Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 18
When I heard this I was reminded of a conversation I had with Rhett Mullis, my guide and companion in the Pacific Northwest. Rhett's organisation, Bigfootology, collates reports of Bigfoot sightings and interviews the witnesses. On one occasion, a lady reported seeing an old Bigfoot walk right into the ocean on the coast of Oregon. She described at length how she and the Bigfoot walked slowly across the sandy beach and into the water. She stayed on the beach but the creature waded further and further out until it disappeared beneath the waves, clearly intent on ending its own life. Rhett's witness took at least forty minutes on the phone describing this moving scene in great detail.
Understandably, Rhett was very excited by the prospect of finding, at the very least, some fresh footprints in the sand above the tide-line and maybe some strands of hair snagged on a bush where the Bigfoot had broken cover. So he asked his witness where exactly this beach was and if she could take him there. ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘I didn't actually see it in the technical sense. I was there all right, with the Bigfoot, but it was more of a kinda mind-melding experience, you know.’
Rhett politely ended the conversation, put the phone down and let out an enormous groan.
On my travels meeting Bigfoot enthusiasts I have come across my fair share of what Coleman would call ‘contactees’ who have turned evasion and circularity into a fine art. Often this shows in answer to a direct question like:
‘Why do you think no one had ever found a body?’
‘Well they bury their dead underground, don't they?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because you never find a body.’
The same line of logic surfaces when the topic turns to the widespread failure of infrared-activated trail-cams to capture an image.
‘They are very intelligent. They can detect infrared and learn to avoid it. They can also sense human intent, you know.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because you never get an image on a trail-cam.’
I had a very similar experience to Rhett when a charming couple came to see me in Oxford. The husband was a former nuclear security guard in the US Air Force and a lifelong Bigfoot enthusiast. His wife, in common with most ‘Bigfoot widows’, was tolerant at best. I was particularly keen to talk to this gentleman who, as a boy in 1968, had seen the Minnesota Iceman in Frank Hansen's travelling show in the Midwest.
I listened intently as he described seeing the Iceman frozen in a block of ice. He certainly thought it was genuine and very scary, and it was this experience that had triggered the fascination with Bigfoot which had never left him. As our conversation was drawing to a close he suddenly started to tell me about the Bigfoot that used to visit Edwards Air Force base in California when he was still working in nuclear security. ‘That sounds odd,’ I thought to myself. Even I had heard of this base and its fearsome array of military aircraft ready to fly around the world at a moment's notice and unleash a nuclear holocaust. How come the Bigfoot were able to penetrate what was presumably one of the most secure places on the planet?
‘They live in the tunnels under the base,’ was the reply when I put this puzzle to my guest.
‘Don't they get caught on security cameras?’ I asked.
‘No, they can sense the cameras and flip into another universe. They have a shape-shifting capability,’ he replied.
I refrained from asking how he knew they were able to do this. I was certain to get the reply that it was because they were never seen on the cameras.
Back to Loren Coleman. I wanted to know about the human cost of being a Bigfoot enthusiast, especially if your partner is not.
‘Definitely people have lost their wives, lost their jobs, lost their husbands. Some people are fired, they get very upset, and yet they want to hang in there. They have to have big egos. So there's a whole list of things that really calls for an individual to have a thick skin. To survive in this field it takes an individual that's very strong-willed and clear on what they want to be doing in it. So there is definitely a dark side to Bigfootology.
‘There's also people in this who seem to be hoaxers and money grabbers and drifters and all kinds of people. The media love this, of course. Their approach is that all of the Bigfoot field is full of hoaxers. But that's really wrong. Research, field studies are really not that dominated by hoaxers. It's only one percent, but that one percent gets all the publicity and really ruins it for the rest of us. It's the hoaxes that get all of the attention. It makes for great television.’
Avidum genus auricularum.
17
The Mountaineer
I only ever got one prize at school. It was for chemistry in the Lower Sixth form. We could choose a book and, after a lot of searching, I asked for The Encyclopaedia of Mountains. It is still here on my bookshelf and every so often I take it down and read a section on some far-off peak. Of course, it is very out-of-date now and the photographs are poor by modern standards. But it still brings back the thrill I felt at reading the stories of great adventures. Like the three escaped Italian prisoners of war who, in 1943, made it to within 500 feet of the summit of Mount Kenya using only the picture from a tin of Oxo as their guide. Or the heroic first ascent of the notoriously difficult Nanga Parbat in the eastern Himalayas by the Austrian Hermann Buhl climbing alone and without oxygen in 1953. This was all schoolboy fantasy, and my own climbing career never exceeded Monte Rosa in the Swiss Alps. I considered attempting the nearby Matterhorn, but all I saw was death. So you can understand my excitement when I was on the way to meet Reinhold Messner, without doubt the greatest living climber – some say, the greatest climber in history.
