Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  THE MOUNTAIN MAN

  If Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first humans to scale Mount Everest, most mountaineers regard Reinhold Messner as the greatest climber ever. Born in the South Tyrol region of the Italian Alps in 1944, Messner started his career making record-breaking climbs in the Alps and the Andes in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1978, Messner and his climbing partner Peter Habeler became the first and so far the only humans to have reached the summit of Mount Everest without bottled oxygen, and two years later he scaled it again, not only without carrying oxygen but climbing alone. He is the only person to have climbed all fourteen of the “eight-thousanders,” the highest peaks in the world, which are more than 8,000 meters (26,000 feet) above sea level (all in the Himalayas). He and Arved Fuchs were also the first people to have crossed Antarctica on foot. He has made many sacrifices for these achievements, losing several toes to frostbite and suffering numerous other injuries.

  He is famous for these many incredible climbs, but Messner had another interest as well: the Yeti. As he described one night in 1986, while traveling alone in a deep, forested valley in the Himalayan foothills:

  Making my way through some ash-colored juniper bushes, I suddenly heard an eerie sound—a whistling noise, similar to the warning call mountain goats make. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the outline of an upright figure dart between the trees to the edge of the clearing, where low-growing thickets covered the steep slope. The figure hurried on, silent and hunched forward, disappearing behind a tree only to reappear again against the moonlight. It stopped for a moment and turned to look at me. Again I heard the whistle, more of an angry hiss, and for a heartbeat I saw eyes and teeth. The creature towered menacingly, its face a gray shadow, its body a black outline. Covered with hair, it stood upright on two short legs and had powerful arms that hung down almost to its knees. I guessed it to be over seven feet tall. Its body looked much heavier than that of a man of that size, but it moved with such agility and power toward the edge of the escarpment that I was both startled and relieved. Mostly I was stunned. No human would have been able to run like that in the middle of the night. It stopped again beyond the trees by the low-growing thickets, as if to catch its breath, and stood motionless in the moonlit night without looking back. I was too mesmerized to take my binoculars out of my backpack.

  The longer I stared at it, the more the figure seemed to change shape…. A heavy stench hung in the air, and the creature’s receding calls resounded within me. I heard it plunge into the thicket, saw it rush up the slope on all fours, higher and higher, deeper into the night and into the mountains, until it disappeared and all was still again.135

  Messner fled in terror, scrambling along the rocky slopes until he reached a village and safety.

  For the next ten years, he trekked around the Himalayas—sneaking into and out of occupied Tibet and hiding from Chinese patrols, breaking out of Chinese jails, hiking up and down one mountain range after another—in search of more evidence. He was one of the first Westerners to visit Bhutan after the king ended the country’s self-imposed isolation. For all his searching, Messner found a few tracks, but they were inconclusive. He visited the famous Pangboche monastery, whose “Yeti scalp” turned out to be a serow pelt. At a Bhutanese monastery, Messner viewed a relic alleged to be the mummified pelt, head, hands, and feet of a “Yeti cub,” but it was also a fabricated taxidermic fake (what sideshow operators would call a “gaffed” creature):

  The hands and legs really did seem human, like those of a child of eight or nine. It was obvious they were shaped with little sticks, leather, cloth, and thread—in other words, re-created. They were hanging on a thin hide that looked as if it might have been that of a monkey. The head was clearly handcrafted, its face a mask, and the hide stretched over it probably that of an animal. I couldn’t tell if what was beneath it was wood or bone…. The Gangtey Gompa relic was nothing more than a doll used to cast out spirits—or to keep the legend of the yeti alive.136

  As had Ernst Schäfer in the 1930s, Messner accompanied Tibetans to find the lairs of the chemo (Yeti), only to discover bear dens.137 In 1997, he visited the Sosar Gompa monastery in Kham, where two animals hung over the entrance: a stuffed yak and a stuffed chemo, which turned out to be a Himalayan brown bear.138 As he spoke with more and more Nepalese and Tibetans, he began to realize that the Yeti is a mythical composite of several animals, including not only an ape-like creature but also the Himalayan brown bear.

