Bob Rickard, Co-editor of the “Fortean Times,” observed: "At the turn of the century it was generally thought that there were no more big animals to be discovered, only little ones - and they didn't matter. Yet. At the beginning of this year there was a new tree kangaroo found in Papua New Guinea and a new kind of ox and a new kind of deer found in an area in Vietnam which had been bombed with “Agent Orange.” It makes you wonder."
He couldn't have been much closer to the truth if he'd tried, because it truly does make you wonder. It makes you wonder just how many more animals there are for us yet to discover. Especially when you consider that there are still, even today, vast tracts of land that remain unexplored by man, some of it uninhabitable by man, but that is not to say uninhabitable. Most notably of all, the two thirds of the planet's surface that is permanently under cover of water, but even in populated areas there are certain animals that are rarely seen.
What about the more remote regions? The jungles of South America, The North and South Poles, mountain ranges, the Siberian Taiga and last, but by no means least, the vast forests of North America. The fact is that as time goes by, man is populating more and more of the planet's surface, and what was once the sole premise of wild animals is now explored, mapped and often looted, and the number of places that animals can live unmolested are becoming fewer and further between. Yet there are apparently places that man does visit frequently, in some cases on most weekends, such as the forests of America's Pacific North West where all and sundry don warm clothing, a gun belt and go hunting in search of the abundant wildlife. It seems amazing that so many hunters can occupy the landscape, and yet still the legendary “Bigfoot” remains one of the most talked about and longed for trophies of all time, if it exists at all that is.
Everybody has heard of Bigfoot. The mythical ape-man that walks upright, is covered in hair and is both very heavy and very strong, but is he real or is he not? Is he a distant relative of man or is he a remnant of man's past? If the stories are to be believed then he makes his home in the dense woodland and seems to be quite shy where man is concerned, being reluctant to pose for photographs, and rather inconveniently choosing not to lie down and die where his body can easily be recovered. It is obvious that Bigfoot will not come to man, so man must go to Bigfoot, and increasingly he is doing just that. During the 1950s, woodsmen and loggers working their way deeper and deeper into the forests began to return with reports of a "strange ape-like creature" and during this time, in The Cascades, they found huge footprints and it was then that the creature that was believed to have made them was nicknamed "Bigfoot."
In the summer of 1958, giant footprints began appearing near road-making equipment at Bluff Creek, Northern California over several nights, and the workers who found them became quite fearful. The San Francisco press got hold of the story and it grew from a local matter into a national story which heralded the birth of the modern Bigfoot era.
Like the tribes of Africa, the natives of North America talk of Bigfoot, not as a myth, but as a real creature who is just nothing more than simply elusive, and they have long believed in a creature they call "Sasquatch" which is a man-like beast that lives on the edges of civilisation. This folklore grew into rumour and the world began to debate the existence of such a creature with only the moulds made from its footprints to go on. Many of these casts turned out to be hoaxes and this is very damaging to the reputation of the apparently genuine ones. This is also true of the Bigfoot hair samples which have been found to be hoaxes. One of the more crude attempts turned out to be nothing more than the hair from a child's “Barbie” doll.
Bigfoot prints have been found and analysed in different parts of the world, the U.S.A., Canada and as far afield as Russia, and from all of these prints certain things become apparent. A typical print is 16 to 18 inches (41 to 46 cm) long and 7 inches (18 cm) wide. The foot is not arched like a man's, except for smaller ones which are presumably from younger animals, as though the foot flattens out as the creature grows older and therefore heavier. There is a double ball at the heel, unlike the single ball of a man's foot, which is a sign of a foot designed to support great weight, and this is also shown by how far the foot sinks into the ground. This combined with reported sightings of the animals height would suggest a creature weighing anything up to 1,000lb (454 kg).
The prints show no signs of the claws which are found on an bear and, in 1982, a set of prints found in the blue mountains along the Washington - Oregon border showed more detail than ever before, and they were cast by U.S. Forest Service workers. Made in a very fine soil that was slightly damp, they were very detailed and it was even possible to see ridges on the skin underneath the toes and on the soles. These details are rather like fingerprints and are only found on the feet of the higher primates.
Since they were cast, the moulds have been examined by forty police fingerprint experts, all of whom came to the conclusion, that the footprints must have been made by one or more genuine creatures - Bigfeet. Not everybody agreed though, anthropologists and primatologists say that they were made by a human foot which had somehow been enlarged, possibly by using a latex mould as latex will expand by 50% when it is soaked in kerosene. This expansion would not only expand the overall size of the foot but would also expand the size of the ridges in relation to it, but the fingerprint experts said that the ridges were spaced like those on other primates.
With appetites being whetted in the 1950s, Tom Slick began organising expeditions to try and track Bigfoot down. Slick was an oil millionaire and he spent a fortune in his search during which he found footprints and droppings, but in 1962 he was killed in a plane crash and, after his death, the fruits of his four year search for Bigfoot mysteriously went missing, and this included not only the records of his expeditions but also his samples of evidence as well, and it would be 30 years before anybody would pick up where he had left off. That man was Grover Krantz.
Krantz is an anthropologist based at Washington State University, and he risks his professional reputation by undertaking such work. This is because he is convinced that Bigfoot is real and he also bases his opinion on footprint casts that he has. Where some people's offices or laboratories are adorned with hunting trophies or pictures, Krantz's are adorned with his moulds of Bigfoot footprints. Krantz has categorised seven different characteristics belonging to the prints and he has published five of them in various journals, but he won't reveal the other two so he can continue to use them to help determine fakes from genuine prints, much like the police will withhold certain details about a murder which only themselves and the murderer will know. Among the five that Krantz has revealed are flat feet which are wide in comparison to their length, toes almost equal in size and what are called "dermal ridges" which are the lines that make up like a fingerprint.
One print that Krantz has was taken from where the maker of the print had stepped on a stone, and the stone has pressed itself into the foot quite deeply, yet the dermal ridges around the stone are unbroken which means that a hoaxer would not have been able to make the print with a mould by rocking it from side to side over the stone.
Another man who collects foot print samples is Bob Titmus who has explored British Colombia's remote forests in search of Bigfoot and, again the year 1958 is of significance, as it was then that Titmus saw his first footprint on a makeshift road. He has been a hunter all of his life and has hunted from Alaska to Mexico and many places in between, and he has tracked Bigfoot prints and feels that only a real, living thing could have made them, and certainly not a man or a machine. Titmus' walls at home are also, like Krantz's, full of his moulds, but the evidence doesn't stop there because as well as footprints there are many eye witness accounts of the creature itself, and Titmus is one of those who has had such an encounter.
He was following a set of tracks in 1963 when he arrived at a remote canyon on the Rockies of British Colombia, and the memory of what he saw that day remains with him now as vivid and clear as the day on which he saw it. He had heard rumours of Indians having shot a Bigfoot in the area many years before, but what he saw was not one Bigfoot but three. Titmus watched as they climbed a rock face, and he said that they climbed "hand over hand" using foot holds as well, much the same as a mountaineer would. When he returned from his trip he relayed the tale and like many before him, and others to follow, he was ridiculed by all but one man, and that man was John Green, a Journalist and former newspaper publisher in British Colombia.
Green had followed Bigfoot reports in the press and, since 1958, he has collected over 3,000 eye witness accounts from the U.S.A. and Canada, and in some cases he has obtained sworn affidavits. Most of these sightings occurred in America's Pacific North West, but some are from as far afield to the east as Arkansas. He admits that some of them are hoaxes, but he is convinced that by far the majority of them are genuine and when he heard of what Titmus had seen he tracked him down. Despite all of the footprints, all of the sightings and all of the research done on Bigfoot, he still remains elusive, but there are some very determined men who won't rest until they have found Bigfoot and are able to prove that he exists. One such man is Peter Byrne, an Irish born hunter who has at his disposal two helicopters, a jeep, a Toyota Land Cruiser, an international scout, a snowmobile and a van which he calls the “Bigfoot Mobile Base” as it houses a lot of his equipment. Part of the equipment are biopsy darts which are fired at an animal and will take a blood sample while still allowing the creature to walk away afterwards, but he has not needed to use them as of yet.
A regular journal, Bigfoot News, is full of sightings and encounters, the number of which seems almost infinite, yet obviously there are hoax sightings just as there are hoax footprints using anything from shaped Wellington boots to moulded strap on casts. Some witnesses are unreliable, for example, the man who gave the colour of the creatures eyes when he had only witnessed it from a distance of over 300 yards. There are countless tales of hunters catching a glimpse of a hairy upright creature walking like a man but a certain percentage of these could be explained away as common bears, which heavily populate the area. Some talk of the creature as having turned to look at them, apparently out of curiosity, and then walking away. The witnesses say that they don't feel threatened in any way by the creature, more often than not they feel as though it is merely as interested in them as they are in it, and this lack of hostility and sense of almost kinship was experienced by an Indian man called Muchalat Harry in 1928. Harry told Father Anthony Terhaar, that he had been kidnapped by a male Bigfoot and carried back to a "camp" where there were around twenty of the creatures including some younger ones. They did him no harm, and when they seemed to have lost interest in him he managed to escape, and he then met Father Terhaar when he arrived at Nookta on Vancouver Island clad only in his torn underwear and with his hair turned white by the experience.
This is not the only kidnap reported, another account was given by Albert Ostman who found his experience much more frightening. It happened in 1924 but he didn't report it until almost 34 years later in 1957 when the Bigfoot phenomenon began to achieve world acclaim, which may cast a little doubt on his story as he may have been seeking the fame and fortune that just such an encounter can bring, and he certainly wouldn't be alone in that. Ostman claimed that he had been picked up while he was in his sleeping bag and carried for several miles where he was then held "prisoner" by a family of four Sasquatch – father, mother, son and daughter - for a period of six days (the alien abduction case of the Bigfoot world).
So with footprints and sightings why do we not yet have conclusive proof that Bigfoot is real? Grover Krantz says that "Even if none of the hundreds of sightings had ever occurred, we would still be forced to conclude that a giant bipedal primate does indeed inhabit the forests of the Pacific north west" and to prove that it does he says that all he would need would be a single lower jaw bone, and he advises anybody who sees a Bigfoot to shoot it as proof. He, himself, drives around "Bigfoot Country" with swivelling spot lamps on the side of his car and with a high powered rifle.
Some people claim to have taken his advice, such as the two men out coyote hunting in 1966 who shot what they thought was a giant "gorilla-like" animal at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They ran over to it to see what it was they had shot and saw that it was a huge, hairy animal with a bare face, huge hands and huge feet. It was so man-like that the two men thought they had shot some kind of local freak and they fled.
Another man who shot a Bigfoot also fled, but not straight away, he took a little persuading. In 1922 Fred Beck was mining with some companions on Mount St. Helens, Washington when they saw a group of what appeared to be giant apes and they began firing at them and shot one. For the next few nights their camp was bombarded with stones and rocks until they decided to give in and move their camp elsewhere.
Often, when the creatures are shot, it is in remote areas which makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to bring the carcass back to civilisation, and sceptics say that Bigfoot can't exist because not only have we not seen one that has been shot, but we have not seen one that has died a natural death, but this point is answered by the fact that man very rarely comes across the body of an ordinary bear that has died naturally. This is because their natural instinct is to take cover when they feel vulnerable so that they are not caught by predators, and when they do die the body will be disposed of relatively quickly by scavengers. There is said to be a multi-million dollar reward for the first person that captures the first Bigfoot, alive or dead, not to mention book deals, newspaper exclusives and radio and TV interviews, and fortune seekers from all over the world go in search of the fame and fortune that this potential discovery will bring them with little more than a rifle slung across their back. It is this which makes faking a Bigfoot sighting a very dangerous practise, as anybody running around in a big hairy suit is taking their life in their own hands. Anything that moves in the forests is likely to be shot at, and even some things that definitely don't move, which the bullet ridden road signs are testament to, as people use them for target practise. So, sensibly, people on hunting trips choose not to opt for stealth in camouflaged clothing, but will wear bright colours so any prospective gunman will know that what they are looking at is not an animal trying to conceal itself, but a fellow hunter in a gaudy checked shirt.
