The myth of the Yeti has been revived by the recent discovery of humanoid-like footprints found in the Himalayas by US TV presenter Josh Gates…News article from BBC World:
A US TV presenter says he and his team have found a series of footprints in the Everest region of Nepal resembling descriptions of the mysterious Yeti.
The presenter and his colleagues say they are "very excited", although they are not saying they definitely believe it is the mark of the Yeti. Josh Gates and his crew work on a series called Destination Truth, which follows reports of fantastic creatures.
The footprints found on Wednesday have renewed Yeti excitement in Nepal.
Mr Gates said they had been searching by torchlight at night-time because, he said, alleged sightings of the yeti had usually taken place at night. They did not see the so-called abominable snowman himself.
Three prints
But a Nepalese member of the team spotted three footprints and alerted Mr Gates, who told the BBC the first print was a "pristine" right paw mark, 33 cm (13 inches) long, with five toes in a wide spread of 25 cm. There was also a heel print and another fainter one.
An excited Mr Gates described the main footprint as anthropomorphic, meaning it had human characteristics. He said he did not believe the prints were man-made or that they came from a known animal such as a bear. But he also said he was not sure he believed in the Yeti, and did not know what to make of it. The team took castings of the three prints which will be examined by scientists in the US.
Scalp claim
Asked why there were only three prints, Mr Gates said the terrain, in a side valley about 2,800 metres (9,000 feet), was mainly rocky.
Reports of the mythical Yeti go back hundreds of years, and the creature is sometimes attributed with dangerous powers, sometimes protective ones.
One Buddhist monastery near Everest houses what some say is a Yeti skull or scalp; scientists who examined it declared that it was made from antelope skin, but other experts disagreed.
In the 1950s the British explorer Eric Shipton took photos of prints in the snow that some are convinced belong to the Yeti.
Article from msnbc.com:
Everest footprints stir up Yeti legend
KATMANDU, Nepal - Members of a TV production team investigating the existence of the legendary Yeti in Nepal said Friday that they have found footprints intriguing enough to merit further investigation.The team of nine producers from "Destination Truth," armed with infrared cameras, spent a week in the icy Khumbu region where Mount Everest is located and found the footprints on the bank of the Manju River at an elevation of 9,350 feet (2,850 meters).
One of the three footprints found on Wednesday is about 1 foot (30 centimeters) long, with an appearance similar to those shown in sketches of the purported apelike creature, the team said.TV host Josh Gates displays a sample showing what appears to be a footprint found in Nepal's Khumbu region, where Mount Everest is located. The tracks will be analyzed as part of an investigation into tales about the legendary mountain Yeti, Gates told reporters in Katmandu on Friday.
"It is very, very similar," Josh Gates, an archaeologist who serves as the host of the weekly travel adventure series, told Reuters in Katmandu after returning from the mountain. "I don't believe it to be a bear. It is something of a mystery for us."
"Destination Truth" appears on the Sci Fi Channel in the United States. (The network is owned by NBC Universal, which is a partner with Microsoft in the msnbc.com joint venture.)
Tales by sherpa porters and guides about the wild and hairy creatures lurking in the Himalayas have seized the imagination of mountain climbers going to Mount Everest since the 1920s. Several teams have searched for it and some have even claimed to have discovered footprints. But no reputable investigator has actually seen the creature, nor has it been scientifically established that the Yeti exists.
Gates said the footprints on lumps of sandy soil, which would be sent to experts in the United States for analysis, were "relatively fresh, left some 24 hours before we found them."
"This print is so pristine, so good, that I am very intrigued by this," said Gates, flanked by his team members.
Even if the traces are found to be authentic footprints, it's not yet clear how they could be attributed to a Yeti rather than, say, a less exotic mountain creature. Nevertheless, the evidence may be enough to fuel a TV show. "Destination Truth" chronicles some of the world's notorious purported cryptozoological creatures and unexplained phenomena.
Some local sherpas believe that the Himalayas are abodes of strange creatures and consider the Yeti (also popularly known as the "abominable snowman") as a protector. Others say it is a destroyer. "There is a kind of mysterious creature that lives in the Himalayas," said Ang Tshering Sherpa, chief of Nepal Mountaineering Association in Katmandu, who hails from the Khumbhu region.
This report was supplemented by msnbc.com.
The Age (Australia) article:
Fresh evidence of mythical Yeti
A GROUP of explorers say they have found fresh evidence of the mythical Yeti in the Nepalese Himalayas, stirring fresh excitement among those who believe the reputed snowman creature really exists.
The explorers, belonging to travel adventure series Destination Truth, said today that they had found footprints of Yeti while on a search for the elusive creature for their television documentary.
"We were doing night investigation near a riverbed about three nights ago when one of our guides first saw the prints and alerted us," Josh Gates, host of the television
show, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Kathmandu. "We cast the footprints, and we all feel a little bit unable to explain what we really saw," Gates said showing off his Yeti footprint cast.
