Ivan T Sanderson: The Original Legend Tripper

Ivan T Sanderson

 

Hey Legend Trippers, some body once asked me what got me into Legend Tripping. The thing that really got me into it was the fact that I was scared of the unexplained. I didn’t like being scared, so I started researching the truth behind the legends. Lucky for me my school library was full of books on the subject. Soon my fear turned into fascination and I found that I really enjoyed reading about legends and the unexplained. I really enjoyed the books on cryptozoology and found one name that kept coming up all the time. The author’s name was Ivan T. Sanderson. He had an about seven books on not only cryptozoology, but on UFO’s and other unexplained events. While Charles Fort is remembered for researching and recording strange events, he never went out and investigated them. Sanderson on the other hand traveled the world looking into these strange legends. He defines what a true legend tripper is. With that, I decided for this post I wanted to do an article on somebody who I would have loved to have met, but also who I also idolize.

Ivan T Sanderson is probably one of the most remembered individuals in legend tripping history. He is credited with coining the term cryptozoology. in addition to his work as a cryptozoologist/monster hunter, but he also investigated unidentified flying object encounters, which makes him one of the first legend trippers. He wrote several books on cryptozoology and flying saucers and was one of the first investigators to focus on unidentified submersed objects, or USOs.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Sanderson earned a Bachelor degree in zoology, followed with his Master’s degrees in botany and ethnology (all from Cambridge University). Like his father, Sanderson loved travel and adventure and upon finishing school, traveled extensively and began leading expeditions. In the late 1930s he began to write books, illustrated with his own drawings, about the animals observed during his expeditions, which were often to collect wild specimens. During World War II Sanderson worked as a spy for British intelligence, reporting German bases in the Caribbean islands. At end of the war Sanderson found himself stationed in New York City as a press agent. After the war he elected to stay in the United States and eventually became a naturalized citizen.



With the success of his books on exotic animals, Sanderson began to make appearances as a naturalist on radio and television shows. He eventually started a business that rented exotic animals to television, motion pictures and even zoos. Although he continued to work in the mainstream world of naturalism, he also was beginning to gain notoriety for his openness to the idea that there were animals unknown, or at least unacknowledged, to science but spoken of in legends. It was during this time the he created the word, cryptozoology, to describe a new branch of science that would work to determine if reports of these unknown animals had basis in fact. Bernard Heuvelmans was the first to use it publication, but he did credit Sanderson for creating the term.



By the 1940s Ivan T. Sanderson found himself as an established naturalist and nature writer. His works often appeared in popular magazines, though, instead of scientific journals. It was during his travels that he started hearing stories about mysterious creatures. While in the Congo, he and his expedition, encountered a legendary beast called the Kongamato. Described as some type of flying dinosaur, Sanderson determined that the Kongamato was in fact a large bat. By the mid-1940s most of Sanderson’s popular magazine articles strayed away from mere adventure stories or reports on exotic, and focused more on the strange creatures such as sea monsters and the Yeti. He tended to believe that if such stories were true, the monsters described would be simply be previously undiscovered (or believed to be extinct) flesh and blood animals.



After Sanderson began to write on cryptozoology he began to become more connected with the hunt for mysterious creatures than “mainstream” zoology. Eventually his popular articles on cryptozoology (and other strange topics) would be collected into the books “Things,” “More Things” (now available as a single edition) and “Investigating the Unexplained.” He also wrote “Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come To Life.” As a noted and well known zoologist and naturalist, it is not surprising that he is best remembered for his work in the field of cryptozoology.



Sanderson also wrote about UFO’s and extraterrestrials. Among his works was Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs, one of the first books to take a serious look at USOs. It is a methodical book that set out to explain to readers, most of whom would have been unfamiliar with the idea of UFOs in our seas, why the subject was so important. He also wrote “Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks At Flying Saucers” which set forth many UFO cases, including stories and evidence that would now fall into the realm of the “ancient alien” theory. Three of the essays in his collection “Things” also focus on unidentified flying objects.

In 1968, the year after Roger Patterson captured the world's imagination with his notorious Bigfoot film, Minnesota carnival huckster Frank Hansen began traveling the American sideshow circuit to exhibit a startling attraction: 'The Famous Missing Link Iceman.' This was the alleged corpse of a six-foot, hairy man-monster, which lay frozen solid in a coffin of ice. Hansen did a brisk business at thirty-five cents a peek.

 



Hansen told varying tales of where the Iceman came from, but the gist of his story was that a crew of either Russian or Japanese fishermen had discovered the body off the coast of Siberia, frozen in a giant block of ice. From there, the creature made its way to an emporium in Hong Kong, where it was purchased by an anonymous American oil millionaire. For whatever reason, this eccentric tycoon then rented his extravagant purchase to Hansen, so that it might be displayed before the carnival-going masses. A far-fetched tale, to be sure, but hang on - it gets even worse.



