Minnesota Iceman Hoax

[Guest LAL]

127, Pye's viewing (in 1976) was mentioned earlier in the thread. He described it here:

http://www.hancockho...060128143634357

In the show he says the bullet passed between the bones near the wrist but the arm was clearly broken in Heuvelmans' photos. Sanderson noted there was blood exuding from the break and the radius and ulna were protruding.

http://www.bigfooten...les/argosy2.htm

I'd have been okay with Animal X leaving Pye out of it. But suppose the animal was shot and landed face down? Wouldn't the blood have pooled much as he described (in Minnesota, anyway)?

<edited to add link and a couple of sentences and to save bandwidth>

Edited May 10, 2011 by LAL

[Huntster]

Huntster, on 08 May 2011 - 08:40 PM, said:

Actually, they (as the official wildlife management agencies) have a responsibility to at least issue a policy statement on the issue.

As the official wildlife management agencies, they are responsible to at least issue a statement of policy.

Says who?

Says their mandate to manage the wildlife in their jurisdiction for the public at large.

Should they issue statements about all unrecognized species, or just the ones you think they should make statements about?

Just the ones within their jurisdiction, Ray. So, for example, the Alaska Dept of Fish and Game?: Iliamna Lake Monster? Yup. Sasquatches? Yup. Loch Ness Monster? Nope. Loch Ness is in Scotland. Let the Scots deal with that. The Lake Champlain Monster? Nope. Somebody else's responsibility.

Any unicorn reports in Alaska? Then yes, a policy statement is due.

Now, bear in mind that I'm not interested in unicorn statements. You are. So, you should get them.

If they're reported here.

I know of no reports here. You?

Sadly, the writeup I made about my phone call has gone the way of the BFF 1.0, a mass of dissipated electrons that we might never recover. However, that wildlife professional is in Alaska, the state you live in, quite easy to confirm for yourself if you truly wanted to.

I don't. I have my own official duties, and I get 'em done.

In fact, I seem to recall trying to encourage you to engage the wildlife professionals in your neck of the woods, but that old adage about leading horses to water comes to mind...

That's more like leading the lamb to the slaughterhouse. I'm not going to give Alaskan skeptics and denialists a flagrum with which to scourge me on fish and game issues. Let 'em blow it off. If sasquatches are discovered during my lifetime, I'll be the one with the flagrum, and they'll be at the pillar.

[Huntster]

What I meant was that it is "not so great" from a knowledge point of view to accept "the inconclusive body of evidence" for Bigfoot as if it were conclusive.

I agree.

I agree that "none of us know whether sasquatches exist or existed recently", however many Bigfooters are seriously positive (certain) that they do exist.

That's true, just as it is true that there are many denialists, and even many skeptics who take "doubt" to a level which knocks on denial's door.

Extremism sucks, doesn't it?

[Guest Blackdog]

The report Loofs-Wissowa referred to was from 1966. It said US Marines had shot and killed a big ape. Maybe it was some other large ape, but that's one story Hansen didn't tell. 1966 was the year Brigadier General Jimmy Stewart was there. Hansen's unit was stationed in Da Nang. BTW, I'm from the sixties. <grabs flit gun>

That was only one story from that clip. Immediately afterwards starting around 4:46 "Vietnam's leading biologist" Vo Quy says that "about 1965 a helicopter brought in a strange animal..."

Vu Ngoc Thanh, Director of Primotology for Viet Nam National University says, "It was alive and many people could describe it."

So one guy hears a story that it was shot and killed by American troops but the Vietnamese say it was alive, none of them saw anything. These are all stories, not confirmation of anything.

I'm not interested in the FBI.

You were when you posted this:

...and @ 6:28 a retired police detective's statement on Hansen's harassment and the charges he might have faced

He specifically mentioned the FBI as the entity that harassed him.

[Guest LAL]

That was only one story from that clip. Immediately afterwards starting around 4:46 "Vietnam's leading biologist" Vo Quy says that "about 1965 a helicopter brought in a strange animal..."

Vu Ngoc Thanh, Director of Primotology for Viet Nam National University says, "It was alive and many people could describe it."

Yes, I know. I watched the segment at least six times last night and then Googled Quy and Thanh 'til 2. Two different years, two different cities, possibly two different animals, unless the Marines shot the one that had been displayed alive. Vietnam apparently has or had Rock Apes as well as Forest People and they are different.

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/03/vietnamese-rock-apes.html

So one guy hears a story that it was shot and killed by American troops but the Vietnamese say it was alive, none of them saw anything. These are all stories, not confirmation of anything.

