"Things" indeed! Ivan T. Sanderson presents this broad little volume of Forteana (mostly reprinted from articles he wrote for Fate magazine) that covers a multitude of funny, nasty, live, dead THINGS including ABSMs, UFOs and saucer nests, globsters, telepathic ants, singing stones and much more besides!
Sanderson spends a lot of time on Victorian explorer Percy Fawcett's 1914 account of a hostile tribe of ape-men encountered deep in Brazil's Mato Grosso state, who wield bows and arrows and build crude palm leaf shelters. The creatures threaten Fawcett's crew with screams and dances until he fires his pistol into the ground, scattering the beasts. Fawcett would later disappear on another expedition into the green inferno, continuing his search for a mystical lost city and leaving yet another mystery in his wake. When Sanderson compiled this book, and before environmentalism filtered into popular culture in the '90s, the jungle was still an impenetrable, alien landscape, with a thousand ways to die and a cumulative mythology of lost civilizations, hostile tribes of cannibals and vicious predators such as jaguars, anacondas, and piranha.
Heading north, Sanderson attempts to cast the wendigo cannibal spirit of the Algonquin as an Abominable Snowman! Here is an early example of authors crowbarring Bigfoots into Amerindian mythology, and an especially weak one at that.
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