March does not bring Spring easily and without a fight to the state of Maine. It calls forth my wanderlust, as talks pop up and investigative traveling for me to the South is on the horizon. Trips call me away from the 100-plus-inches worth of snow in Portland, and out of the cobwebs of February. In two newspapers in the state today, separate articles have been published of my forthcoming talks and treks. The Maine Sunday Telegram contains a good interview in conjunction with my Wednesday noontime, March 5th appearance at the Portland Public Library. It also gives a hint [...]
Hillary Yeti Expedition Member Dies
American ornithologist Melvin Alvah Traylor Jr., 92, has died. He was among the members of the 1960 World Book Encyclopedia Scientific Expedition to the Himalaya led by Sir Edmund Hillary. Melvin Traylor (December 16, 1915 – February 11, 2008) was the son of famed Chicago banker Melvin Alvah Traylor and Mrs. Dorothy Y. Traylor. Traylor was a Lieutenant with the US Marines and served on Guadalcanal during World War II in 1942 where he was awarded with the Silver Star medal. As a Marine Corp officer, Traylor was severely injured during the Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific theatre, where [...]
Felix the Cat & Yeti
Okay, this may be merely a Felix the Cat cartoon, but it also may be one of the worst illustrations of misrepresentations in comic history. This cartoon with Felix the Cat and the Abominable Snowman is from 1958. How many misstatements and mistakes do you see in it? (No, I’m not really upset. I’m just playing along with some kind of mock insult to our cryptozoological legacy.) Some of the errors I caught are: – Abominable Snowmen at the North Pole (the Arctic) – They actually are reported to live in the montane valleys of the Himalaya and cross the [...]
Abominable Snow Rabbit
Take an enjoyable historical break, sit back, and watch this just posted crypto-cartoon from 47 years ago: The Abominable Snow Rabbit is an eight minute 1961 Warner Brothers Looney Tunes theatrical cartoon starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. The cartoon was directed by Chuck Jones and co-directed by Maurice Noble, with a story by Tedd Pierce. (For whatever reason, the video version here is six minutes long.) While the cartoon’s title, according to such sources as Wikipedia, allegedly “is taken from the phrase and horror film, The Abominable Snowman,” I must observe that knowledge of the Abominable Snowman was culturally [...]
A Passion For Field Guides: Updated
Look, to be honest, I love field guides. I don’t merely have a shelf of field guides. I literally have a bookcase full of them, over a hundred different titles. With more in storage. I have such a passion for them, I wrote a couple and am planning on more. But what do we do with all of them? I recently saw this amusing photo on a bird books digest forum, with that birdwatcher out in the field with an armful of field guides. It is a paradox, indeed. You want to take field guides with you into the bush, [...]
How To Escape A Yeti
I was recently talking to Boing Boing‘s David Pescovitz about the long-held belief that the best way to escape a Yeti is to run downhill. Why might such a plan work, you ask? I’ve been reading about the reason behind why this works for a long time. First, the PG version: One of the earliest records of reported footprints in Western literature appeared in 1889, in Major Lawrence Austine Waddell’s Among the Himalayas. Waddell reported his guide’s description of a large apelike creature that left the prints. Most accounts relate that one of the tales that Waddell heard was of [...]
Yeti Author Has Died
Tribhuvan Nath is shown at the far left, in white, at a news conference in 2002, discussing foreign investments in newspapers in India. The well-known veteran Indian journalist Tribhuvan Nath, 86, died at 1:50 am on Monday, February 18, 2008, at his home in Panchkula, near Chandigarh, India. In addition to his newspaper work, Nath had a biological interest in Nepal, which inspired him to co-author a book entitled On The Yeti Trail: Search for the Elusive Snowman (New Delhi/London: UPB Publication, 1994; 119 pages long), with his late contemporary, Madan Mohan Gupta, a correspondent of the UPI. Tribhuvan Nath [...]
50th Anniversary: Slick Begins Snowman Search
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Tom Slick’s most organized, first San Antonio Zoo-sponsored expedition in search of the Yeti. It was formally called the Slick-Johnson Snowman Expedition. Via a feature giving a flashback of 50 years ago, the Los Angeles Times reprinted an old Matt Weinstock column, from the reporter who was sort of the “Herb Caen of Los Angeles.” In this passage, Weinstock talked of the Abominable Snowman and Tom Slick, thus giving a good period view of one newspaper columnist’s way of dealing with the event. Matt Weinstock (You gotta love Weinstock’s 1950s’ haircut.) The following [...]
Gigantopithecus Captured!
On December 1, 2007, before my “Introduction to Cryptozoology” talk, I toured the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition on Mythic Creatures. In their moderately-sized exhibition hall, I felt one of the highlights was the corner they set aside for unknown hairy hominoids. The Gigantopithecus model was a wonder. It appeared as above, large and Yeti-like for all the world to ponder. The photographs below might give an insight into a different kind of feeling. Cryptomundo correspondent Trey Howell had just finished reading Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America and found himself at the American Museum of Natural [...]
Last Weekend for ABSM’s 30% Discount, Postpaid
The sale ends in five days. Time is running out to get this huge HARDBACK book directly from me, autographed, for $10 cheaper than it will cost to buy it online or in stores right now, plus with free postage to any American address. Ivan T. Sanderson’s classic book, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life has been republished in hardback by Cosimo during January 2008. You can secure your copy at a deep discount through February 5th (some people have told me they needed to get their first-of-the-month checks). The choice is yours. You can obtain this 525 page book [...]
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