There is a big question over what a Bigfoot would eat, and a logger from Estacapa, Oregon thinks he may have found the answer. One day he was walking along a path at Tarzan Springs when he heard a noise, he said "I was screened by the trees, but through them I could see these three huge figures digging in a rock pile. They looked just like Bigfoot is supposed to; hairy, huge hands and very powerfully built. There was a big one with a female and a young one. They were lifting rocks out, the big male one, and digging down all of six or seven feet. Then the male reached down and took out a nest of rodents and ate them. " When investigators later went to the site to investigate, they found thirty or more holes with rocks that had been moved. There was also a lot of rodent wildlife in the area such as marmots, which are known to hibernate in nests under rocks, and it had been October when Thomas saw the Bigfoot family.
Just like we had the alien abductions of the Bigfoot world, we also have the alien autopsy video of the Bigfoot world. On October 20th 1967 there came one of the most talked about pieces of film since the advent of the cine camera, that of a Bigfoot taking a walk through the woods. Bob Gimlin and Roger Patterson had set out on a hunting trip with the intent of capturing Bigfoot on film, and they had set out for Bluff Creek in the Trinity National Forest 260 kilometres north of San Francisco because it had gained a reputation for sightings over the years. For a week they roamed the area, and Patterson had been filming the scenery before they, or rather their horses, saw anything. They were riding towards a creek when the two horses were spooked, Patterson fell to the ground, and they soon saw what had bothered their horses. Patterson picked up his camera and began filming a Bigfoot that was on the other side of the creek, and it paused and looked back toward them. Meanwhile Gimlin had picked up his gun and was aiming it at the creature just in case it should decide to attack them, but it merely turned and continued to make its way back into the forest. As it did so, the film in Patterson's camera ran out.
Patterson licensed the film worldwide, and made a lot of money out of it, but Gimlin never made so much as a cent from it, but even so he still maintains that it is genuine and, with Patterson now dead, he would surely have more to gain by admitting that it was a fake, if indeed it was.
The film has undergone intense scrutiny by experts in many fields, and it comes out of these tests rather well, if not with flying colours. Grover Krantz has examined it in minute detail, frame by frame, and has compared it to other sightings, and from this he has concluded that the gait of Bigfoot is different to that of a man. Bigfoot walks by leaning slightly forward at the hip, and though it swings its arms like a human it bends the knees slightly when it puts the forward foot down, and Krantz says that this is out of necessity for a creature of its size, weighing more than 500lb.
Dr. D. W. Grieve, a reader in biomechanics at the Royal Free Hospital, London has examined the film very closely and has compared it to films of humans walking at the same location. By doing so he has come to the conclusion that the creature in Patterson's film is 6ft 5in tall, still possibly a human in a disguise, but the hips and shoulders are too wide to be a human, and the overall size of the creature would suggest a body weight of around 280lb (127kg). The length of the stride is around 42in (1.07m) which is not too long for a man to make, but it would be very difficult to do it with the fluidity of movement and the natural look that is seen in the film. Grieve said that if the film had been shot at 24 frames per second then it could be showing a large man, but if it had been shot at 18 frames per second, then no human being could have made the movements shown. He concluded, "My subjective impressions have oscillated between total acceptance of the Bigfoot on the grounds that the film would be difficult to fake, to one of irrational rejection based on an emotional response to the possibility that the Bigfoot actually exists." His conclusions on the film are that: "If it is a fake, it is a very clever one."
Three senior Russian scientists, Doctors Bayanov, Burtsev and Donskoy, came to roughly the same conclusions and said that "We can evaluate the gait of the creature as a natural movement without any of the signs of artfulness that one would see in an imitation." Bayanov and Burtsev said that the creature had an ape-like head and almost no neck, and its tracks show that it walks with less weight on its heels than a man would, with its legs slightly bent, and there is no arch in the foot. Dmitri Donskoy says that the gait is that of an animal with enormous weight and strength, and the movement is fluid and confident. "At the same time with all the diversity of locomotion illustrated by the creature of the footage, its gait as seen is absolutely non typical of man."
The biggest problem with the Patterson film is that nobody knows at what speed the film was shot, 24 or 18 frames per second, and both speeds would produce markedly different results when screened, and some say that the footprints found at the scene would suggest a creature much taller than 6ft 5in and with a stride longer than 42in.
America isn't the only country to play host to the apeman legend, Australia is another, and its own version of the Sasquatch is known as the “Yowie” which is seen mainly in the areas around New South Wales and Queensland, and has been seen by settlers from well into the last century and by Aborigines for much longer. The Yowie is far from outgoing but it is not exactly timid either as George Summerell discovered on October 12th, 1912 when he was out riding near Bemboka, New South Wales. He came upon a Yowie bending down to drink from a creek, and as it heard him approach it rose up to its full height which he estimated to be about 7ft. It bent down again to finish its drink before picking up a stick and walking away.
Summerell noticed that there were lots of footprints around the creek which indicated that the creature, or others like it, had been in the area before. They also showed on closer examination that the creature only had four toes which had also been the case with other prints found around the world. The Yowie also shares two other characteristics with Bigfoot and other mythical creatures, and those two are that it has little or no neck and the ability to emit a foul smell, apparently at will.
Another Australian to experience this foul smell was a National Parks worker who was cutting timber near Springbrook, Queensland when he saw "this big, black, hairy man-thing" about 12 feet away from him. "It had huge hands and a flat, black, shiny face, with two big yellow eyes and a hole for a mouth. It just stared at me and I stared back. I was so numb I couldn't even raise the axe I had in my hand. We were staring at each other for about ten minutes before it suddenly gave off a foul smell that made me vomit - then it just made off sideways and disappeared."
Africa also has its fair share of man-beasts, and not surprisingly either, as the continent is referred to as the “cradle of mankind,” the place where “Homo Sapiens” are known to have evolved, and also because it has such huge tracts of wilderness where an elusive creature could live quite safe in the knowledge that it would seldom come into contact with man. Africa also has fossils of hominids called “Australopithecines” which first appeared 3 million years ago. Could some of them have survived undiscovered in Africa's remote regions? It would appear that there are different kinds of apeman in Africa which may or may not be part of the same species, or perhaps some could be the result of cross breeding with various types of gibbon or baboon.
The first kind is the “Kakundakari” of Zaire, the “Fating'Ho” of Senegal and the “Agogwe” of Tanzania which are the slenderest of the Ausralopithecines. The smallest is the Agogwe which is russet coloured and man-like, and it is said to also mix with other primates such as baboons, possibly evidence that it is related to them? The more robust are the “Kikomba” of Zaire and the “Wa'ab” of Sudan which, it is believed, could be surviving examples of “Homo Erectus.”
There is a very famous example of a South American creature which caused great controversy at the time, and still does today, because some believe that the whole episode is an elaborate hoax. It took place when a team of twenty geological surveyors had set out on an explorative trip but, after three years, their number had been drastically reduced by disease, venomous animals and the poisoned arrows of the hostile natives. The remaining handful were making their way along the Tarra River on the Venezuala-Columbia border in 1920 when they saw, coming out of the foliage ahead of them, a pair of five feet tall ape-like creatures walking on their hind legs. When the animals, one male and one female, saw them they became agitated and began tearing at the vegetation before they defecated into their hands and threw it at the bemused party. They then moved forwards as if to attack but one of the team shot at them, killing the female, but the male ran away. The geologists examined the body and made some notes before photographing it, but unfortunately a lot of the pictures were lost later on in the expedition when their boat capsized.
On their return to Europe the team's leader, Swiss Geologist Dr. Francois De Loys, showed the surviving pictures of the animal to the French Anthropologist Professor George Montandon who was sure that it was an “old world” ape and he gave it the name “Ameranthropoides Loysi” (Loys American Ape), but some others were not so sure. They said that it was some sort of spider monkey without a tail, and some said that it was a "set up" with a real spider monkey with its tail hidden or removed.
The creature was shown sat down on a packing case with a pole beneath its chin to support its head, and it was said that the picture showed little or no background so that no sense of scale could be gained to prove whether or not it was a real spider monkey, which would not grow anywhere near the height De Loys claimed his creature to be. It was proposed that the packing case it was sat on was a specially made small one to make the creature look larger in comparison to it, and Montandon had a reply for every question that was asked of him, but science as a whole was not convinced, and De Loys' ape was always doomed to be surrounded by controversy.
Not wanting to be the odd one out, Russia found that it too had a legendary apeman and it was called the “Alma.” The search for the Alma is said to be more continuous and scientific than that for any other similar creature, but it must surely have a long way to go to beat the Americans. The Alma has been sighted in Siberia, the Russian Steppes and the Caucasian Mountains, and reports tell of a man-like creature.
Many of the sightings on record are by World War Two prisoners and refugees fleeing the Germans and Russians, and in the book “The Long Walk” Slavomir Rawicz describes his 4,000 mile escape from a Siberian labour camp into India. He tells of the meeting he had with a male and a female Alma which blocked his path for over two hours, forcing him to take a detour. Similarly, a Pole, Mr. Wiktor Juszczyk, was escaping from a Soviet prison camp when he was captured by the Chinese and, during this time, they told him that they would regularly put food out for the Alma. Mr. Juszczyk was watching as they put out a piece of fish and a large loaf of black bread, and he says that the Alma "loped through two feet of snow right up to the table. Then it sat on its haunches, grabbed the loaf and ate. He must have been seven feet high. He had a broad nose and slanting eyes, small and staring. I have never seen such a powerful looking creature: long body, short legs, his chest, shoulders and arms covered in red-brown hair, but his hands were just like human hands. He spent a couple of minutes eating the bread and part of the fish, gave a few animal grunts and then ambled off."
The Alma is said to inhabit inaccessible areas from the west of the Soviet Union to the Altai and the Gobi desert in Mongolia, and the reports of it describe not the ape-like features of the Yeti but rather human-like features. This is borne out by the experience of geologist M. A. Stronin in 1948 when he was prospecting near the “Tien Shan” and made camp with his two Khirgiz guides. He was woken at dawn by their shouting that the horses were being stolen. He looked and "saw this figure behind the horses. It was standing upright but the arms seemed longer than a man's. I shouted ‘Hey! Why are you trying to rob us?’ The figure turned at the sound of my voice and calmly walked away from the horses." Stronin described the reddish hair and the upright stance as he chased it, he said "It wasn't quite human, nor quite animal, but even though it was in my sights, I couldn't decide to shoot what might have been some kind of man."
One man who did shoot an Alma is Moscow factory chief G. N. Kolpachnikov who was leading a reconnaissance mission during the 1937 Japanese invasion of Mongolia. Two sentries on guard duty saw two silhouettes descending a hill and, when the figures didn't respond to their calls, the two men fired and hit them both. The next morning when it was light Kolpachnikov went to look at the bodies and he couldn't believe his eyes. Lying on the ground were "not enemies, but strange hairy creatures more like an anthropoid ape. But I knew that there were no anthropoid apes in the Democratic Republic of Mongolia." He was told by an old man that wild men were sometimes encountered in the high mountains, and the bodies were about the height of a man with an irregular covering of reddish hair which often the skin could be seen through. The faces were very human-like with prominent eyebrows. Like the Bigfoot carcasses, an Alma has never been brought back to civilisation, and again for logistical reasons.
