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Native American Apes . . .
(continued from page 1)
Bancroft’s description is not at odds with Ameranthropoides loysi. And, indeed, Dr. Bernard Huevelmans used it in that context in his voluminous tome On the Track of Unknown Animals. But other reports exist describing variations in some hairy “wild man” that sound different than the loysi. Can there be more than one native American “ape”?
It seems reasonable to assume. The controversy with loysi is that it seemed an ape “version” of a known genus of monkey. This was something zoologists had never seen. It was for that reason that Sir Arthur Keith could get away with his venomous denouncement of de Loys’ in Man. By 1920 nobody thought an ape could have gone undiscovered in America, and none would imagine an “ape” that looked just like a common monkey.
Yet as we’ve seen, both the artwork and description of Indians of the Pacific Northwest, indicates that Ameranthropoides loysi is not only real but did migrate north and set up housekeeping in the dank forests. Here it became known as the Dsonoqua.
But can there be another native American ape that is “akin” to monkeys? The Skoocoom fit no bill whatsoever. They are huge— about 6 to 7 feet tall. No loysi gets that big. Frontiersmen also described something called the “Kangaroo Man,” and a couple of them even said it was “good looking.” This certainly isn’t the loysi. Moreover, the Skoocoom only had 4 toes. The loysi has an ape-like foot with offset thumb/toe. The loysi also liked to live deep in the forests. The Skoocoom were mountain dwellers.
The Skoocoom were so human that artist Paul Kane could only qualify Indian regard for them by describing them in his 1847 journal as that supreme redundancy “race of beings of a different species.” Yet they were considered cannibals for eating a trapper. Thus to the Indians they were close to humans.
What is all this?
Unfortunately, today it is hard to sort out. The Indians distinguished between Skoocoom and Dsonoqua and between Sasquatch men. Sadly, White Man has not. We lump them all together as Sasquatch and then we lump this together as Bigfoot, that giant flat footed gadfly of California forests.
This makes it hard to sort out some of the features attributed to certain wild men. We say that Sasquatch has 5 fingers and no thumb, that is, that the thumb is a shorter digit but it is jointed like a finger; it is not opposable. This trait largely stems from Robert W. Morgan and received wide circulation from his documentary In Search of Bigfoot in 1975. (Dahinden also mentioned it in the Glenn Thomas sighting in his 1973 book Sasquatch)
Skoocoom connection
Morgan, however, concentrated his searches around Mount St. Helens, the infamous abode of the cannibal Skoocooms. It seems this trait of 5 fingers and no thumb applies to them.And, it seems, that the Skoocoom are a separate entity than the Sasquatch.
The Sasquatch, remember, were considered 2 tribes of hairy Indians who lived in the mountainous area of the Saskahaua district of British Columbia. On the other hand, Mount St. Helens is far south in Washington State. The Saskahaua Indians were also sure Sasquatch was a human being who could speak Douglas. The Chinook and Klickitat around Mount St. Helens couldn’t qualify the Skoocoom as anything but nebulous, cannibalistic “beings.”
Their name skoocoom is a clue. This means swift, strong; and this description fits that of the wild men of Oregon and northern California. Another sighting raises the question about another native American “ape.” It is the Happy Camp report of 1882 in Humboldt/Del Norte Counties, the fabled land of Bigfoot. In this report the hunter describes the “what is it?” as having a bulldog head, beard, and making a sound like a startled woman.
South America connection:
This description fits that of only one American primate-- the Howler Monkey. Just as the loysi seems to be an “ape version” of a spider monkey, can there be an “ape version” of the Howler?
“Sasquatch” (at least we call all “hairy wild men” reports a Sasquatch) is said to howl to an unnerving pitch. And, indeed, the South American Howler is the second loudest mammal known after the Blue Whale.
It stands to reason that from descriptions we have more than one primate from South America afoot in the Pacific Northwest. Considering the number of ape species in the Old World, why is this surprising?
Skepticism is understandable. Why hasn’t one been documented beyond all doubt by now? Good question. The answer may be that we are not truly dealing with “apes.” The loysi tells us we’re dealing with an anthropoid that is morphologically closer to monkeys. With the much longer legs that they possess, they are capable of much greater speed, further migrations and are therefore more capable of eluding mankind.
It is possible the Old World also had such a class of primates. Consider the reputation of the Skoocoom. Would something considered a violent predator and cannibal last long? It is not hard to imagine that mankind would not have killed off this type of primate quickly. What would be left? Those type of primates we don’t find too frightening— the chimp, gorilla and orangutan, none of which are very mobile or impressive threats.
