© clairity/Flickr That is ice, in Minnesota. Could there be a man in there?
The first-most disappointing thing about the Minnesota Iceman is that he probably wasn't 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's promoter and hype man, so to speak, and
carted 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 "missing link" 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't even real.
The story changed a few times, as they tend to do in cases like these.
Hansen first claimed 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,
two cryptozoologists named Heuvelmans and Sanderson became involved in an investigation of the Iceman, theorizing - and, rather meanly I think, nicknaming him "Bozo" - that he was mistaken for a human and was shot and killed in the Vietnam War.
A year later, in 1970,
Frank Hansen wrote an article in Saga Magazine, 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.