Dr. Myra Shackley of Leicester University has collated a lot of evidence about the Alma and she is one of the world's leading experts on Neanderthal man who was supposed to have died out 40,000 years ago, and she believes that the Alma may well be a surviving example.In the summer and Autumn of 1979, Shackley went to Mongolia to find further details of the Alma, and she said "I think I was probably the first European for years, perhaps the first European ever, to penetrate some of those mountains." "Nor do the Mongolians go there. They have no reason to, and in any case they are afraid of the creatures that live there." Shackley found Neanderthal tools in a high river valley though they were not recent ones. She says "The pattern of Neanderthal sites which have been excavated across Soviet Asia accord very closely with the sightings of the Alma." "If Neanderthal man were to have survived it would most likely be in exactly those areas where the Alma has been most persistently reported. It may seem bizarre, but could it be that Neanderthal man is alive and well and living in Outer Mongolia."
It is said that good Alma sightings go as far back as 1879 when the great 19th century explorer Przhevalski, who discovered the wild Mongolian horse named after him, saw several wild men, "covered with hair and uttering inarticulate cries."
When Bigfoot mania was sweeping America, in 1958, an expedition was sent to find the Alma, and it was organised by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was led by K. V. Staniukovich and Porchnev. Though they didn't find the creature itself, they did find many witnesses who told them of the meetings they had had with them. One such tale was a multiple sighting by multiple witnesses when, during a spell of harsh weather, a whole village came under attack from stone throwing Alma who came into the village and stole food supplies, obviously driven to desperate measures by their weather depleted food supplies rather than doing it out of malice or hostility.
Expert opinion on the Alma is hard to come by, as is a lot of information from within Russia, but over the years a profile of the Alma has emerged. The young are born without hair which grows sparsely as they get older so, on adults, the skin can be seen through it. The head has a cone shaped crown, the teeth are human-like but larger and with the canines more widely separated. The hands have four fingers and an opposing thumb which means that, like humans, they can grasp objects, but they don't always use the thumb to do this as they will also grasp things between the fingers and the palm. They can run as quickly as a horse, swim very well in strong currents and climb trees. Like other apemen they have, or can produce, a strong and unpleasant odour. They sometimes shelter in holes in the ground and warm themselves around abandoned fires. They eat small animals and vegetables, are mostly active at twilight or in darkness and breeding pairs will remain together. There are even tales of albino Alma. Whereas Bigfoot footprints are not human-like, Alma footprints are but on a larger scale, and prints have been found and collected, as have hair samples and droppings, mostly by a French born Moscow Doctor, Marie Jeanne Koffman and Dr. Bayanov, who have made their work and their findings available to the west.
There was another foreign apeman that was made available to the west but, along with the Patterson film, it vies for top spot in the most controversial evidence stakes.
On March 23rd, 1969 the “Sunday Times” carried an extended report with the headline "IS IT A FAKE? IS IT AN APE? OR IS IT... NEANDERTHAL MAN?” The story continued; "A strange ape-like creature frozen in a block of ice is providing American anthropologists with one of the most intriguing questions they have faced in recent years. Is it a fraud, a freak or is it a form of human being believed to have been extinct since prehistoric times? One thing is certain; it has two large bullet holes in it. Just as a precaution, the F.B.I. have been called in."
Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, a Belgian Zoologist who has written about many rare animals during his career, and made it a rule not to discount even the wildest rumours of strange animals, was invited by science writer Ivan Sanderson to view the “Iceman” in New Jersey. It was then in the custody of a Minnesota showman called Frank Hansen who said that he believed the Iceman had been found floating in a block of ice in the Baring Sea and had been bought in Hong Kong. Hansen, a former Air Force pilot, also said that he believed the Iceman had been in the ice for centuries, but Heuvelmans knew that if a creature is frozen in ice at death it will start to decay very quickly, and the frozen mammoths found in Siberia had only survived the passage of time because they were preserved in bog ice which has antiseptic qualities.
Heuvelmans’ excitement grew as he examined the block of ice in Hansen's trailer with a torch. The man inside was 6ft tall with white wax-like skin covered in brown hair. The neck was short, the torso barrel shaped, and the long arms ended in huge hands. One arm was bent at an odd angle, apparently broken, and there was a large hole in the left eye, and Heuvelmans came to the conclusion that the creature had recently been shot with a high calibre rifle. He suggested that as it was shot it had raised its arm in defence and the bullet had passed through it, breaking it, before hitting the creature in the eye. He couldn't see the back of the head but Hansen told him that it had been shattered. The feet suggested an ape of some kind as the big toe was unable to move independently and freely like a thumb, but the soles were too wrinkled yet more padded than those of a man.
Heuvelmans considered the options; he felt that it would have to be a very ambitious hoax to recreate the hair, and in some places the ice had been scraped away to give people a closer look. In one particular spot, enough ice had been removed to allow a rotten smell to escape. The figure could have been a kind of "Frankenstein" monster made up of different animals stitched together, and such hybrids were not uncommon in travelling shows such as fake mermaids, but Heuvelmans had no idea where a hairy human head, limbs of a giant ape, body of a giant ape or the unusual feet could have come from. Could it then have actually been a Neanderthal man? The long arms, short neck and barrel chest, large hands and feet are all in keeping with an early hominid, and the long second and third digits of the feet are indeed similar to what we know of Neanderthal man.
Following his examination of the Iceman Heuvelmans suffered several sleepless nights with his mind in turmoil. He felt that as the creature had been shot recently it could open up the possibility that there could be a race of such creatures still living in the remote parts of Asia. Despite attempts to buy it, Hansen would not part with the Iceman, so Heuvelmans asked the Washington “Smithsonian Institute” for assistance and they set up an investigating team, as did the F.B.I. who said that if a human-like being had been shot then it may be possible that a capital crime had been committed. Heuvelmans published his findings in Belgium which provoked huge enthusiasm from the zoological and anthropological worlds who felt that they were on the verge of one of their greatest discoveries, but their enthusiasm was short lived as things took a mysterious turn.
Frank Hansen said that the Iceman didn't belong to him but to a wealthy man whom he refused to name, and the owner had now taken possession of it, but an agreement had been made which allowed Hansen to exhibit a replica, and it was this replica that the Smithsonian Institute were allowed to examine, and not surprisingly they came to the conclusion that the Iceman was a clever hoax, a rubber fake made in Hollywood. Why they weren't told at the time that it was a replica is not clear, but they weren't the only ones to lose interest in the case as the F.B.I. also dropped their investigation after saying that they didn't have enough evidence to continue. For Hansen it was not the end of the line as he continued to exhibit the Iceman in Canada, but it is not clear whether or not he was exhibiting the genuine Iceman or the replica.
When he tried to return to the United States with the iceman it was seized by Customs officials who said that he didn't have the correct documentation to return a hominid to the country. Hansen told them that it was a "fabricated illusion" but he refused to allow them to have any samples as he said it would ruin his exhibit. Eventually, after telephone calls to his senator and a lawyer, he was finally allowed back into the U.S. with it where he continued to show it at carnivals for some time until Spring of 1970 when he said that his contract with the owner had expired and he had taken possession of it.
There is another account which says that Hansen disposed of the Iceman to avoid the furore that surrounded it, but obviously in this account he would be the owner.
Most zoologists now feel that it was a clever hoax, Heuvelmans only examined it in a dimly lit trailer but he still says that what he examined for 3 days in 1968 was a real body which was probably shot in Vietnam during the war and smuggled into the United States in the corpse bags which could be marked "NOT TO BE OPENED" to hide horrific injuries and mutilations.
If Hansen is to be believed then only Heuvelmans examined the real iceman and everybody else examined the replica, or was the replica story only invented to allow him to return to the U.S. with it, or was it to allay talk that it was only a hoax and the real one was conveniently elsewhere? Also convenient is the fact that it was Heuvelmans who was chosen to examine the genuine Iceman and not any other expert in the world , perhaps because of his past record, that he would be more likely to believe that it was genuine than dismiss it as a hoax, and he had gone on the record as saying that in the past.
Though the Yeti should strictly come under the same heading as the rest of the mythical apemen, it seems somehow more fitting to give it a heading of its own, if for no reason other than the mental images which the mere mention of the name “The Abominable Snowman” conjures up in all of our minds.
The Yeti is probably the most famous of all the apemen, which is surprising as it inhabits the most remote area of them all, the mountains of the Himalayas, though this is also an advantage as it means that its footprints are made in the snow which often shows them better than the mud which preserves Bigfoot footprints, and apparently the Yeti has adapted well to his environment as he blends in with his snowy environment with his light, almost white, body hair.
Early sightings of the Yeti include one in 1921 by British climbers at an altitude of 5,000 metres up Mount Everest when the party's sherpa guides saw figures in a snow field above them. The guide referred to them as "the man who is not a man" which was mistakenly translated as "the abominable snowman.” When the group reached the snow field the creatures had gone, but the legend was born and the Yeti gained world wide notoriety from this brief encounter.
In 1960 another British climber, Sir Edmond Hillary, ventured to the Himalayas on a scientific expedition, and one of his aims was to track down the Yeti. What Hillary found was footprints in the snow and he concluded that they were the tracks of an animal, most probably a bear, and that they had grown in size and become distorted when the snow both in and around them was melted by the sun. He concluded that the Yeti was nothing more than superstition.
Yeti footprints were first photographed in 1937 and there have been many examples of them seen and photographed since and, just like Bigfoot, has a controversial piece of evidence in the form of the Patterson film, so too does the Yeti in the form of “skull caps.”
On March 27th, 1954 the “Illustrated London News” carried the story of a noted anthropologist, Professor C. Von Fä»rer-Haimendorf, who had discovered a skull cap among other ritual objects in a small Buddhist temple at Pang Boche village. It was a piece of tough skin with sparse, brown, bristly hair, and it was in the shape of the crown of the head. The Professor doubted that it was genuine and said that it was more likely to be "a piece of hide from another part of the body, moulded into its present shape while still fresh and pliable." There are believed to be several of these skull caps in existence and one was also seen by Sir Edmond Hillary in 1960 when he set out on an expedition with Desmond Doig. The expedition was sponsored by the American “World book Encyclopedia” and went to an area renowned for Yeti sightings where they stayed for ten months. They took with them trip-wire cameras, time lapse cameras and infra-red cameras, but despite all of their equipment they failed to find anything conclusive, but there was some excitement when they were able to persuade the villagers of Khumjung to lend them their scalp for six weeks.
Hillary, Doig and the scalp's minder, Khunjo Chumbi, set off on a world tour that took in Honolulu, Chicago, Paris and even Buckingham Palace, and at every stop they showed off the scalp, and Chumbi would imitate the high pitched howl of the Yeti for the press. The scalp was examined by experts who said that it was probably the hide of the Serow goat, but since the expedition Doig has changed his mind and now believes that the Yeti does exist, he says "After all, we may not have seen a Yeti, but we didn't see a snow leopard either and we “know” they exist." Of the scalp though, Doig didn't change his opinion as he now has one of his own. He says that he was once near the Sikkim border when he met a tribesman wearing a similar one on his head and he told Doig that they are frequently made to be worn as warm hats.
There are occasional reports from the New China News Agency that Chinese soldiers have shot and eaten a “snowman” but, like Russian Alma reports, the details are not very easy to come by, and so it is mainly the regions of Nepal and Tibet that boast encounters with the Yeti.
The lead climber on the 1979 British expedition to conquer a 14,840 ft (4520m) Himalayan peak found footprints in the Hinken Valley and heard "scream-like calls" which the sherpas said was the Yeti. It is interesting to note that the sherpas seem to talk of the Yeti so matter of factly as though its existence should never be under any doubt, and the Abbot of the monastery at Thyangboche in the shadow of Everest tells of the Yeti that are casual visitors to the monastery garden.
