Winnipeg’s Sighting Statue

Albert Klyne shows off the statue he made of the creature he says he spotted near his home in 2001. (Jason Halstead, Sun Media). Pick up your computer and turn it on its side, by 90 degrees, or if it is easier, merely tilt your head, to see the proper configuration of the object he carved.

He calls himself a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, but Albert Klyne isn’t worried about his creation coming to life.

What concerns the 63-year-old, is whether his muse will come back now that his masterpiece is near complete.

“It gave me creepy feelings while I was making it, like a guy creating Frankenstein or something,” said Klyne, who has almost finished a statue he calls Neandertal Man — a life-size replica of the giant, caveman-like creature he claims to have encountered seven years ago on his acreage south of Portage la Prairie.

“Seeing him had quite an effect on me, so I felt making this was something I had to do,” he said. “Imagine that thing, a thing like a giant.”

Klyne said he caught a shadowy glimpse of the brute some 30 years ago and thinks he heard it crying from a distance when he was a boy. But he got his first clear look at the unidentified creature on April 5, 2001, when it followed a pack of turkeys that appeared to be injured out of some backyard brush accompanied by a mysterious black dog.

The creature — which wore a loincloth and carried a hunting knife of sorts — wasn’t menacing in any way other than its size, Klyne said.

Still, the encounter stuck in Klyne’s mind and so the previously inexperienced artist decided to memorialize it.

The former tradesman constructed the statue’s massive frame from wire and wood, then filled it with stuffing and fibreglass insulation before shaping his smooth, muscular exterior from stucco.

The sedentary Neandertal Man now stands nearly four metres tall, wears a deerskin loin cloth and — to match Klyne’s recollection — boasts chiselled abdominal muscles along with broom-bristle hair.

“I think if he got on a weigh-scale, (the actual creature) would have been about 2,000 pounds,” said Klyne, who spent more than 3,000 hours and $800 to produce the approximately 400-pound statue.

At the prompting of his wife and in fear of causing a public panic, Klyne kept his sighting silent for nearly a decade. But now that the statue is finally constructed, he plans to display it at area fairs in an attempt to find others who may have been impacted by its massive physique.

“The effect that thing had on me, it has to be world-known,” Klyne said. “When I saw it, it seemed like I couldn’t draw enough air, like after running a marathon but I didn’t do nothing, I just seen it. I seen it and it played me out.”

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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