But take a primate that can pose a true threat to mankind. A very human primate, mobile, omnivorous, one that tends to band together like other monkeys, could be quite savage and as dangerous as very primitive, violent people. Look at what mankind has done to lesser developed peoples. It seems certain that if such types of primates existed in the Old World (as they do in legend) that they are long dead by the hand of mankind, leaving nothing but the droll apes that we know of.
Perhaps in America they survive because of historically lesser population and far more forested and inaccessible country. There has been room for such “Siminids” until modern times. They may have been reduced to living in mountain caves, but possibly the last strains of a very interesting class of primates remained until the present in America. A legend far more provocative than “missing links” may still walk among us in America.
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Hands off!
We make so much of footprints because feet leave impressions. But what do hands tell us?
We don’t have to have casts of hands to know a primate has them. The footprint tells us the primate has hands. But what do hands tell us? Feet tell us something walks. Bipedal tracks from another primate may surprise us, but they don’t tell us much. But because we have hands we can understand some of the capabilities of another primate, even if that primate’s existence is still disputed.
Let’s have a look at this. The old frontier accounts and Indian stories spoke of frightening encounters with a “wild man.” It unnerved and scared the hell out of all who came across it. On some occasions they were known to attack cabins, dogs, people, and even hurl stones.
Why is this such a surprise? Why is this considered so “advanced”? Something with hands is not necessarily more intelligent or even altruistic. It is simply capable of enacting its desires more readily. Raccoons know how to get into roofs. I’ve had one burrow through my shake to get in. They know there’s a comfy house and attic inside. But they have no hands. They scratch and chew and make a mess. But had they hands they would remove the shakes, toss them aside and crawl in.
Hands don’t give them more of an affinity for mankind. Hands facilitate. It doesn’t take much brains to activate hands. How unnerving is would be if raccoons had hands!
Why should a primate be considered more intelligent because it has hands? Why should it be deemed our friend? How shocking it would be to see a few 6 foot tall primates sitting on your roof ripping the shakes off. Or how would you like to be inside after having locked them out? Now you hear them on the roof getting through to get you!
Its hands. Having hands gives any creature an edge, but not a greater intelligence or altruism to people. Having hands doesn’t make an ape smarter than other animals. Moreover, having hands doesn’t make “Bigfoot” our berry-eating buddy. He is simply something capable of enacting many more thoughts than other animals.
Why shouldn’t we believe stories about Skoocoom bombarding 5 miners in their cabin and trying to get in to kill them? Why shouldn’t we believe Caulfield Anderson’s report in 1846 of having to retreat before such wild men in the mountains over Harrison Lake?
Far away in the Himalayas a similar event happened. Ralph Izzard records the event in his Abominable Snowman Adventure. The following happened to Lord Hunt’s Sherpa guide’s father.
Tenzing senior had taken his yaks and goats to Macherma in order that they might profit by the summer grazing. One day he had taken his cattle down to the valley floor to pasture as usual when he suddenly saw them herd together in extreme alarm. He seized his staff fearing a wolf or leopard, but on looking around was astonished to see that the cause of the excitement was what seemed to him to be a small man who was bounding down the mountain-side towards the central stream. The creature was covered in reddish-brown hair and was about 5 feet tall. The skull was conical in shape and the hair of the head being especially long, it fell over the animal’s eyes. The features were those of an ape but the mouth was especially wide showing prominent teeth. The creature walked on two legs like a man; he was convinced he was confronted by a Yeti and rounding up his yaks, who needed no encouragement, he drove them into one of the stone huts and barred the door. This did not deter the Yeti which sprang on the building and began to dislodge a portion of the roof (This would not be difficult for roofs in Macherma are constructed of shingles held down by boulders.)
Tenzing senior survived because he kept his wits and quickly lit a fire and added dried chilies to it. The fumes, rising through the opening roof, quickly drove the Yeti away. It “jumped to the ground and ran in circles tearing up small shrubs and uprooting rocks from the turf, chattering with rage.” Tenzing senior fell serious ill afterward from the shock of the encounter and did not recover for over a year.
Who in the Himalayas knew of such old reports as the Skoocoom attack on Mount St. Helens in 1924?