Messner, as many of you will know, was the first person to climb Everest solo and without oxygen, but that is only the most celebrated of his mountaineering achievements. He was, for example, the first to climb all fourteen 8,000 metre summits and followed Hermann Buhl's alpine style of small climbing parties, even in the Himalayas, rather than joining large-scale expeditions that ‘laid siege’ to a mountain until it submitted. Sadly, he lost his younger brother Gunther on the descent from Nanga Parbat in 1970. He also lost seven toes to frostbite, but that did not stop him climbing. His numerous achievements since are the stuff of legend, but they are not what brought the two of us together.
Among the many books Messner has written about his adventures is one entitled My Quest for the Yeti. In it he describes an experience in the summer of 1986 while trekking through eastern Tibet. At the start of the book he mentions that he has a pelt and a head from a yeti, and that he was making these available to scientists to study. I decided to see if he would let me test some of this material.
It is no easy matter getting an appointment with Reinhold Messner. I emailed his admirably protective secretary in the southern Tyrol near Bolzano where he lives, asking for a meeting. I mentioned that I was the scientist who first recovered DNA from Oetzi, the 5,000 year-old Iceman found in a glacier at the head of the Oetzal Valley near Messner's home. I knew that Messner was among the first on the scene and had, in fact, been the one to realise its great antiquity. Before his intervention, the body was believed to be that of an Italian music teacher who had got lost in the region in the 1930s. So there was at least a nominal connection between us. That didn't immediately open any doors and I eventually decided that the only way I was going to get to see Messner was to turn up on his doorstep.
Though he still climbs, Messner has been hard at work developing five museums in South Tyrol, each devoted to different aspects of the mountains and the people who live among them. The principal museum, and Messner's HQ, is in Sigmundskron Castle perched high up on a rocky promontory above Bolzano. As soon as Ulla and I arrived at Bolzano one hot August day I rang Ruth, his secretary. Yes, Messner was there, but may not have time to see me. When we arrived at the castle gates we were told to wait in the open-air café in the grounds and Messner might be able to spare five minutes. I knew Messner had a reputation for irascibility; sure enough, when he rounded the castle wall and came into view he looked like thunder. His abundant hair framed a craggy face familiar from old photographs. The expression was far from friendly.
I began to explain why I was there and how I wanted to run DNA tests on his yeti samples. All the time I was talking, I was trying to concentrate on the man sitting opposite. Here I was with the greatest mountaineer in the world, the man who had climbed Everest on his own. It was hard to take it all in. I began by saying that I had read his book and that I had developed a new way of analysing hair that might identify the yeti specimens he had in his collection.
‘It's a bear,’ was his only reply. I could see he was completely sick of talking about yetis; in fact, I imagined he might have regretted having written a book about them at all. Nonetheless, I carried on with my explanation.
‘It's a bear,’ was once again his only response, in his strong German accent. Tyrol might technically be part of Italy these days, but its language, history and customs are much closer to Germany and Austria.
‘Yes, probably, but what sort of bear is it?’
His impassive grey eyes flickered momentarily with what looked as though it may have been interest. I pressed on and began to get more assertive. He might be the world's greatest climber, but I was also high up in my own field and I had come a long way to see him. Looking back, I was rather glad he was so grumpy. It served to banish my nerves far more effectively than any politely condescending smile would have done. Eventually I asked Messner if I could take a sample from the yeti. If I left without one it would have been an experience, but I would have felt forever frustrated that I had failed.
He looked at me again. The cumulonimbus had cleared ever so slightly from his expression.
‘Meet me at Juval at three o'clock.’ Then he got up and walked back around the castle wall and out of sight.
So at three o'clock Ulla and I found ourselves being driven by taxi up an even steeper hill to an even rockier crag, on top of which was an even more precariously perched castle, Juval. This is Messner's family home during the summer months. He led us up the steep incline to the gates and I tried my best not to appear out of breath. He took us through the gates and into a room leading off from the courtyard. There on the wall, in the half-light, was the mounted head of a yeti.
I already knew its history. This was one of two yetis in Messner's collection that were brought back by the Nazi-inspired expedition to Tibet led by SS officer Ernst Schafer in 1938 and sponsored by none other than Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. Himmler had many strange ideas, one of which being that the Aryan race was forged by a combination of ice and fire in Shambhala, a lost kingdom in the mountains of Tibet. The yeti, Himmler imagined, might be an ancient product of this fusion and so he sent Schafer off to find one. Schafer thought it was a pretty crazy idea, but he was a zoologist and, as today, any source of research funding is welcome. The expedition carried out a lot of what is now outdated anthropological work, including measuring the skull shapes and sizes of the local people. Schafer also shot a lot of yetis and mocked the Tibetans for being afraid of what he could clearly see were bears. When Schafer died in 1992, his widow, keen to get the mounted yeti head and other grizzly relics out of the house, offered them to Messner. Even though they were by now over seventy years old, I thought there was still a good chance of being able to recover some DNA from a hair sample. With Messner holding the evidence bag, I reached up and snipped a few hairs from the neck of the stuffed yeti head.
Messner's second yeti was at yet another museum, at Sulden, an hour further up the valley, and it was closed at the time. But now we had got to know each other a little, arranging a return visit to take a sample from the second yeti was far more straightforward. When I returned the following summer there was also more time to talk to Messner about the encounter that he himself had with a yeti back in 1986. First, I asked him to tell me more about what he was doing in Tibet.
