airy man-beasts are reported not only in the Himalayas (the Yeti) JL JLand in North America (Sasquatch/Bigfoot), but they are alleged to inhabit other remote areas as well. Here we look at several such regional cryptids from Venezuela, Siberia, Australia, India, and elsewhere— although one is a fake from an entirely different place than alleged, as we shall see.
From remote regions of South America come occasional reports of humanlike apes. For example, there is the strange, controversial photograph of an apelike creature photographed in the 1920s by geologist Francis de Loys. Here are his own words from the Illustrated London News (quoted in Welfare and Fairley 1980, 143):
I was exploring at the time the untrodden forests in the neighborhood of the Tarra River, itself an affluent of the Rio Catatumbo in the Motilones districts of Venezuela and Columbia, and I came across two animals the nature of which was new not only to myself but to the native woodsmen of my party. At a bend of a western minor affluent of the Tarra River these two animals broke upon the exploring party then at rest and, owing to the violence of their attitude had to be met at the point of a rifle. One
of the two was shot dead at very close range; the other one, unfortunately wounded, managed to escape and disappeared into the jungle, the great thickness of which prevented its recovery. The animal shot dead was examined, sat into position on a packing case, measured, and immediately photographed from a distance of 10 ft. Its skin was afterwards removed and its skull and jaws were cleaned and preserved. The hardships met with by the party on their long journey across the forest, however, prevented the final preservation of either the skin or the bones.
At first examination it was found that the specimen was that of an ape of uncommon size, whose features were entirely different from those of the species already known as inhabiting the country.
According to Loys, the creature was 1.5 meters (over five feet) tall and weighed fifty kilograms (over 112 pounds). He added that it was “entirely devoid of any trace of a tail.” When a French anthropologist received Loys’s report and accompanying photographs—showing the animal seated on a crate and propped up with a stick—he promptly proclaimed it a new species of ape and christened it Ameranthropoides loysi. (See Heuvelmans 1972, 183-92).
However, Sir Arthur Keith, a Fellow of the Royal Society, denounced Loys’s alleged find as a hoax. Keith found it suspicious that Loys had lost
Figure 8.1. A spider monkey is the probable explanation for “Loy’s Ape” (photograph by the author at the African Lion Safari, Ontario, Canada).
the evidence, failed to take appropriate notes of the animal’s characteristics, and neglected to photograph the animal with something of known size to indicate scale. “If it was genuine,” Sir Arthur said, “there would have been a man in the picture for comparison.” It was his view that the creature was simply a large spider monkey (see figure 8.1) with its tail either removed or hidden by the crate. That remains the prevailing view of primate biologists (Welfare and Fairley 1980, 143-44).
Loys’s “new species” of ape—like the legendary “wild man,” Yeti, and Bigfoot—intrigues us especially because of its supposed kinship with us. For the same reason, certain other notable hoaxes have captured the popular imagination for a time.
On tour in the mid to late 1960s in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Illinois, Texas, and other states, a carnival sideshow exhibit featured a remarkable Big- foot-type creature encased in a block of ice. Viewing it through the ice’s foggy surface in 1968, two famous cryptozoologists, Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, were impressed. Fleuvelmans believed the specimen was likely that of a Neanderthal man who had been living fewer than five years before. The figure bore apparent gunshot wounds to the head and chest (Sanderson 1969).
A warning should have arisen from the fact that so sensational a curio had only a most suspicious provenance: It was allegedly owned by an American millionaire who wished to remain anonymous, and he had bought it from a Hong Kong exporter who “offered various stories,” admitted Sanderson, “as to the origin of the thing” (1969, 29). In one tale, Russian sealers found it in a block of sea ice floating in the Bering Sea; in another, the discoverers were Japanese whalers who encountered it “somewhere off the coast of Kamchatka,” and there were “other versions, but none can be confirmed.”
