YETI MAKES COMEBACK ON U.S. TV

I can’t help it. I cringe every time I hear the word Yeti. Mention Big Foot, and I’ll hide my face in shame. Go so far as to utter the words Abominable Snowman and I’ll flee in embarrassment.

I want to believe. I do. It’s just…an Abominable Snowman! For a guy who loves to talk conspiracy theories to three in the morning, who devours reports of UFO sightings over Phoenix and tapes all the reruns of the X-Files, admitting even a modicum of maybe about the existence of hairy ole Harry Henderson tends to discredit everything else I espouse.

There’s a thin line between true believer and gullible idiot.

FRESH EVIDENCE

So, it was with queasy stomach I read reports of fresh Yeti footprints in the Himalayas. This time the find was made by a US TV crew, filming for Destination Truth, a show investigating evidence of the fantastical.

That these tracks were witnessed is no surprise – mountaineers and local herders often claim such discoveries. No, it’s that these reports still garner media attention that befuddles me. I mean, our modern world is so small. When you can eat a Big Mac in Moscow, sip Starbucks coffee in Beijing and discuss Bay Watch in Bhutan, you wonder if this jaded world has any natural secrets left to divulge.

I was born a pleasant Sunday drive from the banks of Loch Ness and spent many childhood nights reading about Nessie and the possibility that dinosaurs might still roam this planet. As a child, the concept is easy to accept. There’s a magic to monsters that can’t easily be dispelled. Yet, as an adult, cynical reality stamps its scientific authority. Few places remain unmapped. Civilization’s thirst for expansion threatens every corner of the globe. Creatures once abundant now face extinction. Surely, there’s no chance that a beast as large as Yeti could avoid detection for so long?

THE BEAR NAKED TRUTH

Josh Gates of Destination Truth told the BBC in early December that his team discovered three prints, one a pristine right paw mark, 13” long, with a wide spread of five toes. Commentators familiar with such discoveries are quick to suggest the prints may belong to a Himalayan bear, native to the banks of the Manju River, where Gates and his crew were operating, some 100 miles northeast of Kathmandu.

As always, this latest sensation fell far short of proof. The history of the Yeti is filled with brief glimpses, mysterious prints, unearthly howls and legends aplenty. Missing are the physical clues, the substantive evidence that might peak the curiosity of Gil Grissom and his CSI colleagues. Primatologist John Napier, author of The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, claims Yeti evidence to be circumstantial. “…there is little uniformity of pattern,” he states, “and what uniformity there is incriminates the bear.”

Perhaps it’s our deep desire to cling to the mystical magic of youth, which enables us to see what surely cannot be. Whether it is the Yeti, Nessie, or dinos in the Congo, the evidence always, rightfully, favors the skeptic.

If such creatures do exist, they are to be found in remote wilderness. Our ocean depths are reluctant to reveal their secrets, but surely harbor the majority of what remains to be discovered. While our jungles and isolable realms still reveal a few surprises, they tend to come in smaller packages: frogs, insects, fish. The Yeti, you see, is just too damn big!

AND YET…

And yet, there’s just enough doubt to make me want to believe…

In 2001, a local Yeti-hunter and guide (yes, there are such things) led investigators into the Bhutan forests, where they took hair samples from a cedar tree hollow. Scientists at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, England, were able to extract DNA samples.

“It’s not a human, it’s not a bear, nor anything else that we’ve so far been able to identify,” said Bryan Sykes, a professor of human genetics. “We don’t know what it is,” he confessed.

The remote Everest region warrants further investigation, if only because eye-witness accounts go back thousands of years.

The Yeti has long been worshipped in Tibet and Nepal, in scrolls, relief and annual festival. Alexander the Great wanted one until locals explained that the creature could not breathe properly at lower altitudes.

Pliny the Elder, in 79AD, wrote of the Land of the Satyrs where lived things able to run on two or four legs. They had “human-like bodies and because of the swiftness can only be caught when they are ill or old.”

In modern times, many renowned explorers share stories of the Yeti. The title of Abominable Snowman was coined in 1921 and resulted in a Royal Geographical Society expedition to find the animal. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reported large footprints while scaling Mount Everest in 1953 – hardly the location for a hoax. Many Sherpas claim to have seen the beast, typically during the winter or summer months when herds are taken to pasture, and Sherpas, you would expect, could spot the difference between a bear and a Yeti.

So, for now, I continue to cringe when tracks in the snow suggest the wily Yeti still roams unseen. I’ll be the first to say I told you so whenever science disproves these wild, outrageous claims. Or I’ll be the first to nod and say I knew it along, should one day someone prove my childhood convictions right and produce a Yeti in the flesh.

Until that day, I’ll go on doubting. In public, anyway.