The Abominable Snowman
F or over three centuries, the Sherpa tribespeople who live in the region of the Himalaya Mountains between India and Tibet have expressed belief in a legendary wild man or apelike creature they call the Yeti. Because of its reputed foul smell, it eventually became known to Westerners—through explorers and mountaineers—as the Abominable Snowman. According to one source, “He is tangled in a web of fantasy, religion, legend, chicanery, and commercialism.” Not surprisingly, “The Yeti is a highly commercial legend, perhaps even Nepal’s principal foreign currency earner” (Welfare and Fairley 1980, 14). (See figures 5.1 and 5.2.)
The Yeti are described as ranging from the height of a normal man up to eight feet tall, being covered with hair, and having a conical head and large feet. The creatures are said to be shy and therefore are seen only rarely and are never captured. Yeti relics, such as a pelt and scalp, when scientifically examined have turned out to come from known animals. Peter Byrne, described as a “colorful” explorer and Yeti seeker, tells how he enticed a monk at an isolated monastery to become intoxicated so Byrne could steal a finger from a mummified “Yeti paw.” Tested many years later, it yielded “inconclusive” results but was thought most likely to have been human (Byrne 1994).
Figure 5.1. The Abominable Snowman (or Yeti), inspired a 1996 commercial “collectible” (author’s collection).
One of the earliest sightings of a “wild man” in the region was made in 1952 by a Greek photographer named N. A. Tombazi, who only glimpsed the figure and took no pictures. He said he did not believe in the “delicious fairy tales” about the Yeti, and years later, he offered a theory that the “wild man” could have been simply a hermit or an ascetic. As Daniel Cohen comments in The Encyclopedia of Monsters (1982, 6-7): “There are Buddhist and Hindu ascetics who seek out the desolation of high places. They can live at altitudes of fifteen thousand feet and can train themselves to endure cold and other hardships that would kill the average person.” Cohen adds: “They can and do walk about naked or nearly so in the frigid mountain air. So Tombazi might really have seen a wandering ascetic, as he first thought.”
A 1986 photograph taken by British physicist Anthony Wooldridge near the India-Tibet border fared no better. Wooldridge and others believed they were the first to capture the Yeti on photographic film. Unfortunately, subsequent photo-surveying evidence proved—by the British physicist’s own admission—“beyond a reasonable doubt that what
, n % ** v *>
Figure 5.2. Set of “Snowman” stamps was issued by Bhutan, in the eastern Himalayas (author’s collection).
I had believed to be a stationary, living creature was, in reality, a rock” (Dennett 1989).
Alleged encounters with Yeti by Nepalese children are intriguing but ultimately no more convincing than Western children’s reports of poltergeists or other doubtful or discredited entities. For example, as reported in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World (Welfare and Fairley 1980, 15):
One Sherpa girl, Lakhpa Domani, described an incident to a Peace Corps volunteer, William Weber, who was working in the area of Machherma village in the Everest region. The girl said she was sitting near a stream tending her yaks when she heard a noise and turned round to confront a
huge apelike creature with large eyes and prominent cheekbones. It was covered in black and red-brown hair. It seized her and carried her to the water, but her screams seem to have disconcerted the creature and it dropped her. Then it attacked two of her yaks, killing one with blows, the other by seizing its horns and breaking its neck. The incident was reported to the local police and footprints were found. Weber says: “What motive could there possibly have been for a hoax? My conclusion was that the girl was telling the truth.”
However, Weber’s view of motives for hoaxes—like similar opinions of other laypersons, as seen throughout history—is naive: The girl might simply have been looking for attention (Nickell 1995, 224-26).
As in the foregoing case, footprints are the most tangible and most common form of evidence for the Yeti’s existence. However, the evidence typically fails to withstand scrutiny.
Consider, for instance, the footprints discovered by Frank Smythe in 1937, which were located in the Bhyundhar Valley. Smythe followed tracks that led to a cave. He gives what Bernard Heuvelmans (1972, 80) terms “a strange description” of the prints: Smythe reported that the footmarks were about twelve to thirteen inches long and six inches wide, but shortened going uphill. He stated that they “were turned outward at about the same angle as a man’s,” adding, “There were well-defined imprints of five toes, 1 1/2 inches long and 3/4 of an inch broad, unlike human toes, arranged symmetrically. Lastly, there was what appeared to be the impression of a heel with two curious toelike impressions on either side” (quoted in Heuvelmans 1972, 80).
