The photograph taken by Francois de Loy.
Richard Oglesby Marsh writes of an American prospector named Shea, who in 1920 arrived in Panama with a tale he’d brought up from the Andes, a tale centering on his encounter with an animal “six feet tall, which walked erect, weighed possibly three hundred pounds, and was covered with long black hair.” Shea’s encounter went thus: he was surprised by the animal standing upright before him on a mountain ridge, chattering at him angrily; he pulled out his revolver and promptly shot it through the head. Examining the dead animal where it lay before him, Shea noticed that the big toes on its feet were parallel with the other toes, as they would be on a human being, and not opposable and thumb-like as they would have been on the foot of any monkey or ape.32
In 1924 in another part of the South American forest, another man met up with his own furious primate. Swiss geologist Francois de Loys was returning with his expedition from the Sierra de Peija in the northern tip of Colombia and was making his way along the Sierra de Unturan, near the Brazilian border of Venezuela. Not far from a small river, he came upon a pair of screaming monkeys who were so beside themselves with the rage of being discovered they filled their hands with their own excrement and threw it at the party of intruders. In response, the men shot the nearest animal, as the other escaped into the brush. The corpse of what turned out to be the female of the pair was propped up on a fuel crate and photographed by the geologist; the photograph of the dead female survives today.32
A comparison of de Loys’ Ape with a human.
This photograph shows an animal not much over five feet tall, yet in a hemisphere where the largest monkeys are never more than three foot seven, this specimen does seem to be a rather curious savage. De Loys counted thirty-two teeth in the animal’s mouth, which is a surprising number for any New World primate; platyrrhinians, or New World monkeys, without exception have thirty-six teeth in their heads, while catarrhinians, or Old World monkeys, have thirty-two. (This is not just a question of existing canines and molars, with the possibility of decay or other loss; it concerns jaw structure and tooth placement just as much as tooth number.) This means that the animal was essentially an Asian, or Old World ape. If this was the case, then these giant apes—bigfoot—may have come from Asia across the Bering Straits into Alaska and down through North America many tens of thousands of years ago, if not hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The “monkey woman” from Minas Gerais, Brazil, circa 1968.
The Italian archaeologist and explorer Count Pino Turolla heard about the legendary Mono Grande on his many expeditions to South America in the 1960s. In April 1968 Turolla’s Zapes Indian guide, Antonio, described his own exposure to the animal and the tragic death of his own son. Antonio had gone with his two sons to the Forbidden Range of Pacanaima, and as the three men approached the savannah, they met up with three enormous creatures. Described by Antonio as huge lumbering beasts with smallish heads and extremely long arms, the three set upon Antonio and his sons with clubs. During this attack, the younger son was killed.
Six months after hearing this story, Turolla returned to Venezuela and convinced Antonio to guide him to the Forbidden Range where the attack had occurred. This time, though, there was no confrontation; close to the Pacanaima ruins the animals circled the party through the bush, but did not attack. Instead they sent up a howl that Turolla described as being in volume like the roar of a lion, but in pitch higher and more shrill. The three Indians in the party became nervous, and then alarmed, as this howl continued, and after a few moments they turned and ran back along the trail. The howl persisted, a terrifying sound that seemed to come from all around them at once, drowning out all other noises, rising again and again as Turolla advanced toward the savannah in the distance.
But nothing happened. After a stillness between the howls, the animals—this time there seemed to be only two—loped off through the foliage, and the one image that Turolla retains is of their enormous shadows moving across the boulders before him in the dusk. No longer howling, they soon became a blur against the rocks. The impression he had was of two hairy apelike creatures, well over six feet tall, who ran and leapt in an erect posture. He described them as two perfectly straightforward giant apes, howling like two devils. He estimated their height as being between six and eight feet, but stressed that he was over fifty feet away from where they were silhouetted against the rock. There were no other Indians and no prospectors in the area at the time. After the animals had disappeared, he shot his rifle into the air to call back the men who’d run off, and the group made their way to La Esmeralda. There, locals assured him that the “Monos” were not uncommon. One prospector recounted how his small mule had been carried off by one. The mule was found several kilometers away; it had been ripped open and torn apart.6
The “monkey woman” from Minas Gerais, Brazil, circa 1968.