  While trekking near the peaks of the Nanga Partains in 1997, Messner saw several chemos (or dremos, in the local dialect):

  One afternoon, after a long trek, we encountered another dremo. He fled when he saw us, but then seemed to stop and rest in a hollow. I approached the spot from behind some ridges so that he wouldn’t pick up my scent. Rozi Ali [his trekking guide] followed me. When I began to climb down to where the animal was sleeping in the grass, Rozi Ali tried to stop me. I broke free of his grasp and came within twenty yards of the animal, where I took some good pictures. Rozi Ali, crouching some way back, begged me to make a run for it. He was sweating with fear.

  The animal woke up and looked at me in the way a startled child would a stranger. It was a young brown bear. It would only turn into a dremo, chemo, or yeti later, when the local people were providing their version of the encounter…. We saw only one more dremo during our trip to Kashmir. It was running away on two legs. From a distance it looked uncannily like a wild man [but it was also a brown bear].139

  In an interview, Messner was asked if locals had actually shown him the animal that they called a Yeti:

  In the eastern part of Tibet they said to me, “This yeti is stealing women, he’s killing yaks, and sometimes in the wintertime he comes and steals a goat. And he is a little bit like we are, and when he is whistling we have to run away”—exactly the stories the Sherpas tell about the yeti. Finally they brought me to a place. They said, “There is one! You see it?” And it was a Tibetan bear. And they said, “This is exactly what is stealing the women and killing the yaks.”140

  After a full decade of trekking into and out of Tibet and Nepal, Bhutan and Kashmir, and examining every bit of evidence, one of the best mountain men who ever lived concluded that “the pieces fit”:

  Yeti is a collective term for all the monsters of the Himalayas, real or imagined. It is the abominable snowman, that Western fantasy, as well as the chemo and dremo. My perspective was no longer Western. I did not believe yetis were relics of prehistoric anthropoid species that had managed to survive undetected. The yeti was a living creature, not a figment of the imagination, that corresponded to the brown bear…. After all, in an ancient Tibetan dialect, yeti translates as “snow bear.” I hasten to add that this is an extraordinary animal—fearsome and preternaturally intelligent, as far as possible from the cuddly image people of the West sometimes have of bears.141

  THE HUNT CONTINUES

  Even though the accounts from Ernst Schäfer, Reinhold Messner, and others seem quite conclusive that the Yeti is a mythical animal based on the Himalayan brown bear, and all the “evidence” for the Yeti is inconclusive or points to the bear, not an ape-like creature, many believers refuse to give up the search. In 2007, Joshua Gates, the producer of the television series Destination Truth, mounted an expedition to the Himalayas. His team found 13-inch tracks in the snow142 and brought casts to a Bigfoot advocate, anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum, who thought that the footprints had been made by a primate and resembled Bigfoot tracks. They also found some “Yeti hair,” which, when analyzed, once again appears to belong to a Himalayan ruminant such as the goral or serow. On July 25, 2008, hairs brought back from the Garo Hills in northeastern India by Yeti hunter Dipu Marak were analyzed, and they also turned out to be from a serow.143

  In 2008, the cryptozoology series MonsterQuest mounted its own expedition to the Himalayas.144 The resulting episode features primatologist Ian Redmond and other Yeti advocates; includes cameo interviews with the elderly Pete
r Byrne, telling the story of the expeditions funded and led by Tom Slick, as well as with Messner and other bear experts who affirm the “bear origins” story; and a short segment on Schäfer and the Nazi connection. The presentation is like that of most other episodes of MonsterQuest: lots of spooky music and moody, dark shots; computer-graphic simulations of encounters; plenty of footage of the scenery and of the “Yeti hunters” huffing and puffing their way through the Himalayas (as their Sherpas barely sweat)—and nothing in the way of hard evidence. The tracks are inconclusive, and one “trackway” was made by a rolling snowball. The crew spends an inordinate amount of time trying to rig up a camera on a weather balloon, but finds nothing. The camera traps on the “Yeti trail” capture only ordinary wildlife. The hair samples, sent to a lab for analysis, once again are from a serow or goral. The hunters examine a carcass that vultures were scavenging, and Redmond even eats some of the rotten meat, all to speculate that this kind of food might sustain a Yeti. Programs like Destination Truth and MonsterQuest get high ratings on cable television and sustain the beliefs of viewers who want the mystery of unknown monsters, such as the Yeti, in their lives. But they offer no actual evidence—only much speculation—thus reinforcing the conviction that behind the false leads and inconclusive bits of evidence for the Yeti are only brown bears, rolling snowballs, and the tendency of non-Western peoples to conflate legend with reality in a way that Westerners cannot fathom and usually misunderstand.