I said "possible", didn't I? The interesting thing to me is that a "big ape" was reportedly shot by Americans, and a "strange animal" was taken by helicopter, possibly to Da Nang where Hansen's unit was stationed. Whole lot of coincidence going on. I'm hoping Heuvelmans' book goes into detail about why he thought the Iceman was smuggled out in a body bag.

I'm wondering if, by any chance, Brigadier General Jimmy Stewart flew with Hansen's unit when he was in Nam in '66. Anybody know?

Dr. Helmut Loofs-Wissowa:

There seems to be a general agreement that the essence of the scientific method is the "validation of hypotheses by observation or experiments" (The Heritage Dictionary), to which should be added that this must be verifiable by others. The formulation of an hypothesis is thus to be seen as the first and foremost criterion for something to be "scientific".

My own hypothesis, based on many years of research, is that there still exist higher primate forms distinct from both the Pongidae and Homo sapiens, i.e. either still unknown bipedal pongids or non-sapiens hominids, in certain inaccessible parts of the Indochinese Peninsula and in particular in a well-defined spot in Central Laos near the border with Vietnam, from which I had reports of the existence of "gorillas" in the late 1960s. These reports came from Vietnamese, Laotian, American and Australian sources, checked and double-checked with regard to their authenticity and trustworthiness.

My "experiment" consisted in going there (which is far from easy), interviewing old people in remote villages and eventually recording first-hand information about powerfully built hairy manlike creatures which/who used to live in precisely the area I expected them to have been until it was bombed, defoliated and napalmed because the Ho Chi Minh Trail was going through it) which resulted in the destruction of the primary forest, their habitat. In order to pinpoint more closely their physical appearance, I had prepared a set of pictures to choose from: photographs and drawings of the Great Apes, reconstitution drawings or paintings of some prehistoric hominids such as "Java Man" and the reconstitution drawing, after the original photographs, of the famous "Minnesota Iceman", identified by one of the foremost zoologists of our time, (the late) Dr Bernard Heuvelmans of Paris, as being a relic Neanderthal originating very probably from Vietnam. It was to this latter picture, drawn by Heuvelmans' ex-wife Alika Lindbergh that everybody pointed without the slightest hesitation as being the best representation of the creatures they had seen.

My original hypothesis has been validated inasmuch as there are irrefutable indications for the existence at least into the recent past, if not into the present, of obviously non-sapiens hominids, almost certainly of the relic Neanderthal type, in the area I hypothesized them to be. This can be verified by whoever is game enough to repeat my experiment! This research has been conducted strictly according to the rules and should therefore qualify for the coveted label "scientific".

Not so, say certain skeptics or "mainstream" anthropologists, palaeontologist, human biologists or whatever: where is the proof? We want to be convinced! The counter-argument is "this cannot be: non-sapiens hominids cannot exist any more because they are extinct, as we all know"; end of conversation.

There is thus either no initial hypothesis at all (ignore the problem and it ceases to exist), which is certainly not "scientific", or the hypothesis is that such creatures do not and cannot exist, which is impossible to prove by any experiment or observation, the less so if one keeps in mind the dictum that "the absence of evidence is no evidence for absence".

Back to the demand of proof by those who must be convinced. Unfortunately, "proof" and "evidence" are never a matter of simply yes or no; there are grades and shades. There is "no proof", "hardly any proof', "proof", "good proof' and "ironclad proof". As to evidence, it can be "not a skerrick of evidence,, "some evidence", "evidence" and, if you are lucky, "hard evidence". But the degree of hardness is always determined by the receiver of the evidence, not the giver of it (perhaps we should call them now the "evidencer" versus the "evidencee"). If the evidencee just does not want to be convinced, there is little the evidencer can do except for breaking some crockery or hitting a punch-bag to relieve his/her frustration. The decision of what is "convincing" and what is not is entirely in the hands - or rather the minds-of the custodians of "science as we know it."

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/biology/helmut.htm

But never mind him. He and Quy and Thanh are obviuosly "woo" scientists for taking an interest in "Wildmen".

You were when you posted this:

What I found interesting was that Smith mentioned the two crimes I mentioned earlier and was a witness to Hansen's state of mind. Why would someone just exhibiting a dummy get upset and nervous if he had nothing to hide?

He specifically mentioned the FBI as the entity that harassed him.

Bob Smith specifically mentioned the FBI harassed Frank Hansen, just to get the "hims" straight. Maybe it did, just not very officially and just enough to decide they shouldn't investigate.. Maybe former detective Smith knows more about it than we do.