Turolla had brought with him in his wallet a copy of the photograph of the large monkey, or ape, shot by Francois de Loys, and found that those he talked to who had seen the local animals identified them closely with the animal in the photo.6, 28
Michael Grumley writes in his book There Are Giants in the Earth6 that during Sir Walter Raleigh’s South American expedition in 1595 and 1596 the explorer reported that although he came face to face with none of the animals, he was convinced of their existence by the many tales of those people who had encountered them.
In 1796, Bernard Heuvelmans reports in On the Track of Unknown Animals, Dr. Edward Bancroft brought back from Guiana a tale of an “apeman”:
... much larger than either the African [the chimpanzee] or Oriental, if the accounts of the natives may be relied on. ...They are represented by the Indians as being near five feet in height, maintaining an erect posture, and having a human form, thickly covered with short black hair; but I suspect that their height has been augmented by the fear of the Indians who greatly dread them.32
Five feet, again, is not so very large, except when measured against the height of all other South American monkeys, who stretch no further skyward than three and a half feet. And there are no known apes in all of South America—only the many species of platyrrhinian, or “broad-nosed” monkey, known commonly as spider monkeys.
Turolla describes his December l970 archaeological expedition in the Guacamayo Range, not far from the River Chancis in Ecuador, in his book Beyond the Andes.28 He says that the territory that he and his South American assistant, Oswaldo, were exploring was neither specifically Ecuadorian nor Colombian, but belonged instead within the province of the Aucas tribe between the two countries. An Indian shaman from the Amazon gave him a lead, describing to him the entrance to a particular cave in which he assured Turolla he would find evidence to support his theory concerning the real beginnings of world culture, and of South American culture specifically. The men were able to find the cave and entered it with great excitement. Inside the cave, they encountered what seemed to be a giant apeman that gave a great roar and threw boulders at the two explorers. They ran for the mouth of the cave, Oswaldo shooting his rifle blindly into the darkness behind them. They were glad that the animal did not follow them to the mouth of the cave, but they were too afraid to go back inside and investigate further.
Nguoi Rung: The Vietnamese Hairy Wildman
Like Europe and the Americas, Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam, has traditions of a wildman who lives in the forest. Known as the Nguoi Rung, the Vietnamese wildman is said to inhabit remote mountain forest areas, particularly in Kontum Province, along the border with Cambodia.
The Nguoi Rung (“forest people” in Vietnamese) is also known in other wilderness areas of Laos and northern Borneo, where it is called the Batutut or Ujit. Perhaps encounters with the Batutut gave rise to the popular expression “wildman of Borneo.” All of these “wild hairy men” are described as being approximately the size of a tall man—about six feet in height—and their bodies are completely covered with hair except for the face, knees, the soles of
the feet and the hands. The hair of the Nguoi Rung ranges from black to gray to brown. The creature walks on two legs and has been reported both solitary and moving in small groups.
Chinese officials examine casts of Chinese wildman footprints.
According to Wikipedia, as early as 1947 a French colonist sighted one of the cryptids and referred to it as a L’Homme Sauvage (“wild man”). Then, in 1970, Dr. John Mackinnon claimed to have observed tracks of a similar wildman in Sabah, northern Borneo. Dr. Mackinnon says that he believes that this hominid is similar to the Meganthropus, and it also lives in Vietnam’s Vu Quang nature preserve, the home to a number of newly discovered animals. In the 1990s,
Mackinnon and his colleagues found two new species in the Vu Quang nature preserve: a goat-like animal dubbed the saola from its long spindle-shaped horns, and a robust muntjac deer. These are the first new large mammals discovered by science since the early decades of the 20th century.
Wikipedia also mentions that two Nguoi Rungs were reportedly captured by tribesmen near Dak Lak Province, Vietnam, in 1971. Then, in 1974 a North Vietnamese general, Hoang Minh Thao, requested an expedition to find evidence of the creatures, but it was unsuccessful.