Such footprints gave rise to the Sherpa belief that the Yeti possesses extra toes and walks with its feet pointing backward (as was also said of a race of mountain men in a fourth-century account). Explains Heuvelmans:
Smythe’s photographs of the trail showed that it was indisputably a bear’s. The marks of the extra toes were really those of the side toes of the hind feet, for when a bear is walking it usually puts its hind feet down in the footprints of its forefeet. Moreover, it turns its feet inward, so that from the position of the prints alone the trail looks as if it is going in the opposite direction. Then the toes are seen to be on the wrong end of the foot, and so the legend of the men with their feet back to front arose.
Yeti 59
Another famous case comes from the 1951 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition, when mountaineer Eric Shipton was at 20,000 feet, at the head of the Menlung Glacier. He and a fellow climber came across a giant footprint in the snow, which they photographed up close, and a subsequent trail that they followed along the glacier’s edge for approximately a mile.
As it turned out, however, the trail was made by a mountain goat and had nothing to do with the photo of the giant footprint. Explains Napier (1973, 49): “The photograph was taken earlier on the same day and in roughly the same area and was probably the track of a mountain goat; it was certainly not a view of the Yeti track discovered later in the afternoon. The negatives of the trail and the footprint were filed together in the archives of the Mount Everest Foundation and, presumably, this is how the mistake arose.”
As to the giant foot track, it was, at only about thirteen inches, “not excessively long, even by human standards,” but was extremely wide, some eight inches across the forefoot and about six an a half inches across the heel (Napier 1973, 138). Napier found the foot track interesting but “proof of absolutely nothing” (1973, 141).
Indeed, being able to study the entire field of Shipton’s original negative, Napier observed that the footprint had clearly been altered by melting snow. Thus what had been perceived as “the hairy impression of a heel at the ‘heel-strike’ phase of human walking” was an area where melting— and hence probable “extreme changes in size and outline”—had occurred. “With this observation,” concluded Napier, “the footprint loses one of its principal claims to be man-like” (1973, 138-39).
The conqueror of Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, who died January 11, 2008, was a man of many famous exploits. Less well known was a 1960 paranormal expedition he conducted in the best skeptical tradition.
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, on July 20,1919, Hillary studied science and mathematics at Auckland University College, later adopting a summer occupation, beekeeping, which allowed him to pursue his winter avocation of mountain climbing. In 1939, he reached the summit of his first major mountain, Mount Olliver in the Southern Alps. In 1953, with Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay, Hillary conquered the world’s tallest peak, Mount Everest, for which he received worldwide acclaim, including knighthood. He subsequently climbed many other mountains, trekked overland to the South Pole (1958), and accompanied astronaut Neil Arm-
strong in a ski plane that landed at the North Pole (1985). In addition, he devoted much of his life to humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Sherpa people of Nepal (Nickell 2008).
Hillary gave other attention to his beloved Himalaya mountains, including becoming intrigued by persistent reports of the legendary man- beast of the region, the “Abominable Snowman” or Yeti. Hillary resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery. Among the purposes of a 1960-61 expedition financed by World Book Encyclopedia to study high-altitude effects on climbers and other aspects of mountaineering, meteorology, and glaciology, Hillary added Yeti-hunting. The expedition included mammolo- gist Marlin Perkins (the late, beloved host of television’s Wild Kingdom ) and various physiologists, zoologists, mountaineers, and journalists. Hillary was determined either to document or to debunk the fabled creature. His team searched the region and reviewed evidence regarding the Yeti’s existence.
The investigators came upon what appeared to be fox tracks in shaded snow, but where these led into a sunny area, they had melted and thus become elongated into a semblance of large, human footprints. Hillary realized that this phenomenon of melting and enlarging of tracks—such as those of a bear or a snow leopard—could account for many of the huge “Yeti footprints” that had been photographed. The team analyzed various alleged Yeti relics with consistently negative results. “Yeti fur” turned out to be from the rare Tibetan blue bear, and a “Yeti scalp” was a fur hat made from the goatlike serow.
The results of his investigation led Hillary to conclude that the whole concept of the Yeti was nonsense and that the creature existed only in legend. Monster buffs were angry, but Hillary’s prestige and background gave him credibility among scientific-minded people. After all, says Daniel Cohen in his book Encyclopedia of Monsters (1982, 9), “Sir Edmund Hillary, the great mountain climber, could hardly be criticized as being an armchair critic.”
