Decades after mysteriously disappearing, ‘The Iceman Cometh’ again. The infamous ‘Minnesota Iceman’ will be exhibited at Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas, starting next week after touring at fairgrounds and malls across the country in the late 60s and early 70s. The museum’s owner, Steve Busti, said Wednesday that the frozen, ‘Neanderthal or Bigfoot-like monster’ will be on display beginning July 3. The iceman, 6-feet-tall, was billed as ‘The Siberskoye Creature’ or ‘The Creature of Ice’ beginning in 1968. The hairy creature was displayed in a solid block of ice inside a refrigerated coffin. A man named Frank Hansen exhibited the iceman and claimed to have been behind its discovery, according to the book ‘Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend’.
Two cryptozoologists, Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, examined the body during their search for evidence of Bigfoot the same year the iceman became a carnival exhibit. The pair believed the creature to be a real, unknown species, with Sanderson even remarking he could smell a decomposing corpse through cracks in the icy tomb. The pair believed the creature to be an evolutionary missing link–Heuvelmans even dubbed him ‘Homo pongoides’.
After the two cryptozoologists examined the creature, Sanderson convinced someone at the Smithsonian Institution to launch an official investigation. Unfortunately, Hansen reportedly switched the ‘real’ body with a latex dummy before an investigation took place. At first, Hansen suggested he found the iceman in Siberia, but he confessed he shot the creature in Minnesota woods before putting it on ice. As a result of these new claims, the FBI almost became involved, thinking Hansen had been exhibiting a murder victim.
When the Smithsonian assessed the Iceman–after Hansen said he switched it with a dummy–the museum stated it was ‘satisfied that the creature is simply a carnival exhibit made of latex rubber and hair…the “original” model and the present so-called “substitute” are one and the same’, according to ‘Bigfoot Exposed’. Investigators with the Smithsonian also discovered a company on the West Coast made Hasen an iceman in 1967, but whether or not it was just a replica of the ‘real’ iceman. The company Hansen commissioned to make the dummy never saw an original. After touring through the early 70s, the creature and its eccentric owner remained out of the public eye until 10 years ago, The Huffington Post reported. After investigating its whereabouts for two years, Busti tracked down Hansen’s family and bought the frozen beast or rubber impersonation, depending on who’s talking.
