Yeti, Sasquatch & Hairy Giants

by David Hatcher Childress

  Choden says, “In most traditional Bhutanese houses, the thresholds are raised and the horizontal upper portion of the frame of the door is very low. Anyone entering through a doorway must bend the head and lift the leg quite high in order to cross over to the other side. These are deliberate architectural designs to keep out spirits who, we believe, can neither bend their heads nor raise their legs to enter a house.”12

  In another tale, this one of a sleeping yeti in the eastern Sakteng area, a yak herder named Brongtsa, while looking for a missing yak in a thicket, came across the yeti, which he at first thought was his missing yak. As the yeti stood up, Brongtsa instinctively shot the yeti with an arrow. Brongtsa realized that he had made a big mistake in shooting the yeti, as there were many taboos against it, but he decided that in order to survive he had better finish the yeti off as best he could. He shot the yeti with a second arrow and the creature dragged itself in agony to a precipice and disappeared.

  Choden’s entertaining book includes several tales of women being kidnapped by yetis and becoming lovers of the hairy apemen. Also featured in several of the tales is the element of a fight between a yeti and a tiger. In such a titanic struggle of powerful animals, the yeti is the winner.

  One thing seems for sure as far as yetis in Bhutan are concerned: there is a strong oral tradition of the existence of these elusive creatures and the people genuinely believe in them. Whether they are real or not, the Bhutanese government has issued a number of stamps featuring the yeti, and like the Nepalese government, continues to promote the existence of the yeti as part of its fledgling tourist program. To keep overly excited foreigners from harming any of the migoi that they might come across while visiting the country, the government has proclaimed them a protected species. Hopefully, with tourists shooting cameras instead of guns, we will get some good photos of the Bhutanese migoi soon for our scrapbooks.

  DNA Evidence of a Yeti

  In October of 1998 an American climber and skier named Craig Calonica claimed that while part of an expedition to Mt. Everest he saw two yetis (one tends to imagine such a pair as husband and wife) while descending Everest on the northern, Tibetan-Chinese side. Calonica said that the two creatures walked upright and had thick, black shiny fur. Calonica is world-class mountain skier who has skied down some of the most remote and difficult mountain slopes in the world, reached only after weeks of trekking and climbing. He has skied down Everest and other nearby peaks on expeditions in 1981/82, 1996, 1997 and 1998. It was on October 21, 1998 after skiing down the Chinese side of Mt. Everest that he told Reuters news agency that he had seen the two yetis. They were walking on two legs just like humans. Their arms were longer than human arms and they had very big heads.

  Said Calonica, “My point was that I saw something and what I saw was not human, that was not a gorilla, not a bear, not a goat, and it was not a deer.” He draws the conclusion that it was in fact two yetis. Calonica said that his Nepali cook also saw the yetis as they passed.

  Reports like this from seasoned mountaineers should not be dismissed lightly. After all, who would see yetis in the remote areas of the Himalayas but the climbers, guides and cooks that actually visit these inaccessible areas? What is needed to prove the existence of these legendary creatures is photographic evidence and DNA evidence in the form of hair or flesh.

  In fact, in the spring of 2001, some very interesting DNA evidence was developed. According to a Discovery News article published April 6, 2001, a team working on a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 found a long black hair in the bark of a cedar tree while on location in Bhutan in March. The team was guided by Sonam Dhendup, the King of Bhutan’s official yeti hunter for the past 12 years, who took them into a forest where locals claimed to have discovered a piece of a mysterious skin that they thought belonged to a yeti.

  British scientists went to work on the samples brought back by the team, comparing extracted DNA to samples from other animals known to be found in Bhutan. The DNA from the long black strand of hair proved impossible to identify. Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the Oxford Institute of Molecular Medicine, one of the world’s leading experts on DNA analysis, and the first to extract genetic material from ancient bones said, “We found some DNA in it, but we don’t know what it is. It’s not a human, not a bear nor anything else we have so far been able to identify. It’s a mystery and I never thought this would end in a mystery. We have never encountered DNA that we couldn’t recognise before.”

