The Minnesota Iceman

The Minnesota Iceman was never seen in a forest. It was seen under glass. From 1967 the showman Frank Hansen toured it through malls, state fairs and carnivals, billed as "The Siberskoye Creature" and "The Creature in Ice". Between seasons it wintered in a refrigerated trailer on his farm near Rollingstone, Minnesota. In 1968 a zoology student, Terry Cullen, saw it at the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago. He alerted Ivan T. Sanderson, naturalist and science editor of Argosy.

Mid-December 1968. Sanderson arrived at the farm with Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian-French zoologist often called the founder of cryptozoology. For three days they studied the body through ice and glass. They took photographs. They made sketches.

They described an adult male about 6 ft tall. Barrel-chested, with a thick neck. Very dark brown hair, 3 to 4 inches long, covered the body. The face was broad and flattened, with a short upturned nose and prominent brow-ridges. One eyeball dangled from its socket. The hands were enormous, with long thumbs and flat, yellow nails. Then the glass over the case cracked. Out came the stench of rotting flesh.

Sanderson wrote that "one look was actually enough to convince us". Heuvelmans went further: "For the first time in history, a fresh corpse of a Neanderthal-like man has been found." In February 1969 he described it in a Belgian scientific bulletin as Homo pongoides.

Sanderson mentioned the Iceman on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson during Christmas week 1968. Argosy ran the story in spring 1969. In London, The Sunday Times asked: "Is it a fraud, a freak, or is it a form of human being believed to have been extinct since prehistoric times?" Hansen refused requests from the Smithsonian and the FBI for samples. The FBI was told the figure might be a human murder victim.

Sanderson asked the primatologist John Napier to investigate for the Smithsonian Institution. Napier found that Hansen had commissioned the figure from a West Coast company in 1967. The Smithsonian's verdict was blunt. The creature was "simply a carnival exhibit made of latex rubber and hair". The "original" and the so-called "substitute" were "one and the same".

That last line answered Hansen's defence. By then he was saying the real body had been withdrawn on its owner's orders and replaced with a model. Sanderson backed him, and by one account he and Heuvelmans documented 15 discrepancies. Other accounts named the makers. The fibreglass artist Howard Ball built the figure. Pete and Betty Corral implanted the hair, at a reported cost of about $20,000.

Hansen's origin story kept shifting. In one version, Russian seal hunters found it floating in ice. In another, it sat in a Hong Kong deep-freeze until an eccentric California millionaire bought it. In a third, it came back from Vietnam in a body bag. In Saga in July 1970 he claimed he had shot it himself at Whiteface Reservoir in 1960. The creature, he wrote, "leaped straight into the air from its crouched position" and charged. He added a caveat: "I am not under oath and, should the situation dictate, I will deny every word of it."

In 2013 Steve Busti bought the figure on eBay. It is now in the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas. Darren Naish says it looks identical to the specimen Heuvelmans and Sanderson illustrated. The case has since featured on Unsolved Mysteries and Mysteries at the Museum. Hansen's last word was simple: "I don't know anything more about what it was than anyone else does."