If we are to accept eyewitness testimony (and, without any bodies, Bigfooters are stuck with it), we must grant that Sasquatches are routinely exposed to the same mortal risks as bears. “There are a number of people who claim not only to have seen a sasquatch on the road but to have run into one,” explained Green, presenting as an example the testimony of a logging truck driver who allegedly hit a 7-foot Bigfoot in Oregon in 1973.183 Many others—including pivotal witnesses like William Roe and Bob Gimlin—have described watching Sasquatches over the barrel of a rifle. A considerable number of people have even claimed to have shot Bigfoot.184 Even if we grant that Sasquatches are wily, tough, and rare, their luck must sometimes run out. Common sense dictates that hunters and truckers should occasionally bring one down. In the early days, that’s just what Bigfooters expected to see. And yet, that has not happened. Let’s imagine that Bigfoot is as rare as a wolverine, as stealthy as a cougar, and as powerful as a grizzly. What of it? People see wolverines, photograph cougars, and shoot grizzlies. As Daegling notes, “Wolverines are scarce animals, but we do know what their skeletons look like for the simple reason that we have them.”185
TOO MUCH SMOKE
The two great clichés ruling the Bigfoot literature are the “mountain of evidence” and the connected argument: “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” This is a non sequitur: where there’s smoke, there’s smoke.186 And in this case, that “smoke” is so widespread that it actually argues against the existence of Bigfoot.
It is one thing to suppose that some species of large animals may exist undetected in remote parts of the world (indeed, surveys of deep ocean life have confirmed this for marine animals). It is a different thing altogether to suppose that a species of large animal could thrive in all regions of the globe without anyone ever finding one. Sasquatches are thought to live not only in the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest, but across North America and beyond. They are spotted in every state in the United States, from New Mexico to New Jersey. They lurk in Florida swamps, Texas thickets, and Ohio farmland. Bigfoot even turns up in Hawaii.187 (Meditate on that one first, and it seems almost natural to hear that Sasquatches have been reported on Staten Island.)188 Globally, Bigfoot stomps not only through North, Central, and South America, but across Europe, Africa, Asia, and even Australia (where it is known as the Yowie).
Grover Krantz staked his scientific career on the belief that Sasquatches exist, but the planetary extent of reports of Bigfoot-like creatures was a problem that gave him pause. He warned that “when it is suggested that a wild primate is found native to all continents, including Australia, then credibility drops sharply.” Even if we were to leave aside the plausibility of a global primate remaining undiscovered, Krantz knew that very few animal species have anywhere near as wide a distribution: “Beyond a certain point, it can be argued that the more widespread a cryptozoological species is reported to be, the less likely it is that the creature exists at all.”189
THE YETI IN POPULAR CULTURE
DURING A TRIP AROUND THE WORLD in the summer of 1973—through Africa, India, Thailand, China, and Japan—my college roommate and I stopped in Kathmandu, Nepal. We visited many of the usual tourist sites, including Buddhist temples and stupas and Lamaist monasteries. We attended a religious ceremony during which villagers slashed the throat of a sacrificial goat right before our eyes, and we drove to a spot where (when the clouds finally cleared) we could see the summit of Mount Everest. But as we walked through the open-air markets in several parts of the Nepalese capital, what was most surprising was the huge number of items for sale that were related to the Yeti, the mysterious ape-like creature that is native to the Himalayas. We saw casts of alleged Yeti footprints, supposed Yeti fur, and images of the Yeti on almost every item imaginable. Just like Nessie and Champ, the Yeti is big business, attracting many free-spending tourists to Nepal and bringing expeditions of cryptozoologists determined to find it. There is a five-star hotel in Kathmandu called the Yak & Yeti, as well as the Yeti Bar, and the official airline of Nepal is known as Yeti Airlines. Simon Welfare and John Fairley write that the Yeti “is tangled in a web of fantasy, religion, legend, chicanery, and commercialism. The Yeti is a highly commercial legend, perhaps even Nepal’s principal foreign currency earner.”1
