Slick’s Snowman Containment Site
Posted by: Loren Coleman on June 6th, 2006
One of the sidetrips that Craig Woolheater, his wife Marcy, Miles Lewis, Dennis Stacy, and I took on Sunday was a survey of various Tom Slick sites around San Antonio, as pointed out and discussed, in depth, by the encyclopedic Stacy. Yes, a motley crew, indeed, in search of Slickian history did trek about San Antonio over the weekend.
The locations we visited included Slick’s lift-slab house, and organizations he founded, such as the Southwest Research Instiitue, the Mind Science Foundation, and the Southwest Foundatin for Biomedical Research. We even found the Tom Slick Ranch Creek.
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It is a well-known fact that the biomedical research facilities have the world’s largest colony of breeding rhesus monkeys. What is often forgotten, however, is that at one time Slick had built, on site, a special area that was to house either a Yeti or a Bigfoot that he planned to have captured. In March 1957, news of Slick’s first Himalayan expedition, sponsored and backed by the San Antonio Zoological Society (in name but not financially), in search of the Abominable Snowmen of Nepal, told of his desire to safely return a Yeti to the United States.
The purpose was to study the apelike creature humanely. Tom Slick’s primary original reason for venturing into cryptozoology was his hopes that the Abominable Snowmen, as he perhaps naively called them, the “missing links,” might hold clues to medical mysteries for humans.
When we visited the San Antonio site of this large compound on Sunday, June 4, it was well-guarded with heavy barbed wire, and posted to have sentry dogs and intensive security. There is no doubt this is not your usual tourist stop.
Nevertheless, in the distance, we saw and photographed what vaguely looked like Bigfoot (or at least someone’s bad hoax of one), but which we knew and smelled were Rhesus primates.
Here we were, almost 50 years after the time, at the site of where the first live captive Yeti was to have been kept. Of course, the actual containment enclosure was said to be deep in a bunker, but it was intriguing to see the outside evidence of what is going on there, still today.
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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.
If only I’d been born rich and eccentric. I would have totally snagged you guys a bigfoot by now.
There are probably several other facilities to house cryptids, maybe even ones that are occupied. But an interesting story nonetheless.
Loren said: “it was intriguing to see the outside evidence of what is going on there”
Indeed, look at that demolished basketball hoop. Perhaps this is where they let Seattle SuperSonics’ mascot, Squatch, train.
SMiles Lewis
Hello my name is gustavo wrtiting from Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. I just published my first book on crypto, a worldwide guide to lake monsters. I just finished reading Loren Coleman “Tom Slick search for Yeti”, and I would like to know why the team members didn´t pick up any hair samples from the yeti bed that they found during the 1959 expedition. There weren´t any at all? I suppose that this bed-nest would contain at least some samples…
thanks in advance, I will keep on commenting