The Hunt for the Yeti: A Journey Through Myth and Reality

On the morning of September 10, 1960, the first man on Everest, Edmund Hillary, and his men set out to Rolwaling Valley, in Nepal. Sherpas from the valley had reported sightings of the elusive Abominable Snowman – the Yeti. Hillary wanted conclusive proof of its existence.

The hunt for the Yeti began centuries ago. Legend has it, Alexander the Great demanded to see a Yeti when he conquered the Indus Valley in 326 B.C. But, according to anecdotes, local people couldn't show him one because the creatures could not survive at such low altitude.

In 1921, a Statesman journalist from Calcutta named Henry Newman interviewed a group of British explorers who had just returned from a Mount Everest expedition.

The explorers told the journalist they had discovered some very large footprints on the mountain. Due to a mistranslation, he christened the beast “Abominable Snowman”.

In the 1950s and early ‘60s, the Western world was in the grip of yeti mania. In 1951, the legendary mountaineer Eric Shipton photographed what he believed to be yeti tracks in northeastern Nepal. 

On March 19, 1954, the Daily Mail published an article that talked about expedition teams obtaining hair specimens from what was alleged to be a Yeti scalp found in the Pangboche monastery. The hair was black to dark brown in color in dim light, and fox red in the sunlight.

The hair was analysed by Professor Frederic Wood Jones, an expert in human and comparative anatomy. He concluded that the hair was not actually from a scalp, but from the shoulder of a coarse-haired hoofed animal.

In 1954, Calcutta-born ornithologist Biswamoy Biswas too tried examining the Pangboche scalp, purported to be from a Yeti. There was no conclusive evidence that this belonged to a Yeti.

It was in this spirit that the Hillary expedition set off. The nine-month expedition would go on to study the effects of long-term exposure to high altitudes on human fitness after the search for the Yeti was concluded. 

The expedition group (backed by the World Book Encyclopedia) would research local stories and other evidence of Yeti body parts. Their ultimate goal was to find a thumping Yeti, alive and kicking.

The Yeti is believed to be a mysterious bipedal creature  living in the mountains of Asia. It is apparently muscular, covered with dark greyish or reddish-brown hair, and weighs between 90 and 180 kg.

It is a menacing, ominous character in ancient legends and folklore of the Himalaya people that sometimes leaves its  tracks in the snow.

The group was well prepared with an arsenal of defence which included tranquilliser guns, rifles, shotguns, tear gas pistols and light arms. None of this was used, as they mostly only found footprints.

Hillary dismissed the prints as having been made by snow leopards or wolves and claimed that he needed convincing proof. 

After photographing, measuring, sketching and making casts with plaster of Paris, it was clear that these prints were made by the hot sun, which expanded the prints of small animals into Yeti-sized footprints.

Other “evidence” included fake relics being sold at exorbitant prices. However, a Yeti hand was found at a monastery. An analysis of a photograph revealed it to most likely be a human hand strung together with wire.

Likewise, the numerous yeti skins shown to the expedition team—mostly blue-black with a white stripe across the shoulders—were widely agreed to belong to the Tibetan blue bear.

Three Yeti “scalps” held at local monasteries were the hardest pieces of evidence to disprove. After much wrangling, Hillary was given permission to take one scalp abroad for one month to be examined by scientists in Paris, Chicago, and London. 

Eventually, the scientists agreed the scalp was likely a fake, possibly constructed from the skin of a serow, a goat-like creature found in the Himalayas. Hillary accepted that there was no credible proof of the existence of the Yeti. 

Despite dozens of expeditions in the remote mountain regions of Russia, China and Nepal, the existence of the Yeti remains unproven. Even the Indian army found footprints close to the Makalu Base Camp in 2019. Yet, the Yeti continues to remain a myth.