Ivan T. Sanderson

Ivan Terence Sanderson was a Scottish-born naturalist, biologist, traveler, collector, and exhibitor of rare animals, radio and television commentator, and writer. He was born on January 30, 1911, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Arthur Buchanan was a whiskey manufacturer and founded the first game reserve in Kenya, East Africa. Ivan became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Along with Belgian-French biologist Bernard Heuvelmans^[1], Sanderson was a founding figure of cryptozoology, a pseudoscience, and subculture. Sanderson authored material on paranormal subjects and wrote fiction under the pen name Terence Roberts. Sanderson attended Eton College and at 17 years old began a yearlong trip around the world, spending the most time in Asia.

Sanderson graduated BA Hons in zoology from Cambridge University’s faculty of Biology, a degree traditionally upgraded to MA (Cantab) in botany and ethnology after six years without further study. He claimed to have seen an “olitiau” (a large cryptid bat) after being attacked by the giant bat-like creature. In the 1920s and 1930s, he visited many tropical areas and gained fame for his animal collecting and his popular writings on nature and travel.

He led the Percy Sladen Expedition to Cameron, West Africa for the British Museum, the Royal Society of London, and other institutions (1932-33). During World War II, Sanderson worked for British Naval Intelligence, in charge of counter-espionage against the Germans in the Caribbean, then for British Security Coordination, finally finishing out the war as a press agent in New York City. Post-service he would make New York his home. Here he became a regular on television shows as a naturalist spreading knowledge about the world’s animals.

He also edited books and wrote widely on animals and his favorite hobby, Forteana^[2] (the study of bizarre phenomena, named for Charles Fort.) He illustrated his books with drawings and also the many photos he’d taken on his tours. He became widely known after his book about the Abominable Snowman in 1961. Sanderson purchased a 250-year-old farmhouse, outbuildings, and 25 acres a short way from the ultimate location of the zoo between the communities of Columbia and Hinesburg.

He refurbished and expanded moving 200 of his rarest animals to a barn nearby so he could keep a close watch on them. Then, in the spring of 1954, he established “Ivan Sanderson’s Jungle Zoo” (and Laboratory), a permanent, summer, roadside attraction. Sanderson also developed and deployed winter traveling exhibits of rare and unusual animals for sports shows and department stores.

A fire on February 2, 1955, destroyed his collection of 45 rare animals kept in a barn at his New Jersey home. Ivan Sanderson’s Jungle Zoo was flooded out by the Delaware River during the floods caused by Hurricane Diane on August 19, 1955. Sanderson’s credibility was damaged by his endorsement of the giant penguin hoax^[3].

Sanderson founded the Ivan T. Sanderson Foundation in August 1965 on his New Jersey property, which became the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU) in 1967. SITU was a non-profit organization that investigated claims of strange phenomena ignored by mainstream science. Sanderson suggested that aircraft and boats went missing at Devil’s Sea^[4] because of a wrinkle in spacetime, gravitational or magnetic aberrations, extra-terrestrials, or mysterious underwater people.

In 1968, Sanderson introduced the concept of the “vile vortex”. Vile vortices are supposed to be “anomalic regions” regularly distributed on Earth where disproportionately many strange phenomena occur, such as disappearances, UFO sightings, or poltergeist activity.

Ivan was married twice and he died of brain cancer at his home in New Jersey, on February 19, 1973, at the age of 62. His Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained continued his work into the 1980s, collecting data and maintaining the library he had assembled. He was known for films like “The World Is Yours” (1951), “Crawford Mystery Theatre” (1951), and “Bigfoot: America’s Abominable Snowman” (1968). In the 1950s he served as an in-studio host for the showing of the safari documentaries on NBC TV titled “The Big Game Hunt”.