  Discovery News reported that in the side of the cedar tree, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Oxford named Rob McCall, found scratch marks resembling those made by claws. McCall said he saw odd footprints nearby that were only a couple of hours old. He said that they showed a short print with a narrow heel and toe pads.

  In the Channel 4 documentary, one yeti eyewitness—a former royal guard called Druk Sherrik—described his encounter with the migyur, or yeti: “It was huge. It must have been nine feet tall. The arms were enormous and hairy. The face was red with a nose like a chimpanzee.”

  Unfortunately, exciting evidence like this is quickly ignored and forgotten. Here is what appears to be the strong evidence for the yeti that has been hoped for—the “smoking gun”: the hair of an unidentifiable animal found in a place packed with many tales of the yeti!

  Yeti footprints in the snow taken by Ang Tempa near Makalu.

  Artist’s drawing of early Mongol yeti reports.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE YETI IN TIBET, MONGOLIA AND RUSSIA

  Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.

  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

  Begin it now.

  —William Hutchinson Murray (1913-1996)

  The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

  The yeti is known throughout the Tibetan plateau and into the Trans-Himalaya regions of the Kun Lun Mountains and Altai Himalaya. In Mongolia he is known by the name “wildman” or “wild people“— almas (singular) or in other dialects, almasty or almasti. The most common name in Tibet for the yeti is dremo. In eastern Tibet, near Bhutan, they are called nydag shidag, and are thought to be guardians of certain areas.12

  Apes do not live in the high plateau mountain regions of Tibet, Mongolia, Russia and Central Asia, so the yetis of this region have usually been associated with wildmen, rather than with some sort of giant ape, as in Nepal, Bhutan and Southeast Asia. Almases are usually described as human-like with their bodies covered with reddish-brown hair. They are said to be between five and six and a half feet tall, with anthropomorphic facial features including a pronounced browridge, flat nose, and a weak chin. In many ways they are identical to the yeti.

  The main source for incidents concerning almases is British anthropologist Myra Shackley’s 1983 book Still Living? Shackley chronicled a number of fascinating incidents and had good access to the many Russian sources on the almas. Shackley speculated that these creatures might be the remnants of Neanderthals who had survived over the past 20,000 years, hence the title: Still Living?13

  In Search of the Almas

  According to Shackley, the first report of the almas is the astonishing tale of Hans Schiltenberger who, in the 15th century, was captured by the Turks and sent to the court of Tamerlane, who placed him in the retinue of a Mongol prince named Egidi. After returning to Europe in 1427, Schiltenberger wrote about his experience. In his 1430 book, he described creatures that came from some mountains, apparently the Tien Shan range in Mongolia:

  Chinese drawing of a wildman.

  Chinese drawing of a wildwoman.

  The inhabitants say that beyond the mountains is the beginning of a wasteland which lies at the edge of the earth. No one can survive there because the desert is populated by so many snakes and tigers. In the mountains themselves live wild people, who have nothing in common with other human beings. A pelt covers the entire body of these creatures. Only the hands and face are free of hair. They run around in the hills like animals and eat
foliage and grass and whatever else they can find. The lord of the territory made Egidi a present of a couple of forest people, a man and a woman. They had been caught in the wilderness, together with three untamed horses the size of asses and all sorts of other animals which are not found in German lands and which I cannot therefore put a name to.13

  Shackley found Schilten berger’s account especially credible for two reasons: “First, Schiltenberger reports that he saw the creatures with his own eyes. Secondly, he refers to Przewalski horses, which were only rediscovered by Nicholai Przewalski in 1881... Przewalski himself saw ‘wildmen’ in Mongolia in 1871.”

