Selection from The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates, New York: Anomalist Books, 2006, by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe.  Pages 54-55.

Region: North America

Class: Erectus Hominid

Type: Minnesota Iceman, Bozo, Homo pongoides

Distinguishing Characteristic: upturned nose

Descriptive Incident:

Date: December 17, 1968

Location: Rollingstone, Minnesota

Witnesses: Terry Cullen, Ivan T. Sanderson, Bernard Heuvelmans, among others

 During the autumn of 1967, college zoology major Terry Cullen spotted an extraordinary exhibit in Milwaukee--an apparently authentic  fresh corpse of a hairy manlike animal. After trying unsuccessfully to interest mainstream scientists, he alerted Ivan T. Sanderson, whose guest in New Jersey at the time was the Belgian cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.  The two immediately traveled to see firsthand what exhibitor Frank Hansen was showing at fairs and shopping centers across the American Midwest. For twenty-five cents people could see the "man left over from the Ice Age" that Hansen kept frozen in a block of ice in a refrigerated glass coffin.

For three days, Sanderson and Heuvelmans examined the creature in Hansen's cramped trailer. The specimen was an adult male, 6 feet tall, with large hands and feet. Its skin was a corpselike white and covered with very dark brown hair 3 to 4 inches long. The creature had apparently been shot through one eye, which dangled on its face, but it also had a gaping wound and open fracture on its left arm. Smelling putrefaction where some of the flesh had been exposed from melting ice, Sanderson and Heuvelmans concluded the creature authentic. 

 Hansen wanted the discovery kept quiet, but both Heuvelmans and Sanderson wrote scientific papers on the creature within the year. Heuvelmans named it Homo pongoides. [Sanderson, who was a well-known nature personality on TV, mentioned the Iceman (he had code-named it “Bozo”) on the Johnny Carson Show during Christmas week 1968.]

Then the original body disappeared, and a model, apparently made in California, replaced it, with various Hollywood makeup artists claiming to have created the Iceman. But Sanderson and Heuvelmans knew of at least fifteen technical differences between the original and the replacement, thanks to photographs of the traveling exhibit taken by Mark A. Hall and Loren Coleman. When the Smithsonian Institution and the FBI got involved, Hansen explained that the creature was owned by a millionaire and declined to have it further examined.

The Iceman appears to be an “accidental,” in other words, not of local origin. Heuvelmans theorized it was a Neandertal killed in Vietnam during the war and smuggled into the United States in a "body bag." Its Erectus-like features, however, match quite well some of the reports coming out of Central Asia [within and just north of Pakistan].  

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Article:

Minnesota Iceman, courtesy of Loren Coleman

Images:

1-Cover of The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates Courtesy of Loren Coleman

3-Minnesota Iceman Courtesy of Loren Coleman

2-Frank Hensen's Exhibit Van

Anyone wishing to contact Loren Coleman with information pertaining to the background and/or mysterious owner of the Minnesota Iceman,                                                                                             Please click on image to the right,