The Yeti has become one of the most enduring figures of legend. It has been mentioned by a wide variety of mountaineers who have scaled the highest mountains of the world. Because of its alleged existence in an exotic world largely inaccessible to most Westerners, it has been tied to the myth of Shangri-la as well. As Brian Regal wrote, “Big and hairy, the Yeti lived in a remote part of the world, the locals feared it, and it reportedly behaved like, well, a monster. It conveniently occupied a space, both temporally and physically, at the crossroads of the worlds of East and West, and so it took place alongside other oriental ‘mysteries.’”2
The Yeti (often misnamed the Abominable Snowman) has been the star of numerous movies, starting with The Snow Creature (1954), which was filmed and released only a year or two after the first widespread reports of the Yeti in popular culture, and continuing with The Abominable Snowman (1957) and Snowbeast (1977); makes a cameo appearance, voiced by John Ratzenberger, in Monsters, Inc. (2001); and fights Chinese soldiers in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008). It has appeared in some form in dozens of television shows, including Bumble, the Abominable Snow Monster, in the stop-motion animated Christmas classic Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964); in episodes of Looney Tunes, Spiderman, Electric Company, Scooby-Doo, Duck Tales, Jonny Quest, Doctor Who, Power Rangers, Tintin, and even the preschool cartoon Backyardigans; and in numerous “monster documentaries” on cable channels. In literature, the Yeti appears not only in Tintin in Tibet (1960) by Hergé (Georges Remi), but also in The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena (1995), the thirty-eighth book in R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, and in Marvel comics, among others. There are even audio-animatronic Yetis in the Matterhorn Bobsled ride in Disneyland in California, and in the Expedition Everest ride at Walt Disney World in Florida. Several rock songs refer to it, and a rock band is named Yeti.
The legend is now so widespread in popular culture that most portrayals of the creature bear no resemblance to those in the original accounts reported by explorers in the Himalayas. Thanks to the “Abominable Snowman” label, most pop-culture depictions envision the Yeti as a tall bipedal white-furred beast, not the dark-furred, gorilla-like or bear-like creature that inhabits the legends of the cultures of the Himalayas.
THE MONSTER OF THE MOUNTAINS
What do we know of this mysterious creature that allegedly haunts the world’s highest mountains? There is the confusion due to the numerous names that have become associated with the Yeti legend, with multiple names not only among languages and cultures, but also within each language (and, indeed, multiple or contested meanings for many of those words—not to mention a variety of spellings). Author and mountaineer Reinhold Messner has listed and attempted to define many of these terms: Yeti is the mispronunciation of the Sherpa name for the creature, Yeh-teh (animal of rocky places), or, possibly, a derivation of Meh-teh (man-bear). Tibetans also call it Dzu-teh (cattle bear), also a name for the Himalayan brown bear (Ursus arctos isabellinus), which can walk on its hind legs, or Mi-go (wild man). Messner found that the Tibetan word chemo or dremo is most commonly used for both the Yeti and the Himalayan brown bear. In the different Chinese dialects, it is beshong or bai xiong (white bear), probably the giant panda; mashiung or ma xiong (brown bear); and renshung or ren xiong (man-bear).3 The wide spectrum of names for the creature reflects the facts that the cryptozoological legend is an amalgam of many different cultural traditions and legends, and that (as Messner discovered) there is much confusion between the legendary chemo and the rare Himalayan brown bear.
