Abominable Science
Page 13
According to Brian Regal, Slick made his first foray to find the Yeti in 1956. While in Central Asia, he met Irish explorer Peter Byrne, who became a critical player in both the Yeti and Bigfoot hunts.88 Coleman suggested that both Byrne and Slick were working for the CIA during their exploits in Central Asia,89 and, according to Regal, the connection between spying and hunting cryptids was a common pattern.90 For example, anthropologists Carleton Coon and George Agogino, both of whom were active in trying to determine if the Yeti was real, also had CIA connections. Ivan Sanderson worked for British intelligence during World War II, and several other prominent scientists (such as S. Dillon Ripley and George Gaylord Simpson) also worked in intelligence in the Allied armies during the war. In the postwar world, there were few Americans in Central Asia who could keep tabs on the Chinese struggles with Tibet or the Soviet interests in the region. Thus people like Slick (with his money and powerful friends and his contacts with Dulles) were valuable resources for the United States to monitor the southern regions of Communist China and Soviet Russia.
In 1957, Slick and Byrne (with the backing of Luce, who wanted the rights to the first photographs of the Yeti) spent a month in the region.91 Although they reported three sets of tracks that they attributed to the Yeti, little came of this trip.92 “Like all the various monster expeditions before and since,” wrote Regal, “the Slick project wandered around the region finding a few bits and pieces here and there: a few possible footprints, some hair samples, an apparent Yeti dung sample, lots of local stories, and not much else.”93
Slick’s sequel in 1958 was an altogether more Texas-size affair: bigger headlines, bigger budget, and bigger boasts. (Slick declared at the outset that the Yeti would be found by the end of the year.)94 Led this time by Gerald Russell (a veteran of the Daily Mail expedition of 1954), the expedition of almost 100 people brought innovations as well as money and manpower—some sillier than others.95 Their “pack of three Bluetick hounds” seemed like a good idea, as did their optimistic carting around of “two of a newly developed airgun which propels hypodermic cartridges containing a temporary paralyzing drug.”96 But it is hard to take entirely seriously Russell’s decision that “all the white hunters will be disguised as natives. We will wear rough woolen Sherpa vests, woolen hats, and felt Tibetan knee boots. Our faces will be stained brown.” Even Byrne described the disguise plan as “seemingly ridiculous,”97 which it may well have been in the light of the horde of folks stomping along in their party. They stayed in the field from February until June,98 during which time they heard about Yetis catching frogs,99 boasted of finding the cave of an Abominable Snowman,100 and visited the Pangboche temple where the Daily Mail expedition had sampled hairs from the “Yeti scalp”101 and tried to reanalyze the hairs or obtain the scalp. The temple also had a mummified hand that was claimed to belong to the Yeti. It was a sacred relic, so it was not supposed to be desecrated for scientific study.
Nonetheless, Slick’s people got another shot at the Yeti hand at Pangboche in 1959, during Slick’s last expedition (a much smaller affair, involving only Byrne and his brother).102 According to Regal, Byrne ingratiated himself with the monks—and then, when he got the chance, stealthily removed some finger bones from the hand, replaced them with human bones, and rewrapped the relic so the theft was undetected.103 In an interview with the BBC, Byrne confirmed that he had indeed swapped a human finger for a finger from the relic (though he said the substitution was done openly, in exchange for a donation to the temple).104 Another story claims that Slick had Byrne give the bones of the “Yeti hand” to the famous actor Jimmy Stewart, a silent backer of their project, who smuggled it home in his luggage.105 According to Byrne, the finger bones were actually smuggled in Gloria Stewart’s lingerie case, so customs officials were reluctant to search it.106 The bones were sent to anatomist, primatologist, and anthropologist William Charles Osman Hill, at the Zoological Society of London, who was puzzled by them and at first thought that they resembled Neanderthal finger bones; later studies by Carleton Coon showed that the finger bones were human.107 Recently rediscovered among the Osman Hill material in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, the finger bones have now been definitively identified as human using DNA analysis. Said genetic expert Rob Ogden, who conducted the tests, “It wasn’t too surprising but it was obviously slightly disappointing that you hadn’t discovered something brand new. Human was what we were expecting and human is what we got.”108 This was the final epilogue of a book that long since closed on failure. Despite the audacious hype (“Expedition a Success, Proves Yeti Exists” was the title of Slick’s summary for the 1958 expedition)109 and all the time and money spent (at least $100,000 and perhaps double that),110 the results of the Slick expeditions were ultimately dismal. Coon and the others who examined the hair and dung samples sent by Slick and Byrne concluded that there was no evidence of the Yeti in them and became disillusioned with the entire Yeti hunt, and a mummified “Yeti leg” tracked down during one of Slick’s expeditions turned out to be from a snow leopard.111 Looking over this body of evidence, Napier reflected that “the mummified paw of a snow leopard, a mummified human hand, and a footprint or two—add up to nothing at all. No single item contributed one jot or tittle of proof to the Himalayan Bigfoot legend.”112
