The Indian Army and the Yeti, Pt. 2
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In late April of 2019, while trekking through the Himalayan mountains near the Indian-Nepalese border, soldiers assigned to the Indian Army's Mountaineering Expedition Team were startled to discover a set of large footprints in the snow near their campsite. While much of the world's media and other skeptics would inevitably mock this discovery, these men are by no means the first soldiers exploring the mountainous regions of Asia to report something like this.

For centuries now, locals and other men hiking through these snowy and desolate areas have reported finding similar types of tracks, with many bringing back photographs and others even claiming to have seen the creatures that made them. Among these men is Eric Shipton, a highly respected British military attache and mountaineer, a native-born man of Ceylon, which is now the country of Sri Lanka.

While leading a reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest in 1951, Shipton would discover a set of tracks that would make worldwide headlines. And much like the Indian Army's findings and others throughout the years, the photos he took appear to present irrefutable evidence of the existence of a creature that has eluded mankind for centuries. This is part two of the story of the Indian Army and the Yeti.

I'm Luke LaManna and this is Wartime Stories. Six years after leaving the Second World War and his duties as a British military attache stationed in Hungary, Erik Shipton had long since returned to his boyhood passion, mountain exploration.

Leading the 1951 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition in the early winter, he and his team were crossing the Menlung Glacier just north of Tibet's southern border with Nepal, when like so many others, he came upon a line of surprisingly large footprints. Baffled, he and the team's accompanying surgeon, Dr. Michael Ward, took photographs of the footprints, placing an ice axe beside them to provide scale.

The print measured a stunning 18 inches long and just under 13 inches wide, and its shape was very curious, with three, possibly four, broad toes and one gigantic big toe that appeared almost circular. By his observations, Shipton was certain that the footsteps were those of a two-legged creature, not a four-legged wolf or a bear. And by all accounts, Shipton was regarded by his peers as a respectable authority figure,

a level-headed man of science and an avid researcher. Shipton reasoned that the only animal with a vaguely similar foot is the orangutan, but it has a far longer toe and it is not found in Tibet. His native Sherpa, Sen Ten Sing, assured him that these were yeti tracks, a creature clearly capable of jumping over icy crevasses and using his toes to grip on the other side.

Tenzing said he had seen a yeti two years earlier at a distance of only 25 yards, a half-man, half-beast creature which, except for its face, was covered in reddish-brown hair. And based on this interaction, Tenzing told Shipton that he believed the creature he saw was probably frightened of men.

When the expedition team finally returned home to Britain, Shipton's strange photographs began making the rounds. Because for many, these photographs meant only one thing: proof that the mythological Yeti did roam the Himalayas. However, the Natural History Department of the British Museum was quick to dismiss this evidence, its leading authorities committing themselves to the view that the footprint was made by an animal called the Himalayan langur.

The immediate objection was that the langur, like most apes, walks on all fours most of the time. And besides, its feet look nothing like what Shipton photographed. The feet of langurs have five very long toes, much unlike the four or five rounded toes in the photograph. A more imaginative view was taken by a Dutch zoologist, Bernard Velmans, in a series of articles published in Paris in 1952, the year following Shipton's discovery.

He pointed out that in 1934, a German-Dutch paleontologist and geologist named Dr. Ralph von Königswald had discovered some ancient teeth in the shop of a Chinese apothecary in Hong Kong. The Chinese regarded powdered teeth as medicine. One of these teeth was a human-type molar which was twice as large as the molar of an adult gorilla, suggesting that its owner stood about 12 feet tall.

Evidence further suggested that this giant, he became known as Gigantopithecus, lived around half a million years ago. And although thought to be long extinct, it's strange to point out that men who had never heard about Gigantopithecus but claimed to have seen the Yeti, their descriptions are often strikingly similar to artistic renderings of Gigantopithecus made years later.

For instance, take this account from the journal of Slawomir Rawicz, the Polish army officer who escaped from a Siberian prisoner of war camp in 1941: "For two hours we watched them. They were enormous, and they walked on their hind legs. Their faces I could not see in detail, but their heads were squarish, and their ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from their silhouette against the snow."

The shoulders sloped sharply down to a powerful chest and long arms, the wrists of which reached the knees. The nearest I can get to deciding their color is a rusty camel. They were covered with long, loose, straight hair. They were doing nothing but moving around slowly together, and occasionally just standing and looking about them, like people admiring the view.

