Minnesota Iceman Hoax

[Guest LAL]

Not terribly "scientific" of them, is it?

It's probably best to squelch honest inquiry, especially if it involves *gasp* funding.

[Guest]

We can go on and on about ifs, but you have 3 separate people all saying exactly who made the exhibit. The evidence shows the same thing, both in the "Real" and the "Fake".

Nope. Evidence of ONE being fake in no way proves the other is/was.

[Guest]

How about it being made in 1964?

Does he have receipts showing that was the actual years? It could be bad memory, or he could be backdating the event to make his claim of credit possible. Not needed really, since we know there was an original, and one or more duplicates made.

Which story you buy? Came from 'Nam, Minnesota, floating block of ice, switcheroo? You buy these changing stories over 3 different people who say the same thing, not only that it was fabricated but who fabricated it?

The three unanimous people can be entirely correct in their claim to have made a Iceman, and the other stories be associated with the acquisition of the original, real specimen and also true.

Then I take it without the specimen you believe a 15 foot tall penguin is still out there as well.

I would have to examine the evidence. We know there are relic animals in the world...we've found them before (coelecanth, for example).

[Guest]

He's dead and his widow wasn't talking on advice of their son, an attorney. I've been meaning to order Mike Quast's book if it's still available.

That to me is hightly significant. She could be shopping the story around for a nice bit of coin, a la the Wallaces, but she ISN'T, citing legal advice. That is strong implication that there is something there that she is protecting. Given the theories that Iceman was smuggled into the country illegally, and the pressure put on her late husband by authorities, her silence is understandable.

[Guest]

It's probably best to squelch honest inquiry, especially if it involves *gasp* funding.

Which it always does...funding is the lifeblood of Institutional Science, the carrot and stick which enforces orthodoxy. Thus we get things like that statement, or the shennanigans surrounding that English Climatology department that got caught red-handed falsifying data and trying to arrange for opposition papers to be unfairly denied publication.

[Guest Blackdog]

The original still exists out there somewhere, either still frozen or probably burried in a shallow grave somewhere.

Really...

You know that do you? How do you know that Mulder?

History repeats itself some times, though the two situations are NOT precisely identical.

And Dr Meldrum's observations are current, and repeatable, as he maintains the evidence that he examined to reach those observations and conclusions.

How current are they?

As far as repeatable I assume you mean that you repeat them...again and again and again.

[Guest Blackdog]

Then I take it without the specimen you believe a 15 foot tall penguin is still out there as well.

I would have to examine the evidence. We know there are relic animals in the world...we've found them before (coelecanth, for example).

Seriously? You find a story about a 15 foot tall penguin in Florida even worth investigating?

[Guest LAL]

I would have to examine the evidence. We know there are relic animals in the world...we've found them before (coelecanth, for example).

Inkayacu paracasensis got to 5' tall. I doubt that's what people were reporting, though.

[Guest Blackdog]

I doubt it too, considering the fossil is 36 million years old.

How many people reported a sighting of this 15 foot penguin?

[Guest LAL]

That to me is hightly significant. She could be shopping the story around for a nice bit of coin, a la the Wallaces, but she ISN'T, citing legal advice. That is strong implication that there is something there that she is protecting. Given the theories that Iceman was smuggled into the country illegally, and the pressure put on her late husband by authorities, her silence is understandable.

Hansen was apparently protecting the real owner as well as himself. One interesting conjecture is that the owner was Jimmy Stewart. He had an interest in such things and the money to buy it. From Dmitri Bayanov:

"Having read all that, I contacted Mike Quast in 2002 and in April received a letter from him, with the last paragraph reading as follows: "I have had one theory - and that is all it is - about who the anonymous owner of the Iceman might have been. I am not saying that I necessarily believe it as fact, but the only name that comes to mind is the late actor Jimmy Stewart. Hansen said it was someone in the entertainment industry and that when he met him it was a name he 'recognized immediately', and that the man did not want to be publicly identified with the Iceman because of his strong religious beliefs. I believe Stewart was known as being rather religious, was a world traveler, and he did have some interest in such subjects as he was involved with Peter Byrne and Tom Slick in getting a yeti hand smuggled out of Nepal (according to Loren Coleman's book on Tom Slick). Stewart was still alive when Hansen told me he had just been in touch with the owner, but died a couple of years later. That is the only idea I have come up with ... If investigators visit Hansen today, they might try mentioning this theory to him and just studying what his reaction is to the name."

