Author of the New Book ‘The Abominable Snowman of California' Dustin Severs on Modern Bigfoot Myth vs Historical Sasquatch Legend

I always thought it was weird that the words “Bigfoot” and “Sasquatch” are never mentioned once in the Hammer Horror film The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.

It was realised in 1957. Of course, after I read Dustin Savers excellent narrative history book about the early years of Bigfoot research The Abominable Snowman of California, it made perfect sense. Not only the term “Bigfoot” but its possible connection to the Himalayan Yeti weren’t really made until 1958. I know there are accounts dating to before 1958,  particularly in Native American folklore, but it made me wonder how much of what we think of as being part of Bigfoot lore today, do we owe to the Yeti myth? 

Would our concept of what Bigfoot is be different if there were not stories in the 1950s media about the Yeti?

Would the modern idea of Bigfoot be closer to the Native American mythology? If there is a real Bigfoot could it be very different to the one of popular culture that emerged after 1958?

I liaised with Dustin Severs with these questions and below is his thoughtful reply…

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Dustin Severs: My take on the connection between Bigfoot and the Yeti are summed up in the title of the book: TheAbominable Snowman of California. My thesis is basically that Bigfoot was an appropriation or rip off of the Yeti, and that’s the argument I present in the introduction. Given the popularity of the Yeti in the 1950s, I think that an American version of the Yeti was inevitable, and so we got Bigfoot. The Sasquatch legend is independent from both the Yeti and Bigfoot, and also had a significant impact on Bigfoot’s arrival. I think you can draw a straight line between René Dahinden’s arrival in British Columbia and the Centennial Sasquatch hunt of 1957 and Bigfoot’s arrival in Northern California the next year. As I write in the book, the Sasquatch were always considered Wildmen, a tribe of giant Indians. So, Bigfoot was thought to be a Wildman too throughout what I call the classic period. It was the Patterson-Gimlin Film that changed the perception of Bigfoot to a giant ape rather than a Wildman, which is what John Green had long argued.

The Seventies was THE decade for Bigfoot. The Legend of Boggy Creek from 1972 had a big impact. But the real watershed moment was the CBS documentary Monsters! Mysteries or Myth? which aired Thanksgiving weekend 1974 and was watched by about 60 million people. Yep, TV drew those kind of numbers before cable and the internet.

Zoological Journalist - Richard Freeman, Considers the Question: Is Bigfoot A Man, Another Ape, An Unknown species of Bear, or All of the Above?

...And we're back!

During my long hiatus from updating this blog, I have become increasingly fascinated by accounts of the Himalayan Yeti and North American Sasquatch, often called Bigfoot because of the large humanlike footprints of these mystery animals or 'wild men' leave in the forests of North America, and the wild, remote mountains of Asia. 

Roger Patterson with Bigfoot print cast from 1967

  Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Eric Shipton in 1951

Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Steve Berry in 2016
(Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)

Although the name 'Bigfoot' was not coined by newspapers until the 1950s, the phenomenon of an ape-like wild man living in the forests and mountains had been recorded in the storytelling cultures of different Himalayan peoples and Native American tribes for centuries. How could it be possible that two almost identical legends could develop independently from one another, separated by vast oceans in complete isolation, with a traceable lineage that extends over centuries? 

Further, if there are no native ape species in America; how is it possible then that Native Americans seem to have appeared to have known what an ape looked like before contact with European-American settlers? 

At the very least this would suggest that something resembling an ape must have been known to the ancestors of modern Native Americans. Could this be a race memory from the time before the Native Americans arrived on the American continent, presumably from Asia where the Yeti dwells? 

After combing YouTube for every documentary I could find, and joining Kindle Unlimited to read up on what Arthur C. Clarke called in his popular 1970s series Mysterious  World, "The Missing Apemen", I had more questions than answers.

Back in 2009, I had the privilege of asking Zoological Journalist, Richard Freeman, a few questions about his Cryptozoology research into mystery animals not yet accepted to exist by the scientific establishment. This was Freeman's response when I asked him about the Yeti:

The yeti, possibly a surviving form of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki that lived in China and India 500,000 years ago. Hair has been analysed in the UK, USA and China. The results were the same: unknown primate.

The full Q&A text interview can still be found HERE. Over a decade on, I decided to get back in touch with Richard Freeman to see if he had any thoughts on some of the questions I had. It would take a book for anyone to answer all of my questions, so in our email correspondence we focused on the following topics for discussion:

Is Bigfoot an ape more closely related to known apes? Or is it an offshoot of earlier forms of humans that survived into modern times? Is it a bear, an ape, a man, or three different creatures including all of these?

What are the similarities and differences between the footprints found in Asia and North America? 

The Patterson-Gimlin film. What is the best evidence it is real?

The famous Yeti scalp that was was found to be a fake. Is it possible it could be a form of clothing worn by real Yetis? 

Below is Richard Freeman's full, informative and thoughtful reply to my questions.

