Manimals Newsletter

History

Jim McClarin launched Manimals Newsletter on 12 August 1972 from 4717 Florin-Perkins Road, Sacramento, California 95826 (telephone 916-381-1674). It succeeded George F. Haas's Bigfoot Bulletin, which had run monthly from 2 January 1969 through 31 December 1970, then quarterly through mid-1971 before Haas abandoned it. Haas had felt the Bulletin generated too little return information and worried that publishing locations might enable people seeking to kill a specimen. McClarin disagreed with the information blackout approach, arguing that "a breakdown in information exchange will do little to aid our understanding."

The newsletter's scope was global. "Manimal" was McClarin's coinage, a contraction of "man" and "animal" chosen over Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Abominable Snowman, or Humanoid because it carried "no other special occult, humorous, or ethnic connotation" and could encompass the Yeti of the Himalayas, the Kakundakari of the Congo, the Almas of the USSR, the Sasquatch of North America, and entities whose descriptions fell outside standard categories.

McClarin timed the first issue to coincide with the Fourth International Congress of Primatology at the Portland Hilton (15 to 18 August 1972), distributing copies to attending primatologists. The Congress coordinator was Mrs. Robert J. Low of the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, 505 N.W. 185th Avenue, Beaverton, Oregon. McClarin explicitly positioned the newsletter as relevant to professional primatology, not just amateur cryptozoology.

The newsletter also referenced Dr. John Napier of Queen Elizabeth College, University of London (Director of Primate Biology), who was preparing a book on the subject, and Dr. Don Grieve of the Royal Free School of Medicine (biomechanics), who had viewed the Patterson film at a private London screening on 12 November 1971.