The odd and inappropriate name Abominable Snowman originally derived from the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition, sponsored by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society and l
ed by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Howard-Bury in 1921. This was one of the first groups to scout a route for an attempt to climb Mount Everest. Ascending past 20,000 feet of elevation, Howard-Bury and his team were surprised to find tracks in the snow. “We were able to pick out tracks of hares and foxes,” he wrote, “but one that at first looked like a human foot puzzled us considerably.”4 He soon realized that “these tracks, which caused so much comment, were probably caused by a large ‘loping’ grey wolf, which in the soft snow formed double tracks rather like those of a barefooted man”—that is, a wolf that had placed its back paws in the depressions that had been made by its front paws.5 However, his Sherpa guides “at once jumped to the conclusion”6 that this “was the track of a wild, hairy man, and that these men were occasionally to be found in the wildest and most inaccessible mountains.”7 Howard-Bury was scornful of this interpretation. “Tibet, however, is not the only country where there exists a ‘bogey man,’” he wrote. “In Tibet he takes the form of a hairy man who lives in the snows, and little Tibetan children who are naughty and disobedient are frightened by wonderful fairy tales that are told about him. To escape from him they must run down the hill, as then his long hair falls over his eyes and he is unable to see them. Many other such tales have they with which to strike terror into the hearts of bad boys and girls.”8
Be that as it may, the “wild man” idea was newspaper gold. Journalist Henry Newman interviewed both the expedition members and the porters when they returned to Darjeeling, India. The Europeans rather boringly agreed that the tracks were “unquestionably made in the snow by some four-legged creature about the size of a wolf,” so Newman delightedly recounted the porters’ more colorful tales of what they called Metoh Kangmi—a term, he wrote, that “as far as I could make out, means ‘abominable snow men.’”9 Looking back on this fateful translation, Newman described himself as “the showman responsible for the introduction of the ‘Abominable Snowman’ to the world of literature and art” and described how the name came to be:
I fell into conversation with some of the porters, and to my surprise and delight another Tibetan, who was present, gave me a full description of the wild men—how their feet were turned backward to enable them to climb easily and how their hair was so long and matted that, when going downhill, it fell over their eyes…. When I asked him what name was applied to these men, he said “Metoh Kangmi.” Kangmi means “snow-men” and the word metoh I translated as “abominable.” The whole story seemed a joyous creation, so I sent it to one or two newspapers. It was seized upon…. Later, I was told by a Tibetan expert that I had not quite got the force of the word metoh. It did not mean “abominable” quite so much as “filthy” and “disgusting,” somebody dressed in rags. There is an Urdu word, dalkaposh, meaning somebody wearing filthy and tattered clothing. The Tibetan word means something like that, but is much more emphatic.10
Based on that meaning, Newman believed that the wild-men myth was based on actual human beings: bandits and ascetics who live in the wilderness regions. It is important to note once again, however, that stories about Yeti-like creatures extend throughout the Himalayas and beyond, leading to a very large number of terms in different languages, most with multiple or contested meanings.11 The interpretation of Metoh Kangmi is no exception. In 1956, zoologist William L. Straus Jr. described an alternative interpretation of Metoh Kangmi that had recently been put forward by Indian religious leader Srimat Swami Pranavananda: “Mi-te, which has been translated by some Himalayan expeditionists as ‘abominable, filthy, disgusting to a repulsive degree, dirty,’ actually means ‘man-bear.’ Kangmi, or ‘snowman,’ is merely an alternate word for the same animal. Hence the term miteh-kangmi, from whence ‘abominable snowman’ represents an incorrect combination, owing to mistranslation, of two terms that are essentially synonymous.”12 Based on this translation, Straus argued that the creature was “no other than the Himalayan red bear.”
Whatever the origin of the name, Newman’s newspaper account christened a cryptid, with Abominable Snowman becoming the most common appellation for the creature in the English language. As Regal puts it, “This striking name caught people’s attention, and, more than any of the sightings or stories to this point, made the creature a topic of interest outside the Himalayas. With this catchy but inaccurate label, the creature went from being a quaint local legend to an international phenomenon. The same type of makeover and jump to celebrity status occurred later in the century, when Sasquatch became Bigfoot.”13
THE LEGEND GROWS