Or how about the disappearance of Jim Carter up Mount St. Helens in 1950? Many still wonder about that. Carter had stopped at Dog’s Head to reload his camera. He told his friends to go on and he’ll meet them down the slope. Yet he never showed. A search partner later found where he reloaded his camera. Then they followed his tracks and couldn’t believe he was skiing the way he was. He was taking chances nobody else would take unless desperate. Then his tracks vanished over the cliff into Ape Canyon, the place so named because of the fight with “apes” that the miners had reported in 1924 in that area.
Who needs a giant? How about a 6 foot tall primate with clutching hands coming for you? That’s all an animal needs to take on the aura of a ghoulish predator.
Yet today we have a very different image of the old “wild man.” He is the “Gentle Giant.” This image was born amongst the froth of the antiestablishment movement when it was popular to believe in our pure caveman image.
The Gentle Giant is a farce. Gentility is a characteristic not seen in any non-human primate, especially one as large as the legend proposes. Something that big will have a ferocious appetite. Compare a cat and a lion. If Bigfoot really is the cone-headed giant Yeti of American legend, he could never be our berry-eating buddy.
Imagine what a lion would be like with hands?
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Not Ready Yeti
(continued from page 1)
The object of the search was very different than the beast of British music hall comedies. Ralph Izzard and Charles Stonor were the team leads of the expedition. Stonor was a capable biologist and Izzard a skeptical journalist. Preliminary research indicated that Yeti  was actually only the size of a 14 year old boy (about 5 feet tall) and was an animal that went down on all fours when in a hurry or chasing cattle. Stonor and Izzard declared it “Animal X.”
The 1954 Yeti Expedition is legendary and it was instantly world famous. Izzard’s news updates were syndicated by the Daily Mail into 24 countries. Each week people eagerly waited to read his column to catch the latest update from the High Himalayas.
Yeti was becoming famous. But the 5 foot tall animal wasn’t that appealing. Some anthropologists wanted to believe Yeti was a Neanderthal or an evolutionary missing link. But Stonor and Izzard were implacable on their opinions on the Yeti. It was “Animal X” but no more. From Sherpa descriptions Stonor hit home the point that Yeti was the size of a 14 year old boy. It’s tall cone-head— its most famous feature— was actually surmounted by a crest of bristly hair. It was an animal; it was not a subhuman as so many had been promoting.
Controversies begin
So famous was the expedition that newspapers started reporting scientists’ speculation. Vladimir Tschernesky proved one of the most influential. He boldly disagreed with Stonor and Izzard. He talked to Eric Shipton and confirmed that the stride of the Yeti was 2 feet 6 inches, much too long for a 5 foot tall creature. He even made a plaster foot of the imprint in the Shipton Photo. He made the foot lifelike, creating grooves where bones would be and putting in skin detail. He impressed this into snow and tested its functionality. He was certain that this foot was ideally suited for bipedal walking and that it carried a creature close to 7 feet tall with shorter legs and longer arms.
Tschernesky made many assumptions. First he assumed that since this was bipedal it had to be a “missing link.” That was a common belief in the 1950s. The idea there could be a bipedal primate that has no affinity for mankind was not even considered. He assumed that as a missing link it was between man and ape and therefore had much shorter legs. Assuming this, the 2 foot 6 inch stride demanded that the Yeti be huge. He insisted that the Sherpas had only seen a Yeti that wasn’t fully grown. Tschernesky was the first to say the fateful words: Gigantopithecus. It was a living representative of a prehistoric giant bipedal ape, which at the time indicated a benchmark of primate evolution.
Tschernesky wasn’t a crank. But he had made many assumptions and these were tainted with passing ideologies.
Impasse
Izzard and Stonor would not accept anything but a 5 foot tall animal, and both went to print with their charming books in 1955, describing their expedition.
But Tchernesky had raised a problem. How could a 5 foot tall anthropoid with short legs leave a 2 foot 6 inch stride? If Tschernesky was right (that it had short legs), he too was correct in assuming it was a giant 7 or 8 feet tall. But if it was proportioned like a human, with long legs, it could only be 5 or 6 feet tall, as Stonor said. But then how could it go down on all fours if shaped like a human?
The issue was never settled. No Yeti has ever been captured or filmed. Dr. Bernard Huevelmans, the father of Crypto-Zoology, however, totally agreed with Tschernesky. His popular 1959 book On the Track of Unknown Animals brought forward to the reading public and press the image of Tschernesky’s Yeti— a 7 or 8 foot tall cone-headed bipedal gorilla giant.