Richard Freeman

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Orang Pendek drawing from the documentary The X Creatures
(BBC/Discovery, 1998)

There is more than one type of mystery primate around the world. Some of these, like the Orang pendek, seem to be undiscovered species of ape. Others like the Almasty seem to be relic hominins - relations of the ancestors of man. The long and short of it is that we do not know for sure until we get a type specimen. 

We found hair near Orang pendek tracks in Sumatra. These were analyzed by Lars Thomas, an expert in animal hair based at Copenhagen University. He concluded that they were similar too but distinct from the Sumatran orangutan. Lars concluded that there is a large, unknown species of primate on Sumatra. I think this is the fourth extant species of orangutan. 

Startling new evidence for the Yeti has emerged recently. TV vet and naturalist Mark Evens, formally a Yeti skeptic, took an expedition into the mountains of Bhutan to make a documentary called Lost Kingdom of the Yeti. Water was taken from a pool in the mountains where the Yeti had been reported. From this environmental DNA was taken. Known as eDNA for short, this consists of traces of DNA an organism leaves in the environment. It is a relatively new development and could prove an invaluable tool for cryptozoology as the techniques for extracting traces of eDNA improve. Back in the lab the eDNA from the water was tested and several known species were discovered but there was also anomalous DNA. It came from a primate that shared 99% of its DNA with humans. Chimps share 98%. Whatever left that eDNA at the drinking hole was something unknown to science and closely related to man.

Dr Eva Bellmaine and Mark Evans discuss eDNA testing (Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)

I contacted Dr Eva Bellmaine, the French geneticist involved in the project. She confirmed the details and said that the samples were being held by a French company called Spygen. I contacted Spygen in order to see if we could conduct further tests. Spygen said that they were not the legal owners of the sample and later claimed it had been destroyed.

Some have suggested that it is nothing more than a bear. Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner claimed in his 2000 book My Search for The Yeti that the creature was nothing more than a brown bear. This is curious as on previous occasions he had claimed to have seen the Yeti and described it as a primate-type animal.

I once interviewed the actor Brian Blessed, a renowned explorer, and mountaineer himself, for a long-defunct and not very good magazine called Quest. Blessed, who is a friend of Messner, said that he had told him of his encounter with a Yeti. Blessed said that Messner had walked around some rocks and came "face to face" with the creature. He said it was not a bear, was 7 feet tall, man-like, and stood erect.

There are other occasions when Messner’s descriptions sound precious little like a bear. Julian Champkin of the Daily Mail wrote on August 16th, 1997, that Messner has:

…encountered the Yeti; and not once, but four times, once close enough to touch it. More importantly, he claims to have photographs of the creature, including a mother Yeti tending her child, and a Yeti skeleton.

 

Needless to say, none of his pictures have been forthcoming. Messner goes on to be quoted in the newspaper article to claim:

“...I searched for a week, 12 hours a day, in an area with no trees,” he says. “I didn't expect to find one so soon. First, we saw a mother with her child. I could only take a photograph from the back. The child had bright red fur, the older animal's fur was black. She was over two meters tall, with dark hair, just like the legend. When they saw us they disappeared.”

Two days later, he claimed to have come across and filmed a sleeping Yeti. The film is just as noticeable as the photos by its absence.

In an article relating to the BBC’s Natural World documentary on the Yeti, Messner describes seeing one from a range of 30 meters in Southern Tibet. The article says Messner is sure it is some kind of primate. He describes it in the article thus:

It was bigger than me, quite hairy and strong, dark brown-black hair falling over his eyes. He stood on two legs and immediately I thought he corresponds to the descriptions I heard from Sherpas and Tibetans.

So why did Messner write a book trying to explain away the Yeti as a bear when this transparently was not the creature he claimed to have seen? Was it because of fear of ridicule? And what became of the photos and film? Was Messner trying to take the focus away from these or make them seem less important by saying the yeti was just a bear? Could this be because the film and photos did not exist?

Sherpas become angry when Westerners say that the Yeti is just a bear, and quite rightly. The animal they pick repeatedly as looking most like the yeti is the gorilla but walking on two legs rather than four. The Yeti has a flat, ape-like face. The Yeti walks almost constantly on two legs. The Yeti can manipulate things with its hands and hence must have opposable thumbs. It is said to sometimes hurl large rocks and swing clubs. Bears have none of the above features. The Yeti is clearly some kind of primate, most likely a great ape. Until he delivers the goods, I’m inclined to dismiss Messner’s claims.

The term ‘Yeti’ is applied to three different creatures. The Dzu-teh is a hulking biped eight to ten feet tall with dark hair. It leaves massive, manlike footprints. 

The Mi-teh is more man-sized and moves both bipedally and on all fours. It has reddish hair and leaves tracks that have a divergent big toe. 

The smallest type, around four feet tall is known as the Teh-lma and has light brown to yellowish hair. The creatures have many regional names and are reported from the Himalayas, Tibet, China, Malaysia, and India.

