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WONDERS ARCHIVE - LINKS - HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD - SOME FORTEANS
Forty issues of WONDERS were published from 1992 to 2006. The publishing history is outlined below.
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mark.hall.wonders@att.netTHE MYSTERY OF THE TOWER BEACONS
The archaeological finds at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland were greeted with excitement in the 1960s. They were proclaimed to be the proof that Norsemen a thousand years ago advanced beyond the Greenland colonies to points further west.
The idea that they could be the remains of Greater Ireland was given no serious consideration at the time. Helge Ingstad, who did the early work on the site, dismissed the idea out of hand. Those who came after him have done no better.
Greater Ireland (also called Albania and Hvitramannaland) was identified by the Norsemen as the place of a colony near to Vinland that was occupied primarily by Irishmen. Refugees from Europe had gathered in Greater Ireland. They held captive among them two historical figures in the Norse sagas, Ari Marson and Bjorn Asbrandson. They otherwise killed the Norsemen who were regarded as enemies a thousand years ago. Other Norsemen visited the colony and managed to get away and tell their stories of the people they encountered.
The appearances of Greater Ireland in the sagas is only incidental. The sagas were family histories and the Norse had no particular interest in telling the story of the refugees who established Greater Ireland.
The L'Anse aux Meadows site makes perfect sense as one portion of the four parts of Greater Ireland that appear to have been established in Newfoundland and New Brunswick by those refugees. From the evidence of the sagas Greater Ireland was in existence in the 10th century. Another source indicates it lasted until at least the 14th century.
During those hundreds of years the people in Greater Ireland exploited the natural resources of the Eastern Arctic. It has been suggested that they teamed up with the carriers of the Dorset Culture in those endeavors. The site at the northern tip of Newfoundland was their ship outfitting and repair site for those trips to the north. When the Norsemen first advanced into the neighborhood that site was abandoned, The buildings were burned (a Dorset lamp was found in the remains of a building roof) and most importantly three stone cairns that had stood at the site were demolished.
Cairns and tower beacons of distinctive construction have been a mystery in Eastern Canada. These tower beacons and groups of cairns appear to have served as a system of landmarks that guided the people of Greater Ireland. This area of the world is known for its foggy shorelines and forested landscapes that have led people astray, If Leif Ericson had devised anything so clever, Thorfinn Karsefni would not have missed Leif's Vinland and sailed instead down the east coast of Newfoundland. And historians would not have struggled to identify the true location of Leif's Vinland, which seems to have been on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence River.
The widespread occurrence of these landmarks is indicated on the map below, The southernmost ones occur on the island of Newfoundland. Some of these landmarks have been destroyed in historic times, either out of ignorance about what they were or -- we are told -- by people who thought there was treasure buried beneath them.
Botanical evidence found at L'Anse aux Meadows indicates a connection with New Brunswick, There might have been a settlement of Greater Ireland on Chaleur Bay. That would place the heart of Greater Ireland "a little behind Vinland" which is how it is described in a centuries-old record.
There is no guarantee that archaeological evidence will have survived in New Brunswick. Even some of the stone cairns have been totally wiped away by now. But then no one has been looking there for landmarks and Greater Ireland. Such a find would add greatly to resolving the issues of Greater Ireland. Its place in history has been neglected by archaeologists due to prejudices voiced long ago and perpetuated throughout the twentieth century.
Greater Ireland was discussed at length with full sources in WONDERS VOLUME 6.
THE DORSET CULTURE AND TROLLS
THE DORSET CULTURE
Known as Trolls by the Norsemen and Tornit by the Eskimos
by Mark A. Hall
The identity of the Dorset Culture is not a settled question. Archaeological finds in Eastern Canada show that the bearers of the Dorset Culture were around from 500 BC to AD1200. Burials during that period have not given a clear picture of the identity of the Dorset.
Many peoples were around at the later end of that period. They were: the Eskimos, groups of Indians, the Greenlanders (of Norse origin), the pre-Columbian Irish (and other refugees who inhabited Greater Ireland), and the distinctive tall stock of neighbors the Eskimos called the Tornit. Archaeologists have come to think that the Tornit are to be equated to the Dorset Culture but the academic viewpoint has refused to recognize the accuracy of Eskimo accounts of who the Tornit were.
