Wednesday Weirdness Roundup: Bigfoot, Smallfoot, and Another Atacama Humanoid

• Another Boy from La Noria: The latest news on the Boy from La Noria (the “Atacama humanoid”) is that he wasn’t the first tiny child discovered in the Atacama Desert and paraded around as a sideshow curiosity. Back in the 1930s, Robert Ripley himself possessed and exhibited a 6.5″-tall human he named Atta. There’s a photo of Ripley posing with Atta in the palm of his hand in Neal Thompson’s recently-released biography A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert ‘Believe It or Not!’ Ripley.
  According to Thompson, Ripley was fascinated by shrunken heads and the much rarer shrunken bodies, and seemed to think that Atta was an adult human skeleton shrunk to miniature dimensions, perhaps by the Jivaro Indians of Peru. That’s not how head- or body-shrinking works, of course, but try telling that to a guy who’s been dead for nearly 65 years. 

Ripley’s Atta was probably bought by a private collector after its novelty wore off. Its current whereabouts are unknown.
It’s not easy to discern Atta’s features in the existing black-and-white photos, but there is nothing to indicate Atta wasn’t simply a mummified fetus, as many believe the boy from La Noria to be.  Edward Meyer, vice president of exhibits and archives for Ripley Entertainment, holds that view, but still wants to know what became of Atta. He has asked that anyone with information about Atta contact him at meyer@ripleys.com.

• In Botswana, tiny humanoids aren’t a thing of the past. As Loren Coleman tells us, every part of Africa has its own folkloric man-beast that isn’t very tall, kind of like mini Sasquatches or short Ron Jeremys. On May 17, Mathiba Primary School in the town of Maun had to cancel classes for the day after hysterical children glimpsed a stumpy humanoid with thick black fur roaming the halls and classrooms.  Ten of the kids were sent to hospital to be treated for shock, and school authorities convened a prayer meeting. Greg Newkirk at Who Forted? observes that this mini Squatch  just happened to show up right before 7th-grade final exams. How totally inconsiderate.
• Now, what about that full-size Bigfoot that was supposedly gunned down in Pennsylvania, as mentioned in last week’s Roundup? Well, no body turned up, and the only documented “sighting” around the time of the supposed kill was made by one John Winesickle, who reported to police that he had uncovered proof of Bigfoot. Someone overheard officers discussing Winesickle’s call over the radio and jumped to the conclusion that proof meant a dead body (it was, after all, the opening day of turkey season). What Winesickle actually found were some footprints in the woods.
• If you simply must have a dead Bigfoot story, though, I suggest you dip into the bizarre conspiracy theory that rocked the Bigfoot world several years back. It involved Bobbie Short, a well-known Bigfoot researcher who passed away last week, and centred around film footage and photos from a 1967 Bigfoot expedition to Blue Creek Mountain in California. Canadian Sasquatch enthusiast John Green and the quirky Canadian Sasquatch-hunter Rene Dahinden traveled to Bluff Creek that summer to investigate Squatch tracks that were reported to have been left on Blue Creek Mountain, and they shot some film to document their trip. Several months later, in October, the famous Patterson-Gimlin film of a sauntering female Bigfoot was shot in the same area.
  Roughly six years ago, certain Bigfoot researchers claimed to find, in the film and photos from the Green-Dahinden expedition, clear evidence that the Patterson-Gimlin film was fake, part of a vast cover-up/conspiracy involving the massacre of several real Bigfoot. John Green, who published On the Track of the Sasquatch the following year, was supposedly the mastermind of this cover-up, if not the massacre itself.
  The evidence was pretty thin. One fellow tinted the hands of a man in a photo to make it look like he had blood on his hands. Others, like Bobbie Short, insisted the expedition pilot was actually Bob Titmus, an alleged hoaxer who amassed more plaster footprint casts of Bigfoot than anyone alive. Bobbie Short promoted the Bluff Creek Massacre conspiracy theory on her website, Bigfoot Encounters, and via rather cryptic emails to the others in the field. It’s a confusing but fascinating tale. Just Google “Blue Creek Mountain Bigfoot massacre” or something along those lines to find out more about it.  As always, Bigfoot researchers prove to far be more peculiar and intriguing than the beasts they’re seeking.