The first known sighting of a Yeti-like creature to be recorded in the region by a Westerner appeared more than 180 years ago in a paper by Brian Hodgson, an Englishman living in Nepal. A classic gentleman-explorer typical of the British Empire at that time, Hodgson was not only a diplomat, a biologist, and an administrator, but also an adventurer. He was the first Englishman permitted to visit the Nepalese royal court and the first Westerner to record in detail the traditions of Nepalese Buddhism and other cultural traditions. He wrote more than 300 scientific papers about his discoveries in the Himalayas. In one of them, published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1832, Hodgson wrote, “My shooters were once alarmed in the Kachár by the apparition of a ‘wild man,’ possibly an ourang, but I doubt their accuracy. They mistook the creature for a cacodemon or rakshas [mythological humanoid beings], and fled from it instead of shooting it. It moved, they said, erectly: was covered with long dark hair, and had no tail.”14 As anthropologist John Napier reports, “Hodgson was somewhat scornful that his hunters had run away in terror from the creature instead of standing their ground and shooting it dead like a true British sportsman. Had they done so perhaps this book would never have needed to be written!”15
In 1889, the first report of Yeti footprints (high in the Himalayas in what is now Sikkim) appeared in what Ivan Sanderson described (amusingly, as it is pretty clear that Sanderson had not read it)16 as “a somewhat uninspired and uninspiring book about it, uninspiringly named Among the Himalayas” by Laurence A. Waddell, a soldier, lawyer, and historian:
Some large footprints in the snow led across our track, and away up to higher peaks. These are alleged to be the trail of the hairy wild men who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows, along with the mythical white lions, whose roar is reputed to be heard during storms. The belief in these creatures is universal among Tibetans. None, however, of the many Tibetans I have interrogated on this subject could ever give me an authentic case. On the most superficial investigation it always resolved itself into something that somebody heard tell of. These so-called hairy wild men are evidently the great yellow snow-bear (Ursus isabellinus), which is highly carnivorous, and often kills yaks. Yet, although most of the Tibetans know this bear sufficiently to give it a wide berth, they live in such an atmosphere of superstition that they are always ready to find extraordinary and supernatural explanations of uncommon events.17
As Napier points out, “The willingness of the Sherpas to assure travelers that tracks of any description discovered in the snow are those of the Yeti is a recurrent theme in the literature on the subject. Such conning appears to be quite without malice aforethought and probably reflects the extreme politeness of the Sherpas, who regard it as excessively bad-mannered to disappoint anyone. In addition, as many authorities have reported, the Sherpas possess an element of mischievousness and love a good story.”18
Mischievousness aside, the specific identification of bears as “wild men” was documented by other early authors. United States ambassador William Woodville Rockhill described this encounter in 1891:
One evening, a Mongol told me of a journey he had once made to the lakes in company of a Chinese trader who wished to buy rhubarb from the Tibetans that annually visit their shores. They had seen innumerable herds of wild yak, wild asses, antelopes, and gérésun bamburshé. This expression means literally “wild men”; and the speaker insisted that such they were, covered with long hair, standing erect, and mak
ing tracks like men’s, but he did not believe they could speak. Then, taking a ball of tsamba he modeled a gérésun bamburshé, which was a very good likeness of a bear. To make the identification perfect, he said that the Chinaman cried out, when he saw one, “Hsiung, hsiung,” “Bear, bear”; in Tibetan, he added, it is called dré-mon. The Mongols do not class the bear among ordinary animals; he is to them “the missing link,” partaking of man in his appearance, but of beasts in his appetites. The bear takes the place of the “king of beasts” among them and the Tibetans, for they hold him the most terrible of animals when attacked, and a confirmed man-eater!19
In the early twentieth century, numerous expeditions to the Himalayas were mounted by explorers and big-game hunters, including Major C. H. Shockley, Colonel Gerald Burrard, and Colonel A. E. Ward.20 These three men wrote books about their explorations, in which they detailed reports of animal sightings. They described (and shot) many known and previously unknown Himalayan animals, but
never once did they give a hint of a Yeti—a suspicious track or an ominous footprint. This negative evidence is important, for these men were expert big-game hunters and were accompanied by experienced shikaris and would assuredly have been keeping a sharp lookout for strange animals or for an unusual spoor. Perhaps they were traveling in the wrong area; perhaps their peregrinations were at too low an altitude; perhaps, being soldiers and government officials and anxious to preserve the respect of their colleagues down on the plains, they saw but said nothing. Or, again, perhaps there was nothing to see.21
After the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition, which led to the misnomer Abominable Snowman, the next significant mention of the Yeti was in 1925 by the British-Greek explorer and photographer N. A. Tombazi. Hiking at about 15,000 feet, on an expedition for the Royal Geographical Society, he saw a creature more than 200 to 300 yards away near Zemu Glacier:
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