Minnesota iceman austin

Museum owner Steve Busti claims that Hansen continued to store the Minnesota Iceman in his freezer once he removed it from display. As reported by the Huffington Post , Busti states that he purchased the original Minnesota Iceman from Hansen earlier this year.

Busti is currently preparing the mysterious creature for permanent display in his Texas museum. He expects to complete the exhibit in time for the July 4 weekend. The creature's reappearance may answer some long standing questions that have been explored in books and on television programs , including Unsolved Mysteries. The Museum of the Weird displays oddities historically found at traveling carnivals, fairs, and dime museums.

Current displays include shrunken heads, mummies, wax figures, and unusual animals. Additionally, a daily stage show includes live entertainment reminiscent of circus sideshows. Preliminary description of the external morphology of what appeared to be the fresh corpse of a hitherto unknown form of living hominid.

Genus 25, Shackley, M. Wildmen: Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma. Thames and Hudson, London. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK. He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.

He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo. Follow Darren Naish on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Fall Flash Sale. Hunting Monsters the ebook cover at left ; Hunting Monsters the hardcopy cover at right.

Credit: Arcturus Books. Redrawings of at left the Minnesota Iceman as it looked when frozen, and at right as it was interpreted by Heuvelmans and Sanderson.

Images in public domain. Credit: Darren Naish. Frank Hansen with the Iceman Credit: Costello Fairgrounds and carnivals have a long history of showing 'snowman' or 'wildman' exhibits. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Read More Previous. Support science journalism. Some of the ice was clear, some was murky, but enough could be seen to make out its basic features. Its face had an upturned nose with large nostrils, and one of its eyes was dislodged as part of an apparent head wound.

Its left hand was thrown up over its head, while its right hand was oddly holding its penis up across its abdomen. Its introduction to the world was inauspicious: it was on the carnival and sideshow circuit. One chilly day in November of , a young naturalist at the University of Minnesota, Terry Cullen, was having a scholarly look at the animals on display at the International Livestock Exhibition in Chicago. His attention was drawn to carnival barker Frank D.

Hansen, displaying what he described as "The Siberskoye Creature". Cullen was intrigued; indeed, he was enthralled. One of the leading authors on Bigfoot and abominable snowmen was Ivan T. Sanderson, the noted naturalist and occultist, and Cullen knew of him through having read some of his articles and books. Cullen decided to contact him about the creature.

When Sanderson got the word, he was hosting an assorted group of occultists and paranormalists as he often did on his New Jersey property nicknamed The Farm. Among them happened to be the father of cryptozoology, the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Like Batman and Robin getting the bat signal, Sanderson and Heuvelmans immediately went to go see Hansen, and on December 17, found themselves face to face through the ice and glass with The Siberskoye Creature. It's their respective reporting of what they saw — Sanderson mainly to the Bigfoot community, and Heuvelmans mainly to the European zoology community — that launched the Minnesota Iceman into the pop culture consciousness.

However, the two men saw the creature very differently. Like Cullen, Sanderson and Heuvelmans were both completely convinced of the creature's authenticity, i. Heuvelmans published in a prestigious Belgian journal his theory that the Iceman was a new species, which he name Homo pongoides , that had evolved backwards from Neanderthal and became more ape-like.

Sanderson, meanwhile, wrote an article for an Italian journal forwarding the theory that the Iceman would likely turn out to be a relative of Gigantopithecus. But Sanderson also worked at the Iceman from another angle.

He was so convinced that it was a real creature of great zoological importance that it should be rescued from the carnival circuit and transferred into the hands of the authorities.

He decided that getting Hansen busted for breaking some law would be the easiest way to do this. He also brought the case to his contacts at the Smithsonian Institution, whereupon its secretary, Dillon Ripley, reported to the FBI in fact he wrote J. Edgar Hoover personally that Hansen was transporting a corpse across state lines, and that a scientific journal had identified the corpse as a human who had been shot. It was a very close shave for Frank Hansen, because nothing ever really came from any of Sanderson's reports; apparently none of the government agencies were too concerned about a sideshow attraction.

However, Dr. John Napier, director of primate biology at the Smithsonian Institution, did want to see the creature for himself, and he wrote to Hansen to ask if he could.

Apparently Hansen had been spooked by the unwanted attention, because the reply that Napier received was from a "family member" saying that Hansen had disappeared to "Florida or California or somewhere" and was unreachable, and that the Iceman's true owner had reclaimed it so it was now permanently gone.

And from that moment on, Hansen responded to every official or scientific inquiry with the claim that what he was exhibiting was merely a rubber model made to look like the original. That his Iceman was a rubber sideshow gaff, and not the body of any living creature, may have been the one thing Hansen was ever honest about. That no effort was made to keep the Iceman frozen for the trip, and that its new owner expressed not the slightest misgivings over its balmy condition, is a clue that he wasn't too worried about any actual meat thawing out.

Also featured in the episode was Lyle Blackburn, whom Skeptoid regulars might remember from his book on the Boggy Creek monster. Blackburn did a writeup of the show for Cryptomundo, the cryptozoology website, wherein he openly referred to the Iceman as both a sideshow attraction and a gaff.

Clearly, vanishingly little support remains, even among the staunchest in the cryptozoology community, for the Iceman being anything other than a rubber dummy.

The story clung to by true believers in the Minnesota Iceman is that one that Hansen made up to silence the unwanted attention: yes, today's Iceman is rubber, but there had originally been an actual ape-man body from which the replica was modeled.