Generally the opinion of the sherpas is that the Yeti are timid and harmless, but the “Sunday Times” in 1974 reported that a 19 year old yak herder, Lakhpa Domani, was tending her herd when she heard a noise and turned to see a huge ape-like creature with black and red-brown hair, large eyes and prominent cheeks. The animal picked her up and carried her to a stream but dropped her when she began to scream. It then turned its attention to the yaks and it killed one with heavy blows and another by twisting its horns to break its neck. The report was confirmed by local police and a photographer who recorded the animal’s footprints.
Like Bigfoot the Yeti's footprints give us a good idea of its size and weight, and a set of prints found by the R.A.F. squadron leader Lester Davies were "sunk in about 5 or 6 inches. With cine camera and rucksack, I was weighing about 12 stone and only went in about 1 or 2 inches. I thought, this thing is huge!"
In 1978 Lord Hunt found Yeti footprints that were 14 inches long and 7 inches wide, and he described them at the Royal Geographical Society in London when he made a speech. He said "We were in a side valley below Everest. It was late in the evening and getting dark when my wife and myself came across the tracks. They were very fresh indeed, and I will even say that they were certainly made that day. There was deep snow on a rather steep little slope and the creature was a heavy one, because he had broken through hard crust on which we could walk without making an impression through the snow at all. The prints were oval, elongated. I put down an ice axe to measure. They were 14 inches long and just about half as wide."
This wasn't the first set of prints that Hunt had seen and it certainly wasn't the last. He has also heard the Yeti's "high pitched yelping cries" several times, and he came to the conclusion that he "can find no other explanation but that there is an unidentified creature still to be discovered."
Doig has spent thirty years in and around “Yeti country” and speaks many of the local languages, and he says that the sherpas talk of three types of Yeti, and the Bigfoot hunter Tom Slick also went in search of the Yeti and came to the same conclusion, that there is more than one type of unidentified creature roaming the slopes of the Himalayas.
The “Teh-lma” (little man) is quite small at 3 to 4 feet tall and runs around collecting sticks, and Doig feels that this is almost certainly a kind of gibbon, although zoology says that they don't venture north of the Brahmaputra River in India. they live in the valleys eating mainly frogs and insects, and their fur is a dark red colour with a slight mane.
The other two types are the real contenders for the title of Yeti, and the first is the “Dzu-teh” (hulking living thing). It is large, far bigger than a human, with a dark shaggy coat, flat head, long arms with powerful hands and large feet with two pads under the first toe which points away from the other toes. The Dzu-teh don't live in the Himalayas but in Eastern Tibet and Northern China, but there is some confusion about its eating habits. Some say that it is a vegetarian while others say that it will attack and eat cattle which is why Doig feels that this is really a Tibetan Blue Bear, which is itself very rare and which no Westerner has seen closely. Doig did obtain a Blue Bear skin from a Bhutan monastery which he sold at Christie's for £1,200 in 1978, and the auctioneer said that "It has been suggested that this very rare skin is that of the Yeti or Abominable Snowman." There are still only a few known Blue Bear skins, and scant other bits and pieces including a skull and some assorted bones.
Doig once met a Tibetan lady who told him that there had been a Blue Bear at Panchen Lama's zoo in Shigatse, Tibet, but unfortunately for the bear, and in fact the rest of the animals there as well, the zoo was swept away in a flood.
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman says that "The toe structure is the clue. If you have a creature leaving prints that resemble your hand, it is an ape. If the unknown's footprint looks like your tracks would, it's more man-like, woman-like, hominid." "I do not believe that the Yeti (an ape) or Sasquatch (a possible humanoid) are directly related to man. We are indirectly related to them in the same fashion that we are indirectly related to gorillas or chimps." He also pointed out that both the plant and animal species in the areas of China and in the Pacific north west of America bear an uncanny resemblance to one another, are related or are the same. He also notes that the Dzu-teh of China and the Yeren are "strikingly similar" in the configuration of the pads and toes. Could Yeren and Sasquatch be related or even separate communities of the same animal? If so then a leading candidate is a species of giant ape called “Gigantopithecus” that lived in southern China until it became apparently extinct 500,000 years ago.
Gigantopithecus was a sort of hybrid between man and ape on a large scale, males weighing about 800lb and females about 500lb which makes it the largest primate that ever lived. It did not follow the path of the smaller primates that would still swing through the trees because it was too big and heavy so it walked upright like a human and, like man, it lost its tail which it had no further use for. They had ape-like faces with a retreating forehead and blunt nose and a human-like mouth and jaw. They were covered in body hair but did not make tools as they were not as intelligent as humans and they probably didn't live in close social groups, so some of their traits were more human-like while others were more ape-like.
The other contender for the role of Yeti is the “Mih-teh” which is man sized with a conical head on a stout neck, a jutting jaw and a wide, lipless mouth. It has black or red-brown fur and its footprints show short, wide feet. It is often described as the "original" Yeti, and they are said to eat plants, small animals and birds which they hunt in the high mountain forests, but they are also considered by some to be man eating and quite savage. It has the classic reversed toes and prowls at anything up to 20,000ft (6,100m) or higher.
Doig says of the Mih-teh: "In 1961 we dismissed the Mih-teh as pure myth. I now think we were wrong. I've often shown sherpas, who claim to have seen the Mih-teh, a sort of identity parade of different bears, humans, drawings of neanderthal man and Gigantopithecus, gorillas, chimps, gibbons and the orang utans. Invariably, though they have no knowledge whatsoever of the great apes, it is an ape they point to, usually an orang utan. We know from fossils that the orang utan once lived in northern India. Who knows? There are still immense jungles which could conceal whole tribes of Yetis. Perhaps their rare excursions to the high slopes are, as Abba Bordet suggested, in search of water. It can be very dry on the upper margins of the forest.
So, are we any nearer to the answer after all this or not? Are there man-like creatures living in the world's remote points, and if so what are they? Remnants of our own ancestry or distant cousins? Perhaps we will find out sooner or later when a body is found and recovered, and scientists feel that this may be sooner rather than later, because as populations increase and civilisations spread they cover more and more of the earth's surface, but zoologists believe that all the world's large creatures have already been found, but by the same token some of them proved to be very elusive until quite recently. For example, the mountain gorilla of Africa wasn't seen until 1901, the giant panda wasn't discovered in China until a skin was found in 1869 but the first Westerner to see was as recently as 1936, yet, interestingly, at the time of their respective discoveries both animals had long been considered, like Bigfoot and the Yeti, to be local folklore, and in fact 40% of all known mammals have been discovered in this century.
One cryptozoologist, Richard Greenwell, believes that Bigfoot is a real creature that prefers to remain living in peace away from prying eyes, and he also believes that he is nocturnal, which is another reason why he remains so elusive, but the idea of such a creature living on the outskirts of humanity is far from a recent one. The principal has been around for thousands of years from the epic of Gilgamesh in ancient Babylon to the English tale of Beowulf, and this romanticism has added to what began as folklore, but is now very much regarded as the truth by locals and sherpas alike.
As each year goes by there seems to be more and more evidence to support the existence of the Yeti, and as we've seen the main part of the evidence is the footprints in the snow, and to date nobody has ever satisfactorily explained the existence of footprints made by a creature much heavier than a man which walks for great distances on two legs, and doubters ask whether an animal could survive and find food at such high altitudes, to which the believers quote the examples of the lynx, the woolly wolf, the ibex and the yak, all of which have been seen at more than 18,000 ft (5,490m).
It is argued that the footprints could come from a much smaller creature such as a mountain goat or langur monkey, and that they have been distorted by the sun melting them. The langur monkey is known to live at high altitude but was discounted as a culprit by the zoologist at the Queen Mary College, London, W. Tschenezky, who analysed the footprints and made casts which he compared to a gorilla, fossil man and modern man. He noted the unusually large second toe and the very small metatarsal bone and came to the conclusion that they were made by neither a bear or a monkey, and nor would these details have shown up on a distorted, melted footprint. Most zoologists say that a creature such as Bigfoot or the Yeti cannot exist, but perhaps the best known of all, Charles Darwin, provided the basis for the creature with his talk of the “Missing Link.” Tschenezky says that "all the evidence suggests that the so called snowman is a very huge, heavily built bipedal primate, most probably of a similar type to the Gigantopithecus."
In a remote cave in China in 1989, anthropologists found the teeth and bones of a bipedal animal much larger than a man that had been there since Pliocene times, and from the remains of the animal they reconstructed a creature that was over two metres tall and weighed over 540 kg and it is this creature which they named Gigantopithecus. They put forward the idea that man and Gigantopithecus shared the same ancestry, but 11 million years ago, somewhere down the family tree, they split and became different creatures. This idea was that Gigantopithecus and Homo Erectus shared the earth some two million years ago, and this idea was further boosted when the remains of Homo Erectus were also found in that same Chinese cave, and more importantly these remains also dated back to Pliocene times.
Grover Krantz thinks that while Homo Sapiens descended from Homo Erectus, simultaneously so too did other creatures descend from Gigantopithecus and that we still share the earth with those same descendants, so we are, as with modern primates, not on the same branch of the evolutionary scale, but on different branches that meet in history.
Bigfoot sightings are most commonly of a creature roughly the same size as Gigantopithecus, eight feet tall, hairy, wide shouldered and slightly ape-like in its facial features. If the creatures did exist in east Asia then they could have crossed to north America over the land ridges that formed during the ice age, which is clearly possible as this was the same route that was taken by the early Americans.
If you fly from northern India to Nepal you will see below you range after range of hills and mountains which are for the most part uninhabited by man, and in America's Pacific north west there is square mile after square mile of dense forest with up to 50 miles in between the roads that weave their way through it. Since World War Two there have been over seventy aircraft which have gone missing without trace in the area, and so there is a joke that not only is Bigfoot alive and well in the Pacific North West, but also another creature that feeds on stray aircraft, so if an aircraft can go missing it is not surprising that a shy and elusive creature could evade capture for so long, but what about a dead Bigfoot?
Krantz says that the reason we have not yet found a dead Bigfoot lying conveniently at the side of the road is down to natural instincts. Most animals dying a natural death will hide themselves away where they will not be interrupted by natural predators and scavengers, and Krantz has also asked many hunters, game wardens and park officials how many bones they have found from ordinary bears which have died a natural death, and the total number is zero. For now though we must rely on the numerous footprints and brief sightings by hunters and climbers.
There can be little or no doubt that there are creatures thst we have not yet discovered, and why should it be the case that they must be for example, insects, birds or fish? Why is there such a fuss and even fits of giggling when it is suggested that there could be an undiscovered creature which may resemble ourselves? Is it for the same reason that we giggle at the thought of alien beings resembling us or the deep fear that we are not alone? Or is it that we may not be quite as “superior” as we would like to think?
You also have to ask yourself the question: Would so many "experts" in their field, with so much to lose, spend their working lives and their spare time working on something that has no possibility of coming to fruition? One more thing we mustn't forget is that we ourselves were once living in remote areas, timid of our surroundings, looking for food and probably living in close family units, so is it so ridiculous to suppose that such a being could still exist today, largely unchanged in its adaptation to its environment? Obviously not, as there are other animals alive and well which are wholly or largely unevolved from ancient times, the best examples being sharks which are vastly unaltered from their prehistoric ancestors, or crocodiles which, like sharks, have only reduced in size through history, an excellent case of nature getting it right first time.
These are easy examples to accept because they bear not the slightest resemblance to man himself , but an animal that is well adapted to its environment and therefore not in need of any major evolutionary changes could quite easily be man-like, as we consider ourselves to be at the top of the evolutionary chain as well as the food chain.