I heartily thanked Mike Quast for the information in his book and the theory in his letter, and proposed to Alan Berry to try and verify that theory with a visit to Hansen and one more interview. Alan was too busy to go to Minnesota, but interviewed Hansen by phone on April 7, 2002. Here are some excerpts from that interview:

Berry: What do you think the Iceman represented?

Hansen: I can tell you I don't associate it with Bigfoot.

B: You mean if it was real?

H: Yeah ... well, I mean if it was real, I would think of it like might be some kind of early man, but I don't know.

B: What did the owner tell you about where it came from?

H: He was in the business of producing movies, and he (?) was in the Tokyo(?) bay area, and saw a block of ice with this thing in it. He asked the fishermen, "What do you want for it?" They dickered and he ended up trading a case of whisky for it. He said he didn't know what it was, just that it was interesting and something his people might use, you know, as a prop. The owner leased space with refrigeration on a ship and the block of ice with the Iceman was shipped to the U.S.

B: What was the owner's interest in exhibiting the Iceman?

H: Just to see what the public would think of it ... what kind of furor or controversy it might create. He wasn't looking for anything out of it himself. He was a religious man. He just wanted to see how people would react if they thought there was really a primitive form of man that came before us in time, you know, evolution and such...

B: What kind of person was the owner?

H: He was very, very religious. He didn't want the Iceman exhibited as anything real, only wanted the public's reaction. Like could it be something almost human from prehistoric times?

B: Who was the owner?

H: I can't tell you, I am under oath. I can just tell you that he was a big name... Anybody would recognize his name right away today even, but he's dead. He passed away.

B: What had become of the body?

H: I tried to take it (the exhibit) into Canada for a show, was stopped at the border. It was the Bureau of Customs, and they stopped me because they thought I was transporting cadaver across the border. It was seized at the border. I explained to them it was just an exhibit, neither man nor beast, but they didn't believe me until a US Senator bailed me out. Because of, who was he, Irene? Well, I was a good friend of him, and had given him a lucrative donation, yes, it was a Senator in Washington. It was through Walter Mondale, the Senator, that they got an order from Agriculture and Forest Products to "let them go." After the border incident and with "all the people" that were after me, I got tired of the whole thing and phoned the owner to take back the Iceman.

It is most important that Hansen confirmed the border incident of which we learned first from Heuvelmans, even though there are certain differences with Heuvelmans's words in Hansen's description. Why did he mention Tokyo instead of Hong Kong as the place where the Iceman came from? Was his memory failing?

In September, 2002, Dr.Peter Rubec talked to Hansen on the phone. Here's a quote from Rubec's email to me: "I did ask Hansen about Jimmy Stewart. There was a fairly long pause, but all he would say is that the owner of the real Iceman (he was fairly emphatic there was a real one) was in the movie industry and had died. But he would not reveal who it was."

I then discussed the matter with Loren Coleman who, when writing his book about Tom Slick, had contact with Stewart. Loren confirmed to me that the latter was very religious and referred to the opinion of Mark Hall, who had two separate interviews with Frank Hansen in the 1990s: "It appeared the owner did not value it (the Iceman) in the way many of us would... The true owner of the Iceman did not want to be the one who presented the 'missing link' that would undercut the truth of Biblical creation. The owner was interested in seeing people's reaction to the 'missing link' and so allowed the Iceman to be displayed" (Living Fossils, 1999, p.85)."Mark Hall senses,†wrote Loren to me, “that the mysterious owner was a pro-creationist."