[Guest LAL]

Getting back to pictures for a moment, this is Burien's idea of a "Cro-Magnon" (Howard Ball reportedly said he tried to make the model look like one):

I don't see relatively short legs and a barrel chest "like a goose". Barrel belly, yes.

This is a page from Sanderson's book, Abominable Snowmen: Legend come to Life (1961). Note the Australopithecine. Seems they were seen as small hairy humans with a case of prognathism. Science had barely recovered from Dart's osteodontokeratic industry or had they yet? Robert Ardrey hadn't.

Here's Lucy, but she hadn't been discovered yet. (From The Human Story by Charles Lockwood, 2008.)

I haven't found a reconstruction of the much older male yet. "Kadanuumuu", was an estimated 5 - 5.5' tall.

Here's the MIM again, in photo and drawing.

[wolftrax]

Lal, you know better, these were all available in the 60s, this was already posted on page 4, and I don't recall Ball ever saying what he based the Iceman on.

Edited May 10, 2011 by wolftrax

[Guest LAL]

Lal, you know better, these were all available in the 60s, this was already posted on page 4, and I don't recall Ball ever saying what he based the Iceman on.

Thanks for posting them all again and saving me the trouble, but I still see human-like proportions. I was looking specifically for Burien's "Cro-Magnon" (note the quotation marks, Blurry Monster, if you're lurking).

"At about the same time a Hollywood special effects firm claimed that they had made the "Iceman" in 1967. Howard Ball, who made figures for Disneyland with his son, Kenneth, had modeled the fake in rubber trying to make it look like 'an artist's conception of Cro-Magnon man' with 'a broken skull with one eye popped out.' "

http://www.unmuseum.org/iceman.htm

This was the article that made me think it had been "proven" to be a fake. There's that "rubber" again. It's looking like only Langdon said "vinyl".

My book just arrived from Paris. Excuse me while I go look at the pictures.

[wolftrax]

In the meanwhile George Berklacy of the Public Relations Office of the Smithsonian and I had been doing a little digging on our own. Berklacy after an exhausting and dangerous mission on the telephone tracked down a commercial organization on the West Coast that claimed to have made the Iceman for Frank Hansen out of latex rubber and hair in April 1967 (the year it went out on the first tour of the circus midways).

Don't know why you keep insisting someone else should know the difference between latex and vinyl when you don't either.

There's no mention of Chambers there. Hansen said the L.A. County museum sent him to Howard Ball.

You know better, I don't know why you play this game.

"In January 1967, I made sketches of the real creature and went to Hollywood to confer with the men who make models for the motion picture industry. I talked with Bud Westmore, the director of make-up at Universal Studios. He informed me that such a model might cost up to $20.000. Westmore didn't have the time to make the creation, but he agreed to offer his technical knowledge if I needed it. He also agreed that it would be a "challenging" endeavor. I then consulted with a staff member of the Los Angeles County Museum. He suggested that I contact Howard Ball, an independent artist who was creating life-size fiberglass elephants to be displayed at the La Brea tar pits. I later engaged Ball to sculpture the carcass and mold the body.

John Chambers, a make-up artist and academy award winner from 2Oth-Century Fox suggested that a small wax studio in Los Angeles could implant the hair according to my specifications. I approached Pete and Betty Corral. They agreed to do the work and implanted each hair individually with an open-end needle. I constantly directed this portion and their work was magnificent. They were great artists and a pleasure to deal with."

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/hansen.htm

John Chambers:

"A carnival. There are a lot of guys out there doing that. You know the block of ice with this body that was frozen in a block of ice? This guy’s story was really good, and he brought it to me wanting artificial eyes, and I gave him artificial eyes and I gave him the people that would do the hair, and then he had it implanted in ice."

Pye saw the fake and thought it was real, Coleman's pics of the fake are what people see and say that is what they saw and it looked real, but the timeline and what they identify are the fake.

[wolftrax]

Thanks for posting them all again and saving me the trouble, but I still see human-like proportions. I was looking specifically for Burien's "Cro-Magnon" (note the quotation marks, Blurry Monster, if you're lurking).

"At about the same time a Hollywood special effects firm claimed that they had made the "Iceman" in 1967. Howard Ball, who made figures for Disneyland with his son, Kenneth, had modeled the fake in rubber trying to make it look like 'an artist's conception of Cro-Magnon man' with 'a broken skull with one eye popped out.' "

http://www.unmuseum.org/iceman.htm

This was the article that made me think it had been "proven" to be a fake. There's that "rubber" again. It's looking like only Langdon said "vinyl".