The Eskimos have described them as tall and very strong. They were not too bright in the view of the Eskimos. The Tornit were hunters and intermarried with the Eskimos. The Eskimos over time made an effort to kill them off one by one. One of the best records of Eskimo accounts was preserved by Ernest W. Hawkes (1883-?) writing in THE LABRADOR ESKIMO in 1916. (Some of that record appears on pages 38 to 42 of my book LIVING FOSSILS.)
Figurines found at Dorset sites show that these people wore parkas with high collars rather than hoods. I have suggested that the high collars were more practical for beings with acute hearing which Trolls are reported to possess.
The best remains of a Dorset person were found in a grave in Greenland. In 1926 Danish archaeologists excavated a Norse graveyard dating to the twelfth century AD. The bones from one grave were unique. A first response to the find was the judgment of a Danish professor, F. C. C. Hansen, that they were much like a troll. He noted that the bones were not at all like an Eskimo and were nothing like the Norse burials that surrounded this one grave. He gave the bones a type name of Homo gardarensis. Despite some negative comments made since then, the distinctive name is likely to be seen one day as justified. There was no agreement on the part of other anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s. When Hansen died, the find was labeled a case of disease and stored away to be ignored for its true importance ever since.
The accounts of the Eskimos were overlooked. Also the Greenland colonists' encounters with Trolls were also ignored. The colonists, as noted in sagas, said they had met with Trolls in Greenland.
Other records from that time noted the presence of Trolls. A Norwegian, Bjorn Einarrson, was driven by a storm to Greenland and landed in Eriksfjord. He spent two years there from 1385 to 1387. He had saved two young trolls from drowning. One historian has suggested these were "Eskimo children." After all, Trolls don't exist in the academic world. But the Norsemen knew the Trolls that they met in the New World because they were the very same tall stock of people they knew in the Old World as Trolls. As such the tall creatures were not remarkable but simply commonplace. The Norse records mention them but make no special effort to describe them for this reason.
Some Eskimos have said there are surviving Tornit at the back of Greenland fjords. The Tornit live there in concealed underground dwellings. There is much more known about Trolls than the early Norse and Eskimo records. There are modern reports that have been describing the same tall, strong people.
One of the better records was made in Michigan by the French in 1862. A group of Trolls were seen many times in the what we know today as the Thumb Region of Michigan. According to Le Voleur in Paris for August 15, 1862:
There have just come indications, says the Courier des Estats Unis, that in the forests that extend along Lake Saint Claire and Lake Huron there exists a tribe or family of savage beings of a formidable and bizarre appearance, of a phenomenal and unknown species. This is a troop of seven or eight individuals, of which two are men (if it can be said that these beings are human) and one woman or female, and three or four young or small ones. The men are of an elevated stature, slender but strongly muscled; the woman of a height below the medium, and the young ones aged from ten to sixteen years; all are covered with hair, and the woman and the young ones, even as the men, have the face framed with a bristly beard, like those of certain simians of Brazil; one of the men has a bald head and a white beard. The head is very large in proportion to the body, the stomach is enormous, the arms inordinately long and the legs are knock-kneed....
Whence comes this tribe? No one knows. About two months ago it was glimpsed by Indian hunters who came to carry their furs to Mont-Clemens; this was thirty miles to the west. Eight days later, they were encountered in the vicinity of Port Huron. A little later, they had gone back up toward Saginaw, on the shores of the Shiawassee River. Everywhere they brought terror — unreflecting terror, without doubt, for it was not justified by any positive deed that one could impute to them. Nevertheless, some attributed to them depredations committed in the villages, from which had disappeared some livestock and domestic animals.
In certain places where they had been seen to pass, bizarre deeds were reported. In a village near La Peer, nearly all the dogs died in the night. Elsewhere frightened cows stampeded across fields and forests., and bats flew around in broad daylight. Briefly, it seems that, after their appearance, the country they traversed was stricken by some malicious witchcraft. There was one parish on the shore of Lake Huron where the bell had tolled by itself in the night; the next morning they were seen disporting themselves in the water, in the midst of a storm, and to attain a small island by swimming. The rustics took up their muskets and followed them with boats; when they arrived on the island they (the creatures) had disappeared. The leaves of the bushes, across the copse where they had passed, were withered as at the end of autumn.
Those who have seen them say they crawl like serpents, run like deer, swim like fish and, if need be, vanish like shadows. Briefly, this is an extravagant apparition; superstition, naturally, mixes itself in. Fear is everywhere; the villagers are up in arms, and in several districts vigilante groups form to hunt a lawless band. As of now no one can come near it; hunting dogs, flung into the pursuit, have not been able to catch it by speed, and in all the region of the lakes meetings are held to plan to purge the country of the “family of the devil,” as they call it. Probably it will go as it has come, the path by which it flees unblocked, even as was the path by which it arrived ignored.