So therefore no, it is not too far fetched to suppose that Bigfoot, the Alma or the Yeti could exist, and probably it would be more surprising if such a creature did not exist.”
He couldn't have been much closer to the truth if he'd tried, because it truly does make you wonder. It makes you wonder just how many more animals there are for us yet to discover. Especially when you consider that there are still, even today, vast tracts of land that remain unexplored by man, some of it uninhabitable by man, but that is not to say uninhabitable. Most notably of all, the two thirds of the planet's surface that is permanently under cover of water, but even in populated areas there are certain animals that are rarely seen.
What about the more remote regions? The jungles of South America, The North and South Poles, mountain ranges, the Siberian Taiga and last, but by no means least, the vast forests of North America. The fact is that as time goes by, man is populating more and more of the planet's surface, and what was once the sole premise of wild animals is now explored, mapped and often looted, and the number of places that animals can live unmolested are becoming fewer and further between. Yet there are apparently places that man does visit frequently, in some cases on most weekends, such as the forests of America's Pacific North West where all and sundry don warm clothing, a gun belt and go hunting in search of the abundant wildlife. It seems amazing that so many hunters can occupy the landscape, and yet still the legendary “Bigfoot” remains one of the most talked about and longed for trophies of all time, if it exists at all that is.
Everybody has heard of Bigfoot. The mythical ape-man that walks upright, is covered in hair and is both very heavy and very strong, but is he real or is he not? Is he a distant relative of man or is he a remnant of man's past? If the stories are to be believed then he makes his home in the dense woodland and seems to be quite shy where man is concerned, being reluctant to pose for photographs, and rather inconveniently choosing not to lie down and die where his body can easily be recovered. It is obvious that Bigfoot will not come to man, so man must go to Bigfoot, and increasingly he is doing just that. During the 1950s, woodsmen and loggers working their way deeper and deeper into the forests began to return with reports of a "strange ape-like creature" and during this time, in The Cascades, they found huge footprints and it was then that the creature that was believed to have made them was nicknamed "Bigfoot."
In the summer of 1958, giant footprints began appearing near road-making equipment at Bluff Creek, Northern California over several nights, and the workers who found them became quite fearful. The San Francisco press got hold of the story and it grew from a local matter into a national story which heralded the birth of the modern Bigfoot era.
Like the tribes of Africa, the natives of North America talk of Bigfoot, not as a myth, but as a real creature who is just nothing more than simply elusive, and they have long believed in a creature they call "Sasquatch" which is a man-like beast that lives on the edges of civilisation. This folklore grew into rumour and the world began to debate the existence of such a creature with only the moulds made from its footprints to go on. Many of these casts turned out to be hoaxes and this is very damaging to the reputation of the apparently genuine ones. This is also true of the Bigfoot hair samples which have been found to be hoaxes. One of the more crude attempts turned out to be nothing more than the hair from a child's “Barbie” doll.
Bigfoot prints have been found and analysed in different parts of the world, the U.S.A., Canada and as far afield as Russia, and from all of these prints certain things become apparent. A typical print is 16 to 18 inches (41 to 46 cm) long and 7 inches (18 cm) wide. The foot is not arched like a man's, except for smaller ones which are presumably from younger animals, as though the foot flattens out as the creature grows older and therefore heavier. There is a double ball at the heel, unlike the single ball of a man's foot, which is a sign of a foot designed to support great weight, and this is also shown by how far the foot sinks into the ground. This combined with reported sightings of the animals height would suggest a creature weighing anything up to 1,000lb (454 kg).
The prints show no signs of the claws which are found on an bear and, in 1982, a set of prints found in the blue mountains along the Washington - Oregon border showed more detail than ever before, and they were cast by U.S. Forest Service workers. Made in a very fine soil that was slightly damp, they were very detailed and it was even possible to see ridges on the skin underneath the toes and on the soles. These details are rather like fingerprints and are only found on the feet of the higher primates.
Since they were cast, the moulds have been examined by forty police fingerprint experts, all of whom came to the conclusion, that the footprints must have been made by one or more genuine creatures - Bigfeet. Not everybody agreed though, anthropologists and primatologists say that they were made by a human foot which had somehow been enlarged, possibly by using a latex mould as latex will expand by 50% when it is soaked in kerosene. This expansion would not only expand the overall size of the foot but would also expand the size of the ridges in relation to it, but the fingerprint experts said that the ridges were spaced like those on other primates.
With appetites being whetted in the 1950s, Tom Slick began organising expeditions to try and track Bigfoot down. Slick was an oil millionaire and he spent a fortune in his search during which he found footprints and droppings, but in 1962 he was killed in a plane crash and, after his death, the fruits of his four year search for Bigfoot mysteriously went missing, and this included not only the records of his expeditions but also his samples of evidence as well, and it would be 30 years before anybody would pick up where he had left off. That man was Grover Krantz.
Krantz is an anthropologist based at Washington State University, and he risks his professional reputation by undertaking such work. This is because he is convinced that Bigfoot is real and he also bases his opinion on footprint casts that he has. Where some people's offices or laboratories are adorned with hunting trophies or pictures, Krantz's are adorned with his moulds of Bigfoot footprints. Krantz has categorised seven different characteristics belonging to the prints and he has published five of them in various journals, but he won't reveal the other two so he can continue to use them to help determine fakes from genuine prints, much like the police will withhold certain details about a murder which only themselves and the murderer will know. Among the five that Krantz has revealed are flat feet which are wide in comparison to their length, toes almost equal in size and what are called "dermal ridges" which are the lines that make up like a fingerprint.
One print that Krantz has was taken from where the maker of the print had stepped on a stone, and the stone has pressed itself into the foot quite deeply, yet the dermal ridges around the stone are unbroken which means that a hoaxer would not have been able to make the print with a mould by rocking it from side to side over the stone.
Another man who collects foot print samples is Bob Titmus who has explored British Colombia's remote forests in search of Bigfoot and, again the year 1958 is of significance, as it was then that Titmus saw his first footprint on a makeshift road. He has been a hunter all of his life and has hunted from Alaska to Mexico and many places in between, and he has tracked Bigfoot prints and feels that only a real, living thing could have made them, and certainly not a man or a machine. Titmus' walls at home are also, like Krantz's, full of his moulds, but the evidence doesn't stop there because as well as footprints there are many eye witness accounts of the creature itself, and Titmus is one of those who has had such an encounter.
He was following a set of tracks in 1963 when he arrived at a remote canyon on the Rockies of British Colombia, and the memory of what he saw that day remains with him now as vivid and clear as the day on which he saw it. He had heard rumours of Indians having shot a Bigfoot in the area many years before, but what he saw was not one Bigfoot but three. Titmus watched as they climbed a rock face, and he said that they climbed "hand over hand" using foot holds as well, much the same as a mountaineer would. When he returned from his trip he relayed the tale and like many before him, and others to follow, he was ridiculed by all but one man, and that man was John Green, a Journalist and former newspaper publisher in British Colombia.
Green had followed Bigfoot reports in the press and, since 1958, he has collected over 3,000 eye witness accounts from the U.S.A. and Canada, and in some cases he has obtained sworn affidavits. Most of these sightings occurred in America's Pacific North West, but some are from as far afield to the east as Arkansas. He admits that some of them are hoaxes, but he is convinced that by far the majority of them are genuine and when he heard of what Titmus had seen he tracked him down. Despite all of the footprints, all of the sightings and all of the research done on Bigfoot, he still remains elusive, but there are some very determined men who won't rest until they have found Bigfoot and are able to prove that he exists. One such man is Peter Byrne, an Irish born hunter who has at his disposal two helicopters, a jeep, a Toyota Land Cruiser, an international scout, a snowmobile and a van which he calls the “Bigfoot Mobile Base” as it houses a lot of his equipment. Part of the equipment are biopsy darts which are fired at an animal and will take a blood sample while still allowing the creature to walk away afterwards, but he has not needed to use them as of yet.
A regular journal, Bigfoot News, is full of sightings and encounters, the number of which seems almost infinite, yet obviously there are hoax sightings just as there are hoax footprints using anything from shaped Wellington boots to moulded strap on casts. Some witnesses are unreliable, for example, the man who gave the colour of the creatures eyes when he had only witnessed it from a distance of over 300 yards. There are countless tales of hunters catching a glimpse of a hairy upright creature walking like a man but a certain percentage of these could be explained away as common bears, which heavily populate the area. Some talk of the creature as having turned to look at them, apparently out of curiosity, and then walking away. The witnesses say that they don't feel threatened in any way by the creature, more often than not they feel as though it is merely as interested in them as they are in it, and this lack of hostility and sense of almost kinship was experienced by an Indian man called Muchalat Harry in 1928. Harry told Father Anthony Terhaar, that he had been kidnapped by a male Bigfoot and carried back to a "camp" where there were around twenty of the creatures including some younger ones. They did him no harm, and when they seemed to have lost interest in him he managed to escape, and he then met Father Terhaar when he arrived at Nookta on Vancouver Island clad only in his torn underwear and with his hair turned white by the experience.
This is not the only kidnap reported, another account was given by Albert Ostman who found his experience much more frightening. It happened in 1924 but he didn't report it until almost 34 years later in 1957 when the Bigfoot phenomenon began to achieve world acclaim, which may cast a little doubt on his story as he may have been seeking the fame and fortune that just such an encounter can bring, and he certainly wouldn't be alone in that. Ostman claimed that he had been picked up while he was in his sleeping bag and carried for several miles where he was then held "prisoner" by a family of four Sasquatch – father, mother, son and daughter - for a period of six days (the alien abduction case of the Bigfoot world).
So with footprints and sightings why do we not yet have conclusive proof that Bigfoot is real? Grover Krantz says that "Even if none of the hundreds of sightings had ever occurred, we would still be forced to conclude that a giant bipedal primate does indeed inhabit the forests of the Pacific north west" and to prove that it does he says that all he would need would be a single lower jaw bone, and he advises anybody who sees a Bigfoot to shoot it as proof. He, himself, drives around "Bigfoot Country" with swivelling spot lamps on the side of his car and with a high powered rifle.
Some people claim to have taken his advice, such as the two men out coyote hunting in 1966 who shot what they thought was a giant "gorilla-like" animal at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. They ran over to it to see what it was they had shot and saw that it was a huge, hairy animal with a bare face, huge hands and huge feet. It was so man-like that the two men thought they had shot some kind of local freak and they fled.
Another man who shot a Bigfoot also fled, but not straight away, he took a little persuading. In 1922 Fred Beck was mining with some companions on Mount St. Helens, Washington when they saw a group of what appeared to be giant apes and they began firing at them and shot one. For the next few nights their camp was bombarded with stones and rocks until they decided to give in and move their camp elsewhere.
Often, when the creatures are shot, it is in remote areas which makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to bring the carcass back to civilisation, and sceptics say that Bigfoot can't exist because not only have we not seen one that has been shot, but we have not seen one that has died a natural death, but this point is answered by the fact that man very rarely comes across the body of an ordinary bear that has died naturally. This is because their natural instinct is to take cover when they feel vulnerable so that they are not caught by predators, and when they do die the body will be disposed of relatively quickly by scavengers. There is said to be a multi-million dollar reward for the first person that captures the first Bigfoot, alive or dead, not to mention book deals, newspaper exclusives and radio and TV interviews, and fortune seekers from all over the world go in search of the fame and fortune that this potential discovery will bring them with little more than a rifle slung across their back. It is this which makes faking a Bigfoot sighting a very dangerous practise, as anybody running around in a big hairy suit is taking their life in their own hands. Anything that moves in the forests is likely to be shot at, and even some things that definitely don't move, which the bullet ridden road signs are testament to, as people use them for target practise. So, sensibly, people on hunting trips choose not to opt for stealth in camouflaged clothing, but will wear bright colours so any prospective gunman will know that what they are looking at is not an animal trying to conceal itself, but a fellow hunter in a gaudy checked shirt.
