work on sea monsters. As I was to discover, Heuvelmans was extremely well connected, and as I leafed through the cuttings and the correspondence stored in this remarkable archive it was obvious that he had spared no effort in trying to find the extraordinary proofs for the existence of his creatures that science and the ‘scientific establishment’ demanded. In the end he was disappointed. Neither his creatures, nor cryptozoology, the field he inspired, were ever accepted during his lifetime.
I could not help wondering what might have happened had Heuvelmans been able to use the new techniques of genetics that were now at my disposal. I was sure he would have welcomed them, and seen their potential to bring cryptozoology into the scientific mainstream. It was as if I had now been given the tools to finish the job that Heuvelmans had started, and I began to formulate my plans around that tantalising thought. I had never met the man, and am not at all sure I would have liked him had I done so. But I was confident that, if these creatures really were new species and if I could get hold of physical remains with some DNA in them, then I could prove their existence in a way that Heuvelmans never could.
Descending the wide stone steps of the museum to the Place de Ruminé, I found a street market in full swing. I was feeling very pleased after my meeting with Michel and excited by my glimpse into the Heuvelmans archive. Some new projects are hard going from the beginning, but with this one doors were swinging open with the lightest touch, which is always a good sign. Browsing through the market stalls, I came to one selling second-hand books. There on the table was a copy of Tintin au Tibet with, on the front cover, a trail of giant footprints leading up a snowfield to the peaks beyond and looking just like those in the Shipton photograph. This was too promising a discovery to ignore, so I bought the book. Of course, during their adventure, Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock encounter a yeti. But that was not the end of the coincidences.
I later learned that Georges Remi the cartoonist who created Tintin, under the nom de plume Hergé, was a close friend of Heuvelmans, a fellow Belgian. It was Heuvelmans who had suggested Hergé model the head of his cartoon yeti on a scalp Heuvelmans had collected from Nepal a few years earlier, and which I also discovered on my next visit to Lausanne was on display in the museum – and available for DNA testing. With luck smiling so sweetly, how could anything possibly go wrong? A few days later, Michel and I agreed to make the yeti project an official collaboration between our two institutions, and the Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project was born.
Under the eaves of the Palais de Ruminé is a nesting colony of the rare Alpine swift, larger than the more familiar common swift whose piercing cries in the skies above Oxford are the heralds of high summer. In Lausanne, the Heuvelmans archive is on the top floor of the museum and through the open window I could hear the chattering of the swifts as they pursued each other around the square and dived into the narrow crevices that hid their nests.
The same sound welcomed me back to the archive the following year. By then the project was well under way, and samples were arriving for DNA analysis from all over the world. I had put a week aside for the archive but without any particular objective in mind. By now I had read enough to know who Heuvelmans' main correspondents were likely to be: Boris Porchnev, Yöngsiyebü Rinchen, Peter Byrne perhaps and certainly his close collaborator Ivan Sanderson, who we shall meet very soon. And John Napier, William Osman Hill and many more that we have yet to encounter. I began by looking at the letters Heuvelmans had received from these men – yes, almost all cryptozoologists have been men. There were also file after file of press cuttings, many sent from agencies to which Heuvelmans had delegated the tedious task of spotting relevant articles in newspapers and magazines from all round the world. Other files overflowed with details of cases that Heuvelmans had investigated himself.
One in particular caught my eye. Its spine was decorated with a photograph of the dead body of a strange ape-like creature, its limbs contorted into a very unnatural pose. Inside I uncovered letters and documents relating to the case of the Minnesota Iceman. It was a very famous case for cryptozoologists, but as I leafed through the material, the relevance of this episode for Heuvelmans himself became more and more clear. On the desk in front of me were the original letters that documented the excitement, the betrayal and the despair that finally destroyed Heuvelmans and severed the link between cryptozoology and mainstream science for the next four decades. Such is its significance, that I have no hesitation in devoting the bulk of this chapter to the enthralling Case of the Minnesota Iceman.
The story begins in December 1968 when Heuvelmans was on his first visit to the US. After more than a decade of correspondence he had finally met up with Ivan Sanderson. Sanderson was another of the colourful characters who decorate the history of cryptozoology. Scottish by birth, Sanderson had studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge. Then, after graduation, he worked in counter-intelligence, had spent several years as a taxidermist, then as a publicist and an author of books on cryptozoology. His letters to Heuvelmans are typed on paper embossed with his affiliation. Not Yale or Harvard but ‘The Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained’, based in his home in Columbia, New Jersey.
Earlier in the same year Sanderson was trying hard to persuade Heuvelmans to emigrate to the US. He writes, with a lot of underlined accentuations that I have retained:
Mon Cher,
Your letter of the 23rd Jan reached me only today. I am horrified. I can see by your hand-writing that you are ‘in the dumps’. Bernard, you've just GOT to climb out of it yourself. You have no friends – none of us do – they are all self-centred leeches – and there is nothing wrong with that – it's just part of the biological process. BUT . . .
I've been batted down more times than I can count. Recently I really ‘had it’ with all the full forces of all the ‘establishments’ and a lot of undeniable others besides; but, as of now, I am still here. Don't ‘give up the ship’: but first get your health straightened out. And this time, take my advice.