[This item was published by George Haas in his BIGFOOT BULLETIN NO. 25. The original article was provided by Igor Bourtsev and translated from the French by Richard L. Tierney.]
A similar group of these same unusual people was reported again near Fenton, Michigan, in 1910. Three large ones and two small ones were seen at White Lake west of Fenton. In recent decades the reports have usually consisted of single individuals in the Thumb Region. They are seen to be males seven feet tall. Elsewhere in the East the reports of females and offspring are now rare which suggests they are kept out of sight.
The modern reports (meaning those in the last two centuries) have been made in many places across North America. The accounts share the same characteristics of height, footprints, physical descriptions, and local traditions and local names for Trolls awarded to them by the local populations of humans. These hairy people were at one time successful on the continent but they were displaced by waves of human occupation such as the Kennewick People, the American Indians, the Eskimos, settlers from Europe, and so on.
The bones from Greenland support the contention that Trolls are a modern survival of the line of descent from Homo heidelbergensis. This identity has not been made lightly. It was presented at length in my book LIVING FOSSILS first published in 1999. That book should be consulted for more on the modern survival of Trolls.
Also the associations of the Dorset Culture with their neighbors was discussed further in "The Pre-Columbian Irish in the New World" in WONDERS VOLUME 6 (2001) on pages 67 to 96.
VOLUME 10
Contents of Volume 10 - 128 pages
Editorial: Vintage Forteana
The Wings of Night - Giant Bats
Benoit Crevier Pursues the "Monster Eagle" of Quebec (1892)
Review of UNNATURAL PHENOMENA (Jerome Clark)
Review of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CRYPTOZOOLOGY (Michael Newton)
Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888)
The Crested and Wattled Snake by Philip Henry Gosse
Editorial: Those "Best-Sellers"
"Flying Dinosaurs" - Pterosaurs Seen Alive
More Living Dinosaurs - Dryptosaurus, Tanystropheus, and other remarkable sights
Editorial: Growing up on the web
Satyrs and Centaurs - the origins of "werewolves" from ancient times to our own
Satyrs in Africa - encounters on the Kenya Coast
Editorial: The wonders never cease. . . .
Lost Lands and Colonies - mysteries to solve from Atlantis to the La Verendrye Stone
Charles Fort and Jayne Mansfield - on keeping a sense of wonder
Ivan Sanderson, the Iceman, and the Mummy Case
Index to Volume 10
VOLUME 9
Volume 9 - 128 pages
Contents of Vol.9:
The Yeti in Iowa
Merchants of Discomfort: What Forteans Do
Why the World is Full of Wonders
North American Wildmen in Legend and in Fact
The Satyrs in Our Midst
October 1958 in the History of Bigfoot
The Age of Wild Men
OINTS and Earthlings
Index to Volume 9
* To more reports of Satyrs *
Volume 8 - 128 pages
Contents of Volume 8:
Mysterious Midwest: Spook Lights and Early Exploration
Review of MYSTERIOUS CREATURES
Charles Edson's Quest for Bigfoot
The Bigfoot Community's Wallace Problem
Why Nothing Gets Solved in One Lifetime
The Life of Ivan T. Sanderson
Bibliography of Ivan T. Sanderson
The Acambaro Collection and More
Mysterious Midwest: Cave Mysteries
Midwestern Lake Monsters
Wrought in Stone
Index
Volume 7 - 128 pages
Contents of Volume 7:
The Vampire Beast of Bladenboro, North Carolina
Living Dinosaurs
The Hidden Animals of the Carolinas
Birds that Carry Off People
Mystery Profiles, 2002
The Real Bigfoot and Genuine Bigfoot Tracks
Index
Volume 6 - 128 pages
Contents of Volume 6:
A 32-page guide to North American Monsters
A Primer on Mermaids
The Pre-Norse Europeans in the New World
The Pre-Columbian Irish in the New World
Diversity Among the Mystery Primates
Mysteries of West Virginia
Index
Volume 5 - 128 pages
Contents of Volume 5:
A Different Kind of Bigfoot
Vikings in the New World
The Runestone at Kensington, Minnesota
Bighoot, the Giant Owl
Ivan Sanderson and the Warren County Woo-Woo
Twentieth Century Forteanism
The Solunar Theory
Moonshine
Oriental Magic
Index
Volume 4 - 120 pages
Contents of Volume 4:
The Gardarene Skull and the Taller-hominid
North American Giant Snakes in the 20th Century
The Many Planets called Earth (True Polar Wander)
The Atlantis of Solon and Plato
Farming Forty Thousand Years Ago
Encounters with True Giants, 1829-1994
More Giant Snakes Alive!