With witness testimonies like this in mind, and now with Shipton's photographs in hand, Bernard Vellman suggested that Shipton's photographs were possibly made by a huge biped related to Gigantopithecus. But, as could be expected, few scientists ever considered his theories seriously.

Two years on, in 1954, the Daily Mail hosted its own expedition, an effort to try and capture one of the reclusive beasts, or at least be the first team to photograph it. Fifteen weeks of plodding through the Himalayan snows, and they caught not so much as a glimpse of anything like a filthy snowman. But they did discover something else in their travels, a Yeti scalp. Several of them, in fact.

Being long and conical in shape, covered in coarse hair with an erect crest running down the middle, several Tibetan monasteries possessed these artifacts considering them to be holy relics. However, it would eventually be determined that at least one of these scalps was made from several pieces of animal skin stitched together, and yet another was investigated by famed New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary.

Sir Hillary was an explorer who had also discovered possible signs of a Yeti, these being tufts of coarse black hair, while climbing at 19,000 feet in 1951. His superstitious and terrified Sherpas were quick to grab the tufts of hair from him and throw them off the nearest cliff. He said he saw no reason to go chasing after them and returned empty-handed.

Now, with the possibility of finally having a sample of Yeti skin and hair, Sir Hilary assured the monastery that the artifact would not be damaged and sent it to Bernard Velmonts in France for analysis. Most unfortunately, this scalp too proved to be a fraud, although not an intentional one. It was made from the hide of a type of goat, a sero, which was local to the same snowy regions that the Yeti were touted to live.

The skin had been stretched and molded with steam to shape it to the conical form, possibly a piece of religious headwear, its appearance resembling what suggested the elongated shape of a yeti's skull. But it was determined the shaping was done many years beforehand, and over time, the monastery's knowledge of the artifact's origin and its purpose was lost. But since it was so old and so precious to the monastery, it eventually was believed to be something rare, like a yeti scalp.

These scalps became yet another unfortunate example of mistaken identity that further allowed skeptics to declare that the Yeti was merely a legend. But again, this conclusion may be premature.

Because although rarely managing to sight the creatures that made them, throughout the remainder of the 1950s, many more strange and unexplainable tracks would be documented by British, European, Russian, and even American explorers. And three years after the 1954 excursion by the Daily Mail, an American expedition would discover not only tracks and yeti scalps, but another unexplained artifact in a monastery in Nepal.

an item that would be repeatedly tested and for a time was suspected to have come from neither a human or any known species of animal. This artifact would come to be known as the Pangbache Hand. The 1950s were an exciting time for those looking for evidence of the mysterious Yeti. Among these was Shoal Stiles, a British sailor, author, and expedition leader who had led many treks through the frigid regions of the Arctic and Himalayas.

Stiles had likewise seen footprints which his Sherpas similarly assured him were made by the Yeti. He summed up his views when he said, I'm quite sure that the Sherpas are telling the truth and equally sure that there is some strange beast that walks on two legs in the high snows and has never been caught or identified.

And then there was a French clergyman, the Abbé Pierre Bourdais, who followed three separate lots of tracks during his exploration in 1955. Shortly after came squadron leader Lester Davies, a British RAF pilot who had fought against the Japanese on the Malaya Peninsula. And after the war, he also became a rugged mountaineer and mountain rescue leader. And like his peers, he photographed even more massive, unidentifiable footprints in the same year as Bourdais.

One early morning, he was called from his sleeping bag to investigate a set of footprints, each of them being 12 inches long and 8 inches across. The Sherpas were certain that they had been made by a Yeti. Davies took hundreds of photographs and sent them to the British Museum, but like the others, these tracks remain a mystery. In following the tracks, however, Davies found that they led from snow across water to snow on the other bank.

Standing in the frigid water up to his armpits, Davies, who stood just under six feet tall, remarked that whatever had made these tracks, it was tall enough to cross the deep waterway and easily walk out on the far bank on two legs. By his calculations, he then estimated this creature to be upwards of 840 pounds and at least eight feet tall.

And then there was Texas oil man and adventurer Thomas Slick Jr. In 1957, enticed by the many stories and reports about the Yeti, he too funded and led a famous Yeti reconnaissance. During their travels through the Asian wilderness, his team interviewed eyewitnesses and found supposed Yeti tracks and Yeti hairs. But like so many others, they had no direct contact.

Slick himself was injured during this first trek and then hired brothers Peter and Brian Byrne to continue the search for him. Later that year, Peter discovered another purported set of Yeti artifacts, another scalp and a skeletal hand kept at Nepal's Pangbache Monastery.

