James ‘The Amazing’ Randi comments on the recent Bigfoot scam in his latest newsletter, with some rather slippery knife work on cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson in discussing the Minnesota Iceman:
…I recalled that in October of 1969, when I was a resident of New Jersey, an exhibit at the Monmouth Mall in Eatontown had attracted my attention. It was what appeared to be a hairy human-shaped figure about six feet tall. I say “appeared to be” because the thing was frozen inside a huge cloudy block of ice, visitors viewed it from an overhead scaffolding, and it was poorly lit – perhaps for good reason. All I could have really said about it was that it looked like an old fur coat with legs…
My friend Ivan T. Sanderson, a naturalist who was very interested in Bigfoot matters, having coined the word, “cryptozoology,” lived in New Jersey, north-west of my home, and I contacted him immediately. He arrived the next day, and took a great interest in this exhibit, despite what I found to be very shaky evidence and no validation at all. Much to my dismay, I now discovered that a few years before this, he’d already chosen to accept and endorse the validity of this farce, and had also supported a true “critter” nut, Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, formerly of the Royal Academy of Sciences in his native Belgium. Up until that point, I’d respected Ivan’s opinions, but we parted company on this. And to think that I’d spent a couple of days at his home in Warren County, where he’d taught me how to handle and fire a .45 automatic…
Pardon me, but did Randi just suggest that Ivan T. Sanderson may have been of unsound mind, or at least unfit to possess a firearm? Okay, Randi didn’t exactly say “damn I’m lucky he didn’t put a cap in my ass”…but it read that way to me.
Furthermore, Randi’s glibness on this story – as always – covers up the more interesting facets of the case (you’ll find nine pages on the Minnesota Iceman in Loren Coleman’s Mysterious America). The reason that Sanderson (and Heuvelmans) showed “great interest” in the Iceman was because they had studied it up close in 1967. Coleman also cites the opinion of another close-up witness, herpatologist Terry Cullen, as relayed by Mark A. Hall: “Some of the reasons for Cullen’s avid interest in the Iceman exhibit were that he could see: plant matter in the teeth, shed skin of ekto-parasites (lice) on the skin, and unique detention showing in the mouth where a lip was curled back.”
