MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Wildmen Across Asia

Click to embiggen

Very nice map tracking Yetis, Almas, and similar creatures across Asia, cross referenced to sites of Neanderthal remains. From Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch, and the Neanderthal Enigma, by Myra Shackley. 

Courtesy Thames and Hudson, 1983. 

SNOWMAN by Norman Bogner

Something in the night

Something in the day

Nothing is wrong but darling

Something's in the way 

There's slaughter in the air 

Protest on the wind 

Someone else inside me 

Someone could get skinned, how

Hard boiled pulp action meets creature feature thrills in this oddity from literary and genre novelist Norman Bogner (1935-2022). The monks of Tibet call him Sogpa - Satan. The sheriff and the local editor are claiming it's a gigantic rogue grizzly. But disgraced climber Bradford knows ... it's the SNOWMAN!

He handed Bradford the photos of Janice's head with the black stars burned into her face. The other photographs were close-ups in color of the triangular footprints.

"Christ," Bradford said, "he's on your mountain."

This beast is no normal animal, no simple brown haired hominid, as Bogner makes clear right away. He's an atavistic, evolutionary freak, 25 feet tall, burning with elemental hatred and an insatiable hunger for flesh. Alone and perpetually pissed off, he burns the land with his footsteps leaving a bizarre rainbow effervescence. His hair is hard as stone, his skin sharp as daggers, and his teeth leave burning starpoints as he rends his prey, leaving mutilated bodies in his wake.

Now he's found a new feeding ground, at the summit of the Great Northern Ski Resort's peak. And now he's PR woman Cathy Parker's problem.

Cathy had messed around when she was younger in a series of painful affairs. Now she had little respect for men, since most of them were in search of an easy piece, mothering, or both simultaneously. Her job demanded the front of glibness, friendliness, and she fell into the role rather than expose her vulnerability. She had mastered the shades of public relations, which she understood as civilization's method of counterfeiting reality.

Bogner blends pulpy grit, mundane reality, and flashy fantasy into this unique concoction, as Bradford's old Vietnam buddies and his Sherpa pal Pemba are enlisted as yeti bait. The extreme realm of mountaineering demands special considerations as to tactics - would you believe nuclear cross bows? Bogner dots his eyes and crosses his tees without ever belaboring a scene, and before we know it we're at the end of this 221 page (gut) ripping yarn wishing there was a little more to come.

The striking hardcover!

Partially traced from a Frazetta piece!

No matter, but it would have been nice if maybe the Snowman got one more big scene devouring some skiers ... Bogner keeps things ratcheted down fairly tight throughout, despite his willingness to go out there with mini-nukes and mega-yetis, and part of what makes this such an enjoyable read is his precise control of the story, with not a word wasted. Bogner's working us like a fish on a line, but ain't it a wonderful way to die!

A little romance, a little action, a little bit of the ol' ultra violence - this one has it all. Bogner knows just when to dip out on a scene, and just how far to push things.

Across the pond, Snowman got a gruesome edition courtesy the New English Library:

My, my, someone fetch a priest! You can't say no to the beauty and the beast as Bogner's Snowman slaughters his way to a bloody 4/4 rating!

Man is still the prey ...

The Snowman is available to read and download at archive dot org. This title was also reviewed by one Tony Caro and the ever reliable PorPor Books Blog, check 'em out.

Dell Publishing, 1978

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Yeti Across the Land

"Maps supplied by Plawinski," reporting sightings of the Yeti and Almas across Asia. From In Pursuit of the Abominable Snowman by Odette Tchernine. Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Courtesy Taplinger Pub. Company, 1971. 

COSMIC DEBRIS: Return of the Nazi UFOs

A jam packed ad from Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, making use of Official UFO magazine's large format to list off several of his eye catching titles and flash art. Note the drift from UFO subject matter to straightforward Nazi conspiracism, part of Zundel's funnel scheme to promote his Hitlerism. Zundel outlined this strategy in an interview with Frank Miele for an article about Holocaust denial and freedom of speech in Skeptic magazine:

In a later phone conversation, Zundel told me that the UFO book was in fact a ploy. "I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book was for fun. With a picture of the Fuhrer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I'd talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about."

Zundel will dangle a reference to UFO's or the wisdom of the ancient Atlanteans. If it has no effect, he just moves on. If it elicits skepticism, he blows it off with a jovial "for whatever it's worth." Given our early conversation on the UFO book, I'm still not sure whether Zundel really believes any of this esoteric stuff or whether he's just learned how effective pushing hot buttons is in grabbing the media spotlight and perhaps bringing in donations. "It's a lot like operating a church" he explained. "We survive on donations."

It's worth noting that Miele himself is a former contributor to the scientific racist magazine Mankind Quarterly, and that being "skeptical" of UFOs does not necessarily correlate with rigor in regards to other pseudoscientific subjects.

From Official UFO magazine, Volume 1 - Number 6, February 1976. 

