• Home
• Current Issue
• »Past Issues
  • 2009 Issues
  • 2008 Issues
  • 2007 Issues
  • 2006 Issues
  • 2005 Issues
  • More Issues
• Subscribe
• »Shop
  • Subscriptions
  • Gift Subscriptions
  • Single Issues
  • Books
  • FATE Posters
  • FATE T-Shirts
  • FATE Trading Cards
  • Hilly Rose All Access
  • DVD/VHS/CD-ROM
  • Crystals & Gemstones
• Online Columnists
• »Hilly Rose Show
  • Now Playing
  • About Hilly Rose
  • Login to ALL ACCESS
• »Links & Resources
  • Alternative Directory
  • Upcoming Events
  • Writer's Guidelines
• »Advertise
  • General Information
  • Display Ads
  • Classified Ads
  • Inserts
  • Web Banner Ads
  • Sponsored Links
  • List Rental
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Info Request Form
• About FATE
• »Contact
  • Contact Information
  • Customer Service

Stay up-to-date on Mystical Products, Aquarian Events & Alternative Healing Services




The Paracast
Paranormal Radio




Free Book Catalog!

Trial Subscription

FATE Store

1 Year Subscription

2008 Back Issue Set

Our Haunted Planet by John Keel

Beyond UFO Secrecy by John Greenewald

Our Faerie Best by FATE

Featured Issue

February 1958 This rare, mint condition Feb. 1958 FATE is on sale now for a limited time only! More Details >

Upcoming Events

Eastern Paranormal Conf July 17-19 Harpers Ferry, WV Website 40th Annual International UFO Symposium Aug 6-9 Denver, CO Website View More Upcoming Events

Ivan Sanderson
by Curt Sutherly
FATE Magazine :: July-August 2008

The day I met Ivan Terence Sanderson, he was in the very best of spirits. Alternately boisterous, polite, and inquisitive, he was, as I quickly discovered, a very positive and delightful person to be around. One would hardly have suspected that he was faced with two extremely serious concerns.

One of these problems was that Ivan’s wife, Alma, was battling a highly malignant form of cancer. The other was that Ivan himself had been diagnosed with the disease, though after several operations he appeared to be on the mend. A realist, Ivan confronted the cancer with a pragmatic blend of humor and unwavering resolve—characteristics that served him well during his rather remarkable life.

An investigator at heart and a naturalist and author by profession, Ivan was interested in a good many things, including all facets of the unexplained. Beginning in the 1930s and until his death in 1973, he penned countless articles for a variety of scholarly and popular journals, including FATE. He also authored a number of books and treatises on both the natural sciences and unexplained phenomena.

Ivan’s earliest passion was the exploration of tropical jungles, and he spent a large part of his life doing just that. In the process he became an authority on the plants and animals that inhabited the tropics. He also became one of the greatest jungle explorers our world has ever known.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Ivan was barely six when his parents (his father was a professional whiskey manufacturer) moved to the south of France where he began to develop an intense and (for one so young) rather incomprehensible longing for the tropics.

As the years passed Ivan’s family continued to travel, and he was all of 13 when his father met an untimely death. The year was 1924 and the elder Sanderson was assisting a documentary film crew in Kenya when he was killed by a rhinoceros. The sudden and rather brutal death of Ivan’s father did nothing to diminish the boy’s desire to explore the great tropical jungles of the world.

Already versed in reading and writing, and fluent in several languages due to his family’s travels, Ivan enrolled in Eton College near Windsor, England, north of Windsor Castle, where he obtained the basis for a higher education. He remained at the college for about three years while his wanderlust grew stronger. At the age of 16, no longer able to restrain his desire to travel, he embarked on a solitary journey that took him completely around the world.

“I spent my 17th birthday on the top of the great pyramid of Cheops because my guide got drunk,” Ivan recalled in the foreword to his Book of Great Jungles. “It was Ramadan, and he had bottles under his burnoose—and I first hit a jungle two months later in Ceylon.”

The journey lasted 18 months. The young Scotsman’s travels took him from Egypt to the East Indies, then on to Southeast Asia, China, the islands of the Pacific, and finally to America.

Ivan returned to England in 1928 and enrolled in Cambridge University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in zoology, and later two Master of Arts degrees, one in botany and the other in geology. As time permitted he continued to travel, and by the time he was in his mid-20s he had explored a number of remote tropical regions. These journeys became fodder for some of his earliest scientific papers and popular magazine articles.....read the rest of this article exclusively in the July-August 2008 issue of FATE! Click here to buy this issue now.