Wednesday Weirdness Roundup: The Iceman Returneth

• As you may know, The Altoona Bigfoot murder I mentioned in a previous Roundup (here) turned out to be merely Bigfoot tracks (see here) discovered by a Mr. John Winesickle. And the Winesickle tracks have turned out to be bear tracks.
• Meanwhile, in Utah, amateur fossil-hunter Todd May is very excited about the stupid rock fossilized Bigfoot head he found in Ogden Canyon sometime in May. The Standard-Examiner‘s Mark Saal actually reported  the find, and is now quite flattered that Weekly World News stole his big scoop.
  If you squint and tilt your head a certain way, Mr. May’s 70-lb. rock vaguely resembles a squashy human face. May believes you can even make out the Bigfoot’s tongue, and a hand resting against the skull. He also  admits that, like most people who find Bigfoot-related stuff, he has long been searching for evidence of Bigfoot. Recently, he spotted two of the critters in the canyon.

• After 43 years, the infamous sideshow attraction known as the Minnesota Iceman has reportedly turned up in Austin, Texas. As a hoax, the Iceman is so iconic that he’s even featured on the front page of my old, frozen blog. (Get it? Frozen? GET IT?)
  The saga of the Iceman may be old hat to many of you, but here’s a recap:
  In 1967, a Minnesota man named Frank Hansen began exhibiting a frozen caveman at various carnivals and livestock fairs around the U.S. Encased in a rectangular block of ice, the Iceman was 6′ tall, covered with long dark hair, and definitely not human. He wasn’t a pretty sight. He had the broad, flat nose of an ape and the face of a Neanderthal. One of his remarkably long arms appeared to be broken, and one eye was missing. Hansen advertised him as a missing link fished out of the Bering Strait, and said he was displaying the body on behalf of its owner, an “eccentric California millionaire” who preferred to remain nameless. This dodgy backstory alone should have kept scientists miles away from the thing, but a handful of curious biologists decided to investigate. They couldn’t actually take samples from the Iceman, though, because Hansen wouldn’t allow the ice to be thawed. This made the Iceman’s features blurry and distorted, difficult to discern (the crystal-clear “photo” commonly associated with the Iceman is actually an artist’s rendition of what his face might look like, first published in the May 1969 issue of Argosy magazine).
  Nonetheless, credulous Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans designated the Iceman a previously undiscovered species of human. In February 1969, he published an article in the Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium suggesting it was closely related to the Neanderthal. He called it Homo pongoides, and theorized the Iceman was most likely a certain cryptid shot and killed during Vietnam.

  

  Heuvelmans and world-famous biologist Ivan Sanderson had examined the creature up close earlier in the year, and both deemed it to be a real specimen that had been dead for no more than 5 years. (1)
  Like Heuvelmans, Sanderson was the sort of scientist easily sucked in by peculiar notions and trickery. Two decades before the Iceman surfaced, he declared that a series of 14″ long, three-toed footprints found on a beach in Clearwater, Florida, had been left by a giant penguin that somehow wandered too far north. In 1973, Al Williams admitted he and a buddy created the tracks with a pair of iron “dinosaur” shoes they designed, as a practical joke. (2)

  

Sanderson and Heuvelmans were impressed not only by the Iceman’s appearance, but by his stench. They claimed the block of ice gave off the odour of putrefied flesh. They tried to interest the Smithsonian in studying the Iceman. This apparently made Hansen very nervous, because he soon announced he was withdrawing the Iceman from public exhibition on the millionaire’s orders, and replacing it with an impressively realistic latex replica. However, primatologist John Napier, working with the Smithsonian, looked into the matter and learned that Hansen had commissioned the creation of a rubber caveman from a West Coast artist named Pete Corrall in the spring of 1967 – the very same year he began touring with the Iceman. Napier concluded that Hansen had merely thawed his rubber Iceman, repositioned it a little, and refrozen it to make it look slightly different. (It must be noted, here, that Napier was not exactly a skeptic when it came to Sasquatch. He believed the so-called “Cripplefoot” tracks found in Bossburg, Washington, in 1969 were genuine, though most other Bigfoot enthusiasts considered the prints a hoax likely perpetrated by the peculiar Ivan Marks.)
Heuvelmans and Sanderson insisted the “new” Iceman was not the same one they examined in 1968, but very few people were still convinced. As interest in the Iceman melted away (hur hur), Hansen suddenly changed his entire story. Pointing to the “original” creature’s bulging eyeball, he claimed he himself had shot the creature in the head, somewhere in the woods of Minnesota. Then, in the spring of 1970, he abruptly stopped touring with the Iceman, explaining that the millionaire had decided to stow it in some secret location for no obvious reason. It was not seen in public again.
Now, Steve Busti, the owner/curator of Austin’s Museum of the Weird, claims to have the Iceman in his possession. According to a HuffPo article, he bought it from Frank Hansen’s family in Minnesota. Hansen, who died about 10 years ago, had stashed the thing in a freezer on his property.
The Museum will be holding a Grand Opening event for its new exhibit on July 13th, in collaboration with Cryptomundo, the website of Loren Coleman (perhaps the world’s best-known Bigfoot researcher and cryptozoologist). The MoW seems to be more or less a big sideshow, so maybe the Iceman has found a permanent home at last.

• P.S. If you looked at the title of this post and are now a little disappointed that Richard Kuklinski wasn’t mentioned, stick around. That will be an upcoming post.

Sources:
1. “The Missing Link?” by Ivan Sanderson. Argosy, May 1969, pp. 23-31.
2. Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown by Mike Dash (Dell, 1997), pp. 273-277