Sanderson dubbed the figure “Bozo”—possibly for a perceived pug- nosed resemblance to the famous clown—and published an account of his study of the “missing link.” He included sidebar comments by several leading primatologists and anthropologists but with the proviso that— “until the specimen is x-rayed and properly examined, they cannot, of course, make any more categoric statements at this time” (1969, 29). Heuvelmans had the most to say. “For the first time in history,” he gushed, “a fresh corpse of Neanderthal-like man has been found. It means that this
form of Hominid, thought to be extinct since prehistoric times, is still living today.” He continued:
The long search for rumored live “ape-men” or “missing links” has at last been successful. This was not accomplished by expeditions to faraway places and at great expense, but by the accidental discovery, in this country, of a corpse preserved in ice. The specimen is an adult human-like male, six feet tall, differing from all types of modern man by these striking characteristics:
(1) Extreme hairiness;
(2) An apparent shortness of the neck;
(3) A barrel-shaped torso, more rounded than in modern man;
(4) Extremely long arms, which must reach to the knees when hanging;
(5) Disproportionate hands and feet. Hands are eleven inches long and more than seven inches wide. Feet are eight inches wide.
(6) Peculiar relative proportions of both fingers and toes. The thumb is longer than modern man’s and the toes are all nearly the same size.
Most of these characteristics agree with what is known of the classic Neanderthalers.
(See figure 8.2.) With continued brashness, Heuvelmans added:
It has been established that:
(1) It cannot be an artificial, entirely manufactured object (it is actually decomposing);
(2) It cannot be a composite, produced by assembling anatomical parts taken from living beings of different species (if the face looks merely unusual, both hands and feet are unknown in any zoological form);
(3) It cannot be a normal individual belonging to any one of the known races of modern man (even the hairiest of the “hairy Ainus” of Japan are not that hairy);
(4) It cannot be an abnormal individual, or freak, belonging to any of the known races of modern man because, in all cases of hypertrichosis, i.e., abnormal development of the hair, the most hairy areas are the outside of the upper head, the chin, cheek, upper lip, axillae [armpits], middle of chest and crotch; here, these areas have a less profuse growth of hair.
Figure 8.2. “Sasquatch Safely Frozen in Ice” was featured on carnival midways (drawing by the author).
Foolishly, Heuvelmans went beyond scientific rigor to actually name the creature as a new species, Homo pongoides (Napier 1973, 99).
Alas, the creature proved to be only a rubber figure, fabricated for sideshow display. It was, in carny parlance, gaffed (faked). In an article in the Skeptical Inquirer titled “Sasquatch- sickle: The Monster, the Model, and the Myth,” C. Eugene Emery Jr., a science and medical writer for the Providence Journal , got to the bottom of the “mystery.” The exhibit was operated by Frank B. Hanson, “a quickwitted Minnesotan” who tried to stall Emery by saying scientists were not permitted to examine the corpse because they would necessarily mutilate it in order to confirm its authenticity. “Apparently,” commented Emery, “he never heard of a needle biopsy” (1981-1982, 3).
Emery learned that a retired paleontologist, Leonard C. Bessom Jr., had been approached in the early 1960s and was asked to create a disflayable Cro- Magnon-type fake, but he declined. Subsequently, Bessom said, the creature was made by Howard Ball, a top Disneyland model maker—a fact confirmed by Ball’s widow and son, Kenneth. “We modeled it after an artist’s conception of Cro-
Magnon man and gave it a broken arm and a bashed skull with one eye popped out,” said Kenneth Ball. (The hair had been added later.) Referring to Hansen’s subsequent claim that he was only exhibiting a copy of the original ice creature, Kenneth Ball said, “This is the original. There was no anonymous millionaire” (quoted in Emery 1981-1982, 3-4).
Heuvelmans’s mistaken belief that the figure was decomposing seems easily explained. Sanderson (1969, 28), who gushed that “one look” at the creature was enough to confirm its authenticity, had added brashly, “If nothing else confirmed this, the appalling stench of rotting flesh exuding from a point in the insulation of the coffin would have been enough.” Really? That effect could easily have been accomplished by using, for example, an occasional small pour of fish decomposition products.
John Napier concluded that there had only been one iceman. Instead of being switched, the figure had merely been thawed and repositioned. Napier’s institution issued a blunt statement: “The Smithsonian Institution . . . is satisfied that the creature is simply a carnival exhibit made of latex rubber and hair. . . . [T]he ‘original’ model and the present so-called ‘substitute’ are one and the same” (quoted in Daegling 2004, 78).
In 1973, I viewed the famed exhibit, what carnies call a single-O (a one-feature sideshow often exhibited in a trailer). It was billed as “Sasquatch—Safely Frozen in Ice” on the midway of the Canadian National Exhibition (where in 1969 I had worked as a magic pitchman). It lay in a glass-topped, freezerlike coffin. However, if I recall correctly, the freezer unit was out of order; the glass lid was opened (perhaps it had fogged), and the ice had melted somewhat, exposing part of the figure. It was dark and distinctively rubbery (Nickell 1995, 230; 2005, 338). Although Sanderson had dubbed the figure Bozo , one may wonder who the real bozos were.