Status of the North American Thunderbird
Thunderbirds in 1895
The Indian Rope Trick
Life As We Know It Not (Living Lights)
Index
BEST OF WONDERS - selections from Vols. 1,2, & 3 - 120 pages
Contents of BEST OF WONDERS VOLS 1-3:
Pinky, the Forgotten Florida Dinosaur
Other Sobering Sights of Pink Unknowns
Lake Michigan Monsters
Mysteries in Southeast Asia
In the Philippines with Dean Worcester
The American Lion (Panthera atrox)
Life and Bibliography of Alpheus Hyatt Verrill (1871-1954)
Giant Snakes and Mystery Mounds in North America
Index
To THUNDERBIRDS and BIGHOOT (alias Mothman) - GIANT BIRDS
To MYSTERY PROFILE and the HOME PAGE
To LIVING FOSSILS - Behind the Bigfoot Legend
To Panthera atrox & VINTAGE FORTEANA
To Credible Cryptids and the Museum of Lost Bones
THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The journal WONDERS presented several articles on prehistoric and historical mysteries. The presentations explain how some artifacts have been neglected and need to be re-examined to provide a better understanding of our past.
ACAMBARO FIGURES
An enormous collection of unique artifacts has been found buried and concealed in caves in two locations in Mexico. The most famous is a hoard from Acambaro in the the state of Guanajuato. With the variety they show and their apparent antiquity, they look like nothing else but an ancient museum collection, but without the modern convenience of labels to show and tell of their origins. They have been shunned by professional scientists.
ATLANTIS
The attempts to move Atlantis about the globe appear to be never-ending. People have tried Bolivia and Antarctica, so any other location might seem tame and plausible by comparison. Not even Atlantis should be this lost. When it loses that label for good, it will be found where Plato placed it. Near Spain in the Atlantic Ocean and under water. What can be found of Atlantis will be its traces in the western Mediterranean that date back 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. That is when Atlantis was a military power and was conquering its neighbors.
Atlantis perished in a catastrophe that also affected the other peoples of the time. That is what Plato was saying. Their entire island went under, and that made the Atlanteans unique. The resolution of the Atlantean problem appears to be a long way off as people keep looking in the wrong places for their own convenience and promotional desires. Some people want to threaten a similar catastrophe in the near future, again to promote some rubbish they are selling. Fear not, they are more lost than is Atlantis.
ALBANIA, GREATER IRELAND, WHITEMAN'S LAND
The mysteries of the Norse sagas of the North Atlantic have peculiar and unfamiliar names. One of them is Hvrittramanaland. That mouthful means "White Man's Land." There are fragmentary records that tell of this colony of European refugees who moved to Canada as early as the 10th century. It has been identified as Albania, Greater Ireland, Hibernia Major, and Irland het Mikla. Its existence was even noted in an Arabic geography as Irlandah-al-Kabirah. Today it is almost entirely forgotten, even though the famous L'Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland is likely to have been an outpost of Greater Ireland. Archaeologists have a blind spot where Greater Ireland is concerned. (Source: WONDERS Vol 6, pages 67-96)
FORTEANA
Much of the world's hidden history falls under the label of "forteana." The words "forteana" and "fortean" date from the 1930s. Sometimes they are capitalized. They were derived from the name of Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932). He authored four books on unexplained phenomena. For his sources he burrowed into the scientific periodicals from 1800 to his own time. Also, he took from newspaper records. That practice is derided today. But if scientists have not investigated and are not going to the scene of strange events and getting a good account of what happened, how are we otherwise to examine these events? And if someone expects "amateurs" to do that work for them, how are the amateurs to be funded to execute all those activities? Scientists won't organize and investigate and that's fine with the critics of anomalies. Everything else is "unscientific" because it is being done by non-scientists.
There were many more popular treatments of science in the 1800s where unique data were allowed some kind of record and theories were discussed. The world was better off when that was the case. Nowadays data and theories are strained out of scientific channels. Rather than facing the questions that arise, scientists are moved ahead by lucky accidents like the find of Homo floresiensis. The existence of these "hobbits" was anticipated, but not by professional scientists.