The Dzu-teh seems identical to the North American Sasquatch. It may have crossed over the land bridge between Asia and North America during the ice age. The prime candidate for this larger kind is a massive ape from the fossil record known as Gigantopithecus blacki. This creature is known only from its massive fossil teeth and jaws. The fossil teeth were first found in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1935 by Dutch paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald. They were being sold as 'dragon's teeth'. Koenigswald recognized them as the molars of a titanic ape. Post-cranial remains have never been found but extrapolating from the size of the teeth and jaws Gigantopithecus may have stood ten feet tall and weighed 1300lb. The flaring of the lower jaws made Grover Krantz and Jeff Meldrum conclude that the neck extended directly under the creature's head meaning that it walked upright on two legs.

Pitting and wear patterns on the teeth of Gigantopithecus suggest a fibrous diet similar to that of the giant panda. The creature probably fed on bamboo, but fossil seeds found lodged between the teeth prove that it also fed on fruit. Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in China, Vietnam, and India. It was a hugely successful primate species existing for over two million years before becoming extinct 100,000 years ago due to climate change. However, some think that the animal simply retreated into the mountain forests and still exists today.

Another theory holds that the Yeti is some huge relic hominin.

The Yeti is not white. Its hair ranges from reddish to brown to black. In all my years of research, I have only come across two reports that give the Yeti white hair. The confusion comes from a mistranslation of one of the beast's many names, Metoh-kangmi, Sino-Tibetan for 'abominable man of the rocks'. It was mistranslated as 'abominable man of the snows. This is where we get the western term ‘Abominable Snowman’ from. It is also where the false idea of a white, snow-dwelling beast comes from. Above the snowline, there is little for a large primate to eat. The lush forests in the lower valleys make much more sense for a Yeti habitat. The term ‘Yeti’ is Tibetan for 'rock beast'.

The witnesses I spoke to in the Garo Hills in Northern India described the Yeti, known there as 'Mande barung', described it as ten feet tall and looking like a huge, upright gorilla.

The wild men of the former USSR, Mongolia, and Central Asia sound much more man-like than the hulking Yetis of Tibet, the Himalayas, and north India. The Russians took them so seriously that they even had an official Snowman Commission to investigate the creatures. At the time it was thought that they may be a relic form of Neanderthal. Since then, however, we have discovered that Neanderthals looked very much like us. It has been said that if you washed and shaved a Neanderthal and put him in modern clothes, he could walk down the street in any major city without raising anybody's eyebrows. Sure, he may look somewhat ugly by our standards, but he would clearly be human. Neanderthals used fire, made sophisticated tools and clothes, and may have even had a concept of religion and an afterlife. They sometimes buried their dead with grave goods. This is clearly not what we are dealing with here.

It is more likely that the wild men reported today are an offshoot of a much more primitive species of hominin. In recent years both fossil, sub-fossil and genetic evidence has unearthed many new species of human relatives. We know that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans. The genomes of all non-African people contain 1.5-4 % Neanderthal DNA.

In March of 2010, a tiny fragment of finger bone was found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. The bone was so well preserved that the whole genome was intact within it. It turned out to be from a new species of archaic human that have since been named the Denisovans. Only fragments of this species have been discovered - the finger bone, a toe bone, and two teeth - so the appearance of the Denisovans is unknown. However, they interbred with both Neanderthals and modern humans. Between 4 and 6% of the genome of Melanesians (people from New Guinea and the surrounding islands) is inherited from the Denisovans.

Some hominins are suggested not by any fossil remains but by genetic markers on populations of modern man. As well as Denisovan DNA Melanesians appear to have inherited DNA from another hominin currently unknown from the fossil record. Yet another unknown archaic hominin appears to have left genetic material in the populations of sub-Saharan Africans.

In 2003, some sub-fossil remains were found in the Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The remains were of a tiny species of hominin that were named Homo floresiensis. The remains were dated to around 50,000 years ago. The creatures would have stood no more than three feet, seven inches tall. The remains were found with stone tools and weapons as well as evidence of fire making. They seemed to have hunted giant rodents and pygmy elephants that lived on the island.

Homo floresiensis was thought to be a dwarf island form of Homo Erectus, the hominin that was the ancestor of not only modern humans but Neanderthals, Denisovians, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo antecessor. More recent examination of the remains however showed that they were more closely related to Homo habilis a more primitive hominin that has never been recorded outside of Africa and died out some 1,5 million years ago. So, Homo floresiensis not only half a world away from where it should have been but also nearly one and a half million years out of time. It also begs the question “what else is out there?”

TV Naturalist Mark Evens compared with the height of Homo floresiensis (Yeti: Myth, Man or Beast, 2016)

More recently, two, as yet un-named species of hominin dating to only ten thousand years ago (an eye blink in evolutionary terms) have been unearthed at Red Deer Cave in southwest China. They seem also to have affinities to Homo habilis. It seems that Homo habilis may have had its own lineage outside of Africa alongside Homo erectus.