Indeed, speaking of bozos, the brilliant Minnesota iceman hoax was crudely imitated in 2008 by a couple of Georgia men who were soon described as “idiots” and “clowns” (“Has a Real Bigfoot” 2008). The duo, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, claimed to have an eight-foot-tall Bigfoot carcass, killed by a shot from a .30-06 rifle, and—you guessed it— frozen in ice. The men even apparently scammed Bigfoot huckster Tom Biscardi (who had previously claimed to have captured a Bigfoot) and an “investor,” who bought the “body” for fifty thousand dollars. It proved to be a Bigfoot costume filled with animal parts. Later, those were replaced with inorganic materials, and the fake sold on eBay for a reputed $250,203 (Wagenseil 2008; Radford 2008).
Following a skeptic’s convention in Sydney, Australia, from November 10 to November 12, 2000—held by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (which bestowed on me there its Distinguished Skeptic Award)—I was able to spend two additional weeks investigating several myths and mysteries (Nickell 2004, 271-334). One of these was the legendary Yowie , a Down Under version of Bigfoot.
Like other hairy man-beasts reported around the world, the Yowie has left only meager traces of its supposed existence. It is a fearsome, hairy creature of Aboriginal mythology. Also called Doolagabl (“great hairy man”), it is venerated as a sacred being from the time of creation, which the Aborigines call the Dreamtime. An alleged sighting by a hunting party of settlers in 1795 was followed by increased reports from the mountainous regions of New South Wales in the nineteenth century. For example, in 1875 a coal miner exploring in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney reportedly stalked a hairy, apelike animal for a distance before it finally eluded him. Sightings of the Yowie mounted as settlers penetrated the country’s vast interior, and Yowie hunter Rex Gilroy notes that his files now “bulge with stories from every state” (1995, 197).
The self-described “‘father’ of Yowie research,” Gilroy boasts the acquisition of some five thousand reports, together with a collection of footprint casts, but he complains of “a lifetime of ridicule from both ignorant laymen and scientists alike” (1995, 202). When Australian skeptic Peter Rodgers and I ventured into the Blue Mountains, we experienced something of the prevalent local skepticism at the information center at Echo Point (in the township of Katoomba). Staffers there were emphatic that the Yowie was a mythical creature pursued by a few fringe enthusiasts. (To them, Yowies exist only as popular toys and chocolate figures marketed by Cadbury.)
Nevertheless, to Gilroy “the Blue Mountains continues to be a hotbed of Yowie man-beast activities—a vast region of hundreds of square miles still containing inaccessible forest regions seldom if ever visited by Europeans.” The fabled creatures are known there, he says, as the “Flairy Giants of Katoomba” and also as the “Killer Man-Apes of the Blue Mountains” (Gilroy 1995, 212).
In the Katoomba bushland, Peter and I took the celebrated “steepest incline railway in the world” (built as a coal-mine transport in 1878) down into Jamison Valley. The miserable weather gave added emphasis to the term rainforest , through which we “bushwalked” (hiked) west along a
trail. We passed some abandoned coal mines, which Peter humorously dubbed “Yowie caves,” before eventually retracing our route. We saw no “Hairy Giants of Katoomba” but, to be fair, we encountered little wildlife at all. The ringing notes of the bellbird did herald our visit and announce that we were not alone. (See figures 8.3 and 8.4.)
Resuming our drive, we next stopped at Meadlow Bath, a historic resort area. From the “haunted” Hydro Majestic hotel overlooking the Megalong Valley—also reputed to be Yowie country—we surveyed a countryside that was largely shrouded in fog (Gilroy 1995, 217-18). Proceeding through Blackheath and Victoria Pass (where a bridge is said to be haunted by a female specter [Davis 1998, 95-97]), we continued on to Hartley, then took a narrow, winding road some forty-four kilometers to Jenolan Caves. Gilroy states that the Aborigines believed the caves were used in ancient times as Yowie lairs, and he cites reported sightings and discoveries of footprints in the region (1995, 219). (For millennia the Jenolan area was known to the local Aborigines as Binoomea , meaning “holes in the hill.” According to legend, the first non-Aborigine to discover the area was a bushranger, an escaped convict named McKeown, who used it as a refuge in the 1830s. Once, after a pursuer had followed him for miles, he disappeared, but his tracks “led up to a wild cavern and into it
Figure 8.3. The author looking for the fabled “Yowies” or “Hairy Giants of Katoomba” (author’s photographs by Peter Rodgers).