There is a big question over what a Bigfoot would eat, and a logger from Estacapa, Oregon thinks he may have found the answer. One day he was walking along a path at Tarzan Springs when he heard a noise, he said "I was screened by the trees, but through them I could see these three huge figures digging in a rock pile. They looked just like Bigfoot is supposed to; hairy, huge hands and very powerfully built. There was a big one with a female and a young one. They were lifting rocks out, the big male one, and digging down all of six or seven feet. Then the male reached down and took out a nest of rodents and ate them. " When investigators later went to the site to investigate, they found thirty or more holes with rocks that had been moved. There was also a lot of rodent wildlife in the area such as marmots, which are known to hibernate in nests under rocks, and it had been October when Thomas saw the Bigfoot family.
Just like we had the alien abductions of the Bigfoot world, we also have the alien autopsy video of the Bigfoot world. On October 20th 1967 there came one of the most talked about pieces of film since the advent of the cine camera, that of a Bigfoot taking a walk through the woods. Bob Gimlin and Roger Patterson had set out on a hunting trip with the intent of capturing Bigfoot on film, and they had set out for Bluff Creek in the Trinity National Forest 260 kilometres north of San Francisco because it had gained a reputation for sightings over the years. For a week they roamed the area, and Patterson had been filming the scenery before they, or rather their horses, saw anything. They were riding towards a creek when the two horses were spooked, Patterson fell to the ground, and they soon saw what had bothered their horses. Patterson picked up his camera and began filming a Bigfoot that was on the other side of the creek, and it paused and looked back toward them. Meanwhile Gimlin had picked up his gun and was aiming it at the creature just in case it should decide to attack them, but it merely turned and continued to make its way back into the forest. As it did so, the film in Patterson's camera ran out.
Patterson licensed the film worldwide, and made a lot of money out of it, but Gimlin never made so much as a cent from it, but even so he still maintains that it is genuine and, with Patterson now dead, he would surely have more to gain by admitting that it was a fake, if indeed it was.
The film has undergone intense scrutiny by experts in many fields, and it comes out of these tests rather well, if not with flying colours. Grover Krantz has examined it in minute detail, frame by frame, and has compared it to other sightings, and from this he has concluded that the gait of Bigfoot is different to that of a man. Bigfoot walks by leaning slightly forward at the hip, and though it swings its arms like a human it bends the knees slightly when it puts the forward foot down, and Krantz says that this is out of necessity for a creature of its size, weighing more than 500lb.
Dr. D. W. Grieve, a reader in biomechanics at the Royal Free Hospital, London has examined the film very closely and has compared it to films of humans walking at the same location. By doing so he has come to the conclusion that the creature in Patterson's film is 6ft 5in tall, still possibly a human in a disguise, but the hips and shoulders are too wide to be a human, and the overall size of the creature would suggest a body weight of around 280lb (127kg). The length of the stride is around 42in (1.07m) which is not too long for a man to make, but it would be very difficult to do it with the fluidity of movement and the natural look that is seen in the film. Grieve said that if the film had been shot at 24 frames per second then it could be showing a large man, but if it had been shot at 18 frames per second, then no human being could have made the movements shown. He concluded, "My subjective impressions have oscillated between total acceptance of the Bigfoot on the grounds that the film would be difficult to fake, to one of irrational rejection based on an emotional response to the possibility that the Bigfoot actually exists." His conclusions on the film are that: "If it is a fake, it is a very clever one."
Three senior Russian scientists, Doctors Bayanov, Burtsev and Donskoy, came to roughly the same conclusions and said that "We can evaluate the gait of the creature as a natural movement without any of the signs of artfulness that one would see in an imitation." Bayanov and Burtsev said that the creature had an ape-like head and almost no neck, and its tracks show that it walks with less weight on its heels than a man would, with its legs slightly bent, and there is no arch in the foot. Dmitri Donskoy says that the gait is that of an animal with enormous weight and strength, and the movement is fluid and confident. "At the same time with all the diversity of locomotion illustrated by the creature of the footage, its gait as seen is absolutely non typical of man."
The biggest problem with the Patterson film is that nobody knows at what speed the film was shot, 24 or 18 frames per second, and both speeds would produce markedly different results when screened, and some say that the footprints found at the scene would suggest a creature much taller than 6ft 5in and with a stride longer than 42in.
America isn't the only country to play host to the apeman legend, Australia is another, and its own version of the Sasquatch is known as the “Yowie” which is seen mainly in the areas around New South Wales and Queensland, and has been seen by settlers from well into the last century and by Aborigines for much longer. The Yowie is far from outgoing but it is not exactly timid either as George Summerell discovered on October 12th, 1912 when he was out riding near Bemboka, New South Wales. He came upon a Yowie bending down to drink from a creek, and as it heard him approach it rose up to its full height which he estimated to be about 7ft. It bent down again to finish its drink before picking up a stick and walking away.
Summerell noticed that there were lots of footprints around the creek which indicated that the creature, or others like it, had been in the area before. They also showed on closer examination that the creature only had four toes which had also been the case with other prints found around the world. The Yowie also shares two other characteristics with Bigfoot and other mythical creatures, and those two are that it has little or no neck and the ability to emit a foul smell, apparently at will.
Another Australian to experience this foul smell was a National Parks worker who was cutting timber near Springbrook, Queensland when he saw "this big, black, hairy man-thing" about 12 feet away from him. "It had huge hands and a flat, black, shiny face, with two big yellow eyes and a hole for a mouth. It just stared at me and I stared back. I was so numb I couldn't even raise the axe I had in my hand. We were staring at each other for about ten minutes before it suddenly gave off a foul smell that made me vomit - then it just made off sideways and disappeared."
Africa also has its fair share of man-beasts, and not surprisingly either, as the continent is referred to as the “cradle of mankind,” the place where “Homo Sapiens” are known to have evolved, and also because it has such huge tracts of wilderness where an elusive creature could live quite safe in the knowledge that it would seldom come into contact with man. Africa also has fossils of hominids called “Australopithecines” which first appeared 3 million years ago. Could some of them have survived undiscovered in Africa's remote regions? It would appear that there are different kinds of apeman in Africa which may or may not be part of the same species, or perhaps some could be the result of cross breeding with various types of gibbon or baboon.
The first kind is the “Kakundakari” of Zaire, the “Fating'Ho” of Senegal and the “Agogwe” of Tanzania which are the slenderest of the Ausralopithecines. The smallest is the Agogwe which is russet coloured and man-like, and it is said to also mix with other primates such as baboons, possibly evidence that it is related to them? The more robust are the “Kikomba” of Zaire and the “Wa'ab” of Sudan which, it is believed, could be surviving examples of “Homo Erectus.”
There is a very famous example of a South American creature which caused great controversy at the time, and still does today, because some believe that the whole episode is an elaborate hoax. It took place when a team of twenty geological surveyors had set out on an explorative trip but, after three years, their number had been drastically reduced by disease, venomous animals and the poisoned arrows of the hostile natives. The remaining handful were making their way along the Tarra River on the Venezuala-Columbia border in 1920 when they saw, coming out of the foliage ahead of them, a pair of five feet tall ape-like creatures walking on their hind legs. When the animals, one male and one female, saw them they became agitated and began tearing at the vegetation before they defecated into their hands and threw it at the bemused party. They then moved forwards as if to attack but one of the team shot at them, killing the female, but the male ran away. The geologists examined the body and made some notes before photographing it, but unfortunately a lot of the pictures were lost later on in the expedition when their boat capsized.
On their return to Europe the team's leader, Swiss Geologist Dr. Francois De Loys, showed the surviving pictures of the animal to the French Anthropologist Professor George Montandon who was sure that it was an “old world” ape and he gave it the name “Ameranthropoides Loysi” (Loys American Ape), but some others were not so sure. They said that it was some sort of spider monkey without a tail, and some said that it was a "set up" with a real spider monkey with its tail hidden or removed.
The creature was shown sat down on a packing case with a pole beneath its chin to support its head, and it was said that the picture showed little or no background so that no sense of scale could be gained to prove whether or not it was a real spider monkey, which would not grow anywhere near the height De Loys claimed his creature to be. It was proposed that the packing case it was sat on was a specially made small one to make the creature look larger in comparison to it, and Montandon had a reply for every question that was asked of him, but science as a whole was not convinced, and De Loys' ape was always doomed to be surrounded by controversy.
Not wanting to be the odd one out, Russia found that it too had a legendary apeman and it was called the “Alma.” The search for the Alma is said to be more continuous and scientific than that for any other similar creature, but it must surely have a long way to go to beat the Americans. The Alma has been sighted in Siberia, the Russian Steppes and the Caucasian Mountains, and reports tell of a man-like creature.
Many of the sightings on record are by World War Two prisoners and refugees fleeing the Germans and Russians, and in the book “The Long Walk” Slavomir Rawicz describes his 4,000 mile escape from a Siberian labour camp into India. He tells of the meeting he had with a male and a female Alma which blocked his path for over two hours, forcing him to take a detour. Similarly, a Pole, Mr. Wiktor Juszczyk, was escaping from a Soviet prison camp when he was captured by the Chinese and, during this time, they told him that they would regularly put food out for the Alma. Mr. Juszczyk was watching as they put out a piece of fish and a large loaf of black bread, and he says that the Alma "loped through two feet of snow right up to the table. Then it sat on its haunches, grabbed the loaf and ate. He must have been seven feet high. He had a broad nose and slanting eyes, small and staring. I have never seen such a powerful looking creature: long body, short legs, his chest, shoulders and arms covered in red-brown hair, but his hands were just like human hands. He spent a couple of minutes eating the bread and part of the fish, gave a few animal grunts and then ambled off."
The Alma is said to inhabit inaccessible areas from the west of the Soviet Union to the Altai and the Gobi desert in Mongolia, and the reports of it describe not the ape-like features of the Yeti but rather human-like features. This is borne out by the experience of geologist M. A. Stronin in 1948 when he was prospecting near the “Tien Shan” and made camp with his two Khirgiz guides. He was woken at dawn by their shouting that the horses were being stolen. He looked and "saw this figure behind the horses. It was standing upright but the arms seemed longer than a man's. I shouted ‘Hey! Why are you trying to rob us?’ The figure turned at the sound of my voice and calmly walked away from the horses." Stronin described the reddish hair and the upright stance as he chased it, he said "It wasn't quite human, nor quite animal, but even though it was in my sights, I couldn't decide to shoot what might have been some kind of man."
One man who did shoot an Alma is Moscow factory chief G. N. Kolpachnikov who was leading a reconnaissance mission during the 1937 Japanese invasion of Mongolia. Two sentries on guard duty saw two silhouettes descending a hill and, when the figures didn't respond to their calls, the two men fired and hit them both. The next morning when it was light Kolpachnikov went to look at the bodies and he couldn't believe his eyes. Lying on the ground were "not enemies, but strange hairy creatures more like an anthropoid ape. But I knew that there were no anthropoid apes in the Democratic Republic of Mongolia." He was told by an old man that wild men were sometimes encountered in the high mountains, and the bodies were about the height of a man with an irregular covering of reddish hair which often the skin could be seen through. The faces were very human-like with prominent eyebrows. Like the Bigfoot carcasses, an Alma has never been brought back to civilisation, and again for logistical reasons.