Young Bigfoot
Bigfoot was only 1 year old in 1959. He had been a popular but amorphous giant at Bluff Creek known only by his enlarged flat human feet. John Green, a Canadian newsman, was part of the search for him. Green had come to believe in the Sasquatch through the research of René Dahinden, a Swiss immigrant who had heard the announcement of the Daily Mail expedition on December 3, 1953, and started to do his own research. Green also investigated what is now called the Ruby Creek Incident, and felt that the footprints there had been created by the true Sasquatch. But because of Dahinden’s input, Green also equated Yeti with the Sasquatch of Canada.
This was possible only because the Sasquatch was really very nebulous as well. And Green bought into the belief that “giant” to the Indians meant something huge when, in fact, to the Indians it meant 6.6 feet tall. The Indians said they were two tribes of giant hairy people, one tribe speaking something like the Douglas dialect.
Through both Dahinden and Green the Sasquatch/Yeti equation entered the Bigfoot equation as well. But this was Tschernesky and Heuvelmans’ Yeti giant, a cone-headed, bipedal Gigantopithecus.
Both were members of the first expedition to search for Bigfoot . Pacific Northwestern (also called Northwestern Pacific or Pacific Northwest) Expedition was active in the area of Bluff Creek between 1959-1962. It was funded by Texas oil baron Tom Slick. Through the Canadian influence, Slick was under the impression that the Bigfoot was a Yeti. The Humboldt Times announced the formation of PNE with “Slick Thinks Bigfoot Kin of Abominable Snowman.” Yeti had outwitted his expedition in the late ’50s and he was hoping to catch one on easier  ground closer to home.
One of his scientific advisers was Ivan T. Sanderson, the popular naturalist on TV who had a true love for the occult and all things unexplained. Sanderson was different than the others. He felt there was more than one species afoot around the world. He was skeptical of Bluff Creek’s happenings, but he was also anxious to prove his own theory of evolution. With his personal conviction that more than one species existed, he used Bluff Creek to introduce the entire subject in a very influential article for True magazine in December 1959.
Sanderson’s 1959 article for True magazine inspired a man named Roger Patterson to get involved in the pursuit of Bigfoot in Humboldt County. Patterson was quite the artist. In his self published and charming book Do Abominable Snowmen of America Exist? his images of Bigfoot ranged from slightly cone-headed apes to giant trogs. Yet when Patterson entered the fray he was disappointed to see nobody was interested in Bigfoot anymore.
By 1967 Bigfoot was all but dead. But similar tracks as those in 1958 turned up on Blue Creek Mountain Road over Bluff Creek. John Green and Rene Dahinden returned to examine them and noticed they were the same feet from “Bigfoot” in 1958. Only 2 months later Patterson too returned. He was going to do more than they had done. He was going to go deep into the brush.
Amazingly, Patterson filmed a Bigfoot. It was a bipedal, cone-headed “Yeti” straight out of Sanderson’s and Heuvelmans’ theorizing. It had no appearance to the old reports of “animal humans” in the Pacific Northwest. Bigfoot’s image had now solidified. He was now a cone-headed American Yeti. Sadly, Sasquatch and Bigfoot were equated as the same thing. Even worse, in 1968 John Green equated both Bigfoot and Sasquatch with the Yeti and both with Gigantopithecus in his groundbreaking self published On the Track of the Sasquatch, a title inspired by Heuvelmans’ 1959 success. The equation was made merely because Sasquatch and Bigfoot were supposedly so tall and because a giant fossilized primate jaw had been found years before in the Silawak Hills of India. None seemed to care that footprints showed that Bigfoot walked on a totally different foot than the Yeti.
Grover Krantz, a physical anthropologist in Washington State, would underwrite the theory and give it the appearance of scientific credibility (at least for Bigfooters). In his 1992 book BIG Foot-prints, he writes:
“As far as I can determine,” wrote Krantz, “it was Bernard Heuvelmans (1952) who first suggested the connection between Gigantopithecus and the Himalayan yeti. Ivan Sanderson made the same proposal in 1961, he was soon joined by anthropologist Carleton Coon (1962), and many others have since agreed. In 1968, John Green made the specific equation with our North American sasquatch, and this has become the near consensus of opinion.” Furthermore, “I made the contention in a publication in 1986 that we in fact have footprints from Gigantopithecus blacki here in North America.” Later, “My argument, much like John Green’s, is based on the most probable interpretation of Gigantopithecus as a bipedal hominid that has no other human traits, and the same interpretation can be made for the sasquatch from footprint evidence alone. To propose that two different kinds of animals are involved, with essentially the same description, would be unlikely in the extreme. Since there is only a small amount of tangible evidence from either source, and no direct overlap between them in what material there is, it must remain a possibility that there is some degree of difference between these Asian and American giant primates. . .It is possible that there might come to be some degree of acceptance for the name Gigantopithecus blacki for the sasquatch. . .” Lastly, “I would give this species a distribution that probably encompasses much of North America, and most likely includes some of northern Asia.”