This next part of the story is surrounded in contradiction because earlier testimonies would indicate that Peter Byrne took a thumb and phalanx bone from the hand without the monk's consent, while later testimonies would paint a much rosier picture with Byrne saying he bargained for the bones in exchange for giving the monks a notable sum of money paid to the monastery for its upkeep.

However he acquired them, these artifacts, which included bits of skin, were then smuggled out of the country into India. The problem then was getting them through British customs and back to the UK.

Of all the people that Byrne had at his disposal, American actor Jimmy Stewart and his wife Gloria, who knew about the expedition, met with him while traveling in Calcutta, and they agreed to smuggle the bones for him, which was accomplished by hiding them in Gloria's unmentionables. But like the Yeti scalps, much to everyone's chagrin, authentication of the Pangbache hand and the rest of the evidence found by Slick's men proved problematic.

But as opposed to finding them to be taken from goats or bears, testing of these artifacts in both the 1950s in the UK and decades later by the US television show Unexplained Mysteries found no clear answer as to their origin. That is, until a more recent BBC documentary in 2011 subjected the finger bone to further testing at the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland and determined that the bone was in fact human.

Some have suggested that the monks might have used human bones to stitch a completed Yeti hand together, but since the hand was unfortunately stolen from the monastery shortly after the Unsolved Mysteries documentary aired in 1991, no further testing could be done on any of the remaining bones. And so the Pangboche hand became yet another reason for skeptics to doubt the Yeti's existence.

Having been injured during the first expedition, Thomas Slick funded two more Yeti quests he did not participate in. Overall, the net result of the 1957 expedition was three sets of human-like tracks, excrement samples, several strands of hair, and the supposed Yeti bones and skin samples.

Despite taking along three female blue tick hounds known for their superb tracking skills, the highlight of a return trip the next year was the unsubstantiated claim by two Sherpas of a close encounter with a skittish Yeti.

And after the third trip to Nepal in 1959 yielded no more hard evidence than the previous two, the Texan gave up on funding any more personal quests for the beast. But by chance, in the following years, other explorers who weren't even looking for the Yeti, they would have better luck. Oi, chapa, what scared them all thing? A Yeti. A what? Yeti.

In June of 1970, while scaling the Annapurna, a mountain in the north of Nepal, climber Don Willans saw two lines of crows suddenly scatter into the sky. His Sherpas told him in a horribly matter-of-fact tone that it was probably a Yeti that had scared them off. With night falling, he did not pursue it for a closer look, but the next morning he found a set of deep tracks about the same size foot as his own.

The tracks came down to about 13,000 feet and then vanished over a crest at about 15,000. He rejected the idea that these tracks could have been made by a bear. And the next night he looked out by moonlight and saw a dark figure moving across the terrain. He described it as an ape-like creature bounding uphill on all fours. It gave him the distinct impression it was hunting.

And when it finally disappeared, Willans said that the odd, uneasy atmosphere he had been feeling suddenly disappeared with it. Henry Cecil John Hunt, son of an Indian Army officer and a distinguished army officer himself, began climbing expeditions during his service as a military intelligence officer with the Indian Army in the 1930s. He likewise stumbled across strange, large tracks in the snow in 1937.

After a stint as a chief instructor at the British Army Commando Mountain and Snow Warfare School, he served in Italy during World War II. After the war, like his compatriot climbers, Lord Hunt returned to mountaineering and would be selected to lead the successful 1953 British expedition to Mount Everest.

25 years later, in 1978, he was again scaling the slopes of Everest and photographed even more Yeti tracks, later adding that whilst sheltering for the night in a Sherpa's hut, he heard a strange, bellowing cry from across the snows. The cry of the Yeti, his Sherpas told him. Still further, in Russia, more solid evidence had began emerging in the 1950s. What's that?

In January 1958, there was Dr. Alexander Pronin of the Leningrad University, a former MiG-3 fighter pilot and Soviet squadron commander. Thirteen years after the war's end, now working as a hydrologist, while exploring the Pamir mountain range in Central Asia to study its water resources, he too reported seeing an Alma, what he referred to as a "being of unusual aspect."

At first he thought it was a bear, but then he realized it was a man-like figure, covered in reddish-gray hair, standing in the snow with its legs wide apart and with arms longer than a normal man's. He observed it for more than five minutes at the same spot on two separate occasions. The first time he saw it, after it disappeared, he dismissed it as a trick of the light or his eyes playing tricks on him.