Dr. Myra Shackley of Leicester University has collated a lot of evidence about the Alma and she is one of the world's leading experts on Neanderthal man who was supposed to have died out 40,000 years ago, and she believes that the Alma may well be a surviving example.In the summer and Autumn of 1979, Shackley went to Mongolia to find further details of the Alma, and she said "I think I was probably the first European for years, perhaps the first European ever, to penetrate some of those mountains." "Nor do the Mongolians go there. They have no reason to, and in any case they are afraid of the creatures that live there." Shackley found Neanderthal tools in a high river valley though they were not recent ones. She says "The pattern of Neanderthal sites which have been excavated across Soviet Asia accord very closely with the sightings of the Alma." "If Neanderthal man were to have survived it would most likely be in exactly those areas where the Alma has been most persistently reported. It may seem bizarre, but could it be that Neanderthal man is alive and well and living in Outer Mongolia."
It is said that good Alma sightings go as far back as 1879 when the great 19th century explorer Przhevalski, who discovered the wild Mongolian horse named after him, saw several wild men, "covered with hair and uttering inarticulate cries."
When Bigfoot mania was sweeping America, in 1958, an expedition was sent to find the Alma, and it was organised by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was led by K. V. Staniukovich and Porchnev. Though they didn't find the creature itself, they did find many witnesses who told them of the meetings they had had with them. One such tale was a multiple sighting by multiple witnesses when, during a spell of harsh weather, a whole village came under attack from stone throwing Alma who came into the village and stole food supplies, obviously driven to desperate measures by their weather depleted food supplies rather than doing it out of malice or hostility.
Expert opinion on the Alma is hard to come by, as is a lot of information from within Russia, but over the years a profile of the Alma has emerged. The young are born without hair which grows sparsely as they get older so, on adults, the skin can be seen through it. The head has a cone shaped crown, the teeth are human-like but larger and with the canines more widely separated. The hands have four fingers and an opposing thumb which means that, like humans, they can grasp objects, but they don't always use the thumb to do this as they will also grasp things between the fingers and the palm. They can run as quickly as a horse, swim very well in strong currents and climb trees. Like other apemen they have, or can produce, a strong and unpleasant odour. They sometimes shelter in holes in the ground and warm themselves around abandoned fires. They eat small animals and vegetables, are mostly active at twilight or in darkness and breeding pairs will remain together. There are even tales of albino Alma. Whereas Bigfoot footprints are not human-like, Alma footprints are but on a larger scale, and prints have been found and collected, as have hair samples and droppings, mostly by a French born Moscow Doctor, Marie Jeanne Koffman and Dr. Bayanov, who have made their work and their findings available to the west.
There was another foreign apeman that was made available to the west but, along with the Patterson film, it vies for top spot in the most controversial evidence stakes.
On March 23rd, 1969 the “Sunday Times” carried an extended report with the headline "IS IT A FAKE? IS IT AN APE? OR IS IT... NEANDERTHAL MAN?” The story continued; "A strange ape-like creature frozen in a block of ice is providing American anthropologists with one of the most intriguing questions they have faced in recent years. Is it a fraud, a freak or is it a form of human being believed to have been extinct since prehistoric times? One thing is certain; it has two large bullet holes in it. Just as a precaution, the F.B.I. have been called in."
Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans, a Belgian Zoologist who has written about many rare animals during his career, and made it a rule not to discount even the wildest rumours of strange animals, was invited by science writer Ivan Sanderson to view the “Iceman” in New Jersey. It was then in the custody of a Minnesota showman called Frank Hansen who said that he believed the Iceman had been found floating in a block of ice in the Baring Sea and had been bought in Hong Kong. Hansen, a former Air Force pilot, also said that he believed the Iceman had been in the ice for centuries, but Heuvelmans knew that if a creature is frozen in ice at death it will start to decay very quickly, and the frozen mammoths found in Siberia had only survived the passage of time because they were preserved in bog ice which has antiseptic qualities.
Heuvelmans’ excitement grew as he examined the block of ice in Hansen's trailer with a torch. The man inside was 6ft tall with white wax-like skin covered in brown hair. The neck was short, the torso barrel shaped, and the long arms ended in huge hands. One arm was bent at an odd angle, apparently broken, and there was a large hole in the left eye, and Heuvelmans came to the conclusion that the creature had recently been shot with a high calibre rifle. He suggested that as it was shot it had raised its arm in defence and the bullet had passed through it, breaking it, before hitting the creature in the eye. He couldn't see the back of the head but Hansen told him that it had been shattered. The feet suggested an ape of some kind as the big toe was unable to move independently and freely like a thumb, but the soles were too wrinkled yet more padded than those of a man.
Heuvelmans considered the options; he felt that it would have to be a very ambitious hoax to recreate the hair, and in some places the ice had been scraped away to give people a closer look. In one particular spot, enough ice had been removed to allow a rotten smell to escape. The figure could have been a kind of "Frankenstein" monster made up of different animals stitched together, and such hybrids were not uncommon in travelling shows such as fake mermaids, but Heuvelmans had no idea where a hairy human head, limbs of a giant ape, body of a giant ape or the unusual feet could have come from. Could it then have actually been a Neanderthal man? The long arms, short neck and barrel chest, large hands and feet are all in keeping with an early hominid, and the long second and third digits of the feet are indeed similar to what we know of Neanderthal man.
Following his examination of the Iceman Heuvelmans suffered several sleepless nights with his mind in turmoil. He felt that as the creature had been shot recently it could open up the possibility that there could be a race of such creatures still living in the remote parts of Asia. Despite attempts to buy it, Hansen would not part with the Iceman, so Heuvelmans asked the Washington “Smithsonian Institute” for assistance and they set up an investigating team, as did the F.B.I. who said that if a human-like being had been shot then it may be possible that a capital crime had been committed. Heuvelmans published his findings in Belgium which provoked huge enthusiasm from the zoological and anthropological worlds who felt that they were on the verge of one of their greatest discoveries, but their enthusiasm was short lived as things took a mysterious turn.
Frank Hansen said that the Iceman didn't belong to him but to a wealthy man whom he refused to name, and the owner had now taken possession of it, but an agreement had been made which allowed Hansen to exhibit a replica, and it was this replica that the Smithsonian Institute were allowed to examine, and not surprisingly they came to the conclusion that the Iceman was a clever hoax, a rubber fake made in Hollywood. Why they weren't told at the time that it was a replica is not clear, but they weren't the only ones to lose interest in the case as the F.B.I. also dropped their investigation after saying that they didn't have enough evidence to continue. For Hansen it was not the end of the line as he continued to exhibit the Iceman in Canada, but it is not clear whether or not he was exhibiting the genuine Iceman or the replica.
When he tried to return to the United States with the iceman it was seized by Customs officials who said that he didn't have the correct documentation to return a hominid to the country. Hansen told them that it was a "fabricated illusion" but he refused to allow them to have any samples as he said it would ruin his exhibit. Eventually, after telephone calls to his senator and a lawyer, he was finally allowed back into the U.S. with it where he continued to show it at carnivals for some time until Spring of 1970 when he said that his contract with the owner had expired and he had taken possession of it.
There is another account which says that Hansen disposed of the Iceman to avoid the furore that surrounded it, but obviously in this account he would be the owner.
Most zoologists now feel that it was a clever hoax, Heuvelmans only examined it in a dimly lit trailer but he still says that what he examined for 3 days in 1968 was a real body which was probably shot in Vietnam during the war and smuggled into the United States in the corpse bags which could be marked "NOT TO BE OPENED" to hide horrific injuries and mutilations.
If Hansen is to be believed then only Heuvelmans examined the real iceman and everybody else examined the replica, or was the replica story only invented to allow him to return to the U.S. with it, or was it to allay talk that it was only a hoax and the real one was conveniently elsewhere? Also convenient is the fact that it was Heuvelmans who was chosen to examine the genuine Iceman and not any other expert in the world , perhaps because of his past record, that he would be more likely to believe that it was genuine than dismiss it as a hoax, and he had gone on the record as saying that in the past.
Though the Yeti should strictly come under the same heading as the rest of the mythical apemen, it seems somehow more fitting to give it a heading of its own, if for no reason other than the mental images which the mere mention of the name “The Abominable Snowman” conjures up in all of our minds.
The Yeti is probably the most famous of all the apemen, which is surprising as it inhabits the most remote area of them all, the mountains of the Himalayas, though this is also an advantage as it means that its footprints are made in the snow which often shows them better than the mud which preserves Bigfoot footprints, and apparently the Yeti has adapted well to his environment as he blends in with his snowy environment with his light, almost white, body hair.
Early sightings of the Yeti include one in 1921 by British climbers at an altitude of 5,000 metres up Mount Everest when the party's sherpa guides saw figures in a snow field above them. The guide referred to them as "the man who is not a man" which was mistakenly translated as "the abominable snowman.” When the group reached the snow field the creatures had gone, but the legend was born and the Yeti gained world wide notoriety from this brief encounter.
In 1960 another British climber, Sir Edmond Hillary, ventured to the Himalayas on a scientific expedition, and one of his aims was to track down the Yeti. What Hillary found was footprints in the snow and he concluded that they were the tracks of an animal, most probably a bear, and that they had grown in size and become distorted when the snow both in and around them was melted by the sun. He concluded that the Yeti was nothing more than superstition.
Yeti footprints were first photographed in 1937 and there have been many examples of them seen and photographed since and, just like Bigfoot, has a controversial piece of evidence in the form of the Patterson film, so too does the Yeti in the form of “skull caps.”
On March 27th, 1954 the “Illustrated London News” carried the story of a noted anthropologist, Professor C. Von Fä»rer-Haimendorf, who had discovered a skull cap among other ritual objects in a small Buddhist temple at Pang Boche village. It was a piece of tough skin with sparse, brown, bristly hair, and it was in the shape of the crown of the head. The Professor doubted that it was genuine and said that it was more likely to be "a piece of hide from another part of the body, moulded into its present shape while still fresh and pliable." There are believed to be several of these skull caps in existence and one was also seen by Sir Edmond Hillary in 1960 when he set out on an expedition with Desmond Doig. The expedition was sponsored by the American “World book Encyclopedia” and went to an area renowned for Yeti sightings where they stayed for ten months. They took with them trip-wire cameras, time lapse cameras and infra-red cameras, but despite all of their equipment they failed to find anything conclusive, but there was some excitement when they were able to persuade the villagers of Khumjung to lend them their scalp for six weeks.
Hillary, Doig and the scalp's minder, Khunjo Chumbi, set off on a world tour that took in Honolulu, Chicago, Paris and even Buckingham Palace, and at every stop they showed off the scalp, and Chumbi would imitate the high pitched howl of the Yeti for the press. The scalp was examined by experts who said that it was probably the hide of the Serow goat, but since the expedition Doig has changed his mind and now believes that the Yeti does exist, he says "After all, we may not have seen a Yeti, but we didn't see a snow leopard either and we “know” they exist." Of the scalp though, Doig didn't change his opinion as he now has one of his own. He says that he was once near the Sikkim border when he met a tribesman wearing a similar one on his head and he told Doig that they are frequently made to be worn as warm hats.
There are occasional reports from the New China News Agency that Chinese soldiers have shot and eaten a “snowman” but, like Russian Alma reports, the details are not very easy to come by, and so it is mainly the regions of Nepal and Tibet that boast encounters with the Yeti.
The lead climber on the 1979 British expedition to conquer a 14,840 ft (4520m) Himalayan peak found footprints in the Hinken Valley and heard "scream-like calls" which the sherpas said was the Yeti. It is interesting to note that the sherpas seem to talk of the Yeti so matter of factly as though its existence should never be under any doubt, and the Abbot of the monastery at Thyangboche in the shadow of Everest tells of the Yeti that are casual visitors to the monastery garden.