  Indeed, the most conclusive proof of the true meaning of the Yeti, as documented by Reinhold Messner and others, is that many of the peoples of the Himalayas know and admit that the Yeti is a myth, built on the foundation of the terrors of the Himalayan brown bear and then transmuted into their religious symbol. Messner describes a visit with the Dalai Lama, who asks him this very question:

  “Do you think that the migio, chemong [another name for the brown bear], and yeti might well be the same thing?” [asked the Dalai Lama].

  “I not only think so, I am completely convinced that they are,” I said. Then I put my finger to my lips, as did the Dalai Lama, as if acknowledging that this must remain our secret.145

  OF ALL THE “REAL” MONSTERS that stir the Western imagination, there are few so romantic as the Loch Ness monster. I’m not even slightly immune to that romance. My love affair with Nessie blossomed early and strongly. What could be more wonderful than the idea that a living plesiosaur might slide undetected through the frigid waters of a Scottish lake? I sought out and devoured every book available in my elementary-school and community libraries. As a young boy wishing to learn more in those pre-Google days, I even asked the local reference librarian to track down the address of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. (Alas, the organization was defunct by the time I tried to contact it.)

  In the pulpy books on the paranormal, I studied the famous cases, marveled at the amazing photographs of arching necks and underwater flippers, and absorbed the standard arguments. “Loch Ness is connected to the sea through underwater tunnels,” I told my classmates at recess. (I was unaware that the surface of Loch Ness is more than 50 feet above sea level.) “Do you know why Nessie wasn’t reported until 1933?” I asked on the playground. “Because that’s when they finally built the road beside the loch!” (I now know that the road predates Nessie by more than a century.)1

  If my understanding of the Nessie literature was a bit uncritical, at least my research techniques were inventive. I remember crouching around a Ouija board in my fifth-grade classroom, pragmatically asking the spirits at which end of Loch Ness I should concentrate my search for the monster. (Or perhaps this was not so innovative. Seven years before my Ouija board consultation, mentalist Tony “Doc” Shiels allegedly led a team of psychics—successfully, he claimed—to summon Nessie and other “aquatic serpent dragons throughout the world.”)2

  Years later, my love of these wonderful stories led me to the skeptical literature. Eventually, I found myself a magazine writer, which offered me the professional opportunity to pursue my childhood dreams of investigating monster mysteries. And so, it is with great pleasure that I turn now to the enduring mystery of the Loch Ness monster.

  LOCH NESS

  Loch Ness is a long, deep lake that lies on a geological fault line—a country-spanning cleft called the Great Glen. Bisecting Scotland from coast to coast, the Great Glen features several large lakes, of which Loch Ness is the largest (figure 4.1). At 22 miles long and around 754 feet maximum depth, Loch Ness is the United Kingdom’s largest body of freshwater. It is also, according to legend, the home of an unknown species of large animal. If there is a Loch Ness monster, it is a recent arrival. The steep sides of the loch were scoured by glaciers during the Ice Age of the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million–11,700 years ago). Indeed, the whole of Scotland was crushed beneath a half-mile-thick sheet of solid ice as recently as 18,000 years ago (or less)!3

  Figure 4.1 Loch Ness is the largest of the lakes along the Great Glen, which bisects Scotland. Since 1822, these lakes have been linked by the Caledonian Canal, allowing water travel from the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean across the middle of Scotland. (Image by Daniel Loxton)

