Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes. It showed up dark against the snow, and as far as I could make out, wore no clothes. Within the next minute or so it had moved into some thick scrub and was lost to view.

  Such a fleeting glimpse, unfortunately, did not allow me to set up the telephoto camera, or even to fix the object carefully with the binoculars; but a couple of hours later, during the descent, I purposely made a detour so as to pass the place where the “man” or “beast” had been seen. I examined the footprints, which were clearly visible on the surface of the snow. They were similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long by four inches wide at the broadest part of the foot. The marks of five distinct toes and the instep were perfectly clear, but the trace of the heel was indistinct, and the little that could be seen of it appeared to narrow down to a point. I counted fifteen such footprints at regular intervals ranging from one-and-a-half to two feet. The prints were undoubtedly of a biped, the order of the spoor having no characteristics whatever of any imaginable quadruped. Dense rhododendron scrub prevented any further investigations as to the direction of the footprints.22

  Tombazi later said that he did not believe it was a Yeti after all, but probably a Hindu hermit who lived in isolation in the local mountain caves.23 Although it seems to be possible for at least some acclimatized people to go barefoot in the snow at high elevations for long periods,24 the measurement of the footprints as only 6 to 7 inches long but 4 inches wide is, as Napier points out, not typical of that of a human footprint. It is, however, the right proportions for a bear paw print. The prints had narrow heels, which is also a bear-like feature. Human footprints are broad in the back because the heel supports the body weight each time a human foot strides and steps. As Napier concludes, Tombazi’s description is inconsistent: the creature’s bipedal motion is human-like, but it left bear-like prints.25 Either it was an unknown bipedal creature with bear-like feet, or it was just a walking bear and Tombazi’s “fleeting” glimpse of the creature is distorted (as memories often are).

  Additional accounts from the different Himalayan climbing and surveying expeditions occurred through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, although none made much of an impact on Western consciousness until the name Abominable Snowman emerged as a grotesque label for the creature.

  THE NAZI AND THE SNOWMAN

  Brooke Dolan II, the son of a wealthy Philadelphia industrialist, led two expeditions to China and the Himalayas in the 1930s. In 1938, the German biologist Ernst Schäfer wrote a popular account of his second (1934–1936) expedition under Dolan.26 Schäfer was attached to these American-funded surveys as a scientist, and he made numerous observations on the natural history of Tibet, including some of the first records of the giant panda (he was apparently “the second white man to shoot a panda”),27 the Himalayan brown bear, and other wildlife. He also reported contemptuously on lore and traces of the Yeti in the region. “For the rest of his life Schäfer would poke fun at believers in the apemen of the Himalayas,” explained author and documentarian Christopher Hale. “In 1938 he became exasperated as day and night his men fearfully discussed Migyuds [ape-man god of Buddhist mythology, associated with the Yeti], and he took to playing tricks on them by faking its footprints in the snow.”28 Rather than being some sort of mythological beast, Schäfer concluded, the Yeti was actually the Himalayan brown bear (figure. 3.1). He described an adventure that cinched it for him and shared the opinion of his assistant Wang:

  On the morning of the second day, a wild-looking Wata with a rascally face comes to me and tells the fantastic story of a snowman that haunts the tall mountains. This is the same mythical creature about which Himalaya explorers always like to write because it envelops the unconquered peaks of the mountain chains with the nimbus of mystery. It is supposed to be as tall as a yak, hairy like a bear, and walk on two legs like a man, but its soles are said to point backward so that one can never track its trail. At night it is supposed to roam, descend deep into the valleys, devastate the livestock of the native people, and tear apart men whom it then carries up to its mountain home near the glaciers. After I listen calmly to this bloody tale, I convey to the Wata that he does not have to make up such a tall tale; however, if he could bring me to the cave of such a “snowman,” and if the monster is actually in its lair, then the empty tin can in my tent, which appears to be the object of his great pleasure, would be his reward. But should he have lied to his lord, added Wang, he could expect a beating with the riding crop. Smiling, with many bows, the lad bids his leave with the promise to return early the next morning and report to me. Wang is also of the opinion that there are snowmen and draws for me the face of the mystery animal in the darkest colors, just like he has heard about it from the elders of his native tribe countless times: Devils and evil spirits wreak havoc up there day and night in order to kill men.29