In 1982 Professor Tran Hong Viet, now at the Pedagogic University of Hanoi, discovered in Kontum Province a Nguoi Rung footprint. He made a cast of it that measured 28 by 16 centimeters. The footprint is said to be similar to a very large human’s, though much wider and with toes much longer than those of a human. Professor Viet only recently returned to his research on this subject, inspired by a Japanese television show on the Vietnamese apemen broadcast in March of 1996.
Vietnamese wildman footprint made in 1982.
Some recent studies on the Nguoi Rung are from Professor Dang Nghiem Van, Director of Hanoi’s Institute for Religious Studies,who has collected many stories of Nguoi Rung in the mountains of central and northern Vietnam. Professor Van says that the Nguoi Rung will come at night to places where people have fires. They sit beside men but do not speak or make any sounds. There are stories of couples of Nguoi Rung moving rapidly, easily climbing trees, shaking trees for insects and sleeping in grottos on mountain slopes. Professor Van’s detailed notes have yet to be published.
The May 1969 cover of Argosy.
Online discussions of the Nguoi Rung also tends to speculate on the possibility that the famous Minnesota Iceman might have originally been from Vietnam, and therefore would have been a frozen Nguoi Rung. The Minnesota Iceman was an ape-like creature about six feet tall, encased in a block of ice that was exhibited at state fairs or carnivals in Minnesota and Wisconsin starting around December 1968. It vanished by 1974, and no one knows what became of it.
The mysterious owner had been based in California, and had suddenly withdrawn the Iceman and replaced it with a different exhibit that was clearly a model and looked different from the original. The original was extremely realistic, if it was a fake. One of its arms appeared to be broken and one of its eyes appeared to have been knocked out of its socket, allegedly by a bullet that was supposed to have entered the animal’s head from behind. If the Minnesota Iceman was a genuine animal, the specimen would be a significant zoological discovery. Many now think it was an elaborate hoax, but it truly remains a mystery.
Both Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans believed that the Minnesota Iceman was the real deal: a genuine abominable snowman encased in ice. Heuvelmans consistently claimed that the Iceman was a genuine specimen and that it was originally from Vietnam. Sanderson and Heuvelmans gave the Iceman the name Homo pongoides, having examined the specimen and concluding it was a genuine creature, noting “putrefaction where some of the flesh had been exposed from the melted ice.”32.69, 74
Heuvelmans wrote a scientific paper about the Iceman and theorized that it was shot and killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Sanderson wrote an article for Argosy magazine and spoke about the frozen sasquatch-cicle on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The Smithsonian Institution was reportedly briefly interested in the Iceman, asking the famous bigfoot scholar John Napier to investigate the matter. Later, the Smithsonian suggested the FBI investigate, due to reports that the creature had been shot through one of its eyes and killed. Shortly thereafter, the Iceman disappeared, withdrawn from public display.74, 69
The Minnesota Iceman photographed by Ivan T. Sanderson in 1968.
Sanderson called the Minnesota Iceman “Bozo” in the May 1969 issue of Argosy:
Bozo’s face is his most startling feature, both to anthropologists and anyone else±and for several reasons. Unfortunately, both eyeballs have been blown out of their sockets. One appears to be missing, but the other seems (to some, at least) to be just visible under the ice. This gives Bozo a gruesome appearance, which is enhanced by a considerable amount of blood diffused from the sockets through the ice. The most arresting feature of the face is the nose. This is large but only fairly wide, and is distinctly pugged, rather like that of a Pekinese dog but not like that of a gorilla, which actually doesn’t have a nose, per se. The nostrils are large, circular and point straight forward, which is very odd. The mouth is only fairly wide and there is no aversion of the lips; in fact, the average person would say he had no lips at all. His muzzle is no more bulging, prominent, or pushed forward than is our own; not at all prognathous like that of a chimp. One side of the mouth is slightly agape and two small teeth can be seen. These should be the right upper canine and the first premolar. The canine or eye-tooth is very small and in no way exaggerated into a tusk, or similar to that of a gorilla or a chimp. But to me, at least the most interesting features of all are some folds and wrinkle lines around the mouth just below the cheeks. These are absolutely human, and are like those seen in a heavy-jowled, older white man.