Generally the opinion of the sherpas is that the Yeti are timid and harmless, but the “Sunday Times” in 1974 reported that a 19 year old yak herder, Lakhpa Domani, was tending her herd when she heard a noise and turned to see a huge ape-like creature with black and red-brown hair, large eyes and prominent cheeks. The animal picked her up and carried her to a stream but dropped her when she began to scream. It then turned its attention to the yaks and it killed one with heavy blows and another by twisting its horns to break its neck. The report was confirmed by local police and a photographer who recorded the animal’s footprints.
Like Bigfoot the Yeti's footprints give us a good idea of its size and weight, and a set of prints found by the R.A.F. squadron leader Lester Davies were "sunk in about 5 or 6 inches. With cine camera and rucksack, I was weighing about 12 stone and only went in about 1 or 2 inches. I thought, this thing is huge!"
In 1978 Lord Hunt found Yeti footprints that were 14 inches long and 7 inches wide, and he described them at the Royal Geographical Society in London when he made a speech. He said "We were in a side valley below Everest. It was late in the evening and getting dark when my wife and myself came across the tracks. They were very fresh indeed, and I will even say that they were certainly made that day. There was deep snow on a rather steep little slope and the creature was a heavy one, because he had broken through hard crust on which we could walk without making an impression through the snow at all. The prints were oval, elongated. I put down an ice axe to measure. They were 14 inches long and just about half as wide."
This wasn't the first set of prints that Hunt had seen and it certainly wasn't the last. He has also heard the Yeti's "high pitched yelping cries" several times, and he came to the conclusion that he "can find no other explanation but that there is an unidentified creature still to be discovered."
Doig has spent thirty years in and around “Yeti country” and speaks many of the local languages, and he says that the sherpas talk of three types of Yeti, and the Bigfoot hunter Tom Slick also went in search of the Yeti and came to the same conclusion, that there is more than one type of unidentified creature roaming the slopes of the Himalayas.
The “Teh-lma” (little man) is quite small at 3 to 4 feet tall and runs around collecting sticks, and Doig feels that this is almost certainly a kind of gibbon, although zoology says that they don't venture north of the Brahmaputra River in India. they live in the valleys eating mainly frogs and insects, and their fur is a dark red colour with a slight mane.
The other two types are the real contenders for the title of Yeti, and the first is the “Dzu-teh” (hulking living thing). It is large, far bigger than a human, with a dark shaggy coat, flat head, long arms with powerful hands and large feet with two pads under the first toe which points away from the other toes. The Dzu-teh don't live in the Himalayas but in Eastern Tibet and Northern China, but there is some confusion about its eating habits. Some say that it is a vegetarian while others say that it will attack and eat cattle which is why Doig feels that this is really a Tibetan Blue Bear, which is itself very rare and which no Westerner has seen closely. Doig did obtain a Blue Bear skin from a Bhutan monastery which he sold at Christie's for £1,200 in 1978, and the auctioneer said that "It has been suggested that this very rare skin is that of the Yeti or Abominable Snowman." There are still only a few known Blue Bear skins, and scant other bits and pieces including a skull and some assorted bones.
Doig once met a Tibetan lady who told him that there had been a Blue Bear at Panchen Lama's zoo in Shigatse, Tibet, but unfortunately for the bear, and in fact the rest of the animals there as well, the zoo was swept away in a flood.
Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman says that "The toe structure is the clue. If you have a creature leaving prints that resemble your hand, it is an ape. If the unknown's footprint looks like your tracks would, it's more man-like, woman-like, hominid." "I do not believe that the Yeti (an ape) or Sasquatch (a possible humanoid) are directly related to man. We are indirectly related to them in the same fashion that we are indirectly related to gorillas or chimps." He also pointed out that both the plant and animal species in the areas of China and in the Pacific north west of America bear an uncanny resemblance to one another, are related or are the same. He also notes that the Dzu-teh of China and the Yeren are "strikingly similar" in the configuration of the pads and toes. Could Yeren and Sasquatch be related or even separate communities of the same animal? If so then a leading candidate is a species of giant ape called “Gigantopithecus” that lived in southern China until it became apparently extinct 500,000 years ago.
Gigantopithecus was a sort of hybrid between man and ape on a large scale, males weighing about 800lb and females about 500lb which makes it the largest primate that ever lived. It did not follow the path of the smaller primates that would still swing through the trees because it was too big and heavy so it walked upright like a human and, like man, it lost its tail which it had no further use for. They had ape-like faces with a retreating forehead and blunt nose and a human-like mouth and jaw. They were covered in body hair but did not make tools as they were not as intelligent as humans and they probably didn't live in close social groups, so some of their traits were more human-like while others were more ape-like.
The other contender for the role of Yeti is the “Mih-teh” which is man sized with a conical head on a stout neck, a jutting jaw and a wide, lipless mouth. It has black or red-brown fur and its footprints show short, wide feet. It is often described as the "original" Yeti, and they are said to eat plants, small animals and birds which they hunt in the high mountain forests, but they are also considered by some to be man eating and quite savage. It has the classic reversed toes and prowls at anything up to 20,000ft (6,100m) or higher.
Doig says of the Mih-teh: "In 1961 we dismissed the Mih-teh as pure myth. I now think we were wrong. I've often shown sherpas, who claim to have seen the Mih-teh, a sort of identity parade of different bears, humans, drawings of neanderthal man and Gigantopithecus, gorillas, chimps, gibbons and the orang utans. Invariably, though they have no knowledge whatsoever of the great apes, it is an ape they point to, usually an orang utan. We know from fossils that the orang utan once lived in northern India. Who knows? There are still immense jungles which could conceal whole tribes of Yetis. Perhaps their rare excursions to the high slopes are, as Abba Bordet suggested, in search of water. It can be very dry on the upper margins of the forest.
So, are we any nearer to the answer after all this or not? Are there man-like creatures living in the world's remote points, and if so what are they? Remnants of our own ancestry or distant cousins? Perhaps we will find out sooner or later when a body is found and recovered, and scientists feel that this may be sooner rather than later, because as populations increase and civilisations spread they cover more and more of the earth's surface, but zoologists believe that all the world's large creatures have already been found, but by the same token some of them proved to be very elusive until quite recently. For example, the mountain gorilla of Africa wasn't seen until 1901, the giant panda wasn't discovered in China until a skin was found in 1869 but the first Westerner to see was as recently as 1936, yet, interestingly, at the time of their respective discoveries both animals had long been considered, like Bigfoot and the Yeti, to be local folklore, and in fact 40% of all known mammals have been discovered in this century.
One cryptozoologist, Richard Greenwell, believes that Bigfoot is a real creature that prefers to remain living in peace away from prying eyes, and he also believes that he is nocturnal, which is another reason why he remains so elusive, but the idea of such a creature living on the outskirts of humanity is far from a recent one. The principal has been around for thousands of years from the epic of Gilgamesh in ancient Babylon to the English tale of Beowulf, and this romanticism has added to what began as folklore, but is now very much regarded as the truth by locals and sherpas alike.
As each year goes by there seems to be more and more evidence to support the existence of the Yeti, and as we've seen the main part of the evidence is the footprints in the snow, and to date nobody has ever satisfactorily explained the existence of footprints made by a creature much heavier than a man which walks for great distances on two legs, and doubters ask whether an animal could survive and find food at such high altitudes, to which the believers quote the examples of the lynx, the woolly wolf, the ibex and the yak, all of which have been seen at more than 18,000 ft (5,490m).
It is argued that the footprints could come from a much smaller creature such as a mountain goat or langur monkey, and that they have been distorted by the sun melting them. The langur monkey is known to live at high altitude but was discounted as a culprit by the zoologist at the Queen Mary College, London, W. Tschenezky, who analysed the footprints and made casts which he compared to a gorilla, fossil man and modern man. He noted the unusually large second toe and the very small metatarsal bone and came to the conclusion that they were made by neither a bear or a monkey, and nor would these details have shown up on a distorted, melted footprint. Most zoologists say that a creature such as Bigfoot or the Yeti cannot exist, but perhaps the best known of all, Charles Darwin, provided the basis for the creature with his talk of the “Missing Link.” Tschenezky says that "all the evidence suggests that the so called snowman is a very huge, heavily built bipedal primate, most probably of a similar type to the Gigantopithecus."
In a remote cave in China in 1989, anthropologists found the teeth and bones of a bipedal animal much larger than a man that had been there since Pliocene times, and from the remains of the animal they reconstructed a creature that was over two metres tall and weighed over 540 kg and it is this creature which they named Gigantopithecus. They put forward the idea that man and Gigantopithecus shared the same ancestry, but 11 million years ago, somewhere down the family tree, they split and became different creatures. This idea was that Gigantopithecus and Homo Erectus shared the earth some two million years ago, and this idea was further boosted when the remains of Homo Erectus were also found in that same Chinese cave, and more importantly these remains also dated back to Pliocene times.
Grover Krantz thinks that while Homo Sapiens descended from Homo Erectus, simultaneously so too did other creatures descend from Gigantopithecus and that we still share the earth with those same descendants, so we are, as with modern primates, not on the same branch of the evolutionary scale, but on different branches that meet in history.
Bigfoot sightings are most commonly of a creature roughly the same size as Gigantopithecus, eight feet tall, hairy, wide shouldered and slightly ape-like in its facial features. If the creatures did exist in east Asia then they could have crossed to north America over the land ridges that formed during the ice age, which is clearly possible as this was the same route that was taken by the early Americans.
If you fly from northern India to Nepal you will see below you range after range of hills and mountains which are for the most part uninhabited by man, and in America's Pacific north west there is square mile after square mile of dense forest with up to 50 miles in between the roads that weave their way through it. Since World War Two there have been over seventy aircraft which have gone missing without trace in the area, and so there is a joke that not only is Bigfoot alive and well in the Pacific North West, but also another creature that feeds on stray aircraft, so if an aircraft can go missing it is not surprising that a shy and elusive creature could evade capture for so long, but what about a dead Bigfoot?
Krantz says that the reason we have not yet found a dead Bigfoot lying conveniently at the side of the road is down to natural instincts. Most animals dying a natural death will hide themselves away where they will not be interrupted by natural predators and scavengers, and Krantz has also asked many hunters, game wardens and park officials how many bones they have found from ordinary bears which have died a natural death, and the total number is zero. For now though we must rely on the numerous footprints and brief sightings by hunters and climbers.
There can be little or no doubt that there are creatures thst we have not yet discovered, and why should it be the case that they must be for example, insects, birds or fish? Why is there such a fuss and even fits of giggling when it is suggested that there could be an undiscovered creature which may resemble ourselves? Is it for the same reason that we giggle at the thought of alien beings resembling us or the deep fear that we are not alone? Or is it that we may not be quite as “superior” as we would like to think?
You also have to ask yourself the question: Would so many "experts" in their field, with so much to lose, spend their working lives and their spare time working on something that has no possibility of coming to fruition? One more thing we mustn't forget is that we ourselves were once living in remote areas, timid of our surroundings, looking for food and probably living in close family units, so is it so ridiculous to suppose that such a being could still exist today, largely unchanged in its adaptation to its environment? Obviously not, as there are other animals alive and well which are wholly or largely unevolved from ancient times, the best examples being sharks which are vastly unaltered from their prehistoric ancestors, or crocodiles which, like sharks, have only reduced in size through history, an excellent case of nature getting it right first time.
These are easy examples to accept because they bear not the slightest resemblance to man himself , but an animal that is well adapted to its environment and therefore not in need of any major evolutionary changes could quite easily be man-like, as we consider ourselves to be at the top of the evolutionary chain as well as the food chain.
So therefore no, it is not too far fetched to suppose that Bigfoot, the Alma or the Yeti could exist, and probably it would be more surprising if such a creature did not exist.”
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