Yet from history, chronology, morphology of genuine footprints, there is no reason to have ever suspected Yeti in America. The proponents of the giant Bluff Creek Bigfoot couldn’t even tell the difference between the Yeti and Sasquatch footprints. Between these two radically different prints they built a Eurasian giant missing link that stepped into America with a flat human foot.
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See Bluff at Bluff Creek
Bigfoot Print Comparisons
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It’s all academic . . .or is it?
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Recently NASA stunned the world with anticipation that “alien life” had been discovered by two scientists. Guesses ran high until it was finally announced at a press conference and published in Science that it was some microbe in California’s Mono Lake. Supposedly it was not made up of phosphorus in its amino acids but of arsenic, a potentially toxic element.
Fortunately, the news was so high profiled that there was genuine peer review of the claims, and none was favorable. Some were so succinct that it damaged the reputations of the scientists making the claims. University of Colorado’s Shelley Copley openly said that the paper should not have been published. Rosie Redfield of the U of British Columbia was the most scathing about the claims. “I was outraged at how bad the science was,” she declared in a Slate interview. She condemned the scientists’ work as “flim-flam.” Harvard’s microbiologist Alex Bradley carefully showed how the scientists’ method of handling the bacterium exposed their own mistakes. When the two NASA endorsed scientists ran for cover and said they would not respond to their critics except in scientific literature, U of Cal. at Davis’ Jon Eisen called them hypocrites. According to Slate: “If they say they will not address the responses except in journals, that is absurd . . . They carried out science by press release and press conference. Whether they were right or not in their claims, they are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature.” U of Davis’ John Roth concluded “I suspect that NASA may be so desperate for a positive story that they didn’t look for any serious advice from DNA or even microbiology people.”
All of this recent hoopla brought to mind again the furor NASA caused in 1996 when they claimed they found fossils in a Martian rock. To this day that has never been clearly demonstrated and it still causes disagreement throughout the halls of “Science.”
None of this is actually bad. It is the healthy world of peer review by qualified, skeptical people, who can provide evidence for their disputes. What is bad is when some holders of scientific degrees attempt to use that ALONE to outweigh arguments against their often flimsy evidence. In a world of peer review that is impossible. In a roomful of PhDs nobody shouts their degrees as proof their theories must be blindly accepted. All have the same degrees and achieved them by presenting their evidence and defending their thesis. Graduation does not change this basic requirement. (Cont’d at bottom of page)
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Confessions of a Sanderson Junkie
A former devotee looks at the master of armchair theorizing.
In the Beginning
Should one even confess to such a thing? I hesitate to do so. But aren’t the confessions of the reformed and rehabilitated considered not only acceptable to society but also cathartic for those of us confessing? Therefore I take courage and write the following, pen in hand, as the authors of old would declare on the first leaf of any tome. I must hereby confess to having been (deep breath) an Ivan Sanderson junkie. To know the world of Ivan T. Sanderson is to appreciate the bravery of such a confession. Sanderson probed into the world of the unexplained that titillates us all, but he was not the recorder of phenomena. He was a bizarre theorist following the limelight. A stack of old men’s magazines over a foot and a half high record the career of Ivan Sanderson spiraling into the absurd, the inept and the ludicrous.
Whether it was Bigfoot, Yeti, UFOs, Loch Ness monster,  Bermuda Triangle, even lunar anomalies, one is sure to come across Sanderson’s articles and insights. But to leave off the world of the unexplained as a spectator’s sport and to sally forth to contribute thereto is to discover something shocking about Sanderson: a disturbing trail of impromptu renditions, muddled facts, pulp magazine standards and misplaced flippancy, and outright humorous error. It causes one to seriously question whether Sanderson really had a protracted interest in these topics or whether he was more just a hasty commentator for a buck. Those who have gone through Sanderson rehab may read the following with the utmost contentment. Those who suspect that there were problems behind Sanderson’s research may read this the most delectably. Those who are little acquainted with him except that his name is dropped now and again should take warning.