News of the Iceman grabbed the attention of two prominent cryptozoologists, Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans. Sanderson called Hansen and asked for permission to visit his home in Minnesota and view the creature. Hansen says that he turned down Sanderson's request, but a few days later, Sanderson turned up at Hansen's doorstep, along with his Belgian colleague Heuvelmans. Hansen recalls that he initially refused to show the men the creature, but after the three of them shared a quart of gin, he relented.

It is unclear whether the Iceman that Sanderson and Heuvelmans saw was the 'original' corpse or Hansen's "fabricated illusion," but in either case, the two experts were stunned. They agreed that this was an actual animal, a specimen of an unknown primate species. They took photographs and made elaborate sketches (as in the drawings by Sanderson shown on this page), although the opacity of the ice keep them from observing as much detail as they would have liked. Hansen flatly refused their request to open the lid, but Heuvelmans later shattered the glass cover accidentally by dropping a light bulb on it. A horrible stench escaped from within, alarming Sanderson because the smell of putrefaction meant that the body must be rapidly decomposing, and needed to be thoroughly examined by scientists before any further deterioration.



Following Sanderson and Heuvelmans’s visit, the Smithsonian Institution contacted Hansen and asked to examine the Iceman. At this point he announced that the original specimen had been returned to its millionaire owner, and he was now touring with a replica. Embarrassed by their compulsive gullibility, Sanderson and Heuvelmans backed away from their initial endorsement of the Iceman. Sanderson investigated Hansen's claims of having the creature duplicated by movie prop artists, and discovered that three California companies had manufactured latex Icemen for Hansen as early as 1967.

 

            The most logical scenario is that there was no millionaire owner and no real monster, and Hansen changed the story about his fake creation whenever reality began to pry too deeply. First he introduced the story of the "replica switcheroo" after Sanderson and Heuvelmans brought scientists breathing down his neck, and then he retroactively stretched the substitution tale back to before the Iceman's first tour, once word was out that he'd had Hollywood build props for him since the beginning.

 

One of the most overlooked incidents in Sanderson’s career was his investigation of the Flatwoods Monster in Braxton County, West Virginia. True Magazine and the North America Newspaper Alliance asked Sanderson to travel to the area and investigate the case. He arrived in the area just a few days after the sightings and was there at the same time as famous Ufologist Gray Barker. He spoke to legendary radio host Long John Nebel about the encounter in 1953 and, speaking from memory, recounted the investigation. Among the things he mentions is the fact that there were multiple UFOs spotted in the time before the Flatwoods Monster incident, as later pointed out by researcher Frank Freschino.

Sanderson also investigated the 1955 Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, also known as the Kelly Green Men case. It is an alleged close encounter with supposed aliens and one of the most well-known and well-documented cases in the history of UFO incidents and a favorite for study in ufology.

While Sanderson did go look into some legends, there were those he didn’t  believe. He discovered the 1909 "Jersey Devil" incident was an elaborate real estate hoax. When it came to ghost hunting, Sanderson went on record disapproving of ghost investigations, as he thought the phenomenon was too "intangible" and therefore not amenable to genuine scientific investigation. He was however avidly interested in investigating ship and plane disappearances linked to the paranormal. He studied not only the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon but also the Philadelphia Experiment story. From these he focused his attention on ten areas that were approximately equidistant and were the subjects of reported unexplained incidents and/or electro-magnetic distortions.

Ten of Sanderson’s Vile Vortices are located in the earth’s tropical climates; five of them fall within the Tropic of Cancer and the other five within the Tropic of Capricorn. The remaining two Vile Vortices are located at the North and South Poles. Together the Vile Vortices form the vertices of an icosahedron (a 20-faced polyhedron). One of Sanderson’s theories was that hot and cold air and sea currents crossing these lozenge-shaped areas might create the electromagnetic anomalies responsible for the disappearances of planes and sea-going vessels and the reported mechanical and instrument malfunctions in these areas.



Originally founded in 1965 as the Ivan T. Sanderson Foundation, the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU) was a non-profit group started by Sanderson. It was dedicated to examining a wide range of topics outside the realms of mainstream science. While the group was in existence it published a newsletter called “Pursuit” that followed everything from living dinosaurs to UFOs. Ivan T. Sanderson passed away in 1973. Unfortunately, SITU eventually disbanded and their journal has not been collected or republished. His contributions to the field of cryptozoology and the field of unidentified flying object research deserve to be remembered, even celebrated, making him one of the first legend trippers.



In closing I just wanted to make a comment that I own everyone of Ivan T Sanderson’s book and was a member of the SITU until it was disbanded. As you can see above, I still own my membership card and my issue of Pursuit magazine. There are certain people that really have an impact on your life and he was it. Here was someone going out there and doing what I always wanted to do; investigate the unexplained and legends. Richard Grigonis did a awesome tribute to the great man at Ivan T Sanderson tribute. I will always consider Ivan T Sanderson the original legend tripper.