In India, a reputed version of the Yeti—a ten-foot-tall, apelike creature known as mande barung or “forest man”—-supposedly put in an appearance in the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya in 2003. For each of three successive days, it was witnessed by a forester. Subsequently, a passionate Yeti buff named Dipu Marak claimed to have retrieved some hairs from the dense jungle area.
Yeti 61
The “Yeti hairs” became news five years later, in 2008, when they were obtained by a BBC journalist, Alastair Lawson. He contacted biologist Ian Redmond, an authority in ape conservation, who examined the hairs under high magnification and in comparison with various known animal specimens. He reported, “Under the microscope they look slightly human, slightly like an orangutang and slightly like the hairs brought back by Edmund Hillary.” He added: “These hairs remain an enigma. They could be a new species, but the DNA tests will hopefully tell us more” (quoted in AFP 2008). Redmond was referring to the expected results of DNA analysis, that was then being performed by scientists in the United States.
On October 13 the results were in. The “Yeti hairs” proved to be no such thing. DNA tests revealed instead that they came from a species of goat known as the Himalayan Goral, a creature about thirty-seven to fifty- one inches in length with a rough, gray-brown coat. Redmond conceded, “We always knew that the link between the sightings of the Indian Yeti and the finding of the hairs was purely circumstantial.”
In summing up the case, Redmond continued, “Nevertheless, the DNA test is an interesting result because the reported location where his sample was collected is way south of the published distribution maps of the Goral species, which is said to live between 1,000 to 4,000 metres up in the Himalayas.” He added: “Perhaps we have a more modest discovery— extending the known range of the Goral rather than confirming the existence of the lowland Yeti” (quoted in Lawson 2008).
However, Yeti hunter Dipu Marak was undaunted. “While these results are discouraging, it does not affect my firm conviction that there is a Yeti-like creature out there,” he stated. “It has been seen too often for it to be dismissed as nothing more than a myth” (quoted in Lawson 2008).
Reports of a strange animal found by Chinese trappers and dubbed an “Oriental Yeti” surfaced in early April 2010. Photos depicted the caged creature—discovered in Sichuan province—as it was being sent to Beijing for scientific identification.
Unfortunately, its whitish appearance was its only trait in common with the Yeti. Unlike the Yeti, the Chinese creature is relatively small, four- footed, thick-tailed, decidedly unapelike, and hairless—a condition that scientists believe was due to mange.
Mange (a skin disease caused by a parasitic mite) has long been known
to give a mysterious appearance to an ordinary creature—in this instance, apparently a Himalayan weasel, although others suggest a civet or marten. (“Case Closed” 2010)
For example, a “Bigfoot” that my wife, Diana Harris, and I pursued in February 2008 (renting a cabin in the north Pennsylvania forest) turned out to have been, most likely, a black bear with mange. As cryptozoologist Loren Coleman told the Christian Science Monitor (April 6, 2010), some of the hairless quadrapeds that have turned up as “Chupacabras” in the United States may simply be dogs, cats, or other animals with mange.
AFP. 2008. “British Scientist Hopes for ‘Yeti Hair’ Breakthrough.” Breitbart.com, July 28. http://www.breitbart.com/ (accessed July 29, 2008).
Byrne, Peter. 1994. Interview on television program Unsolved Mysteries , aired July 30 (not the original broadcast).
Cohen, Daniel. 1982. The Encyclopedia of Monsters. New York: Dodd, Mead. “Case Closed: Sichuan Mystery Beast Identified, Maybe.” 2010. Gochengddoo .com, April 16. http://www.gochengdoo.com/ (accessed April 19, 2010). Dennett, Michael. 1989. “Abominable Snowman Photo Comes to Rocky End.”
Skeptical Inquirer 13, no. 2 (Winter): 118-19.
Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1972. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lawson, Alastair. 2008. “‘Yeti Hairs’ Belong to a Goat.” BBC News, October 13. http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/south_asia/7666900.stm (accessed January 31, 2011 ).
Napier, John. 1973. Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
-. 2008. “Sir Edmund Hillary, Explorer, Skeptic (1919-2008).” Skeptical
Inquirer 32, no. 3 (May/June): 8.
Welfare, Simon, and John Failey. 1980. Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. New York: A & W Visual Library.
Chapter 6