SASQUATCH by Don Hunter with Rene Dahinden

Author Don Hunter presents the story of one of the Grand Old Men of Bigfooting, Rene Dahinden (1930-2001), and his quest to expose the SASQUATCH! Dahinden grew up a foster child, was re-adopted by his birth mother and abandoned yet again, and eventually settled in Canada from his native born Switzerland whereupon the quest for Sasquatch would consume him, to the point of ending his marriage. To finance his work he scraped by collecting and reselling spent lead shot from the Vancouver Gun Club. He became involved in millionaire Tom Slick's Bigfoot expedition, which is described herein with mixed feelings from Dahinden and some truly bizarre details ... 

What the hell, Bob?

An anecdote which is fortunately absent from the modern Bigfoot canon has expedition member Bob Titmus stealing used sanitary pads from women's rest rooms and nailing them to trees around camp in an attempt to attract horny Bigfoots. This is, admittedly, in keeping with classic stories of Bigfoot kidnapping forest brides and the modern, sleazy underbelly of the Bigfoot genre:

From the Men's Adventure Library's excellent Cryptozoology anthology

Amidst this sleaze, Dahinden struggles to make scientists and the public appreciate the serious nature of witness sightings. The death of Slick in a 1962 plane crash robs the field of a major donor, and at times money is tight for Dahinden and he has to suspend field work. Always though he continues collecting reports, and the fact that people are seeing something out there - something that leaves enormous footprints - keeps him going. Some sheriffs and policemen have sightings, along with mineral prospectors and various First Nations individuals, and these witnesses are treated as especially reliable and important by Dahinden.

Co-author Don Hunter

Not so reliable is fellow Bigfoot hunter and confirmed hoaxer Ivan Marx, who leads his comrades on a merry chase around Bossburg, WA, with the infamous "Cripplefoot" tracks of 1969, alongside a grift from one Joe Metlow, a local prospector who claimed at first to have an entire Sasquatch captured in a mine, and then later only a foot in a freezer. 

Here is where extreme fractures appear in the Bigfoot community, as Roger Patterson, John Green, and Dahinden and their cliques all find themselves at odds over the Bossburg mystery. Dahinden is offended by the moneymaking attitudes of both Patterson and Green, with Patterson acting a carnival barker and Green throwing money at Metlow's bogus captured Bigfoot.

Eventually Peter Byrne discovers he's been swindled by Marx when he checks some supposed film of the crippled Bigfoot taken by Marx and finds it blank. Other accounts have said it was snippets of Mickey Mouse cartoons but in either case it was a bust, and Dahinden is left with a bad taste in his mouth.

Co-author Rene Dahinden and his quarry

Dahinden again, in the field

Despite his friction with Patterson, Dahinden is bullish on the Patterson-Gimlin Film. Expertise from Grover Krantz and "the Russians" Dmitri Bayanov and Igor Bourtsev is brought to bear in support of its authenticity.

It's interesting 50 years on that despite Dahinden's approval of it the film is only one small part of the book - nowadays it's one of the few pieces of Bigfoot evidence left for us to pick over, and instead of blurry reprints of still frames in black white we can watch a "hi-def" (give or take) stabilized version on youtube. But Dahinden was after the real thing, the genuine article of a live Bigfoot. 

Sketches from the Bords' Bigfoot Casebook Updated

One especially evocative sighting doesn't quite get the full treatment from Hunter and Dahinden: two prospector brothers who sighted a gigantic, auburn haired creature near Pitt Lake, BC in 1965. The creature was "only a city block away" from them but on the other side of a steep gorge, and had immense hands, "like canoe paddles" and yellow in color. The brothers also found huge footprints before and after their sighting.

Hunter and Dahinden leave out the mysterious parallel grooves found beside the tracks, as well as the brothers' description of a pink tint within the tracks. Janet and Colin Bord's Bigfoot Casebook Updated (2004) includes these as well as sketches made by the brothers. Perhaps Hunter and Dahinden thought the additional details too outré, a common tension in Bigfooting that sees "scientific" perspectives of relict hominoids set against cases that include UFO, ESP, and high strangeness.

The Bords' casebook also includes three other reports of captured Bigfoots beside the famous Jacko case, with two from 1800s newspaper accounts and one from 1940 in Alaska. Hunter and Dahinden do not mention these, as they term Jacko the only captured Bigfoot. Maybe they thought the other cases too flimsy or weren't aware of them, but the point of this nitpicking is to illustrate the varied perspectives within the Bigfoot field.

Above, the original 1973 hardcover edition from McClelland and Stewart Limited. One gets a melancholy feeling reading Dahinden's quest, and he himself admits it may be a fool's errand, but that he can never give it up. Despite his searching, he never had a sighting of his own.

We'll leave Dahinden with the last word here, as recollected by fellow Bigfooter Christopher Murphy: "You know, I've spent over 40 years - and I didn't find it. I guess that's got to say something."

Sasquatch is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1975 (original pub. 1973)