  The American Tibetologist W. Rockhill wrote of his 1886 journey into Tibet in his book The Land of the Lamas?75 In it he refers to Przewalski’s 1871 account of seeing wildmen in the remote area where he also discovered the famous primitive horse. Przewalski called the wildmen kung guressu, or “man beast.” Rockhill also heard of stories of these primitive men from the lamas. Says Rockhill of one story told to him by a lama:

  Several times, he said, his party had met hairy savages, with long, tangled locks falling around them like cloaks, naked, speechless beings, hardly human... This story of hairy savages I had often heard from Tibetans, while at Peking.75

  Later Rockhill says that a Mongolian reported to him that he had seen a certain area that had “innumerable herds of wild yak, wild asses, antelopes and geresun bamburshe. This expression means literally ‘wild men.’” Rockhill muses that the wildmen might actually be bears, and notes that such legends were common in the Middle Ages, and that they derived from the worship of bears. However, at the end of his book he recounts a story of “men in a primitive state of savagery” who are very hairy, wear primitive garments made of skin and probably live in caves.75, 64

  The famous mountaineer Reinhold Messner also concluded that the yeti was actually the Himalayan Black Bear in his 1998 book My Quest for the Yeti.91 Messner said he had been fascinated by the yeti since 1986, when he encountered a dark figure in the Himalayas one night and discovered a strange footprint the next day. He said that he had been searching for the elusive animal since that time, even asking the Dalai Lama about the yeti. He concluded at the end, however, that the yeti is not some apeman at all, but a Himalayan bear, or Tibetan bear—the chemo—which sometimes walks on two feet, as do all bears.

  Mongolian drawing of a wildman.

  Messner does recount an interesting tale, which he calls “unbelievable,” that his Balti porter told him in the Karakoram Mountains, bordering western Tibet and Kashmir, of a girl who was abducted by a dremo or yeti:

  A long time ago, a dremo abducted a girl in Hushe and carried her off to a cave, where he held her captive and fed her. Her brothers looked for her but couldn’t find her. Years later, the family’s dog found the cave and the girl. When the dog brought the girl’s necklace back to the village, her family immediately recognized it. The brothers followed the dog to the cave, where they found their sister and wanted to take her back to the village. Six or seven years had passed since her abduction, and she now had two yeti babies and didn’t want to go back to the village. But the brothers forced her to come with them and carried her babies in a basket. When they crossed the glacial torrent near the village, they stopped in the middle of the bridge and dropped the children into the water. The woman became frantic, sobbed, wanted to return to her cave, but they wouldn’t let her go. A few days later a dremo appeared, obviously looking for her. The village hunted him down and shot him. The woman died shortly thereafter.91

  The opinion that the yeti, almas, or Tibetan dremo is actually the chemo-bear of the mountains is sharred by Australian anthropologist Peter Bishop who spends portions of several chapters discussing the yeti and its affect on the early myth making of Tibet in his book The Sacred Myth of Shangri-La.64 Bishop, like Rheinhold Messner, has traveled extensively in Tibet and the Himalayas, but feels that stories of the abominable snowman are just too fantastic to be true, and that the occasional footprint or encounter can be explained by the bears.

  Mongolian drawing of a wildman.

  Shackley notes a drawing of an almas is found in a 19th-century Mongol compendium of medicines derived from various plants and animals. The text with the Mongolian drawing of a wildman.illustration is translated as saying, “The wildman lives in the mountains, his origins close to that of the bear, his body resembles that of man, and he has enormous strength. His meat may be eaten to treat mental diseases and his gall cures jaundice.”13

  With Mongolia becoming a client state of the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution and the death of Bogd Khan, reports of the almasty began reaching Russia. In 1937, Dordji Meiren, a member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, saw the skin of an almas in a monastery in the Gobi desert. The lamas were using it as a carpet in some of their rituals. Shackley says, “The hairs on the skin were reddish and curly... The features [of the face] were hairless, the face had eyebrows, and the head still had long disordered hair. Fingers and toes were in a good state of preservation and the nails were similar to human nails.”13

  Shackley was to become friends with the Russian zoologist/cryptozoologist Dmitri Bayanov of the Darwin Museum in Moscow. He wrote the best-known Russian book on yetis and the almas. Bayanov related that in 1963, Ivan Ivlov, a Russian pediatrician, was traveling through the Altai Himalaya in the southern part of Mongolia. Ivlov saw several humanlike creatures standing on a mountain slope. They appeared to be a family group, composed of a male, female and child. Ivlov observed the creatures through his binoculars from a distance of half a mile until they moved out of his field of vision. His Mongolian driver also saw them and said they were common in that area.13

  After his encounter with the almas family, Ivlov interviewed many Mongolian children, believing they would be more candid than adults. The children provided many additional reports about the almas. For example, one child told Ivlov that while he and some other children were swimming in a stream, he saw a male almas carry a child almas across it.