After that, I being completely and absolutely, and fucking-well bankrupt, can not send you any cash – which, believe thou me, I would do if I had any.
Point is, why in the effing-hell don't you just ‘up-stakes’ and come over here on a tourist or visitor's visa. I'll try to get up the cost of your passage (with return, to satisfy the immigration). We'll look after you somehow: and, as I have said before, if you do ever haul-arse over here, I'm prepared to bet that you will be a full professor at some topnotch university within three months.
Your friend, Ivan.
This characteristically feisty appeal from Sanderson touched on two pressing issues for Heuvelmans. First his chronic lack of cash. Despite the runaway success of his first book, which brought in a small fortune in royalties, money slipped through Heuvelmans' fingers like water. He had numerous ‘female friends’, spending two months every summer in their company on an island off the Côte d'Azur. As if that were not enough of a drain on his finances, he was always helping out friends or acquaintances, and even strangers, who fell on hard times. As the Sanderson letter hints, Heuvelmans was by now dependent on handouts from his own coterie of disciples.
The second sensitivity that this letter reveals was Heuvelmans' failure to secure a proper academic position after getting his PhD. Until Sur La Piste des Bêtes Ignorées appeared in 1955, he supported himself by writing newspaper and magazine articles on a wide range of topics, many with a technical or scientific focus. Among many preserved in the Lausanne archive are essays on subjects as diverse as Leo Baekeland, the inventor of the early plastic Bakelite, on the impact of the newly arrived medium, television, on ‘global cooling’ following a warning by two American scientists that ‘soon there will be no Summer’, on the possibility of Martian invasions and on the Swiss explorer Jacques Piccard's descent by bathysphere to the ocean depths. These articles were written either under his own name or using a pseudonym, Dr Simon Obispo. He also wrote about sex, either as Dr B Heuvelmans, as in the scientific treatment ‘Sex Appeal’ or, more commonly, in erotic fantasies such as ‘Ménage à Trois’ or ‘The Naked Hitchhiker’ where his authorship was thinly disguised as Barney Hillman (the English translation of Heuvelmans).
On 9 December 1969 Heuvelmans was staying with Sanderson at his home in New Jersey when a telephone call arrived from a Mr Terry Cullen, the owner of a reptile vivarium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Heuvelmans' handwritten note shows the following text as having been taken from the shorthand transcript by Marion Fawcett, Sanderson's secretary, immediately after the call.
An American is now touring local fairs with the body of an alleged ABSM (the shorthand for ‘Abominable Snowman’ used throughout the archive) frozen in a block of ice. This is reported to have been obtained from the Red Chinese who stole it from the Russians. The American got it from the Chinese in Hong Kong harbor.
It was apparently found by a Russian fishing trawler which thought it was a seal frozen in the ice. As the ice melted somewhat, a ‘monkeylike’ form became visible.
Mr Cullen has seen this and describes it as a ‘rather hairy hominid’. It has a sagittal crest (a prominent bony ridge on top of the skull used to anchor powerful jaw muscles) but no canines. The back of the head has been smashed and the brains are ‘hanging out’. The feet are human, the great toe not being opposed. The hair is dark brown and 3–4 inches long; Cullen states that the hair grows out of the ‘pores’ and is not pasted on. The body is apparently somewhat sprawled out but he estimates its height at 5 to 5 1/2 feet and emphasizes a barrel chest and wide shoulders.
Soon after the news reached Sanderson, he set about finding corroboration of Cullen's story from his network of members of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained. Confirmation soon arrived from Member No. 215, a Mr Richard Crowe of Chicago, who had inspected the specimen when it was on display in his home city. Sanderson also records reports from ‘several dozen’ people who had seen the exhibit in different locations around the Midwest.
Imagine how thrilled Heuvelmans and Sanderson must have been to have a real body to examine. Then, much as now, many commentators had asked why, if these creatures existed, no body had ever been obtained for proper scientific examination. Here was the opportunity for the final vindication, a chance to silence the critics once and for all, and to make what would be the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century. All this without the need to mount an expedition to some far-flung corner of the earth. The proof was in a freezer, somewhere in the American Midwest. Almost on the doorstep.
Through his network of contacts, Sanderson quickly located the specimen at the ranch of Mr Frank D Hansen, near Winona, Minnesota and, on 14 December 1968, he and Heuvelmans set out by car from New Jersey. Before they left Sanderson noted:
The crux of the matter is that we have now a (fresh) corpse of at least one type of ultra-primitive hominid, with fresh blood, available for proper examination.
Driving through the Midwest in winter is no joke, but they arrived at the Hansen ranch on the morning of 17 December. The ranch was located on top of the plateau that lies to the west of the Mississippi and could only be reached via a bewildering complex of unsigned dirt roads. Nevertheless they got there and were soon gazing at the creature lying in a large chest-freezer that was kept inside a trailer in the yard. There was no doubt that this was a body of something very strange, frozen beneath a translucent layer of ice.