Both American and Vietnamese veterans from northern Vietnam had reported tales of apemen. The Vietnamese zoologist Professor Quy, interviewed for a popular article in early 1995, said that he had gotten a letter from a former Vietnamese soldier who saw the body of an ape being loaded on to a helicopter at a highlands airfield in the mid-1960s. It is possible that this was the Vietnamese wildman that later became the Minnesota Iceman? And where is the Minnesota Iceman now? In some private walk-in freezer somewhere in the suburbs of Los Angeles? Or perhaps in a government vault where its DNA has long been analyzed and cloned by military specialists.16
Is this perhaps the answer to some reports of bigfoot and flying saucers being seen together? Though such incidents are a very small subsection of bigfoot reports, they are intriguing, even if some of them are hoaxes. Could it be that the US Army at its Area 51 flying saucer manufacturing facility is also experimenting with and cloning genuine sasquatch DNA that came from the Minnesota Iceman? It is reminiscent of a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Men in Black movies where the humans walk past aliens, bigfoot and genetic oddities as they tour an underground base. Does the military occasionally drop off a cloned bigfoot with one of its flying saucers just to muddle the already muddled world of these phenomena? As we are beginning to see in this book, many strange things are very possible!
PART TWO:
YETIS
CHAPTER 4
THE CALL OF THE YETI
Our coolies at once jumped at the
conclusion that this must be the “Wild
Man of the snows,” to which they
gave the name of Metohkangmi, “the
abominable snow man,” who interested
the newspapers so much.
—Himalayan Explorer C. K. Howard-Bury
Call of the Yeti
Hopefully we won’t have to worry about cloned abominable snowmen running amok (a Malaysian word, by-the-way) through Singapore, Bangkok or Kathmandu in the very near future. For the time being, there is plenty of danger and adventure in remote parts of the Himalayas. Climbing and exploring in the Himalayas of Tibet, India, Bhutan and Nepal is hazardous enough for any adventurer—and if you were to stumble onto a yeti cave, either purposely or by acc
ident, you would want to have your pepper spray and ice axe handy. You’re miles from nowhere in steep, unknown country, when you could come face-to-face with some hairy man-ape who has the strength of Mighty Joe Young.
At 19, my fascination with the Himalayas and the yeti had so consumed me that I dropped out of college and went to the Far East to teach English. Eventually my trail led to Kathmandu where I began to trek all over the Himalayas in an effort to photograph the creature or get hair samples. I wrote about these experiences in my book Lost Cities of China, Central Asia & India.58
Eventually, I trekked to the remote Rowaling Himalayas, where one night I lay in my sleeping bag on a high mountain pass that stretched north into Tibet. As I drifted off to sleep I thought about the combinations of rumors, expedition accounts, Sherpa stories and photographic evidence that had made up the yeti legend. Visions of the strange creature—Neanderthal man or savage giant ape—drifted through my mind as the cold mountain winds howled against the mountain peaks outside. Then in the distance there was a strange sound, a high-pitched wail that sent a chill down my spine. Was it the call of the yeti? Since we found no footprints or other evidence the next day, because of a fresh fall of snow, we would never know what the strange sound was.
Yetis are usually described as standing at least two meters (6 feet) tall with brown or reddish-brown hair, although some yetis are described as being shorter or having black or even white hair. A huge sloping head sits atop massive shoulders and a barrel chest. The creature does not have much of a neck, witnesses have said. As we shall see, a large number of activities have been ascribed to yetis, including kidnapping, sexual assault, killing yaks and even climbing Mount Everest!
Since the late 1800’s, there have been literally hundreds of references to yetis and sightings of the creatures themselves or of their footprints. Legends from the Karakorams across the Himalayas (a vast area spanning northern Burma,Assam, China, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet, and India) talk about these creatures. Supposedly, they are incredibly strong, and can uproot trees and lift large boulders. They live in caves in the high, inaccessible mountains, being very shy of humans, whom they avoid at all costs. Yetis are generally said to be herbivores, though certain reports make them into omnivores, like bears and humans. In Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet they have been reported to have killed yaks, breaking their necks with their tremendous strength.
Yeti, Sasquatch & Hairy Giants Page 5