93
83 ® m
Sli f I 11 m
Figure 8.4. The Australian rainforest is the supposed home of the Yowie (photograph by the author).
Figure 8.5. Terrain of Australia’s Bigfoot—the Yowie—is viewed through Carlotta Arch in the Jenolan Caves region (photograph by the author).
. . . and burst again into open day, and the route lay along a rugged gorge for some three miles” [Bates 2000, 23].)
Except for passing through the Grand Arch, a majestic limestone-cavern entranceway into a hidden valley, and surveying the spectacular grotto called Devil’s Coachhouse, we avoided the caves themselves in order to continue our cryptozoological pursuit (see figure 8.5). (This despite the discovery therein of a skeleton of the extinct thylacine, or “Tasmanian Tiger” [Gregory’s 1999].) We instead searched the surrounding mountainous terrain for signs of the elusive Yowie, again without success. Here and there the raucous laughter of the kookaburra seemed to mock our attempt. Neither did we encounter another claimed paranormal entity—a ghostly lady—when we dined at the “haunted” Jenolan Caves House. An employee told us he had worked at the site for three years without seeing either a Yowie or the inn’s resident “ghost,” and he indicated that he believed in neither.
Failing to encounter our quarry, we ended our hunt relatively unscathed—soaked, to be sure, and I with a slightly wrenched knee. But consider what might have been: headlines screaming, “Skeptics Mauled by Legendary Beast!”—a tragic way to succeed, certainly, and with no guarantee, even if we survived, that we would be believed! Even Gilroy conceded that “nothing short of actual physical proof—such as fossil or recent skeletal remains or a living specimen—will ever convince the scientific community of the existence of the ‘hairy man’” (1995, 202).
That, however, is as it should be: In many instances the touted evidence for Bigfoot-type creatures—mostly alleged sightings and occasional footprints—has been shown to be the product of error or outright deception (Nickell 1995, 222-31). Cryptozoologists risk being thought naive when they too quickly accept the evidence of man-beast footprints. “Some of these tracks,” insists Gilroy, “have been found in virtually inaccessible forest regions by sheer chance and, in my view, must therefore be accepted as authentic yowie footprints” (1995, 224). It seems not to have occurred to the credulous monsterologist that a given “discoverer” might actually be the very hoaxer. Thus, the debate continues.
During May 2001 a mysterious half man, half animal called the Monkey Man reputedly attacked hundreds of people in New Delhi, India’s capital.
To understand the phenomenon, we need to consider a mechanism psychologists call contagion—the spreading of an idea, a behavior, or a belief from person to person by means of suggestion—such as the Salem
Figure 8.6.
The lowland gorilla, which was once reported as a mysterious man-beast, later gained scientific recognition (photograph by the author at the Buffalo Zoo).
witch hysteria of 1692-1693. A modern example occurred in 1978 when a small panda escaped from a zoo in Rotterdam. Following a media alert, some one-hundred panda sightings were reported across the Netherlands. In fact, no one had seen the unfortunate creature, which had been killed by a train near the zoo. Due to contagion, people’s expectations led them to misinterpret, say, dogs or other animals as pandas, and some of the reports may have been hoaxes (Van Kampen 1979; Nickell 1995, 43).
In the case of the Monkey Man, my friend and colleague Sanal Edamaruku, along with others at the headquarters of the Indian Rationalist Association, began to investigate. They found that the contagion was fueled by a number of factors, including people seeking attention with self-inflicted wounds, as well as other efforts of pranksters and rumormongers. Soon the police conducted their own investigation—utilizing a team of psychologists and forensic experts—and confirmed the rationalists’ findings. When arrests of the troublemakers began to be made, the number of panic calls to the police dropped dramatically (Edamaruku 2001; see also Maiti 2001).