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

Remember Byrne's story about the finger smuggled out of Tibet in Gloria Stewart's lingerie case?

[Guest LAL]

I doubt it too, considering the fossil is 36 million years old.

How many people reported a sighting of this 15 foot penguin?

I don't know but I've read the sighting by two fishermen was part of the hoax. Sanderson's team calculated the weight and height from the prints. I don't recall any sightings giving the height. So, they put 2 and 2 together and got 5. Heuvelmans was no part of that.

Einstein blundered a few times too, didn't he?

I know how old the fossil is, thanks. I thought you were done with me. I had hopes.......

[Guest LAL]

Irene Hansen did talk some. From the same webpage:

I went out into the parking lot of the bank and called Mrs. Hansen (Irene) using my cell phone, and I reached her. She was not enthusiastic about talking about The Iceman but she did speak to me for about 5 minutes. (...) She said her husband died with the secret as to the true story on the Iceman, that even she didn't know it. She seemed to think that was quite appropriate and she seemed sincere about it. And at least twice she said, in reference to the secrecy surrounding the Iceman, that it was 'to protect the innocent ones.'

"The son is an attorney and I reached him at work just after speaking to his mother. He was in a bad mood in the first place, I would say, and was just barely polite to me on the subject of his father's iceman. (I'm sure the Hansen family has been bothered plenty about it over the years.) He told me the second body, the one widely thought to have been an obvious fake, was gone. That it had been cleared out long ago.

"I called Mrs. Hansen back again while driving home to ask for a clarification on something (can't recall what just now), and she asked me if I knew Roger Patterson. She said she and her husband visited Patterson in California. She just volunteered that, seemingly just to make conversation. She didn't remember anything about the meeting, but it tells me Frank Hansen had an interest in bigfoot. I find that interesting -- that the carnival man showing off The Iceman would look up a man who claimed to have filmed a bigfoot, a man thousands of miles away in California. It suggests to me that Frank Hansen believed what he had might be a bigfoot. (If Hansen's body was a fake why would he be interested in bigfoot?)

"In summary here is what I took away from my conversations with Irene Hansen and her son: Nothing is final, it is still all a mystery. (...) The son is a lawyer and if there is a concern about legal issues (the creature might be considered human) he has certainly counseled his mother on how to answer questions -- with no real answers. It seems to me that the simplest truth behind this story would be that it was all a hoax perpetrated solely by Frank Hansen. If that were true why, decades later, wouldn't he and now his family just say, forget it, it was just a carnival trick!(?) (...) Please feel free to use what I've told you in any way you like."

[Guest Blackdog]

I don't know but I've read the sighting by two fishermen was part of the hoax. Sanderson's team calculated the weight and height from the prints. I don't recall any sightings giving the height. So, they put 2 and 2 together and got 5. Heuvelmans was no part of that.

Einstein blundered a few times too, didn't he?

I know how old the fossil is, thanks. I thought you were done with me. I had hopes.......

Just about the Iceman hoax. Fifteen foot penguins are another subject and I didn't bring Heuvelmans into the discussion although I don't give him much credibility either.

[Huntster]

LAL, on 25 April 2011 - 05:05 PM, said:

It's probably best to squelch honest inquiry, especially if it involves *gasp* funding.

Which it always does...funding is the lifeblood of Institutional Science, the carrot and stick which enforces orthodoxy.

Follow the money. No money? No science.

Got money? You can buy your science.

It's really that simple.

[Guest LAL]

Just about the Iceman hoax. Fifteen foot penguins are another subject and I didn't bring Heuvelmans into the discussion although I don't give him much credibility either.

You read Heuvelmans in French, then?

Since the thread's about the MIM and not 15' penguins I think you could be done with them too. This was gone over and over and over on the old BFF. We can wait for the archives.

"Homo pongoides" was also the closest match to the Barmanu of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hansen said in 2002 "I can tell you I don't associate it with Bigfoot." There goes Minnesota. Sorry.

Edited April 26, 2011 by LAL