As for the Patterson-Gimlin film, I will share my own thoughts, looking at the film through the eyes of a natural historian.

Firstly, the creature is a female, with visible breasts. If you were going to fake a film of bigfoot by using a tall man in an ape suit, where in the equation would you think of adding large hairy breasts? Such an artifact would make the costume more expensive and harder to create. In known ape species, the females have fairly flat breasts. Human females have rounded breasts as a counterbalance to the large buttocks. Humans are bipeds and walk upright. The gluteal muscles keep the body level when the legs are lifted. Human female pelvic girdles are broad in order to accommodate the birth canal. Hence the buttocks of human females are larger and more rounded than males. Great apes are knuckle walkers and move on all fours, ergo they lack developed buttock muscles and the pendulous breasts that counterbalance them. A hypothetical upright walking female ape would have rounded buttocks and breasts. The creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film possesses both of these. 

Secondly, the creature turns its head sideways and the viewer can clearly see a thick brow ridge and a forehead that slopes away at an angle to make a cone-shaped head somewhat like that of a gorilla. Fossil hominins display this same acutely sloping forehead above a thick brow ridge. The human forehead rises up directly above the brow. If the creature in the film was a man in a suit his human head would not fit into a mask with such a sloping forehead, there simply would not be enough room unless the mask was very oversized like some kind of carnival headpiece which it is clearly not.

Thirdly, the limb and body proportions of the creature are non-human. The torso is longer than a human's and the hip proportionately lower. The arms are 10% longer than a human's. The upper legs are longer than a human’s and the lower part is shorter. Even if you could make such a convincing costume, you could not get a human to fit into it. The arm and leg joints cannot be made to line up. Muscles can clearly be seen moving under the hair. In short, the subject in the film is not a man in a costume. 

 

And then we have the footprints. Jimmy Chillcutt a crime scene investigator and latent fingerprint examiner from the Conroe, Texas Police Department has taken fingerprints of many primates in zoos. He has examined many of the sasquatch print casts in the collection of Jeff Meldrum. He has found dermal ridges that lay parallel to the edge of the feet. 

The ridge flow pattern and the texture was completely different from anything I've ever seen. It certainly wasn't human, and of no known primate that I've examined. The print ridges flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which flow across. The texture of the ridges was about twice the thickness of a human, which indicated that this animal has a real thick skin.

The Yeti scalp from Nepal was an artifact made from the skin of a serow, a type of wild goat. However, it is thought that the monks used it in rituals where they dressed up as the Yeti. 

Khumjung's famous Yeti scalp (The X Creatures, 1998)

There are no reports of yeti wearing clothes. Their thick fur would give them ample protection and they are forest dwellers and not creatures of the eternal snows of the mountain peaks.

The sasquatch has on rare occasions been seen wearing human clothes. It seems they had stolen the clothes and put them on for amusement. Known apes and monkeys have been recorded as doing this. The Russian Almasty is said to sometimes do the same thing.

Big thanks to Richard Freeman for doing this!

Please visit his Amazon Author Page where you can find all of his books.

Visit The Centre for Fortean Zoology to find out more about Richard Freeman's Cryptozoology work: cfz.org.uk

Adam Davies (Monster Quest) answers some questions about the similarities 

between the Himalayan Yeti and North American Bigfoot.

A Room 101 Interview with Richard Freeman

This fortnight in Room 101, I've been fortunate enough to track down Richard Freeman of the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) for a special two-part interview. Here in Part I, we'll be discussing cryptozoology, from a number of angles, including looking at such infamous beasties as Alien Big Cats, the British Bigfoot, the Tasmanian Wolf, the Almasty, Yeti, and the Chupacabra. In part II (which will be featured in my new column here at BoA Sci-Fi Worlds) we'll be exploring the 45-year-long relationship between monsters and Doctor Who. 

 

Richard Thomas: First things first, thank you very much for giving us the time to answer these questions. I really appreciate it and I'm sure our readers will too. 

  

In hindsight, how do you think you first became interested in cryptozoology and other Fortean-type subjects? Richard Holland (editor of Paranormal magazine) and Nick Redfern both tell me you're a "huge" Doctor Who fan, would I be wrong in thinking that, like me, a childhood obsession with the classic series played a big part? 

  

Richard Freeman: Yes, you would be right. I grew up in the Jon Pertwee era and, because he was incarcerated on Earth by the Time Lords, the monsters the third Doctor faced seemed more compelling and real. A monster in your backyard is more frightening than a monster on some alien planet. Doctor Who oozed menace and weirdness in a way no other show has before or since. Giant maggots exploding out of Welsh slag heaps, killer dolls animated by an alien will, super-evolved marine dinosaurs, you wouldn't get stuff like this in Star Trek. This sparked my interest in monsters.

  

Richard Thomas: I understand you're the "zoological director" for the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ). What exactly does the CFZ do and how did you become involved with it? 