  A significant report came in 1980, when a worker at an experimental agricultural station, operated by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences at Bulgan, encountered the dead body of a wildman. The man said, “I approached and saw a hairy corpse of a robust humanlike creature dried and half-buried by sand. I had never seen such a humanlike being before covered by camel-colour brownish-yellow short hairs and I recoiled, although in my native land in Sinkiang I had seen many dead men killed in battle.

  Drawing of a sleeping almas from the early 1900s Russian zoologist Khakhlov.

  ...The dead thing was not a bear or ape and at the same time it was not a man like Mongol or Kazakh or Chinese and Russian. The hairs of its head were longer than on its body.”13

  The Almas of the Pamirs

  The Pamir Mountains are a range at the northwestern end of the Himalayan masiff where the Kunlun Mountains of northern Tibet smash into the area just above Pakistan and the Karakoram Mountains. This remote region is where the borders of Tajikistan, China, Kashmir and Afghanistan meet, and this area has been the scene of many almas sightings. In 1925, Mikhail Stephanovitch Topilski, a major general in the Soviet army, led his unit in an assault on an anti-Soviet guerilla force hiding in a cave in the Pamirs. One of the surviving guerillas said that while in the cave he and his comrades were attacked by several apelike creatures. Topilski ordered the rubble of the cave searched, and the body of one such creature was found. Topilski reported:

  At first glance I thought the body was that of an ape. It was covered with hair all over. But I knew there were no apes in the Pamirs. Also, the body itself looked very much like that of a man. We tried pulling the hair, to see if it was just a hide used for disguise, but found that it was the creature’s own natural hair. We turned bare of hair and had callous growths on them. The whole foot including the sole was quite hairless and was covered by hard brown skin. The hair got thinner near the hand, and the palms had none at all but only callous skin.

  A
scene from the 1957 film The Abominable Snowman with the body of a yeti.

  The colour of the face was dark, and the creature had neither beard nor moustache. The temples were bald and the back of the head was covered by thick, matted hair. The dead creature lay with its eyes open and its teeth bared. The eyes were dark and the teeth were large and even and shaped like human teeth. The forehead was slanting and the eyebrows were very powerful. The protruding jawbones made the face resemble the Mongol type of face. The nose was flat, with a deeply sunk bridge. The ears were hairless and looked a little more pointed than a human being’s with a longer lobe. The lower jaw was very massive. The creature had a very powerful chest and well developed muscles... The arms were of normal length, the hands were slightly wider and the feet much wider and shorter than a man’s.13

  In 1957, Alexander Georgievitch Pronin, a hydrologist at the Geographical Research Institute of Leningrad University, participated in an expedition to the Pamirs, for the purpose of mapping glaciers. On August 2, 1957, while his team was investigating the Fedchenko glacier, Pronin hiked into the valley of the Balyandkiik River.

  According to Shackley, around midday, he noticed a figure standing on a rocky cliff about 500 yards above him. At first he was surprised, since this area was known to be uninhabited, but then he became frightened as he saw that the creature was not human. It resembled a man but was unusually stooped over. Pronin watched the stocky figure move across the snow, keeping its feet wide apart, and noted that its forearms were longer than a human’s plus its body was covered with reddish grey hair. He claimed that he saw the creature again three days later, walking upright. Since this incident, there have been numerous wildman sightings in the Pamirs, and members of various Soviet scientific expeditions have photographed and taken casts of footprints.13