But the second time he saw it, at the same location, three days later, he could not dismiss what his eyes were seeing. The creature's form clearly outlined against the sky over a cliff, before it disappeared behind a nearby outcropping of rocks. And a week later, one of his group's inflatable boats disappeared without explanation and was later found upstream. Pronin found that the locals often blamed these wild men with stealing household items and taking them up into the mountains.

While the Soviet Union remained, several expeditions were mounted to look for the Alma. While they gathered some interesting stories and a few unusual artifacts, no Alma was ever captured, and Soviet scientists became split over the value of searching for it.

Despite such growing marks of skepticism of the existence of such wild men, Soviet scientist Dr. Boris Prozhnev's efforts to compare and evaluate these reported sightings resulted in what has been called an impressive body of evidence, which he collected and published in Adet Chernin's 1970 book, The Yeti. Evidently, Dr. Prozhnev was also relentlessly teased by his colleagues because of his work on the subject.

But he insisted in his speculations that the creature is perhaps the last surviving group of Neanderthal men. And at least a few Western researchers, including Dr. Myra Shackley of Leicester University in England, agreed with him.

Now, while Neanderthals are widely believed to now be extinct, there are several leading theories as to why. One of which is human aggression, an increasing competition for scarce resources against the Homo sapiens species that took place some 40,000 years ago and resulted in the Homo sapiens driving the Neanderthals to extinction.

But what if they or some other hominid species were not driven to complete extinction, but merely driven into isolation? Dr. Shackley, who visited Mongolia in 1979 and found the area to be loaded with Neanderthal artifacts, she pointed out that if the Neanderthal or some other biped species were to have survived, it would have likely been in those isolated regions where the Yeti is often reported.

And like their ancestors, out of their instinct for survival, what if they have survived merely by continuing to avoid contact with our species? He goes by many names and falls under the heading of many legends. He is the spirit of men killed violently. If you see him, it is a bad omen and you may soon die yourself. He is wild and hairy, twice the size of a grown man.

Shooting him will not help because bullets will pass right through him. He is called ferocious, man-eating, violent. These are only a few of the ways in which the Yeti is portrayed in legends across the small, scattered and isolated communities of the Himalayas and other mountainous regions of Asia. Places where superstitions are rife, where Buddhist services are chanted in dark, ancient, smoke-filled monasteries that cloud the senses.

And certainly, not all legends can be true. And it doesn't help that the story of the Yeti, like so many others, has been heavily watered down by many blatant hoaxes. But simply because a few foolish charlatans have presented false evidence, that doesn't discount the evidence presented by serious men, and the larger truth that may still remain undiscovered. So, what can we make of the evidence we do have?

In an article written in a 1973 copy of the zoological journal Oryx, J. A. McNeely, E. W. Cronin, and H. B. Emery firmly declared their confirmed belief in the Yeti. They point out that at that time, there were over 50 descriptions from witnesses or photographs of footprints which tended to be consistent, as did the collective descriptions of the animal offered by the mountain people.

A yeti is something like the height of a man or taller, perhaps a range of heights between juveniles and adults, all with coarse hair covering their bodies that is reddish or grayish-brown. Its face is hairless, and it has long arms and big feet. This same article went on to possibly answer one common query, which is what could such a large creature find to live on way up in the high elevations and deep snows?

The author suggested that the creature, alternatively, spends most of its time in the dense forests at lower elevations below the snow line, and that its tracks are only found when it goes up over the mountain passes from one forest to the next. As for its strange nature, these men also favored the theory that it is descendant from the giant ape, Gigantopithecus, a creature known only in fossil form.

And certainly, the idea of such a strange survival of a species is not unheard of. The standard example would be that of a fish called the coelacanth, long thought by researchers to have been extinct for 50 million years. But a number of living specimens have been caught since 1938. Why couldn't the same be true of a creature like the yeti?

We must also take into consideration that the accounts listed here are only those which Western media reported. Those accounts they at least found credible enough to publish. But these are only a few. There are many more bewildering encounters with these ape-like creatures to read about. Some juvenile, smaller-sized creatures and others, massive, towering over the men that saw them and terrifying them out of their wits until frightened away themselves by gunfire.

And if not by guns, there are cases where survivors of Yeti encounters have claimed that the Yeti were scared off by other loud noises, such as the blowing of conch shells and longhorns. Even Alexander the Great, during his conquest into the Himalayan region of Kashmir in the 4th century, is reported to have heard about these creatures, then demanding for the locals to procure one for him.