  Figure 3.1 Himalayan brown bear mother and cub, photographed in the district of Kargil in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, India. (© 2013 Aishwarya Maheshwari/WWF–India)

  “But Wang,” Schäfer scoffed, “how can you as my senior companion believe in such fairy tales?” Wang explained that these forces were manifest all around them. After all, “the same evil demons already tried to menace us many times as we traverse the wild steppes. They also sent us the violent snowstorms that fell on our weak little group like supernatural forces and at night wanted to rip apart our tents with crude fists as if they had rotten canvas before them.” Schäfer insisted “that this snowman is nothing other than a bear, perhaps a ‘Mashinng,’ a really large one; but with our ‘big gun,’ I will easily shoot him dead before he even leaves the cave!”

  The Wata returned within the day with a witness who had, while searching for lost sheep, found a cave in which “he beheld for the first time with his own eyes the yellow head of a snowman.” Following his guides to the den of the Yeti, Schäfer shot it at point-blank range when it emerged, roaring angrily, from its nap—and it was indeed a Himalayan brown bear. He later described the Abominable Snowman idea as a “sham,” saying that he “established the yeti’s real identity with the pictures and pelts of my Tibetan bears,”30 some of which he shot and sent back to American and European museums.

  Schäfer even alleged that in 1938, mountaineers and important Yeti track–finders “[Frank] Smythe and [Eric] Shipton came to me on their knees, begging me not to publish my findings in the English-speaking press. The secret had to be kept at all costs—‘Or else the press won’t give us the money for our next Everest expedition.’”31 If true, this claim, made in 1991, would be extremely damning. If Shipton had been engaged in hoaxing or playing along with a popular legend in the 1930s, that would reflect badly on his famous footprint find in 1951—a print that remains the Yeti’s most powerful icon, but that has (as we will see) recently been implicated as a hoax. It happens that Shipton did indeed report other Yeti tracks in 1936—footprints that predate the publication of Schäfer’s book.32 In 1937, likewise, Smythe found “the imprints of a huge foot apparently of a biped and in stride closely resembling my own tracks.” Smythe was able to follow these tracks all the way to the creature’s cave lair. The problem for Schäfer’s claim that Smythe and Shipton begged him to stay silent (apart from being uncorroborated and reported decades after the fact) is that in 1938 Smythe had no need to fear that Schäfer would reveal that the Yeti is really a bear: Smythe already had publicly debunked his own well-documented Yeti tracks as those of a bear, declaring that “a superstition of the Himalayas is now explained” as being based on bears.33 Still, Schäfer’s allegation should not be ruled out in Shipton’s case. In 1937, Shipton’s climbing partner H. W. Tilman responded to an article on the Yeti written by Smythe with a tongue-in-cheek letter of denunciation (or, rather, two letters, one prankishly penned under his nickname, Balu [Bear]):34 “Mr. Smythe’s article, if it was an attempt to abolish that vene
rable institution the ‘Yeti,’ was hardly worth the paper on which it was written.”35 Tilman’s comments about the Yeti were, throughout his career, filled with playful, cheeky jokes—with “unbecoming levity,” as one author put it.36 “Admittedly difficult though it is, the confounding of scientific skeptics is always desirable, and I commend [track witness] Wing Commander [E. B.] Beauman’s suggestion that an expedition should be sent out,” becomes a telling comment in that humorous context—as does, perhaps, Tilman’s claim to have found mysterious tracks himself in 1937: “I was crossing the Bireh Ganga glacier when we came upon tracks made in crisp snow which resembled nothing so much as those of an elephant. I have followed elephant spoor often and could have sworn we were following one then, but for the comparative scarcity of those beasts in the Central Himalaya.”37 It is tempting to speculate that Shipton and Tilman (rather than Smythe) truly could have encouraged Schäfer to play along with all the Yeti fun. After all, as Ralph Izzard found when he interviewed Tilman, “It was obvious that he also belongs to the school which considers that the mystery of the Yeti should be left uninvestigated; that once the unknown becomes known and the glamour is dispelled, the interest evaporated.”38