Writing about the mass panic, Sanal Edamaruku concluded:
Spreading with enormous pace and intensity, the monkey-man mania in India’s capital has alarmed and shocked us. During these days of hard and hectic work around the clock we felt like firefighters trying to stop an expanding area conflagration. But looking back, I feel that our victory over the flames has not only been a defensive one. The fantastic monkey- man has given us a unique opportunity to touch thousands of people and make them listen to the voice of reason at a moment of greatest receptivity. This lesson in critical thinking, which we have been able to give, may have a lasting impact on many of them. The episode can also be seen as a rationalist crash course on how to handle mass delusions. And last but not least, it has been another chance for us to understand the importance of our work and it has equipped us to face greater challenges and take up greater tasks. (2001, 4)
The foregoing by no means exhaust the regional variants of the type I have designated hairy man-beasts. There are many others. As cryptozoologists frequently point out, although the lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla , figure 8.6) gained official scientific recognition in 1847, the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringa) first became known by reports of a monster ape that reached Western scientists in 1861. Two of the animals were killed by a Belgian army officer in 1902, and their bodies were recovered for science (Coleman and Clark 1999, 172-73; Heuvelmans 1972, 12-13).
When I was in China as a visiting scholar in October 2010 (as part of an exchange program between China Research Institute for Science Popularization and the Center for Inquiry), one of my excursions was into the cave-pocked mountainous countryside at Zhoukoudian. There, in the 1920s, fossils of Homo erectus pekinensis —popularly called “Peking Man”—were discovered. More recently some have wondered whether Peking Man might be a hypothetical living fossil—possibly even the basis for the legendary Yeren, China’s version of Bigfoot. Unfortunately, Peking Man (who stood about five feet tall, compatible with the Yeren’s reported three-to-nine-feet height) is an unlikely candidate for the Yeren or Bigfoot for reasons including a lack of species distribution (Krantz 1992, 186). Two supposed Yeren shot by a hunter in 1980 turned out to be the rare and endangered golden monkey (Poirier et al. 1983, 37-38).
Among other reputed hairy man-beasts are the Barmanu (Pakistan’s “Big Hairy One,” said to resemble the Minnesota iceman); the so-called “Marked Hominid” (a seven-foot-tall Bigfoot-like creature with two-
Man^Beasts Range Far 97
toned hair patterns, reported from Siberia to the United States); “Momo” (or “Missouri Monster,” the Bigfoot-like subject of a scare that terrified rural Missouri folk near the Louisiana border for two weeks in July 1972); the “Skunk Ape” (a chimpanzeelike, but seven-feet-tall and smelly creature of Florida Everglades lore); and others (Coleman and Clark 1999, 28-29, 151-53, 169-70, 224-26). Alas, however, despite the proliferation, not one specimen of any of these has ever been found by science.
There are also smaller reputed creatures like east Africa’s Agogwe (a small, furry man about four feet tall), the Mongolian Alma (a “man- animal” about five feet in stature), Sumatra’s Orang Fendek (or “wild short man”), and the Himalayan Teb-lma (the smallest of several types of Yetis) (Coleman and Clark 1999, 24-28, 189-91, 233-34; Heuvelmans 1972, 64-75). Skeptics have dubbed such creatures “Littlefoot.”
Bates, Geoff. 2000. “Historic Jenolan Caves.” In Blue Mountains Tourist , Olympic ed. (citing Government Gazette , August 19, 1884).
Binns, Ronald. 1984. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Cryptozoology A to Z. New York: Fireside.
Daegling, David J. 2004. Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Edamaruku, Sanal. 2001. “The ‘Monkey Man’ in Delhi.” Rationalist International 72 (May 23): 1-5.
Emery, C. Eugene, Jr. 1981-82. “Sasquatchsickle: The Monster, the Model, and the Myth.” Skeptical Inquirer 6, no. 2 (Winter): 2-4.
Gilroy, Rex. 1995. Mysterious Alaska. Mapleton, QLD, Australia: Nexus Publishing.
Gregory’s Blue Mountains in Your Pocket. 1999. 1st ed. Map 238. Marquarie Centre, NSW: Gregory’s Publishing.
“Has a Real Bigfoot Finally Been Caught?” 2008. http://www.fayettedailynews .com/article.php?id_news=l832 (accessed July 28, 2008).
Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1972. On the Trail of Unknown Animals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Maiti, Prasenjit. 2001. “India’s Monkey Man and the Politics of Mass Hysteria.” Skeptical Inquirer 25, no. 5 (September/October): 8-9.
Napier, John. 1973. Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. New York: E. P. Dutton.