The pair spent four hours that afternoon examining the object, returning the following day for a further four hours of photography. The weather was getting much colder, and Hansen invited them to stay the night. Next morning, 19 December, they spent three more hours making scale drawings of the body. By then the pair were feeling very cold inside the trailer and Hansen tried to make them more comfortable by installing a gas burner. By the time they left that afternoon, Heuvelmans and Sanderson were beginning to feel the disorienting effects of carbon monoxide poisoning and put up in the first motel they could find. They returned to Sanderson's home in New Jersey on 22 December after eight days and 2,600 miles on the road. The two men had spent a total of eleven hours studying the specimen and they were left in no doubt that it was genuine.
Frank D. Hansen had gone into the carnival business in the early 1960s when he had exhibited a restored 1916 classic four-cylinder John Deere gasoline tractor, one of the very first to have been manufactured. He had refurbished an old creamery on the ranch to work on the tractor and his other exhibits and, after the Iceman, was planning to tour with a show about UFOs. Hansen told Sanderson that he had been an army flyer for seventeen years, mostly in the Far East and that, like Sanderson, he had been engaged in counter-intelligence. He and his wife Irene had been married for twenty-six years with a son and a daughter living locally. Only Hansen was permitted to drive the trailer containing the Iceman, though his wife always accompanied him when they were on the carny circuit. Of course, Heuvelmans and Sanderson wanted to know how Hansen had acquired the Iceman and the notes record four different accounts of its history, accounts that Sanderson prefaces by the following two paragraphs:
The exhibit is alleged to have been on the road for no less than eighteen months. Whether this is true or not is of little import since it was definitely at the famous ‘Stock Show’ in Chicago in November, 1968, where it was seen by our first informant (Terry Cullen). Further, that it was there was confirmed to our member No. 215 by the lady who acts as executive secretary of the organisation that runs this show annually. Further, and subsequent to our inspection visit, several other people told us that they had seen it in Milwaukee and other cities – some even saying more than eighteen months ago.
The other aspect of the history is the ‘origin’ of the object. To this there are four versions, the first two still not confirmed by Mr Hansen directly.
(1) The story as relayed to us by Mr Cullen, who said he got it from Hansen at the Chicago Fair, was that it had been retrieved from the sea off Kamchatka by a Russian sealing vessel, the captain of which thought it was some animal. The block of ice lifted aboard weighed some 6,000 pounds. This sealer had to put in at a Red Chinese port in an emergency and was virtually seized by the authorities. After a near fight, the ship and crew were released, but after they were at sea, the mate reported that the Object, along with the rest of the cargo, had been off-loaded by the Chinese. The Object is said to have disappeared in China for ‘several months’ but finally turned up in Hong Kong as contraband. By this version, Hansen was led to it there and paid a lot of money for it.
(2) The second version that Hansen gave a couple of weeks later was that it had been a Japanese whaler which had obtained it and that its owners had sold it to a Chinese curiosity dealer in Hong Kong. When asked about this, Hansen remarked casually that . . . ‘Oh that whole thing's a mess. We don't know the name of the ship and can't find it.’ Pressed, but for diplomatic reasons not too strongly, he went on to say that it had been found in Hong Kong by an American film executive on a trip to the Orient for ‘background material’ and that he (Hansen) had then been sent to fetch it with the necessary money. This brought up the mysterious (and I may say, to me, at least, somewhat dubious) Mr ‘X’ of Hollywood, of whom more anon.
(3) Having been alerted by Terry Cullen by phone that Hansen was extremely wary, had changed his story and was scared almost into silence by ‘the government’, I tried to set a friendly and co-operative stage at the outset of our first meeting by remarking casually, in Heuvelmans presence and that of Hansen's brother-in-law, Walter, that, ‘Seals are constantly found embedded in flow-ice in international waters in the Bering Sea.’ Hansen pounced on this, remarking that he never knew it, but looked very relieved. (Note: this will probably be his official story from now on).
However, Sanderson's fourth paragraph adds a further twist to this already tangled history.
(4) During the last hour of my inspection of the corpse, I noted something that ordinary lights had not disclosed. I had powerful floodlights to one side, the beam from which shone under a layer of opaque ice covering the center and right side of the torso. Almost in the middle of the torso there is a low dome of fresh, dark opaque ice which was explained to us by Hansen as follows. He alleged that when the top layers of ice were being shaved away by the professional ice-carver in Los Angeles, he went too deep and uncovered a ‘nipple’ which immediately turned black and showed signs of rotting. He therefore re-gelated over it. However, I immediately spotted both true nipples, which were pink and fresh and to either side of the torso just like ours. Under the central ice dome I could see (since I was looking straight down while doing a scale drawing) what looked like a bullet hole around which was a little red blood in the crystal-clear ice.
This last observation, if confirmed, places an entirely different connotation on the whole affair. (The legal implications are discussed below). It adds a fourth possibility: namely, that the creature was shot in this country and, after some medical man had pronounced it to be more hominid than pongid (i.e. more man than ape), it was quickly and ‘obviously’ ‘buried’ (in ice) and put on the carny circuit as the best possible ‘cover’.