  

Richard Freeman: The Centre for Fortean Zoology is the only full-time scientific organisation dedicated to cryptozoology, the study of unknown species of animal. I came upon a copy of the society's journal Animals & Men in the now-defunct Potter's Museum of Curiosities in Cornwall. I started to write for them, became the Yorkshire rep then, after I finished my zoology degree, I was invited down to work with them on a permanent basis.

  

Richard Thomas: As a cryptozoologist who has written and lectured widely on the subject, aside from ABCs and the British Bigfoot (which we will discuss later), what are some of the "mystery animals" you are convinced are probably real? 

  

Richard Freeman: The thylacine or Tasmanian wolf, a striped, dog-like, flesh-eating marsupial. The thylacine was supposedly hunted into extinction in the mid-1930s but there have been over 4000 sightings since then, some by zoologists and park rangers. There have also been a couple of film sequences that I have seen analysed frame by frame. I have no doubt this creature is still around.

  

The giant anaconda. This snake gives birth to live young rather than laying eggs. Ergo it has severed its last link with the land and can spend 99% of its time in the water. Thus buoyed up, it can reach huge sizes, perhaps as much as 60 feet!

 

Orang-pendek, an upright walking ape from Sumatra. Debbie Martyr, head of the Indonesian Tiger Conservation Group has seen it four times. It is probably related to the orangutan but adapted for a bipedal existence on the forest floor.

  

The yeti, possibly a surviving form of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki that lived in China and India 500,000 years ago. Hair has been analysed in the UK, USA and China. The results were the same: unknown primate.

  

The Almasty, a relic hominid, an ultra-primitive kind of man, it has no fire and only ape-like tool use. I know two scientists who have seen this creature and I think I came within 12 feet of one last Summer on a derelict farm in Russia at 2.30 am.

  

Dragons, the original uber monster. Found in every culture and dates back at least 25,000 years in cave paintings. Still seen today in parts of Asia and Africa and the world's oceans. Possibly the descendant of a group of prehistoric seagoing crocodiles. World wide the dragon is more associated with water than it is with fire.

  

Richard Thomas: Likewise, are there any of these alleged cryptozoological creatures that you think are just modern-day myths or simply a product of peoples' imaginations?  

  

Richard Freeman: Surviving dinosaurs can be explained by other animals. The sauropod reports by an unknown species of giant, semiaquatic monitor lizard in both Africa. The Tyrannosaur like reports in New Guinea and Australia are probably giant monitor lizards rearing up onto their hind legs. The supposed horned dinosaur in Africa is probably a species of rhino. 

  

Richard Thomas: My younger sister actually had an ABC (Alien Big Cat) sighting here in Wales. What are your thoughts on the "big cats" seen in Britain? Do you think they're simply flesh and blood animals or do you think in some cases something far stranger could be happening?

  

Richard Freeman: There is no doubt big cats are alive and well in the UK. A female puma was captured in Inverness in 1980. These are descendants of escapees and deliberate releases. Until the Dangerous Wild Animals act anyone could keep anything as a pet and up till the early 1980s, an old duffer could start a zoo in their backyard! The nucleus of the current ABC population in the UK was from these irresponsible people.

  

Richard Thomas: Neil Arnold has written Monster! - The A-Z of Zooform Phenomena, is a truly unique book about: "a void of creatures which clearly aren't flesh and blood, yet which cryptozoology and the paranormal realm attempts to file, and yet ... fit into neither." What are your thoughts on "Zooform" phenomena?

  

Richard Freeman: Zooform phenomena may have something to do with the human mind. There is a global monster template of archetypes that are found all over the world. Dragons, hairy giants, little people, big cats, monster dogs, monster birds. These all have analogues with creatures that would have been preying on or competing with our primitive ancestors on the plains of East Africa three million years ago. Crocodiles, pythons, larger and smaller primate species, leopards and lions, hunting dogs, and large raptors like the martial eagle. I think we carry these beasts as fears or fossil memories in our collective subconscious. At certain times they can become externalised and take on a quasi-solid form for a while.

  

Richard Thomas: Nick Redfern has written a book with the interesting title Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot. What do you think the likelihood of such a creature in the UK really is and, perhaps more interestingly, what do think it could be? For instance, do you think we're dealing with some kind of missing link or something else entirely?

  

Richard Freeman: There is no way a species of giant ape could live undetected in the UK. You would need a population to carry the species on and there is just not enough room. The UK is not like Canada or Tibet, a real ape or hominid would have been discovered decades ago. I think what people are seeing are zooform creatures.

  

Interestingly though, relic hominids may have lived on mainland Europe until relatively recently. The trolls of Scandinavia sound very like them and as recently as the 1980s a hominid was reported from western Russia only 15 miles from the borders of Finland. 

  

Richard Thomas: The Chupacabra of Latin America is probably the strangest cryptozoological type creature I've heard of and think just might actually exist. What are your thoughts on the Chupacabra? Do you think we're dealing with something extraterrestrial or something much more mundane? 

