Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 25
This sounded to me like a very tall story indeed, reminiscent of the Edwards Airforce Base yarn. Why, I asked myself, hadn't one of the soldiers reached for his gun? After all, they are said to sleep with them by their side. But I didn't say anything. That was one of the delights of this project. My opinion of what I was told didn't matter a fig. I could be told the most outrageous nonsense and even smile while I listened, then just send the samples to the lab and wait for the truth to emerge.
The Archangel sample was unusual as it was the only one to have come from the Far North where almasty sightings are rare. These creatures are far more frequently encountered in the vast taiga forests of Siberia and here they are different from those found further west and in the Caucasus. Along the Ob River in western Siberia for example there are dozens of eyewitness reports, and according to Trachtengerts these Siberian almasty are dangerous. The woods are their domain and they don't like people encroaching on their territory. Michael told me that they want to eat people because they need meat. They can kill any creature quite easily. They are not afraid of dogs, but dogs are terrified of them. Even trained hunting dogs bred to be fearless and aggressive will run from an almasty. The aggressive tendencies of the Siberian almasty towards humans contrasts with the peaceful nature of the North American sasquatch, for example. But the fear they instil in dogs is something I heard many times in my travels in the United States.
A lot of almasty reports came from the Caucasus, an area which I became extremely interested in when I investigated the case of Zana, the wildwoman, as you will hear. These reports of sightings have been thoroughly documented by Russian scientists since the Snowman Commission was established. Boris Porchnev and his protégé Igor Burtsev had both worked there, but it was a remarkable woman Marie-Jeanne Koffman who spent the longest time researching the almastys of the Caucasus. Koffman was born in France and moved to Russia in 1935. She was a medical doctor and also became a celebrated climber and, most notably, commanded a battalion of Russian alpine troops in the Second World War, for which she received several Soviet military decorations.
I asked Trachtengerts what he knew about the Caucasus region and its almasty inhabitants. Which turned out to be rather a lot.
‘In the Caucasus there are some huge creatures. For instance, we have a story about when a big man, more than six foot tall, met such a creature in the mist, which was twice as tall as he was. These are very hairy creatures and their colour can vary from nearly white to almost black. The hair is about four inches long except on the head where it is longer, like a woman's. They are fond of water and like to bathe. And they use tools too. They try to steal combs. In the villages, if you leave a comb somewhere outside your house, they will steal it and use it to comb their hair.
‘They eat mostly vegetables and also some meat, although it is not easy to find meat in Caucasus. But usually, they eat vegetables – and mice. In the Pamirs, across the Caspian Sea, the almastys are white, but in the Caucasus, under their hair, the skin is black. Some people say they have African features.’
Both Dr Koffman, and Dr Porchnev thought these almastys might be some form of surviving Neanderthal.
When I asked about the current state of affairs in Russian hominology research, Trachtengerts' normally beaming smile left him for a moment. He felt, in common with many of the other enthusiasts I encountered, that scientists didn't take proper notice of what they did. They did not want to investigate these creatures. These days he felt reluctant to speak about these creatures for fear of ridicule or isolation. Nevertheless, the Darwin Institute, a well-respected academic institution, still hosts their monthly meetings, so the trio of scholars have not been entirely excommunicated. This link to a functioning institute, however tenuous it may be, is invaluable, and is the only one of its kind in the world. I did make a weak defence of scientists' lack of interest in the trio's research. There seems somehow to be an expectation that scientists ought to be interested enough to work on these creatures. Speaking as a professional scientist myself, I am quite sure that there would be no shortage of offers, but only once there is some hard evidence to go on. Stories of gigantic creatures sharing a room with a unit of soldiers is nowhere near enough to convince any mainstream scientist to invest the time and effort to make a committed research project. I came away from my conversation with Michael Trachtengerts reflecting with some sadness that forty years of research with little to show but travellers' tales and a few hair samples had reduced the hominolgy seminars to nothing more than a monthly social event. If any professional scientist had spent even three years, let alone forty, with such a meagre output, then he or she would have been strongly encouraged to move on to something else, or risk being fired. But as you will see, I was too hasty in dismissing their apparent lack of progress.
Igor Burtsev, the leader of the Russian scholarly trio, is a few years over seventy. He is a tall, slim man, with a fine, angular face. While Michael Trachtengerts was always smiling, Burtsev wore a much more serious expression. He has been involved with the almasty in Russia for forty-eight years, since 1965, and is well known internationally, particularly in North America, where he has been on many visits to study Bigfoot. I came across several references and photographs of a young Igor, often in the company of his mentor Boris Porchnev, when I was reading through the Heuvelmans archive in Lausanne. Burtsev told me that he became hooked on the almasty in 1965, when a friend suggested that he should go to the Caucasus one summer to look for ‘snowmen’. That year Igor and his wife Alexandra spent their holidays in the Caucasus, where they met up with the expedition led by Marie-Jeanne Koffman, who by then was more or less permanently based there. That is when Igor ‘caught the bug’.
‘We were helping Jeanne Koffman to repair her car and the house she rented for the expedition when a neighbour came round and said, “Oh, there is a woman in the next village who met an almasty. After that she became ill and is now in her house. If you are interested you can speak to her.” So we went along in the car we had just repaired and sat down in the woman's house and heard her story. I had no doubt that the story was real, that she really had met an almasty in the forest. After that I spent all my spare time looking for the almasty. One month every year until I retired, and now even more often.
‘Five years after I started I became ill and could not go on expeditions for a while, so I began to help Dr Porchnev with his researches. He was also very interested in the Caucasus and did a lot of work with Dr Koffman. But it was only in my leisure time. I was not paid for these activities. I am a doctor of history, but in another field, not in snowmen. In the last ten years, since I retired, the almasty is the main occupation of my life. The main purpose of my life.’
I had to go further so I asked Burtsev more about the creatures he has spent so long studying. I was surprised that, almost at once, he began to stress their paranormal abilities.
‘Years ago we thought this was just an animal, like an ape or maybe a Neanderthal. We started to make something to tranquilise them, but it never worked. We came to understand that we were dealing with a very, very intelligent creature and that it had paranormal abilities. They can use telepathy. If they don't like you to come too close, they will just stop you. You cannot overcome this obstacle. You just cannot move. You are walking down a path in the woods, and you just stop in your tracks. Typically a man is going through the forest and begins to feel some discomfort, something that is bothering him. He does not understand what it is. He feels badly and he does not know the reason. He starts to look around and, “Oh behind that tree is a big hairy creature standing there,” and after that he understands what was bothering him mentally.’
I asked Igor if this had ever happened to him. ‘Many times,’ he replied, but like Trachtengerts, he has never actually seen one of these creatures himself. Nonetheless Igor has documented hundreds of eyewitness accounts from people more fortunate than himself.
‘A military doctor was one of the first eyewitnesses I interviewed. He found this creature in the Caucasus during the war, World War Two, in 1941. A local detachment of soldiers had captured such a creature, a hairy giant. Maybe it was ill, I don't know. The soldiers brought him into a barn and kept him there in the winter time. They called the military doctor to determine what sort of creature it was. Maybe it is a deserter from the army or maybe it is a spy? The military doctor asked, “Why you keep him in the barn? This is winter. It is cold. He is without clothes, just naked.” They replied, “We brought him into the warm but he start to smell badly. He was sweating and that is why we brought him into the barn.” The doctor started to examine the creature and saw lice on him that were much bigger than humans normally have. On the brow and on the side of the face, he saw so many lice.
‘He didn't know what sort of creature this was. It wasn't a deserter or a spy and they didn't know what to do with him. They asked for orders. Should they kill him or let him go? In the end that is what they did. They let him go.’
I had to ask why nobody had taken a photograph. Igor could only say, rather feebly I thought, that they did not think of it or that they didn't have a camera. But what about during the hundreds or thousands of other encounters in those days? And now that almost everybody has a mobile phone, surely there should be lots of photographs?
‘We must bear in mind the resistance of the creatures themselves. They don't want to be photographed, they don't want to be registered.’
This was getting silly. All it would take to convince the world that these creatures exist is some really good unadulterated photographs. How can the creature possibly know it is going to be photographed? And if almasty and Bigfoot somehow use their telepathic powers to avoid being photographed, how can you believe, as you have said you do, the Patterson-Gimlin film or, even more recently, the mobile phone pictures from Siberia? I was referring to the widely reported video of a yeti taken by 12-year-old Yevgeny Anisimov in Kemerovo, Siberia. Igor Burtsev is quoted as saying says he believes the footage is genuine.1
Igor evaded these questions altogether, preferring instead to launch into the familiar diatribe about how the Patterson-Gimlin film was labelled a fake without the benefit of the serious study he has given it. Could there have been a force field around Bluff Creek, where the film was shot, that neutralised the Bigfoot's telepathic powers? However, I didn't bring that up, even though I felt sure that Igor would have come up with an answer.
We got on to talking about hair samples and I got the usual stuff about how hairs that Igor had given to specialists had often been reported as unidentified. As we have touched on before, this more often than not means unidentifiable, not unidentified. Then we got on to DNA and Igor told me that he had sent some samples to an American lab, but they could only sequence mitochondrial DNA, which Igor thought was not enough for an identification. But, as I hope you will realise by now, mitochondrial DNA is in fact the very best way of identifying the species origin of a hair sample. To support his view that mainstream science journals consistently refuse to publish the results of DNA studies, he cited Dr Melba Ketchum's work in which she studied over one hundred Bigfoot samples from the US and Canada and concluded that the sasquatch were hybrids between humans and some other creatures. I have dealt with this study elsewhere but one of the tragedies of the Sasquatch Genome Project is that even well-informed cryptozoologists like Igor Burtsev cannot see how very flawed the work is. He puts its general rejection down to the prejudices of mainstream scientific journals rather than to its poor quality and unsupported conclusions.
I had to stop at that point in our discussion as I was required to go to another appointment on the other side of Moscow. Fortunately, Marcus Morris was with me and able to take up where I had left off. He had been listening to Igor's ducking and weaving and straightaway challenged him on the possible outcomes of my DNA project. Marcus began by stressing the important ability we had developed to remove all human contamination from the surface of a hair sample.
‘The important thing about Bryan's work is that it puts an end to all the debate about human contamination. The best thing about his technique is that it completely removes contamination. But what do you hope for from the results?’
‘I would be happy if he said this was a positive result,’ Igor replied. ‘If he proved that this creature is different from human species, maybe like a Neanderthal, or a different kind of hominid. That is what I believe the creature is.’
Marcus then pressed Igor on whether he would believe the results of the DNA tests on the hair samples, whatever they turned out to be.
‘I do not know, I'm not a geneticist. I am not aware of Bryan's capabilities. I am not a geneticist, and I am not a specialist in this field. I can only say that if he said “It is human . . .” But that might mean he could not find the difference, which is less than one per cent, between DNA of Homo sapiens and this creature.’ (You will by now realise, I hope, that Igor is mistaken on this point.)
Marcus continued: ‘But that is what Bryan and I worry about. If he gives you a result that isn't the result that you would like to hear, you will say, “The test is not good enough, do a better test,” because you passionately want to believe the almasty exist. So much so that if Bryan says, “I'm sorry, but the samples you have given me that you believe are from the creature are actually from a bear or a goat,” you will not accept it, and you will be so disappointed that you will find ways of saying, “I don't believe in science.”’
‘Science cannot distinguish the difference between this species and Homo sapiens,’ Igor again insisted.
‘But it can, that's the point. How can you say that, though, if you admit you are not a geneticist? Bryan is a geneticist and he says he can,’ Marcus replied robustly. ‘There comes a point where you have to believe the scientists even if the news is bad. The news may be good, who knows. But if it is bad you still need to believe it. And if the results says this is goat or bear, or something else it does not mean that almastys do not exist, just that that particular sample was not from a primate.’
After my conversation with Igor, and when I heard what he had said to Marcus, I was beginning to think we were both wasting our time. It looked very much as though Igor would believe the DNA results from the hairs that Michael Trachtengerts had donated to the project only if they showed the result he wanted, but not if they didn't. Actually that is a situation I have faced many times as a geneticist, and it has not always made me popular. But if all DNA did was to give the result you wanted, why bother doing any tests at all? The power of genetics is precisely that it doesn't care what you think. However much you want to get a particular answer, the DNA isn't going to listen. So when it does come up with a result that you were hoping for, you can believe it. Surely even Igor could not believe that the almasty's telepathic mastery would stretch to being able to change the DNA sequence of one of its hairs from Neanderthal to goat? But you never know with a true believer. Hume, I'm sure, had to put up with much worse.
The appointment that took me away from my conversation with Igor Burtsev was with the third member of the Moscow trio, Dmitri Bayanov. Like Trachtengerts and Burtsev, Bayanov has written books on the subject of ‘hairy hominids’ in Russian, but also in English, without the need for a translator. In many ways he is the most intellectual of the Moscow scholars. Like the others, he has been in it from the beginning, but his motivation to get involved with hominology was one I had not come across before. Whereas many people who I met or read about had their interest triggered by a direct experience, either seeing one of these creatures or coming across footprints while trekking through the wilderness, Dmitri Bayanov had more of a sociological viewpoint. He was born in 1932 and his family moved from Moscow to the relative safety of Tajikistan in the early 1940s as the German army advanced. They nearly starved. While in Tajikistan he heard the common rumours of strange ‘wildmen’ that were said to inhabit the forests and the mountains. Returning with his family to Moscow after the war, Bayanov eventually went to college to study anthropology, specialising in folklore and mythology. The privations, however, continued. At one stage he was reduced to collecting empty beer bottles from the streets to make ends meet. His main reason for becoming intrigued by the almasty and related creatures was more philosophical than biological. He considered that studying these creatures, if they were in some way related to ourselves, might explain the root cause of all the troubles of Russia and the Soviet Union that were all too clear to him. Quite how this would help he did not elaborate.
Bayanov met Boris Porchnev in 1964, read his book and from then on became fascinated by the prospect that, as Porchnev advocated, the almasty might be a surviving form of Neanderthal. He joined the almasty expeditions to the Caucasus led by Marie-Jeanne Koffman and interviewed dozens of eyewitnesses, whom on the whole he believed were telling the truth. He told me about the long history of ‘wildmen’ in European and Russian folklore, and that the founder of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, in his magnum opus Systemae Naturae (1758) included a special classification for them. While modern man was dubbed Homo sapiens by Linnaeus, literally ‘wise man’, he coined the term Homo troglodytes meaning ‘cave man’ for the wildman. Like his two colleagues, Bayanov has seen footprints but not the almasty itself, though over the years he has interviewed plenty of people who have. Like many of his witnesses he believes the almastys are very aware of human presence and keep themselves hidden.