Fort's first book was THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED. By the "damned" he meant those things excluded by scientists in the twentieth century. "Fortean" became an adjective meaning "related to something that remains unexplained despite efforts to sweep it under the rug or discard it as false." As a noun it means "anyone interested in the fair treatment of such data." The word "forteana" covers the wide range of happenings that are without adequate explanations. As the twentieth century progressed those happenings became familiar to people as Unidentified Flying Objects, Cryptozoology, Extrasensory Perception, and so on into areas without convenient labels.
Fort's books including NEW LANDS, LO!, and WILD TALENTS were combined as the BOOKS OF CHARLES FORT published by Henry Holt and Company in 1941. In 1974 Dover Books re-issued them as THE COMPLETE BOOKS OF CHARLES FORT.
GUNNBJORN'S SKERRIES
Gunnbjorn's Skerries were some islands that once stood out from the ocean half way between Iceland and Greenland. That real estate has now vanished. It was consumed in volcanic fury in the 15th century. And so was removed one of the stepping stones across the North Atlantic that once served the pre-Columbian ships of the Irish and Norse in their explorations to the New World.
A modern study of the ocean bottom has determined where the islands once stood.
KENSINGTON RUNESTONE
The Kensington Runestone was a monument to ten men who died on a journey of exploration in 1362. They were from a party of Norwegians and Swedes as told in the inscription. The stone was raised on an island in marshy land that was to become part of the state of Minnesota. The monument fell over and was buried until it was removed from the soil grasped in the roots of a tree in 1898. We have come to understand the place of the Kensington Runestone in history much better than was possible one hundred years ago.
We know that there was an expedition headed by Paul Knutson that set out from Norway in 1355. He went at the instruction of King Magnus Erickson, then the ruler of Norway and Sweden. And we know that eight people who had returned from a journey to the northern regions were at the court of King Magnus in 1364. These historical records bracket the deposit of the monument.
The stone upon which the inscription was carved is native to Minnesota. It was shaped to hold the message which was inscribed on its face and on one side. We know by a geological analysis that the prepared surfaces have aged for hundreds of years.
Further we understand the runes that were used were not inventions. Such a charge had long been made to try to discredit the stone's content. We know now the characters are part of a recognized runic script. The use of these runes in the fourteenth century appears to be a bridge between the Younger Futhork Script and the undoubted use of the same runes from 1500 to 1910. This recognition has come too late to remove the suspicions that were heaped upon the stone for one hundred years after its discovery. Presently among runologists there is a fear of an association with something that has been condemned for so long, no matter how unjust that condemnation has been.
THE LA VERENDRYE STONE
An inscribed stone was found in 1738 by Pierre de La Verendrye (1685-1749) on a journey to the Missouri River. It seems to have been located somewhere in the vicinity of the Sheyenne River, which flows into the Red River of the North. Scholars in French Canada thought the inscribed characters resembled Tataric lettering. This suggests that the characters could have been runes, for the letters of Tataric origin resemble runes. The Tatars themselves are a Turkic people who have lived in the region of the Crimea and Central Asia. They are not thought to have traveled to the New World.
A stone with runes could have been another record left by the same people who carved an inscription on a memorial stone to dead Norsemen in Minnesota in the 14th century. That was the Kensington Runestone found on the other side of the Red River of the North in what is today Minnesota.
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One of the first to take special interest in the stone was Peter Kalm (1715-1779), a Swedish botanist, who first heard of it directly from the finder. He also talked with Jesuit scholars in Canada who had handled the stone. By then the stone had been shipped to France into the hands of the minister for the colonies. The stone was found in 1738. It was taken to Quebec in 1743. By 1749 it was thought to have found its way to France.
Searches have been made for the La Verendrye Stone without any success. The better course of action now would be to search for a record of the stone's inscription along the route that the relic took after discovery. Someone would have made a copy of this inscription and that is likely to be all that will now be found.
VINLAND
There is a lot more to the Norsemen in the New World than the Greenland colonies and their visits to Vinland.
By way of colonies in Greenland, the Vikings actually moved into the New World in the 10th century and stayed for several centuries. The archaeology of the colonies has been undertaken, but their extensive explorations from that base of operations has been poorly studied. They visited Vinland, a location that has not been determined yet with any certainty. They discovered the Feather Islands and New Land and attempted a colony there too. But that effort has not been pursued by archaeologists. They traveled through Ginnungagap, but most attempts to identify it appear to have been way off the mark.