  Today, Loch Ness is connected to the Moray Firth inlet of the North Sea by the 7-mile length of the River Ness (figure 4.2).4 Since 1822, Loch Ness has been also been part of a shipping channel called the Caledonian Canal.5 Composed of a series of canals, locks, and natural lakes, the Caledonian Canal allows ships to cross Scotland from coast to coast. The route runs by canal through several locks from Moray Firth to Loch Ness (in parallel to the River Ness), continues down the length of Loch Ness, and then proceeds by canal to Loch Oich (and, eventually, to Scotland’s west coast). Thus Loch Ness has been busy and well traveled for almost 200 years. Indeed, Loch Ness was well used and well populated even before the construction of the canal, crossed for centuries by boats and bordered by roads, towns, and villages (and, at the mouth of the River Ness, near the loch’s northern end, the sizable city of Inverness). The opening of the canal ushered in a tourism boom, with daily steamship traffic running the length of Loch Ness. “Far from being a lonely, uninhabited spot before 1933,” explains Ronald Binns, “Loch Ness was extremely popular with the leisured English middle-classes during the previous hundred years.” Even Queen Victoria toured Loch Ness. Almost a century before the birth of the modern monster legend, Loch Ness was already overrun with recreational traffic, according to one disgruntled naturalist. He complained bitterly about the noisy, polluting steamboats “full of holiday people, with fiddles and parasols conspicuous on the deck.”6

  Figure 4.2 Loch Ness is connected to the Moray Firth and the North Sea by two short, parallel waterways: the River Ness and the Caledonian Canal–both of which run through the city of Inverness. (Image by Daniel Loxton)

  BEFORE NESSIE

  Water-Horses

  As we look toward the emergence of the Loch Ness monster in the 1930s, it is important to understand that a teeming menagerie of water-based supernatural creatures had already lived for centuries in Scottish folklore. In addition to the Great Sea Serpent—such as the Stronsay Beast, whose carcass washed up on the island of Stronsay in 1808 (chapter 5), and the sea serpent sighted in one of the inland freshwater lakes of the northern Isle of Lewis in 18567—Scotland’s feared folkloric monsters include the boobrie (a giant carnivorous waterfowl), the buarach-bhaoi (a nine-eyed eel that twists its body into a shackle around the feet of prey), the biasd na srogaig (a clumsy one-horned water beast with vast legs), and even the twelve-legged “big beast of Lochawe.”8

  Among this horde of folkloric creatures are the widespread traditions of kelpies (associated with running water), water-bulls, and water-horses (Each uisge, which haunted lochs and the sea).9 Today, these related but distinct mythological creatures are harnessed in service of the legend of the Loch Ness monster, but there are strong reasons to think that this linkage is inappropriate. First, none of these creatures is anything like the modern Loch Ness cryptid. Seco
nd, none of them is indigenous to Loch Ness.

  In Scottish folklore, water-bulls are small black bulls that are encountered when they venture onto land; they sometimes breed with terrestrial cattle before returning to the water. Water-horses (whether Each uisge or the distinct but similar kelpies) are lethal, shape-shifting demons. They are likewise encountered on land in the form of ordinary-looking horses, often with weeds in their manes and wet-looking, adhesive skin. If anyone is foolish enough to climb onto the back of a water-horse, he or she will become stuck in place—and the water-horse will carry the rider screaming into the water. Children are a favorite prey of water-horses. “Often he grazes in a field near the water,” as one historian described the folklore in 1933, “and by his tameness tempts children to mount him. As they mount, he lengthens his back until all are accommodated in a line, when he rushes with them into the water.” (A common folk tale describes a single surviving child who touches the monster and then must cut off his own finger to escape. But all his friends are carried off to their deaths.)10

  Figure 4.3

  In a tale retold by W. Carew Hazlitt, a ravenous kelpie pursues a beautiful maiden. After a desperate flight, she escapes over the threshold of her house and collapses. Vampire-like, the kelpie is unable to enter the open door because it is protected by a branch from a rowan, a tree believed to offer protection against malevolent beings, but does capture the young woman’s shoe, which extended slightly beyond the boundary of magical protection when she fell. (From W. Carew Hazlitt, Dictionary of Faiths and Folklore: Beliefs, Superstitions, and Popular Customs [London: Reeves and Turner, 1905], facing 334)