  

Richard Freeman: My colleague Jon Downes has investigated the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico. He concluded that most of the attacks on livestock were done by imported mongooses as well as feral dogs. He thinks that the spiny-backed beast reported from the area is an unknown species of new world porcupine.

  

Richard Thomas: Have you got any books or anything coming out soon? Maybe a new case or something has grabbed your attention recently? 

  

Richard Freeman: I have two books out currently Dragons: More Than a Myth? from CFZ Press and Explore Dragons from Heart of Albion. Later this year my new book, The Great Yokai Encyclopaedia: an A to Z of Japanese Monsters is out from CFZ Press. I have become enthralled with Japanese folklore. They have the weirdest monsters on Earth including a giant man-eating sea cucumber that grows from the knickers of a girl, a giant flesh-eating rabbit that digs up human bodies to eat their livers, and a flaming pig that steals human genitals. Fortunately, most of these are purely imaginary. 

  

Richard Thomas: Thanks again, I'm looking forward to doing part II of this interview with you for my other BoA column Sci-Fi Worlds. There we can go more in-depth about our shared obsession with Doctor Who.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

Ghosts, Aliens, Yeti and the Late Great Nigel Kneale - Richard's Room 101

Who was Nigel Kneale?

This is the question that many readers are probably asking themselves right now, which is a real shame because, without the work of this great television pioneer, I highly doubt there would be much intelligent science fiction on television today. There probably would have never been a Doctor Who or X-Files and science fiction, on television at least, would in all likelihood still only be Saturday morning nonsense for little children and even littler minds.

So for those who are still wondering, who was Nigel Kneale?

  

Nigel Kneale (18 April 1922 – 29 October 2006) was a Manx (Isle of Man) writer, active in television, film, radio drama and prose fiction. He wrote professionally for over fifty years and was, in many ways, the father of serious science-fiction drama on television.

   

Kneale is best remembered today as the creator of his now-legendary character "Professor Bernard Quatermass." Quatermass was a heroic rocket scientist, kind of a prototype for Doctor Who, who saved humanity from a range of very different alien menaces in a trilogy of stories written by Kneale in the 1950s.

   

Kneale's Quatermass trilogy begins with The Quatermass Experiment, the first-ever manned space rocket returns to Earth with two of the three astronauts on board missing and the third possessed by some kind of hostile alien organism. In time, this organism consumes and changes the last astronaut into something horrific: a creature that threatens to possess and consume all other life on Earth. However, Quatermass confronts the monster and, with a moving speech, reaches what is left of his friend's humanity, persuading him to sacrifice himself to save the rest of mankind. 

  

In the next story, Quatermass II, Quatermass is asked to examine strange meteorite showers falling in rural England. His investigations lead to him discovering a vast conspiracy involving alien infiltration at the highest levels of the British and other major world governments. Somehow these aliens, who have a group consciousness similar to the "Borg" in Star Trek, can control the minds of people exposed to an alien parasite concealed in their meteorite-like projectiles. The aliens plan to colonise the Earth, but Quatermass manages to stop them by destroying their asteroid base in orbit, very sadly losing his close friend and colleague Dr Pugh in the process.

Finally, in the best and last story of the 1950s trilogy, Quatermass and the Pit, Quatermass becomes involved in the discovery of a strange object near some ape men remains millions of years old, at an archaeological dig in Knightsbridge, London. The odd object is first thought to be an unexploded World War II bomb, but then more ape men remain are found mysteriously inside the back of the object and later, more disturbingly, the decaying bodies of dead insect-like creatures are found inside the front. The object turns out to be a nuclear-powered spaceship, five million years old, the creatures: Martians and the ape-men: their creations ... us ... the human race.

  

It is revealed that when Mars was dying, the ancient Martians had tried to create a colony on Earth by proxy. They altered mankind's early ancestors, giving them minds and abilities like their own, but with a body adapted to Earth. More worrisome, they also passed on to mankind their genocidal instincts to destroy anyone different from themselves. In effect, making us the Martians now. Fortunately, the Martians died out before completing their plan and, as mankind bred and further evolved, most outgrew their darker Martian inheritance.

  

Unfortunately, somehow the spaceship reawakens the old Martian instincts, transforming more and more people into genocidal Martians on a race purge, destroying anyone unaffected by the ship's evil influence. However, Quatermass finds a way to stop the ethnic cleansing before the Martians turn the Earth into a second dead planet. He also tragically loses another friend in doing so. 