Meanwhile, the Chinese began to crack down after the Tibetan uprising of 1959, which led the Dalai Lama to flee into exile in India. The Chinese viewed the Yeti hunts as espionage, so they closed the country’s borders and made it very hard for expeditions to travel beyond Nepal. One of the last to do so, in 1960/1961, was mounted by Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary and America’s favorite animal expert, Marlin Perkins. Perkins, a zoologist, was the director of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, in which role he had also hosted the hit animal program Zoo Parade.113 (Perkins would go on to host Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, another immensely popular television show about wild animals and nature.) Backed by World Book Encyclopedia, the huge expedition team included a number of scientists (and 150 porters).114 The Hillary–Perkins crew went straight to the Pangboche monastery, where they persuaded the monks to let them examine the “Yeti hand” (not knowing that Byrne had switched the relic’s finger bones with those of a human). They even successfully arranged to borrow the “Yeti scalp” from the Khumjung monastery, and brought it back with them for expert examination in London, Paris, and Chicago. As Hillary explained, the scientists who studied the scalp found that “although it was an interesting and probably ancient relic, it was really a fake—molded from the skin of a serow. It had certainly never held the cunning brain of the elusive Yeti.”115
These examinations confirmed what Hillary’s team had discovered in the field: when they acquired three hides from serows (mid-size wild animals that resemble goats or antelopes), they suspected immediately that the hides were a match to the skin used to manufacture the Pangboche “Yeti scalp” and a very similar relic at the monastery at Khumjung (a village 8 miles from Pangboche). As team member Desmond Doig excitedly noted in his journal that night, “Almost certainly the Khumjung and Pangboche scalps are twins, made on the same mold of serow’s hide. The shape, color, and essential dimensions are identical; two conical, balding caps of black-and-henna-colored bristles with distinct median crests and punctured with holes around their bases which look suspiciously like those made by nails used to hold the scalps onto their mold.” To test this impression, “we set about making two of our own, sacrificing one of the three serow hides we had acquired, and employing an unsuspecting lama to carve the molds directly from a freshly felled pine log…. After four days of experiment we possessed two distinctly anthropoid ‘scalps,’ unlike those in the Khumjung and Pangboche monasteries only in their newness and wealth of hair.” Finally, they sent hair samples from both of the allegedly authentic Yeti scalps and from both of the newly re-created fake scalps to Osman Hill for analysis, without telling him the origins of the samples. “If the two samples were declared iden
tical,” Doig reflected, “the scalps would be fakes and an important argument in favor of Yetis would have been defeated.”116 And that is exactly what happened. Hillary takes up the story: “Hill showed us microscopic sectional photographs he had taken of the bristles from the Khumjung and Pangboche scalps and from our own fakes, molded from serow. Until then he did not know which was which—we hadn’t told him the origin of the bristles when we sent them from Khumjung. Dr. Hill was confident that all the specimens belonged to the same genus of animal.”117 The other physical evidence that supposedly argued for the existence of the Yeti was similarly disappointing. The alleged Yeti hand from the Pangboche monastery proved to be “essentially a human hand, strung together with wire, with the possible inclusion of several animal bones” (presumably those switched by Byrne).118 The “Yeti skins” turned out to be the pelts of Himalayan brown bears, leaving Hillary’s expedition with the “very strong inference that this bear might well have been the source of much of the Yeti legend.” Looking over this evidence, and considering their failure to turn up “a single case of a lama who claimed personally to have seen a Yeti,” Hillary concluded:
There is no doubt that the Sherpas accept the fact that the Yeti really exists. But then they believe just as confidently that their gods live in comfort on the summit of Mount Everest. We found it quite impossible to divorce the Yeti from the supernatural. To a Sherpa the ability of a Yeti to make himself invisible at will is just as important a part of description as his probable shape and size. Part animal, part human, part demon—the Yeti is as calmly and uncritically accepted as we accept Father Christmas when we are children.