Ginnungagap was probably the estuary of St. Lawrence River. It was said to be the route from Vinland to Greenland. It probably was if Vinland was located on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence.
The Norse have been incorrectly associated with the founding and use of L'Anse aux Meadows, which looks like an outpost of Whiteman's Land (Greater Ireland), another place visited by Vikings but only as captives in the hands of their enemies in the early centuries of their stay in the New World.
The marker for the deepest Western penetration by the Norse is the Kensington Runestone. (Sources: WONDERS Volume 5, pages 35-63 and for the long history of Whiteman's Land see Volume 6, pages 67-96)
SOME FORTEANS WE MISS
I am very happy that I was able to spend a day in the company of Robert Lyman in 1973. He was one of the smartest people I have ever met. He was justifiably proud of the four books he had written on the local history of north-central Pennsylvania. I met him at his home in Coudersport where we discussed Pennsylvania wildlife and the fortean occurrences that he had chronicled.
He was the author of HISTORY OF ROULET, PA, AND THE LIFE OF BURREL LYMAN (1967) published by the Potter County Historical Society and THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MAJOR ISAAC LYMAN, a Civil War era ancestor.
His other two books were tremendously successful. He did not have to advertise. Word quickly spread that he had compiled rare collections of forteana about the Black Forest region of his native state. Those volumes were:
FORBIDDEN LAND: STRANGE EVENTS IN THE BLACK FOREST VOL. 1, 1614-1895 (1971) published by the POTTER ENTERPRISE, Coudersport.
AMAZING INDEED: STRANGE EVENTS IN THE BLACK FOREST VOL. 2 (1973) published by the POTTER ENTERPRISE, Coudersport
In one of his books he gave credit to "My wife, Lorena, who for many years has endured a home cluttered with dusty, old, crumbling maps, books, letters, diaries and documents beyond count, without which much of this history would have been lost forever."
AMAZING INDEED contained his account of seeing a Thunderbird. That experience caused him to investigate further and his chapter on the birds was the first organized study of these birds in Pennsylvania.
Three of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century were the finding of the remains of Homo gardarensis in 1926, the filming of the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film in 1967, and the examination of the "Minnesota Iceman" in 1968. The first event delivered up bonafide evidence of the survival in the New World of primitive men other than Homo sapiens. The second event was a "Bigfoot sighting" for all of mankind. It gave us all a chance to experience what many people have had in the Pacific Northwest, a fleeting and unforgettable look at the hairy Neo-Giants of the New World. The third event was a frustrating but still instructive peek at the corpse of Homo erectus, a third category of the several kinds of living fossils that still roam the earth.
One man found himself at the center of two of these controversial moments. He was Ivan T. Sanderson, the man who "wrote the book" on ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN (1961). His lifetime of looking into nature's wonders led him to personally investigate the peculiar "Iceman" exhibit when it was reported to him. Also he was the connection between the famous film and the scientific men who made a close examination and commentary after the film had been summarily rejected at the American Museum of Natural History.
Ivan had a part in the drawn-out saga of Homo gardarensis as well. It was in his library that I first saw a copy of Sir Arthur Keith's book describing the Greenland discovery of Homo gardarensis. In following up on that odd bit of history, I made the connection with the Trolls, the Tornit, and the Dorset Culture. I have been pressing for a re-evaluation of those remarkable bones ever since. And others are now agreeing with me. (See the discussion on the Living Fossils page.) (Source: "The World of Ivan T. Sanderson" in WONDERS Volume 8, pages 67-85. There is also a bibliography of his works on pages 86-90.)
- Mark A. Hall
In a few years the copyrights on the works of Alpheus Hyatt Verrill (1871-1954) will expire and access to his books will be uncorked. There will be a rush to reprint his delightful nature books, his studies of Indians, his anthropological views, and his books on treasures lost and found. He also wrote a lot of fiction. People who have read his BRIDGE OF LIGHT know how imaginative and fun his stories could be. It is the perfect script for an Indiana Jones movie, though it was first published in 1929.
A brief look at his life and an extensive bibliography of all his works appear in BEST OF WONDERS VOLUMES 1-3, pages 74-88.
One of his books can be read online. KNOTS, SPLICES AND ROPE WORK, originally published in 1912, can be found in its 1917 second edition at the link below. Be sure to read the Introduction.
to KNOTS. SPLICES AND ROPE WORK at Project Gutenberg
To Biography and BRIDGE OF LIGHT reprint
http://home.att.net/~mhall.feature/