Abominable Snowman (Yeti)

During the 1950s and 1960s fascination with the Abominable Snowman (or Yeti) reached fever pitch.

The Himalayan half-man, half-ape joined the Loch Ness Monster and the American Northwest’s ‘Bigfoot‘ as among the most popular mythical legends.

To the native Sherpa tribe of the Eurasian Himalaya mountain region, the Abominable Snowman was a religious figure to be feared and protected, a creature that lived in their folklore and, they were sure, roamed the mountains walking upright on two legs, covered with long dark fur, letting out an occasional eerie howl to remind the mountain herdsman of his existence.

To the mountain explorers and scientists who tried to track and capture the fabled Yeti, it was a frustratingly elusive game that left behind only questions and a few tracks leading to nowhere through the melting snow.

According to the Sherpa, the Abominable Snowman towered over eight feet tall and had been encountered repeatedly by herdsmen who tended their grazing animals in the lower ranges that surround the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest. A drawing of the Yeti even appeared in an 18th-century book illustrating the wildlife of Tibet.

British explorer Colonel Howard Bury reported finding huge footprints in the Himalayas in 1921, and another British mountaineer, Eric Shipton, took the first photographs of the famous tracks in 1951.

Several expeditions of explorers and scientists from the United States, Britain, New Zealand and the Soviet Union scaled the treacherous snow-covered Himalayas in search of the elusive creature. They were not able to capture him, however – either on film or in the flesh – and returned with only Sherpa tales, plaster casts and photographs of a few footprints, and hair-raising stories.

The hairy, ape-like biped has been described in all different shapes and sizes – sometimes said to be much taller than a human and sometimes small yet frightfully strong, and while most famously depicted with white hair to blend into the snow-covered landscape, it can also be reddish-brown and live in the Himalayan forests around the mountains.

It was even portrayed as a killer monster in the 1957 Hammer horror film The Abominable Snowman. 

In the late 1950s, an expedition funded by the appropriately named Texas oilman Tom Slick came across a curious item at a Buddhist monastery in the village of Pangboche: the mummified hand of a Yeti.

The explorer Peter Byrne managed to acquire one of its fingers, allegedly after making a financial donation to the monastery, and smuggled it out of Nepal. He achieved this with the help of Hollywood star James Stewart, a friend of Slick’s, who hid the finger in his wife’s luggage, wrapped in her underwear.

In 1960, another Yeti body part showed up. Having seen strange tracks during his history-making climb of Everest with Tenzing Norgay, Sir Edmund Hillary went looking for the Yeti and returned with a purported scalp, borrowed from a monastery in Khumjung.

Testing revealed, however, that the helmet-shaped hide came from a serow, an animal resembling a goat. As for the Pangboche hand, DNA analysis carried out in 2011 proved once and for all that it was human.

In 1986, English physicist Anthony Wooldridge, who was on a charity run in the Himalayas, claimed to have seen a Yeti just 150 metres from him, and managed to take photos.

The same year, the seasoned Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, famous for climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen, claimed he, too, had an encounter. He spent years unsuccessfully trying to find another Yeti, while the conclusion of Wooldridge’s story was that he had seen an unusually shaped rock outcropping.