  Be that as it may, the important zoological work that Schäfer had done on his Himalayan expeditions was besmirched by a much more serious matter: his joining Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS; Protective Squadron) in 1933.39 Asserting that “science only grows on a racial basis,” Schäfer described the values of science and the values of the SS as one.40 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, used Schäfer’s expertise in Tibet to plan Operation Tibet, a secret Nazi mission to incite the local Tibetans and Nepalese to rise up against the British troops in the region. In addition, Hitler and Himmler had strange notions that the ancestral Aryan race had originated in the mountains of Tibet, and they sent Schäfer there to find evidence in support of their bizarre genealogy. He was not successful, and his association with Hitler and Himmler completely overshadowed his scientific reputation after the war, so almost all of his solid prewar scientific work on the natural history of Tibet was forgotten. So, too, were his sober descriptions of the Yeti’s legends and traces, and his evidence that the footprints had been made by Himalayan brown bears was discounted or forgotten until Reinhold Messner translated them and revived the idea in connection with his own quest for the Yeti.41

  THE STAMPEDE TO THE HIMALAYAS

  World War II slowed down the exploration of the Himalayas for a while because most men were engaged in the war effort, and Central Asia was part of the battleground between the Allies and the Japanese. Not until the late 1940s and early 1950s did the pace of exploration and the search for the Yeti pick up again. Two reports are of note. In 1948, three army officers who were headed to Kolahoi Glacier in Kashmir had reached the snowline at 13,000 feet when they saw a large primate bounding toward them. At first, they thought that it might be the Yeti, but at closer range it turned out to be a large langur monkey (perhaps Semnopithecus schistaceus or Semnopithecus entellus), which can weigh nearly 50 pounds and walk bipedally for long distances (figure 3.2). Shortly thereafter, two Scandinavian prospectors reported large langur monkeys at 13,000 feet. The monkeys apparently attacked them and left large footprints in the snow42 (though some sources doubt their story).43

  Figure 3.2 A species of langur monkey.

  The 1950s were the golden age of Yeti hunting, when, as John Napier suggests, “folklore started to deteriorate into fakelore” and there was a stampede to hunt for evidence of the Yeti. The Nepalese government offered special licenses at £400 per Yeti as an inducement to hunters.44 The crucial event occurred during the Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition of 1951, led by Eric Shipton. The explorers were scouting a route to the top of Mount Everest (which still had not been climbed) and had split into three parties. While Edmund Hillary and another expedition member scouted one area, and two other climbers explored another, Shipton, team doctor Michael Ward, and Sherpa San Tenzing crossed a glacier at 18,000 feet.45 There they found footprints in the snow—and, for once, someone took photographs. In doing so, they made history, for the Shipton print remains the single most famous and most persuasive piece of evidence for the Yeti. Like the film footage of Bigfoot shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, it echoes hauntingly throughout the literature. As Napier put it, “Something must have made the Shipton footprint. Like Mount Everest, it is there, and needs explaining. I only wish I could solve the puzzle; it would help me sleep better at night.”46 But Shipton and Ward may not have anticipated how famous this print would become. By Shipton’s own account, few of the tracks seemed impressive. “The tracks were mostly distorted by melting into oval impressions,” he said, “slightly longer and a good deal broader than those made by our large mountain boots.”47 Elsewhere, Shipton elaborated:

  As we went down the glacier, however, the snow became less deep and the footprints more regularly shaped. At length we came to places, particularly near crevasses, where the snow covering the glacier ice was less than an inch thick. Here we found specimens of the footprints so sharply defined that they could hardly have been clearer had they been carefully made in wax. We could tell both by comparing one print against another and by the sharpness of the outline there had been no distortion by melting, and from this we inferred that the creatures (for there had evidently been two) had passed only a very few hours before. They were going down the glacier. The footprints were 12 inches long and about 6 inches wide. There was a big, rounded toe, projecting very much to the side; the middle toe was well separated from this, while three small toes were grouped close together. There were several places where the creatures had jumped over small crevasses and where we could see clearly that they had dug their toes into the snow on the other side to prevent their feet from slipping back.48

  Shipton photographed what he and Ward took to be the clearest, least-distorted track (figure 3.3), but seems not to have taken pictures of any of the other “Yeti” prints, which would have helped determine the significance of the photographs he did shoot.

  Or did he? Since the late 1980s, a school of thought has grown that Shipton may have intentionally faked his famous track, and that argument hinges on discrepancies in the accounts about how many photographs were taken.49 Some cryptozoological sources claim that Shipton shot not only two close-up photographs of the famous footprint (one with an ice ax for scale, and the other with Ward’s boot), but also two wider shots showing the same Yeti trackway trailing off to a moraine.50 The problem is that the tracks in the wider shots do not match the footprint in the close-ups. When Napier asked Ward about this, Ward told him that the wider photograph was frequently misidentified, as an accidental result of having been kept in the same photo file as the shots of the “Yeti” footprint. According to Ward, that second trackway—probably from a goat—was photographed separately, earlier on the same day, and had nothing at all to do with the “Yeti” footprint photos. When Shipton confirmed Ward’s two-trackway story, Napier felt that this explanation “clears up an eighteen-year-old mystery”—but it did not stay clear. Writing two decades later as the only surviving witness of the photographing of the famous Yeti print,51 Ward spoke of

  Figure 3.3 An alleged Yeti footprint photographed by Eric Shipton in 1951, on a glacier of the Menlung Basin (near the border of Nepal and China). (Reproduced by permission of Royal Geographical Society [with IBG], London)

  a whole series of footprints in the snow. These seemed to be of two varieties, one rather indistinct leading to the surrounding snowfields, while the other had in places a markedly individual imprint etched in the two- to four-inch snow covering on the top of hard névé. We had no means of measuring these, so Shipton took four photographs, two of the indistinct prints with myself, my footprints and rucksack as comparison; the other two photos were of one of the most distinct and detailed prints, one with my ice axe and one with my booted foot for scale.52

  Is “a whole series of footprints … of two varieties” one tr
ail or two trails? Most early accounts seem to describe only a single set of tracks, while later versions (and later interpretations of the older records) either suggest two sets or one—or are ambiguous. The records and memories on this point are as conflicting as the comparison between the prints in the wide shots versus the print in the close-ups. As team member Hillary later reflected, “I was not aware of any second set of tracks.”53

  Whatever these photographs truly depict, the shot of the footprint compared with the ice ax was soon celebrated and debated in newspapers around the world, popular magazines, and even leading scientific journals54—and soon a rush of people were trying to mount expeditions to find more evidence of the Yeti. “The discovery of these footprints in 1951 stimulated great interest in the yeti,” Ward recalled, “and, as a result, many expeditions of greatly varying degrees of competence have taken place in the Himalaya and Central Asia.”55

  But could the shot have been a hoax or prank perpetrated by Shipton and Ward? That was the suspicion of investigative journalist Peter Gillman, who found it “particularly striking” that the two-trackway story, in his opinion, “contradicted all previous accounts.”56 Potentially more damaging, Gillman noted that rare uncropped versions of the close-up photo with the ice ax may show part of a second footprint that seems to lack the distinctive features of the “main” footprint:

  Unlike the full footprint above it, it had only vague impressions of the smaller toes; and where you would expect a big toe to match the one in the main footprint, there was nothing at all. It was after pondering all the evasions and inconsistencies that we concluded that the most obvious explanation for the unique and anomalous single footprint was that it had been fabricated by Shipton. It would have been the work of moments to enhance one of the oval footprints by adding the “toe-prints” by hand, particularly a hand wearing a woollen glove.57