In recent decades, however, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, fewer explorers have ventured out looking, as many of the regions where this strange creature has been reported have long been politically unstable. Economic conditions in Russia, who inherited many of the scientific institutions and opinions of the old Soviet Union, have likewise not been favorable in allowing continued research on the creature.

As such, public interest has ebbed away and little effort in finding the Yeti has been made in recent years, something that the Indian Army's mountaineering team had perhaps hoped to change with their newfound discovery in 2019. The world, in all its self-assured wisdom and short-sightedness, might view the Indian Army's most recent discovery as something to laugh at.

But how many more times have our servicemen and women experienced something strange while exploring new or isolated places, only to be mocked and ridiculed for their testimony? And are these men really that foolish for simply believing in a legend backed up by centuries of reported encounters and other evidence?

For those of us who do find the stories credible, the lingering question is how these creatures have remained undocumented by mainstream science, after so many years of reported encounters and improvements in our technology. For that, we can only reason and answer by logical deduction.

First, we might humble ourselves to realize that, as advanced as we have become, the Earth remains quite large, and many regions and harsher climates still lie far beyond human reach or scientific exploration. And as the disgruntled Soviet scientist pointed out, there is the financial consideration. Someone does have to fund this research, after all.

And we might also consider that even wolves, highly intelligent animals and fearsome predators, in fearing the consequences of prolonged human contact, they will retreat further and further into reclusiveness until their existence becomes practically unnoticed by us. By comparison, what could then be said of a bipedal creature like the Yeti, something resembling a man, which would presumably have a much higher level of intelligence than a wolf? The

The ability to reason, to plan, and not to mention their clear ability to hunt and live comfortably in harsh conditions that we humans require special gear and training to survive in. Something like a Neolithic man, an evolutionary offshoot of Gigantopithecus. There is much we do not yet understand about our own human origins, let alone those of hard-to-find creatures.

And as much confidence as our modern science projects about its collective findings, we certainly do not know everything. I was rather surprised to learn that the collective sum of all of our human evolutionary evidence, the fossilized bones and artifacts of animals like the Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and every species in between, all of the evidence we have found, if piled together, it would hardly fill the bed of a small pickup truck.

and that's because the majority of these findings are very small in size, bone fragments, and teeth. For instance, in 1935, it was Ralph von Königwald's discovery of a fossilized tooth in China that led to the discovery of the Gigantopithecus species. This small amount of evidence is what led to a fossil hunt for more evidence, and in the following decades, thousands of more teeth and sections of jawbone have been found

to verify the existence of this animal, but to date, no one has found any actual bones from the body of Gigantopithecus.

So while textbooks and museums display artwork and full-sized models of this creature, our entire understanding of its size, its diet, when it lived, and when it went extinct has been derived from these fossilized teeth and whatever paleontological information could be derived from the soil, from the areas where the teeth were found, and from comparisons to modern primates.

That's not to say that such a seemingly small amount of evidence lacks credibility, but to point out that while the world openly acknowledges the legitimacy of extinct creatures like Gigantopithecus because of their fossilized teeth, they have largely denounced the possible continued existence of creatures like the Yeti, in spite of the evidence and witness testimony provided.

Just because they are still living doesn't mean finding their decaying bodies or bones would be any easier than those creatures like Gigantopithecus. What if these Yeti creatures do live in family groups and practice ritual burials like humans, or otherwise hide the bodies of their dead from potential scavengers? To that point, what if the answer to the Yeti's continued elusiveness is that it is intentional?

If we have found so many samples of footprints and other indications of the Yeti's continued existence, who's to say these creatures have failed to notice ours? Certainly, if they exist, they know about humans, especially with all of these reported efforts to explore their territories and track them down against their will. Humans are very strange creatures ourselves, are we not?

beings who will go so far as to risk death to travel across the world to climb the tallest mountain and ultimately leave it littered with our many once highly motivated and now frozen corpses still dressed in bright neon colors. And while we want nothing more than to find these creatures and to study them, to curb our own innate curiosity, what if they are intelligent enough to want nothing to do with us? Perhaps the further we have ventured into their territories,

the further they have drifted out of our reach. And if we heeded the advice of a Tibetan Sherpa, perhaps this is the best case for both the Yeti's sake and for that of mankind. Because if it hasn't already happened, one day an unwitting explorer might stumble upon this massive and ferocious creature face to face. And far from the issue of whether the world will believe his story or not, the real question is, will he survive to tell us about it?

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Whit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan. Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone. Production coordination by Avery Siegel. Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden. Artwork by Jessica Clarkson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picotta. If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com. Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.