‘I was crossing Tibet from the east to Lhasa and then going further on to Nepal, following the trail of the Sherpas. The Sherpas left eastern Tibet 450 years ago and travelled for over seventy years before they settled in Solokhumbu in Nepal. We still don't know why they did it. A German archaeologist was following this Sherpa migration in his studies and I read about it and was interested. Also I had never been to the eastern part of Tibet. It was also closed to foreigners and I was not allowed to go there. But I sneaked in. I hid in a monastery and from there I started going west, going up and down in yak caravans, but also sometimes with cars if it was possible.
‘And once, late in the evening I was hoping to find a small village to have a night with the local people, also hoping to get some food. Then I could see a strange figure in the woods. It was beginning to be dark and I was hoping maybe in ten minutes I will find a place, but there was no place. This strange figure went away, not running away. It was in the last light of the day so I could not see immediately what it was. It was too quick. I could see it and then it was gone. I was remembering a shadow in my eyes and I asked myself have you really seen something or was it only imagination? And when I went to where the figure was standing I found the footprints. I knew there was something real, it was not only an imagination. They were exactly like the footprints in Shipton's photograph. And it was the first moment I was thinking this is very strange. It looks like the footprints of a yeti.
‘But I was not yet thinking about a yeti seriously. I was afraid because it was a huge being, I couldn't even say it was an animal, human being or something else. And I became afraid and I went and didn't find any villages and I went about the woods, I was up maybe 4,500m, no village and I was so tired that I tried to give up and in this moment again in the moonlight I could see a similar figure on two legs, going away. Not attacking me.
‘I was very frightened, and I became more and more frightened when I was trying to find a place to sleep, but I made a bivouac, staying outside. There was one river behind me so I could not go back, and one river in front of me that I had to cross to get to the next village. And this river was very wide coming from maybe some glacier mountains and there was no bridge. I couldn't cross it. For me crossing a river is not so easy because I lost part of my toes, so being barefoot in a river is difficult. It was too dangerous in the night and I went back and I tried to find shelter and sleep, a few rocks. And I could not sleep because otherwise this creature is coming and killing me or eating me, whatever, I didn't know what it was.
‘Very early in the next morning and I crossed the river and found a village and it was empty. No people around, only a few dogs. And I went in the end to a house and went to the upper part and tried to sleep. But local people came with fires, and they told me to come down. They took everything I had away. I was really afraid that something might happen or they might kill me. I began to defend myself by saying that I was running away from a huge being. And then I heard the first time the name chemo (Messner pronounces it as ‘chay-mo’) and they taught me, they understood my eyes looking there and movements that I was in touch with the chemo but I didn't know what is the chemo. And after this I was beginning to try to understand my possibilities, very poor possibilities to communicate from the local people what is this chemo, and I had a feeling maybe it's something like we call the yeti. Only afterwards I was speaking with the local people. I understand they have a great respect for this creature. They spoke with fear about it and also had some compassion with me because I was able to run away from this creature. So with this I made friends with them, otherwise maybe they would kill me because I came in the night in their villages without even asking them if I could sleep there. They pulled me in the houses and gave me food and asked me about the chemo I had seen and how big and where it was.
‘They said they are very, very dangerous but normally hiding so you cannot see them. They appear and then disappear again. For me there is no doubt that the yeti legend is based on this special bear. And the local people are speaking about a huge, huge being, bigger than a human being. They speak about a hairy figure, a stinky figure going on four legs, two legs, leaving footprints like human.’
Like other witnesses, this experience had a profound influence on Messner and over the next few years he went back again and again to the Himalayas. To climb of course, but also to find out more about the chemo.
‘I went back to Nepal one month later. I was very interested in knowing what happened in this sighting. I went to many, maybe a dozen local Tibetans who are now living in Kathmandu in Nepal. And I knew them and went in their houses and asked them all the same questions. How are you calling in your homeland, in eastern Tibet, what we call, and what the tourists are calling yeti, in Nepal? And they all answered immediately “chemo” and so I know I have seen the animal which is the basis of the yeti legend.’
We returned to the subject of the footprints that Messner saw shortly after his experience. His first thought was that they were very like the footprint in the Shipton-Ward photograph and definitely not made by a bear. Later on, as he went in search of the chemo, he began to form an idea that this animal actually was a bear, albeit a special kind of bear. He had taken a photograph of the print he found in the forest and compared it to the Shipton print.
‘With a lens it was possible also to see the nails of the fingers. I could see it was exactly like the Shipton footprint. The Shipton footprint is in the snow and the snow around the Shipton footprint is melted out badly by the sun so you don't see perfectly the fingers and nails of the bear. When I came home and I understood that the chemo is the yeti I could see this (the Shipton print) could perfectly be a footprint left by a chemo, by a bear.’
Messner was talking about a double print, where the hind foot is superimposed on the impression of the front. But, from his own experience, he came up with a very plausible explanation.