In each of the three Quatermass stories, Kneale managed to tap into the popular interests and, more importantly, anxieties of the time. In The Quatermass Experiment, he played on the mass interest in the early space race and the new threat of nuclear war. The UK conducted the earliest post-war tests of captured Nazi V-2 rockets in Operation Backfire, less than six months after the war in Europe ended, and the development of a British launch system to carry a nuclear device started in 1950. So there was a real fear that one of these rockets could come falling out of the sky bringing with it destruction, as one does in The Quatermass Experiment. Then, in Quatermass II, before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kneale exploited the popular paranoia about the threat of communist infiltration and subversion of the West. Like nuclear war, this was a real fear at the time. For instance, in 1951, two members of the British establishment, Burgess and Maclean, made international headlines by very publicly defecting to the Soviet Union. And, finally, with the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 still very much fresh in people's minds, Kneale wrote Quatermass and the Pit admittedly as a fable about race hate. 

  

Kneale's Quatermass trilogy clearly had a huge impact that continues to be felt even today, influencing everyone from Chris Carter to Stephen King. The Quatermass Experiment (1953) was the very first science fiction production to be written especially for an adult television audience and cleared the way for the many others that followed it. Also, the three basic alien invasion storylines were first pioneered on television by Kneale in the Quatermass stories. In The Quatermass Experiment, we go to the aliens and bring them back, in Quatermass II the aliens come to us, and in Quatermass and the Pit, we discover that the aliens were here all along.

  

But it would be a mistake to think that Nigel Kneale only wrote stories involving alien possession and invasion. An excellent example of this is The Abominable Snowman, a 1957 Hammer horror film based on Kneale's own BBC television play The Creature. Again tapping into popular interest at the time, the film follows the exploits of an English anthropologist with an American expedition as they search the Himalayas for the legendary Yeti, the ape-man of Tibet. In the real world, speculation about the existence of an unidentified creature living in the Himalayas had been sparked off in November 1951, when Eric Shipton and Michael Ward of the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition found several large footprints as they traversed the Menlung Glacier, and, two years later, Edmund Hillary made a similar discovery during his historic conquest of Mount Everest.

  

In the film, Kneale turns perceptions on their head by suggesting that the so-called Abominable Snowman is not so abominable at all and, perhaps, even a great deal better than mankind who turn out to be the real monsters. The central idea is that the Yeti are our collateral descendants from the apes and are patiently and peacefully waiting for mankind to destroy himself, either quickly through war or slowly through pollution, before descending from the mountains to inherit the Earth. 

  

Another excellent example is The Stone Tape, a Christmas ghost story from 1972 and Kneale's last major original work for the BBC. Like Quatermass and the Pit before it (which suggested that poltergeist activity could be explained by the psychic abilities left to us by the Martians), The Stone Tape combined science fiction with the supernatural. The television play revolves around a group of scientists who move into a new research facility: an allegedly haunted Victorian mansion. Curious, they investigate the alleged ghost but soon determine that it is really just some kind of recording of a past event somehow stored by stone in one of the rooms (the stone tape of the title). Believing that this discovery may lead to the development of a whole new recording medium, which they were originally brought together to find in the first place, they throw all their knowledge and high-tech equipment into trying to find a means of playing back the stone tape recording at will. However, their investigations only serve to unleash a far older and more malevolent force, with tragic consequences. Of course, The Stone Tape is where "the stone tape theory" familiar to many paranormal researchers today finds its origins.

  

Kneale also wrote three excellent dystopian texts, a fourth Quatermass story The Quatermass Conclusion, a 1954 television adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four for the BBC, and The Year of the Sex Olympics. However, we will have to discuss these in a future edition of Room 101. 

   

Hopefully, this goes some way to answering the question of who Nigel Kneale was. Of all the great science fiction writers to emerge from these islands since World War II, including the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps only Nigel Kneale comes anywhere close to matching H G. Wells in terms of lasting public impact and sheer brilliance. Both successfully tapped into the mass anxieties of their time and placed them at the centre of their stories, making science fiction accessible to the general public. In short, what Wells did for science fiction in print, Kneale did on television, clearing the way for intelligent science fiction drama on the small screen.

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The Esoteric Worlds of Doctor Who - Richard's Room 101

And now for something completely different. In the first two editions of this new column, we delved into the black world of conspiracy theories. In this edition, we are going to lighten things up a bit and migrate to what will be another major topic in Room 101: cult television shows and how they relate to the esoteric.

We start with what is the longest-running science fiction television series in the world and, in my opinion, also the best ... Doctor Who. For those people that do not own a television set and haven't had the time to read the novelisations, Doctor Who is about the adventures of a mysterious alien known simply as "the Doctor." With his companions, the Doctor explores time and space in his travel machine the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), encountering danger, solving problems and righting wrongs wherever he goes.

I first became a fan of Doctor Who when my father bought me a video of Genesis of the Daleks, written by Terry Nation. It tells the story of how the Doctor's greatest enemies, the Daleks, were created millennia ago on the war-devastated planet Skaro by the evil genius Davros. To this day, it is my favourite Doctor Who story and, as a child, it triggered my first major interest in science fiction and the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos.