One of the casts Gates showed consisted of a whole foot nearly two times as large as that of humans. The creature could have been up to 2.4 metres tall, the explorers said. Gates said the footprints were discovered in a remote area where with no human settlements, a three day trek from Lukla, about 250 km northwest of Nepal's
capital, Kathmandu.
"We are preparing to bring the footprints back to the US to have them further analysed," Gates said.
Many people in the Nepalese Himalayas and Tibet believe that the creature exists, though undisputed proof has been elusive.
Purported evidence such as skull and bone fragments that were said to belong to the creature have been dismissed by experts as coming from other animals.
Gates himself says he remains cautious about the discovery but is open to the beliefs of others. "There are lot of people living in the Himalayas who are having a genuine experience, and I don't know how we can readily explain all eyewitness accounts" Gates said. "Certainly, there is more work to be done to explain this."
For Gates and his television team, the find was unexpected after travelling through a dozen countries in search of similar of the world's most notorious crypto-zoological creatures.
"To talk to the locals about their sighting and find a piece of evidence, even if it is not a conclusive piece of visible evidence, is exciting," Gates said.
The team will make an effort to return to Nepal to carry out more investigations if justified by laboratory results.
For now, the team is headed to Africa and then to Brazil to investigate other creatures of legend.
& here are the photos of the most famous & most credible yeti prints to date:
From anomalyinfo.com:
In 1951, British explorer Eric Shipton took a picture of "yeti" tracks in the Gauri Sankar range in the Himilayas. The prints were 13 inches long and 8 inches wide. Shipton said that the prints were too large to be a bear's and too fresh to have been enlarged or distorted by melting.
Shipton was quoted as saying: "What really made my flesh creep... was that where we had to jump crevasses you could see clearly where the creature had dug its toes in."
In Their Own Words
From August to October 1951, Eric Shipton made his fifth visit to Mount Everest; and it was on this trip that he took his famous photograph. The expedition party consisted of leader Eric Shipton, Mike Ward, Bill Murray, Tom Bourdillon, Ed Hillary, Earle Riddiford, Angtharkay, Pasang Bhotia, Nima, Sen Tensing and six other Sherpas (Ed Hillary was later to be knighted Sir Edmund in 1953 after reaching the top of Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay, a native guide). Towards the end of the expedition the climbers were making an exploratory travel in the Gauri Sankar groups to the south-west of Everest, when they discovered the prints. I now quote Eric Shipton's account of the matter, from The Six Mountains-Travel Books [Pg. 621]:
"It was on one of the glaciers of the Menlung basin, at a height of about 19,000 feet, that, late one afternoon, we came across those curious footprints in the snow, the report of which has caused a certain amount of public interest in Britain. We did not follow them further than was convenient, a mile or so, for we were carrying heavy loads at the time, and besides we had reached a particularly interesting stage in the exploration of the basin. I have in the past found many sets of these curious footprints and have tried to follow them, but have always lost them on the moraine or rocks at the side of thc glacier. These particular ones seemed to be very fresh, probably not more than 24 hours old. When Murray and Bourdillon followed us a few days later the tracks had been almost obliterated by melting. Sen Tensing, who had no doubt whatever that the creatures (for there had been at least two) that had made the tracks were "Yetis" or wild men, told me that two years before, he and a number of other Sherpas had seen one of them at a distance of about 25 yards at Thyangboche. He described it as half man and half beast, standing about five feet six inches, with a tall pointed head, its body covered with reddish brown hair, but with a hairless face. When we reached Katmandu at the end of November, I had him cross-examined in Nepali (I conversed with him in Hindustani). He left no doubt as to his sincerity. Whatever it was that he had seen, he was convinced that it was neither a bear nor a monkey, with both of which animals he was, of course, very familiar."
Where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire…
The footprints do not exactly resemble that of Eric Shipton’s, but there’s no doubt that it’s definitely not of any known animal that lives in the Himalayas - the footprints were found at altitudes too high for bears to reach & the creature in question was definitely biped.
Although there have been sightings of an “ape-like very tall & hairy creature” all over the world (Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yowie, etc.) it’s only the Yeti aka the Abominable Snowman that has most fascinated everyone - maybe because of the numerous sightings, evidences & it’s existence since ages in the Tibetan folklore.
Most cryptozoologists believe that the Yeti may be a distant cousin of the Giant Ape (Gigantopithecus) or else an evolution of the long-extinct Neanderthals. Early estimates of Josh Gate’s footprint suggest that the creature may have a height of around 2.14 m…
How can such a large being remain hidden for so many years? Or does it have near-human intelligence that allows it to hide from humans? There’s no strong evidence to suggest that the Yeti exists but we can’t prove the contrary either - can we show that Yeti doesn’t exist?
So… according to you… is the Yeti fact or fiction?
Want more?
http://unmuseum.mus.pa.us/yeti.htm
http://visitnepal.com/nepal_information/yeti.php
http://www.bigfootencounters.com/images/shipton.htm
http://www.occultopedia.com/y/yeti.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeti
& speaking of the Yeti, here is the most substantial proof of the fact that it does exist: