One of the sidetrips that Craig Woolheater, his wife Marcy, Miles Lewis, Dennis Stacy, and I took on Sunday was a survey of various Tom Slick sites around San Antonio, as pointed out and discussed, in depth, by the encyclopedic Stacy. Yes, a motley crew, indeed, in search of Slickian history did trek about San Antonio over the weekend.

The locations we visited included Slick’s lift-slab house, and organizations he founded, such as the Southwest Research Instiitue, the Mind Science Foundation, and the Southwest Foundatin for Biomedical Research. We even found the Tom Slick Ranch Creek.

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It is a well-known fact that the biomedical research facilities have the world’s largest colony of breeding rhesus monkeys. What is often forgotten, however, is that at one time Slick had built, on site, a special area that was to house either a Yeti or a Bigfoot that he planned to have captured. In March 1957, news of Slick’s first Himalayan expedition, sponsored and backed by the San Antonio Zoological Society (in name but not financially), in search of the Abominable Snowmen of Nepal, told of his desire to safely return a Yeti to the United States.

The purpose was to study the apelike creature humanely. Tom Slick’s primary original reason for venturing into cryptozoology was his hopes that the Abominable Snowmen, as he perhaps naively called them, the “missing links,” might hold clues to medical mysteries for humans.

When we visited the San Antonio site of this large compound on Sunday, June 4, it was well-guarded with heavy barbed wire, and posted to have sentry dogs and intensive security. There is no doubt this is not your usual tourist stop.

Nevertheless, in the distance, we saw and photographed what vaguely looked like Bigfoot (or at least someone’s bad hoax of one), but which we knew and smelled were Rhesus primates.

Here we were, almost 50 years after the time, at the site of where the first live captive Yeti was to have been kept. Of course, the actual containment enclosure was said to be deep in a bunker, but it was intriguing to see the outside evidence of what is going on there, still today.

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