If I had to narrow it down to one single thing that got me interested in esoteric subjects in the first place, it would have to be watching repeats of Doctor Who while I was growing up. The writers of the series would often take inspiration from the realms of the esoteric and, in its original 26-season run, everything from bug-eyed aliens to the lost city of Atlantis and the Loch Ness Monster would make an appearance. There are far too many examples of how esoteric subjects were tied into Doctor Who to write about them all, so here are just some of my favourites ... 

   

Death to the Daleks, again by Terry Nation, is an excellent example of how the esoteric was tied into Doctor Who. In this story, the Doctor is drawn to the planet Exxilon, where he must outwit the native savage Exxilons and a crew of stranded Daleks in order to survive. 

  

It looks like the description of the Greys, short with grey skin and big black eyes, might have played a big part in the design of the Exxilons costumes. This is interesting because the story was first broadcast back in 1974, three years before that image of what an alien should look like was made so popular by the release of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. 

   

Also the writers seem to have taken a lot of inspiration from Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods and the ancient astronaut theory. At one point in Death to the Daleks, the Doctor goes as far as stating that he believes that the ancient Exxilons, who we learn were far more advanced, travelled to Earth and taught the Peruvian Incas how to build their great temples. In an earlier story, The Dæmons, the Doctor tells us that another advanced race of aliens, the Dæmons from the planet Dæmos, came to Earth 100,000 years ago in order to help mankind's development as part of some scientific experiment. 

   

As well as the ancient astronaut theory, Mars anomalies also seem to have inspired the writers of Doctor Who. One story, written by Robert Holmes, is even called Pyramids of Mars. In this story, it is revealed that the ancient Egyptian Gods were inspired by a race of powerful aliens called the Osirans, the last of whom, Sutekh the Destroyer, is imprisoned in the Great Pyramid of Mars. 

   

The lost city of Atlantis is another major esoteric subject that is tied into a number of Doctor Who stories. In The Dæmons, after learning about the many wars and atrocities mankind has committed against their own people, Azal, the last of the Dæmons, warns the Doctor that: "My race destroys its failures. Remember Atlantis."

    

In two other stories, the Doctor even visits the lost city itself. In The Time Monster, the Doctor travels back in time before Atlantis was struck by disaster and we learn that Atlantis was part of the Minoan civilisation (which is a real-life theory still advocated by some today). This is another sign that the writers were very much inspired by the esoteric and the ideas circling it. In an earlier story, The Underwater Menace, the Doctor discovered that some Atlanteans had survived the sinking of Atlantis and had continued to live beneath the waves in isolation from the rest of humanity into modern times (perhaps, in a small way, echoing some of the ideas that would evolve into Mac Tonnies' cryptoterrestrial hypothesis). 

   

However, by far the best two examples of Doctor Who stories that incorporate elements of what would become the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis are Doctor Who and the Silurians and its sequel The Sea Devils, both by Malcolm Hulke. Both stories centre on an ancient super-intelligent race of reptiles that evolved on and dominated the Earth when man was nothing more than a primitive ape. After resting in hibernation deep underground and beneath the sea for millions of years, they awake only to discover that the apes have evolved into man and now rule their world. Very interestingly, Doctor Who and the Silurians was the first broadcast in 1970 the same year Ivan T. Sanderson's Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs was first published. This book hypothesised that perhaps an advanced aquatic non-human civilisation may have evolved right here on the Earth, much in the same way as the Silurians and Sea Devils of Doctor Who did.

   

Ivan T. Sanderson was also well known for his books on cryptozoology (a word Sanderson himself coined in the early 1940s), in particular, books on Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, Mokèlé-mbèmbé, Yeti, and Sasquatch. All of these creatures, in some form or other, would make an appearance in Doctor Who. For instance, in Terror of the Zygons, the Doctor encountered the Zygon Skarasen at Loch Ness, Scotland, the creature was clearly the Loch Ness Monster. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, we saw a number of prehistoric beasts in modern London, among them a Brontosaurus, perhaps an ancestor of Mokèlé-mbèmbé. Finally, in The Abominable Snowmen and its sequel The Web of Fear, both written by the team of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (one of the co-authors of the controversial 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail), the Doctor is threatened by a small army of alien robots disguised as Yeti.

   

So clearly the writers of Doctor Who were inspired by and tied a lot of esoteric-type subjects into the stories. So what?

   

Well, one of the big question issues Tim Binnall keeps raising in BoA: Audio is the lack of young people in Ufology and some other esoteric subjects. Perhaps the best way to solve this problem is to get children interested in science fiction first. Let them learn about these esoteric mysteries through fiction, and then, as they grow up, they will come looking for the truth behind the fiction. The first documentaries about UFOs and the Yeti that I probably watched were episodes of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and the reason I watched them was that I had heard about UFOs and the Yeti on Doctor Who!

   

If this theory is correct then Ufology and other esoteric subjects have nothing to fear, the new series of Doctor Who is going strong with millions of very young fans. With that growing fanbase, we can be hopeful that in a few years they, too, will discover our esoteric world.

  

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