My addiction began in old book stores amidst the smell of musty tomes and innocence. I entered the world of the occult in 1990, investigating the Bermuda Triangle for which I now hold the dubious honor of “world expert.” Expert, ah, what a concept. I am now qualified to disagree with others. From innocent into expert I have evolved. I think I prefer my days of innocence. I could read books and wistfully contemplate their contents. Now I compare actual data with an old author’s account of the same thing.
In a world of comparisons Ivan Sanderson does not fare well. His writings strike one as offhand musings. That approach is fine for all the magazines he wrote for or as a reaction to snippets of hearsay; but for tomes that are meant to stand the test of time this approach reveals a flippancy at odds with the ramifications of many of his theories. Bigfoot inspired his own theories of subhumans around the world; UFOs inspired several theories of an evolved civilization under the ocean and biological life living in the upper atmosphere or space. Surely such theories are worth serious and careful presentation?
From his typewriter and his New York apartment leapt his criticisms of others and his new theories tidying everything up. He “delves deep into the heart of problems most scientists shy away from and most laymen have never before been exposed to . . .he has a knack for seeing the excitement and mystery in things that most persons simply take for granted.” In reading Sanderson one often gets the impression that he had a constant superior smirk on his face while he was typing away at his books and articles.
This approach may have commanded a more innocent age, but time has not been good to Sanderson.
Bigfoot
Sanderson’s desire to locate and explain 5 or 6 subhuman species on Earth for his bloated tome Abominable Snowmen (Chilton, 1961) revealed his unusual analytical process. There is one especially revealing vignette when it comes to Ameranthropoides loysi. More and more the subject in a photo taken by a French geologist named Francois de Loys is being looked upon as a genuine New World anthropoid, and, in fact, due to my research, is being regarded as a lot of the evidence behind “Bigfoot,” especially in light of the artwork of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
However, Sanderson’s approach to it is disturbing. And his published views are no doubt why it never dawned on any Bigfoot enthusiast to consider this photo of a dead unexplained native American ape whose features so match Indian artwork as the culprit behind much of White Man’s concoctions. As the first prolific writer of Bigfootery he used his unique investigative methods from afar to completely smear the whole idea that the loysi even existed. In Sanderson’s erudite tabloid Abominable Snowmen his usual superior style of approach actually broke out into vehement libel of Francois de Loys.
Ameranthropoides Loysi, photo by Francois de Loys, 1920, Venezuela.
“The original photograph is not just a case of mistaken identity: it is an outright hoax, and an obnoxious one at that, being a deliberate deception.” Sanderson’s unfounded statement is merely induced from his unsupported dogma that the crate upon which the loysi was seated for photographing was only 15 ½ inches tall. “Thus the animal, with its head poked up to an unnatural degree by a stick, measures about 27 inches . . .” Therefore he deduced it was merely a spider monkey. “This is a fair sized spider monkey but not even a large one.”
Professor George Montandon was not an incompetent. It took him 9 years to complete his investigation. He consulted people about the height of the petroleum crates, discovering they were 17 ¾ inches high. “And as the animal is three and a third times the height of the case,” he wrote, “this implies a height of 5 feet.” Bernard Heuvelmans faithfully quoted Montandon and endorsed his findings in his popular 1959 book On the Track of Unknown Animals.
But Sanderson based his very denigrating oration of the whole topic on his own personal recollection of being in the tropics. “Anybody who has ever been outside a tourist hotel in the tropics will have run into a fuel problem. Since the discovery of petroleum oils . . .they have been shipped all over the world in pairs of 5-gallon cans, or rather light tins, fitted into cheap wooden cases, measuring exactly 20 ½ inches long, by 10 ½ inches from front to back, and 15 ½ inches high. The better grade boxes are bound with metal tape around the two ends. The case shown in de Loys’ picture is such an object, and stenciled lettering may be seen on it under the monkey’s right leg. Such lettering is also standard and is usually stamped over two of the four 4-inch bits of board of which the sides are invariably constructed.” Thus he concludes the height of the monkey and from this and nothing else, apparently, goes into his vitriolic condemnation of Dr. de Loys as an intentional hoaxer.
