Heinrich Harrer in Tibet. I got to first thinking about Nazis, Tibet, and Yeti, three years ago, when I heard that famed mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, 93, died on January 7, 2005. The entire story does feel like it is straight out of Indiana Jones, of course. Movies are often a point of reference, needless to say. Harrer was portrayed by Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet, a 1997 movie based on Harrer’s 1953 nonfiction memoir with the same title. But sometimes the movies leave out the best parts. Harrer’s interest in what today we mostly know as the lore [...]
Women in Cryptozoology: Debbie Martyr
How does a former editor of a south London newspaper find herself in the deep rainforest of Indonesia, studying one of the most discussed primate cryptids in the world? She decides one day that she is going to go there and study them, that’s how. Debbie Martyr. Cryptozoologists, hominologists, and Bigfoot researchers have been receiving important data through correspondence from Debbie Martyr in Sumatra for years. Martyr’s decision to actually go to live in the midst of the rainforest follows the tradition of women placing themselves in the field to study great apes, popularized by Jane Goodall (chimpanzees), Dian Fossey [...]
Grendel: Another View
Cryptozoology pitches a large enough tent to encompass many different folks who hold varied opinions, happily, side by side. One notion of Grendel, that of a specific line of thinking has it that Grendel was a surviving hairy hominoid, a Neandertaloid, or perhaps even a relict form of Homo heildelbergensis. Harry Trumbore’s image of Grendel (above) is from The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates and captures one version of the hominological view. How about another opinion? Today, the author of Shadows of Existence, cryptozoologist Matt Bille shares his insights in this commentary about Grendel: Cryptozoologists have speculated [...]
Classic Yeti Images
With the death of Sir Edmund Hillary and Yeti images of the photographs from that era (1950s and 1960s), insights into the evolution of how the Abominable Snowmen were viewed can be considered through the lenses of time and distance. The first image shared here (click on Perkins Yeti) is the 1960 lifesize drawing shown by then-Lincoln Park Zoo director Marlin Perkins before the World Book expedition to the Himalayas with Sir Edmund Hillary. (This may be different than the large cutout Perkins showed on “Wild Kingdom” in 1963, or it may be the same one.) Below is the slightly [...]
My Favorite Hillary & Yeti Photo
The tributes to Sir Edmund Hillary continue to roll in from afar, a fact acknowledged in today’s New York Times. The man’s reach was far indeed. In Portland, Maine, the local newspaper recalled Sir Edmund visited here in 1962, and gave a lecture for teachers and school children at the-then-grand Lafayette Hotel on his Abominable Snowman expedition. As a final goodbye to Sir Edmund Hillary, I want to share my favorite photograph of him. It is Hillary with an unknown artist’s drawing of the Abominable Snowman that Hillary loved to show to the media before his 1960 expedition. To prepare [...]
Yeti Hunter Sir Edmund Hillary Dies
Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two men to climb the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, has died at the age of 88, on January 11, 2008, local New Zealand time. He climbed the 29,035 ft (8,850m) peak with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, reaching the top on May 29, 1953. Hillary’s health had reportedly been in decline since April 2007, after a fall while visiting Nepal. He suffered a heart attack in hospital on Friday morning. Sir Edmund’s fellow climber, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (right), died in May 1986. Born July 20, 1919, in Auckland, New Zealand, Sir Edmund Hillary began [...]
Yeti At McGill
The Year of the Yeti continues. Amazingly, my last Friday introduction of the classic film The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and the new hardbound release of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, is being mirrored (skeptically) with something quite similar occurring tomorrow in Quebec. At McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec, there will be a screening of the same film, preceded by an intriguing lecture. Here’s the announcement from McGill: The Redpath’s ever-popular Freaky Fridays series hits the New Year running, or at least ambling with a [...]
Old Books, Classics, and the Minnesota Iceman
I’m away in New York City, doing Yeti business, of course, including launching the new classics, like Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (PayPal me at lcoleman@maine.rr.com $25 marked “For ABSM Book” and I’ll send you, postpaid, an autographed copy, a hardback of this new printing to any USA address, for this one-time discount price). See the end about news of another classic to be reprinted. But, anyway, I left something for you to read on Saturday. Before I get into the crop of new cryptozoology books on the horizon for 2008 in a forthcoming post, how about a trip [...]
Year of the Yeti Begins Now!
This Friday will be the official launch of the new publication of the reasonably-priced hardback edition of Ivan T. Sanderson’s classic book, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, from Cosimo Classics. This new printing contains a new preface I’ve written, and I will have a few copies, hot off the press, literally, for sale at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. I also will have copies of two other books I’ve written that contain large sections about the Yeti: Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology and The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide [...]
World of Warcraft’s Yeti
Yetis are truly everywhere, including within the popular online game of World of Warcraft. Reportedly WOW, as it is called by those in the know, is played by nine million individuals around the globe, often late into the night. If you are one of those 9,000,000 players and have gone to level 70, you’ve seen the Yetis. But why do they look the way they do in WOW? In terms of the creative copycat phenomena, the horned nature of WOW’s Yetis seems to have more in common with the snow creature from the Star Wars movie rather than cryptozoology’s Yetis [...]
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