My book just arrived from Paris. Excuse me while I go look at the pictures.

It was Howard Ball's son that said that:

"The relevance of this question became especially clear with the publication in FATE (March 1982) of the piece, "The Iceman Goeth", in which debunkers referred to one Howard Ball, "who died several years ago" and who "made models for Disneyland." "He made (the Iceman) here in his studio in Torrance (Calif.)," Ball's widow Helen told Emery. "The man who commissioned it said he was going to encase it in ice and pass it off, I think, as a prehistoric man." Ball's son Kenneth helped his father build the figure.

He says its "skin" is half-inch-thick rubber. "We modeled it after an artist's conception of Cro-Magnon man and gave it a broken arm and a bashed-in skull with one eye popped out." (p.59)."

http://www.hominology.narod.ru/iseman.htm

Hmmm didn't you refer to that site before? So you should know that Ball himself didn't say that, but his son did. And again, YOU don't know the difference between latex and vinyl, why should anybody else?

[wolftrax]

Thanks for posting them all again and saving me the trouble, but I still see human-like proportions.

you are wrong

[Guest LAL]

The first place I saw the quote was on the UnMuseum site. Didn't I make that clear? Yes, I knew Kenneth Ball said that, according to Bayanov's site, but that was not what I saw first. I'm finding a lot of inaccuracies and inconsistencies site to site. I referred to that site several times. Is this the first time you read it? Either way, it says they modeled it after an artist's conception of a "Cro-Magnon". And on that site Dmitri Bayanov said,

That the Iceman is a model of Cro-Magnon man is sheer nonsense and the height of anthropological ignorance. There exists no artist's conception even of Neanderthal man as hairy as the Iceman. A "prehistoric man" of this kind was only posited by Boris Porshnev's anthropological theory, which was not widely known at the time and is not recognized even today. So the question persists: If the original Iceman is a model, WHAT is it a model of?"

All these sources say latex rubber. I'm merely quoting them. Yes, I could tell the difference on close examination, but it does matter whether I can or not? I don't see why the sources would say rubber if it was vinyl, especially when the source was supposed to be the model-makers or the studios.

How is it a "game" when I point out you said something is that isn't (in that case anything about Chambers)? If you correct me is that a "game" too? I thought this was a debate, or at least a discussion.

Now, just for fun, are shots from Heuvelmans' book (unfortunately there are no captions) of those gappy teeth and the upper jaw of an Australopithecus afarensis that hadn't been discovered yet.

[Guest LAL]

you are wrong

Oh?

[wolftrax]

The first place I saw the quote was on the UnMuseum site. Didn't I make that clear? Yes, I knew Kenneth Ball said that, according to Bayanov's site, but that was not what I saw first. I'm finding a lot of inaccuracies and inconsistencies site to site. I referred to that site several times. Is this the first time you read it? Either way, it says they modeled it after an artist's conception of a "Cro-Magnon". And on that site Dmitri Bayanov said,

That the Iceman is a model of Cro-Magnon man is sheer nonsense and the height of anthropological ignorance. There exists no artist's conception even of Neanderthal man as hairy as the Iceman. A "prehistoric man" of this kind was only posited by Boris Porshnev's anthropological theory, which was not widely known at the time and is not recognized even today. So the question persists: If the original Iceman is a model, WHAT is it a model of?"

Howard Ball didn't say it, that was what was asked for, and you went to a site that didn't say it was his son saying it to pass it off that Howard said it. You have no idea what role his son played in it, planning, or it's construction. Either way, doesn't matter, Hansen admitted it. Doesn't matter what Bayanov said.

All these sources say latex rubber. I'm merely quoting them. Yes, I could tell the difference on close examination, but it does matter whether I can or not? I don't see why the sources would say rubber if it was vinyl, especially when the source was supposed to be the model-makers or the studios.

How would you know the difference between vinyl and latex?

How is it a "game" when I point out you said something is that isn't (in that case anything about Chambers)? If you correct me is that a "game" too? I thought this was a debate, or at least a discussion.

Did you read the quote? Hansen DID say he went to Chambers. That is the game though, isn't it?

Now, just for fun, are shots from Heuvelmans' book (unfortunately there are no captions) of those gappy teeth and the upper jaw of an Australopithecus afarensis that hadn't been discovered yet.

And more games. Africanus had been well known, and afarensis had more prognathism than what we see in the Iceman, while Africanus looks the same. But you know what that Iceman looks exactly like? The fake one Coleman too photos of, one and the same.

[wolftrax]

Oh?

Yep, in the arms.