The crate, if indeed it is constructed of four 4 inch boards, would, by the way, total 16 inches in height and not 15 ½ inches. However, the picture also makes it undeniably clear that this crate is made of 4 and ½ boards. At the bottom of the crate it is plain to see the half a board. The lettering is actually stenciled over this half-board and part of the full board over it. Thus Montandon’s source was more accurate: the crate is 17 ¾ to 18 inches high. The creature is thus over 5 feet tall like de Loys said.
There was therefore no reason for Sanderson’s acidic and judgmental condemnation of a respected geologist or to regard de Loys’ account full of “mumbo-jumbo” because he could not bring  out the specimen and also lost some of the other photos. De Loys went into the “green hell” with 20 men and emerged with only 4 emaciated men three years later. Just what was he to do in those conditions in 1920?
One’s ire is justifiably raised considering Sanderson’s overriding tendency to denigrate others based on nothing but poor research and hasty conclusions. And in this case I suspect de Loys’ discovery impeded Sanderson’s strange tabloid thesis that all these “Abominable Snowmen” reports indicated subhumans rather than animals. Sanderson did not have one iota of evidence to support his dogma of 15 ½ inch high crates (who would measure such a thing off hand?), nor did he notice that there were 4 ½ boards making the sides of the crate in the photo. His deduction of 27 inches is incredibly fatuous, even aberrant, even if the crate is 15 ½ inches high, for the “spider monkey’s” height is clearly over 3 times that of the crate.
Sanderson’s analytical instability is plainly demonstrated two paragraphs away. “Quite apart from anything, the picture alone, if analyzed, displays the creature shown, to be a maximum of 48 inches, from crown to heel. This is indeed large for a female Ateles but it is really substandard for large females of the northern. . .group.” Two paragraphs before this the spider monkey was merely 27 inches, now it is 48 inches. It is unfortunate that such poor analytic skills were mixed in a man who had the need to fly off the handle and put others down.
Of de Loys’ “hoax” Sanderson writes: “This is the kind of nonsense that has done more harm to the cause of any serious research for ABSMs, and other creatures as yet unknown, than anything I can imagine, and it is to be most utterly deplored.” Sanderson should have written this of himself, for such a hasty style of writing not only indicates that in 1920 there was such a search for ABSM’s, as he tritely acronymizes “Abominable Snowmen,” but it seems clear that he added inexcusable falsehood and sensationalism to his pulp magazine articles on Bigfoot and other topics to goose the action of his evolving theories.
Ivan Sanderson was well placed in the 1950s to achieve an easy “in” to being published. Although he was educated in zoology, he had a knack for popular writing. People were familiar with his articles or books on nature (even children’s books) by the time the world of the “occult” broke out onto the popular stage. When this happened, it became apparent that Sanderson had a great interest in the paranormal and followed the camps. His articles on UFOs began to appear in popular magazines, such as Fantastic Universe.
But it was Yetism and especially Bigfoot that boosted Sanderson into the lime of the “unexplained.” Attaining the position of Tom Slick’s PNE “scientific advisor,” Sanderson was able to get his first major article published in the popular men’s magazine True in December 1959. Not since Donald Keyhoe’s January 1950 article on Flying Saucers had an issue generated so much hype. In True’s typical fashion, they followed up with another Sanderson article on Sasquatch in the March 1960 issue.
Sanderson’s December 1959 article in True was pivotal. It brought Bigfoot greater and more detailed coverage than the terse and sometimes flippant newspaper articles and AP stories. For promotion sake, Sanderson’s image of being a zoologist fit in with the Bigfoot pursuit better, too. If Sanderson aspired for a publication of his book Abominable Snowmen by Fawcett, which owned True and had also published Keyhoe’s first Flying Saucer book based on his article, he was disappointed. True had kept Sanderson’s articles more generic and journalistic. It had a reputation as a “true” magazine, and Sanderson’s theory of “subhumans” all over the globe under the flippant acronym of ABSMs isn’t something that slipped into True’s pages. The March issue also shows the number of jibing letters True received from readers concerning the December ’59 issue. Letters to the editors were particularly full of mirth over Sanderson’s article.
Eventually, Sanderson secured Chilton Press to publish his bloated tome in 1961. In it some of Sanderson’s deductions should call into question his academic claims. He developed the most ludicrous human family tree of evolution, classifying Australian aborigines and Melanesians as “primitives” and not a Sapiens. Pigmies and Bushmen were also classified as separate species of modern man. Gigantopithecus was descended of “Apelike submen.” “Neo-Giants” came from the “Sub Men” category, and from here he thought it possible that Sasquatch, O-mah, and the Didi descended as well as the Dzu-teh in the Himalayas, which is actually the great red bear and not an anthropoid or hominid. All this was deduced from afar, from his New York apartment where he sifted popular reports and folklore.
There was no anthropologist at that time who ever would have put forward such a bellicose thesis as a family tree of man from sub-hominids to the present, inserting where he thought applicable those tabloid “ABSMs,” as Sanderson always tritely called them. One can see why Sanderson’s tenure with True was not a lasting one.
With the republishing of this unwieldy tome in 2006, a new generation is subject to Sanderson’s rather unique investigative methods and bizarre theories trying to sound excessively scientific. Today, to the uninformed these hopefully don’t pass off as normal or standard for their time. They were really from the world of Ivan Sanderson and his hasty views from afar.
It is indeed hard to determine to what extent he had formal education. By 1965, Sanderson claimed 3 PhDs, although it seems he really never achieved any. As far as his books would acknowledge he had been educated at Cambridge with “degrees in botany, zoology and geology.” In addition he “read in” [British term for studying without achieving a degree] physical anthropology and anatomy. As Abominable Snowmen conveys, he really did not have the theoretical stability to write and survive a doctoral review board.
UFOs and the Philadelphia Experiment
By the late 1960’s Sanderson was actually writing articles for another men’s magazine, Argosy, a magazine that was a cut under True. This eventually merited him the position of Science Editor. This was perfect for Sanderson, for although he followed the limelight he seldom anticipated it. When some “unexplained” topic became popular, however, he was in position to write articles and get them published several times per year. It is in this capacity in 1967 that he was on line with the Patterson Film, trying to secure still picture rights before the magazine’s deadlines. A couple of months (and issues away) later he could give an expert view on the Bermuda Triangle, as in the August 1968 issue.
UFOs were coming back into vogue again, but there was little interest in the old style of flying saucer literature, where the author merely repeats ad nauseum witness sightings of strange lights in the sky. Sanderson, however, had been toying with an idea for quite sometime. In 1967 he published a very verbose look at UFOs called Uninvited Visitors, proposing that there were UFOs that were biologic life in the upper atmosphere or space. Sanderson showed his penchant for acronyms again. In order to sort these out, UFOs should be divided into subcategories, like UAO and UAP— Unidentified Aerial Objects and Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena— instead of the popular and conventional UFO. Using these liberally he completely confounded everybody and the book did not go into any significant paperback edition. The book didn’t sell well for other reasons as well. His days as being a popular TV lecturer on wildlife were still remembered, and all knew the book’s subtitle was misleading: “A biologist looks at UFOs.” The book was also couched in his usually excessive style to sound scientific and strangled by voluble tangents.
Around this time, Sanderson founded SITU, Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, an amateur group devoted to studying the many popular phenomena topics that were beginning to reach higher and more respectable profile in the public’s taste. The new anti-establishment movement was making it bigger business to question our norms and past established views. True to the character of following the limelight but not anticipating it, Sanderson now cashed-in on the Philadelphia Experiment, writing in Pursuit, his society’s journal (in the 4th issue) of his own involvement and “take” on this growing popular mystery. For any who had a close knowledge of Sanderson’s 1967 Uninvited Visitors his Pursuit article exposes his “closer study” to be haphazard grandstanding.
This particular topic surrounded the mysterious death of a scientist named Morris Jessup, who, after writing his 1955 book The Case for the UFO, received unusual letters from a man named Carlos Allende. In these letters Allende claimed to be an eyewitness to a Navy experiment conducted at Philadelphia Naval Yard in October 1943. The result of this experiment was to cause a Navy destroyer to vanish. Over a period of time afterward, so Allende claimed, the crew would also instantaneously vanish and reappear. The Allende Letters have become famous as the juvenal source of The Philadelphia Experiment mythos, which, with Sanderson’s help, was able to reach out and include Morris Jessup’s death in 1959 as the suicide of the man who might have “learned too much.”
To its advocates, like Sanderson, the underpinning importance of The Philadelphia Experiment is that it supposedly confirms Einstein’s Unified Field Theory was harnessed by the US Navy, unleashing astonishing electromagnetic power. Enough power it is said to teleport the vessel (supposedly the USS Eldridge), bend time, and cause things to disappear. With UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle gaining in popular literature, the PE could also help explain the power source behind flying saucers and explain sudden disappearances. Thus discovering something as earth-shaking as this would truly be dangerous for Jessup.
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