Pleasant though we felt it would be to believe in the existence of the Yeti, when faced with the universal collapse of the main evidence in support of this creature the members of my expedition—doctor, scientists, zoologists and mountaineers alike—could not in all conscience view it as more than a fascinating fairy tale, born of the rare and frightening view of strange animals, molded by superstition, and enthusiastically nurtured by Western expeditions.119
The Hillary–Perkins expedition not only investigated remains of the Yeti, but also did research on high-altitude medicine, so the absence of proof of the existence of the Yeti did not make the expedition a complete failure. More important, Hillary was sensitive to and concerned about the plight of the Nepalese and especially the Sherpas, who had helped him climb Mount Everest and become world famous. In exchange for the loan of the “Yeti scalp,” he and his expedition’s sponsors paid for a village elder to “accompany the Yeti scalp wherever it may be taken in America and Europe” and for urgent renovations at the monastery.120 Even more lasting were his efforts to raise funds for the construction of numerous schools and other public buildings in impoverished Nepalese villages.121
By this point, nearly all the Western Yeti hunters were thoroughly discouraged by the repeated failures of the successive expeditions. The more people looked for the Yeti and the more “evidence” they analyzed, the less likely the existence of the Yeti became. The shenanigans and CIA connections of the Slick–Byrne group not only had disillusioned many believers, but had alarmed the Chinese government. Because the Chinese viewed all the Yeti hunters as spies, they clamped down even further on them, even as they crushed Tibet, destroyed the Lamaist religion and political system, and drove the Dalai Lama into exile. After the Hillary–Perkins expedition, no effort was made to mount further trips into Tibet, since the Chinese were completely in control and did not allow foreigners into the country. The short golden age of Yeti hunting through the 1950s came to an end, and almost no one returned to the Himalayas for many years to find the Yeti. As John Napier put it, “The Hillary Expedition of 1960–61 had the effect of dampening the enthusiasm of all but the staunchest of Yeti supporters. Scientists smiled knowingly, mountaineers lost interest, and journalists found other fish to fry.”122
WHILLANS, WOOLDRIDGE, THE CHINESE, THE RUSSIANS—AND A HOAX
For almost a decade, the closure of Tibet by the Chinese made it difficult to travel to the country to find evidence of the Yeti. The various expeditions undertaken before 1960 had found nothing: all the “Yeti scalps” in Tibetan monasteries were serow pelts; “Yeti” hands were human hands; “Yeti” dung and hair came from known animals; and “Yeti” trackways were still not convincing. Although the local peoples continued to report seeing the Yeti, the only “sighting” of a supposed Yeti by a Westerner had been by the British-Greek explorer and photographer N. A. Tombazi in 1925; he later decided that the figure he had seen was a hermit, although John Napier showed that the prints Tombazi reported are better explained as those of a bear.123 But in the summer of 1970, the mountaineer Don Whillans, who was co-leading an expedition to climb Annapurna from the Nepalese side, reported footprints of Yeti-like appearance at 13,000 feet. However, his photograph shows a track-way that probably was made by a quadruped.124 The same night, Whillans saw what he considered to be an ape-like animal bounding along on all fours a long distance from his tent. “I saw some black blobs up the slope in the shadows, then I saw a blob that hadn’t been there a moment before,” he said. “It was something moving ’round…. Then it bounded out of the shadows and headed straight up the slope in the absolutely bright moonlight. It looked like an ape. I don’t think it was a bear.”125 He had been equally uncertain days earlier: “It could have been a bear but it looked much more like a monkey-type thing.”126 Whillans never saw the creature again, and it had been so far away from him (“about a quarter of a mile”) that he could provide few details about his distant sighting in the darkness—except that it was apparently running on four legs. This detail suggests that it was a Himalayan brown bear or another known quadruped, rather than a supposedly bipedal Yeti.
