国产吃瓜黑料

GET MORE WITH OUTSIDE+

Enjoy 35% off GOES, your essential outdoor guide

UPGRADE TODAY

minnesota iceman mythical creat
That is ice, in Minnesota. Could there be a man in there? (Photo: *clairity*/Flickr)

Monster Hunt: Minnesota Iceman

Katie Heaney recounts the history of the most famous Midwestern Yeti

Published: 
minnesota iceman mythical creat
(Photo: *clairity*/Flickr)

New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you. Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! .

The first-most disappointing thing about the Minnesota Iceman is that he probably wasn鈥檛 even a native Minnesotan. He simply stayed here, in the southeastern town of Rollingstone, between trips around the Midwest, encased in a block of ice and wedged into the trailer of a retired Air Force pilot named Frank D. Hansen. Hansen was the Iceman鈥檚 promoter and hype man, so to speak, and him around to carnivals and state fairs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, charging fairgoers 25 cents to take a look at the figure described as a 鈥渕issing link鈥 in human evolution. Call it regional chauvinism, but you want an important guy like the Iceman to really belong to your home state.

The second-most disappointing thing about the Minnesota Iceman is that he probably wasn鈥檛 even real.

The story changed a few times, as they tend to do in cases like these. the figure was found in the Bering Strait, sent to Hong Kong, and purchased by an eccentric California millionaire, who later hired Hansen to care for the Iceman and take him on trips around the Midwest. Later, , theorizing鈥攁nd, rather meanly I think, nicknaming him 鈥淏ozo鈥濃攖hat he was mistaken for a human and was shot and killed in the Vietnam War. A year later, in 1970, , which claimed that he, 10 years earlier, then stationed in Duluth, Minnesota, came upon the Iceman during a deer-hunting trip 60 miles out of town. Actually, he wrote, he came upon three Icemen. But only the one charged Hansen. Only the one was shot.

He fled, but returned for the corpse several months later and found it buried in snow. Hansen retrieved the body, took it home to an understandably irritated wife, and kept the Iceman in his family freezer until spring. According to his story, Hansen then met a veteran showman who convinced him to showcase the creature鈥攂ut to do so (at least at first) with a model version of the Iceman in order to gauge public curiosity and to protect Hansen from potential murder charges. On the carnival circuit, in order to stave off negative scrutiny, Hansen would admit to fellow showmen that his creature was a fake. But after a year, he felt safe substituting in the real thing. And that鈥檚 when the story blew up鈥攖he Smithsonian, and even the FBI, wanted to investigate. Hansen, as he writes, got nervous, and put the fake model back up for display. The reason that particular figure was later deemed a hoax by the Smithsonian, then, is because it was.

The Iceman鈥檚 original investigators maintained that what they had seen in Hansen鈥檚 trailer was definitively something real.

It鈥檚 a story that doesn鈥檛 tie together very nicely. Frank Hansen appears to have died some years ago (, a relic from Hansen鈥檚 first foray into showmanship, 鈥渨as acquired from the estate of the late Frank Hansen of Rollingstone, Minnesota.鈥) but I can鈥檛 find his obituary. , and there are people on the Internet who, for reasons that are certainly creative, think that mysterious California millionaire was Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart, legendary actor and famed secret Yeti-in-a-block-of-ice collector. We鈥檒l never know, because he鈥檚 dead, too.

Whatever happened to the Iceman, or the Model Iceman, and whether there was any difference between the two (and whether there were two at all), I cannot say. I suppose I could make an educated guess, knowing what you know and what I know about the nature of frozen hairy figures in boxes and blurry photos. But what fun would that be?

I think I will look for him instead. Or not him, necessarily, but his two mates: the ones that got away.

HERE鈥橲 THE RATIONALE THAT propelled my friend Rylee and I to look for something called the Minnesota Iceman in Wisconsin: clearly he is (or they are) on the lam, but he鈥檇 also probably be homesick, so he wouldn鈥檛 be too far from home. He鈥檇 want to be somewhere he could hide among the trees, and near a water source. He could be anywhere, so he might as well be in , just across the state line and the St. Croix River.

It鈥檚 hard to prepare for something like an open-ended nature search for something that was possibly a lifeless rubber suit 40 years ago, but you鈥檒l want to start with a first-aid kit鈥攆or the potential loss of limbs. A ruler and a magnifying glass are also crucial鈥攆or tracking. We also packed notebooks, granola bars, and a hollow chocolate turkey, leftover from Thanksgiving, which we figured was a decent meat substitute and an attractive piece of bait. I brought a blush brush, too, ostensibly to dust for fingerprints, but in retrospect that just seems silly.

We get to the park two hours before sundown, and the trail of cars leaving the reserve as we drive in lends an appreciated sense of foreboding to our mission. There are four or five inches of packed snow crunching beneath our wheels. I see a moving figure behind the trees ahead and say, 鈥淥h, there he is.鈥 It turns out to be a normal human skier, probably. Rylee pulls the car into the next lot, and we get out and into the single-digit chill.

There are a handful of paths to take, but we follow a narrow, lesser-trodden one into the forest. Rylee occasionally asks our target to reveal himself (鈥…Iceman?鈥), and each time she does I almost expect a head to pop up from a fallen log and say, 鈥淗ey!鈥 Instead, we keep plodding through the snow, noting a couple of 鈥渦nusual鈥 markings: a snow print that looks claw-like and a dead tree with a chunk of bark torn out of it. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a sign of an Iceman if I ever saw one,鈥 says Rylee. It鈥檚 true: as far as all that I鈥檝e ever seen goes, this is as much an indicator of the presence of a Midwestern Yeti as anything else.

Deeper into the forest, we start seeing handfuls of trees sprayed with red paint, mostly in neat lines but in some cases splattered wildly like blood. Even though I know it鈥檚 fake鈥攖oo bright and garish to look close to real鈥擨 still lean in close to make sure. It鈥檚 not that I鈥檇 attribute that kind of carnage to the Iceman anyway; I鈥檝e seen the pictures. He looks like he was a nice, calm guy. Look at , the other resting on his belly. Even he doesn鈥檛 look like he cares whether or not he鈥檚 real, and even less what we think. You have to respect someone with that kind of confidence.

聽is a writer based in Minneapolis. She has a memoir coming out in early 2014.

Lead Photo: *clairity*/Flickr

Popular on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online