The continued closure of Tibet only increased the desire of Western mountaineers and cryptozoologists to visit the country. It focused attention on the area, suggesting that the Chinese had proof of the existence of the Yeti and were hiding it. Indeed, the Chinese themselves examined the legend, sending more than 100 investigators into the region in 1977 to exhaustively track down every lead and look in every possible place where the Yeti might lurk. They found absolutely nothing. Eventually, in 1988, the Chinese government allowed a Western expedition into Tibet, but it, too, found no evidence of the Yeti. Chinese scientists have themselves investigated the legends of the Yeti and other Wildmen that fall within their national borders. For example, according to anthropologist Zhou Guoxing,
A large-scale scientific investigation sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences was carried out in these areas [northwestern Hubei and southern Shanxi provinces] in 1977. More than 100 people participated in it for nearly a year…. Although the investigation was unusual in its scale, number of participants, and duration, no direct proof was found of the existence of the Wildman, and only footprints, pieces of head hair, and feces presumed to be those of Wildman were recovered.
Although Zhou believed that it can be inferred on the basis of indirect evidence that “these unknown animals are not mere creatures of fiction,” he conceded that the majority of Chinese scientists do not agree. Zhou also noted the long history of failed Chinese attempts to confirm the Wildman:
Since the end of the 1950’s, China has organized a series of on-the-spot investigations of Wildman in Tibet, and the provinces of Yunnan, Hubei, Shanxi, and Zhejiang. Among the participants in these investigations have been a number of professional scientists, such as anthropologists, geologists, zoologists, and botanists, as well as personnel in specific fields of zoological parks and natural history museums. Taking part in the investigation in the Shennongjia forest area are experienced huntsmen and skilled scouts. Up to the present time, apart from the above-mentioned hand and foot samples obtained in the Jiolong Mountain areas of Zhejiang Province [found to be from a monkey, perhaps a macaque], no direct physical evidence has been found to support the existence of Wildman.127
In 1998, the head of the Regional Association for Wil
dlife Protection, Liu Wulin, told the Xinhua news agency that all the fur samples and footprints came from the Himalayan brown bear and that nothing gave evidence of the existence of the Yeti in Tibet128 (although the Chinese are still hopeful of finding the creature, despite the complete failure of every effort).
Cold War tension even extended to monster hunting. Gerald Russell, leader of the American-financed expedition led by Tom Slick in 1958, said, “Our task this time has assumed all the more significance now that the Russians are already in the field on the Pamir plateau. It is now an international race for the yeti.”129 Led by Boris Porshnev, several Soviet expeditions were made to the Pamir Mountains, the northwestern extension of the Himalayas, which stretch from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan through China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Those who live in these mountains also have their share of legends about the “Wild Man of the Snows,” known as the Almasti or Almas. Porshnev based his ideas on the earlier work of Badzar Baradiin, an ethnologist who claimed to have seen the Almasti when exploring and collecting cultural artifacts in Tibet in 1906. Porshnev and the Soviets were motivated by their Marxist ideology to view the search for the “Wild Man” as a way to confirm materialism and evolutionary explanations of human origins and behavior.130 Cryptozoologists like Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan Sanderson regarded Gigantopithecus as evidence for the survival of a giant ape in the form of the Yeti, but the Almasti does not fit that legend. Rather than being a ferocious beast that kills yaks and humans, the Almasti was kind to the Soviet peasants and does not have mythological stature or gigantic proportions, as the Yeti allegedly does. Porshnev thought that they were a relict population of Neanderthals who had survived the extinction of that species during the Ice Age of the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million–11,700 years ago). He led an unsuccessful expedition to the Pamir Mountains, and soon his career went into decline and he fell out of favor with the Soviet regime. After Porshnev’s downfall, some of his followers, including Dmitri Bayanov and Marie-Jeanne Koffman, tried to keep the Almasti hunt in the Pamirs alive in the 1960s and 1970s, but their expeditions met with failure.131