February 19, 2019 • 45 mins
We've covered Nessie and Bigfoot, so why not tackle the Yeti? Listen in today and Josh and Chuck cover what used to be known as the Abominable Snowman.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over
there somewhere over there, And this is stuff you should know,
(00:22):
the Continuing Cryptozoology Edition. Oh, this finishes it, right. Oh,
I don't know about that. We've done Bigfoot, Locknest monster yetti.
Well you haven't done like, um, moth Man. That's the Chupacabra. Chupacabra.
That's a big one too. Yeah. This slender Man, Slenderman
(00:43):
is more Internet folklore than anything. Uh did we do
that one? Or did we think about it and not
do it? The ladder of those two? If I remember correctly,
I said it stinks or something. Yeah, if I remember correctly,
hurt my feelings. Oh my in I think it was.
I think we could do slender Man now, it was
(01:05):
just so early on that Um it was very thin.
Now I think it would be more robust. Yeah that's right. Um, well,
today we're talking about the Yeti, which is not slender
Depending on which yetti you're talking about, Chuck, it's either
enormous and like eight feet tall, covered in gray or
(01:26):
white or maybe sometimes reddish hair, weighing four pounds easily
or actually it is kind of slender. It could be
basically what amounts to a wild hippie, basically a somebody
who likes to grub roots out of the ground and
(01:46):
lets out a squeal or a cry every once in
a while just to I guess know that they're alive.
And um. There's really two competing versions of what those
of us in the Western world would would inc was
the Yeti. But the one we're really talking about is
the first one, what we also think of as the
abominable Snowman. How tall it was, hippie rob uh? He
(02:11):
was average like five something, I guess, like high five.
He was a little shorter than me. Yeah right, he
was not. He was not the uh. He was not
the the Yeti of legend as far as I know.
He could be now though well I don't know. It
just sounded an awful lot like him, kind of test
he opened in the mountains grubbing for roots, yep, covered
(02:35):
in dirt and with wild, crazy hair. So I think
we should just tell, like, if you don't know what
we're talking about, this is the um the legendary beasts
that lives in Asia. Yeah, around the Himalayas typically. Yeah,
so it's known as Asia's Bigfoot, or maybe Bigfoot is
(02:55):
known as North America's Yetti. I don't know, Uh, I
guess Yetti came first, right, Yeah, I think yet he's
been around with the Sherpa of Tibet for a very
long time. Yeah. And that's sort of the deal of this.
The origin story of this thing is the Yetti has
been told um for many, many years in traditional stories
(03:18):
in that area. Um, there's a there was someone named
um Shiva dot Call that collected a bunch of these
stories in a book called folk Tales of Sherpa and Yetti,
and all of them kind of figured the same way,
which was whether it's a story called the Annihilation of
the Yetti uh, in which this is pretty good. It's
(03:39):
about sherpas seeking revenge on a tormenting group of Yettis
this sounds like something that should be on like the
Sci Fi channel. I would be very surprised if it wasn't.
But all of these stories basically have the same moral
um message at the end, which is because it's sort
of like a grim's fairy tale. Like be careful out
(04:01):
on the woods. Actually, yeah exactly. I think it serves
the exact same purpose to like in the Grimm's fairy Tales,
and I thought the same thing. Um, you know, there's
witches that live in candy houses, so don't go wandering
off in the woods kids, because you'll end up getting eaten.
For little kids in Tibet, it was don't wander off
into the Tibetan plateau or the YETI will get you,
(04:23):
and you will all sorts of terrible things will happen
to you, which is funny because they are all sorts
of real things that could kill you in the Tibetan plateau. Well,
that's why I think what they were saying was, you know,
you can't just be like, look out for the bears.
You can. Kid will be like, I don't know. I
can see a brash kid being like, no bear, everybody
knows what a bear is. All rustle a bear any
(04:44):
day of the week. And then you know, along the
way it gets into a drinking contest with Marion from
Indiana Jones right, right exactly. That was one of the
best scenes in the history of film. Yeah, I think so,
And Tibetan kids tend to agree with me too. But
before we move on, I want to say one thing,
(05:06):
that annihilation of the Yetti. Keep keep that in the
back of your mind. And the story was that, like,
there are a bunch of Yetti that, um, we're hanging
around and the Sherpa we're sick of them hanging around.
So the sherp but basically through a YETI party and
got drunk and fought with each other to kind of
provide an example to the Yetti. Hey, you should get
drunk and fight with each other too, in the hopes
(05:27):
of the Yeti would destroy each other. It didn't work,
and the Yetti all managed to escape, except for one
who was supposedly killed by a a llama, one of
the Buddhist monks in the area. That's part of the story.
That's the end. That's the annihilation of the Yetti story.
I didn't know a Lama figured in. And really, annihilation
(05:50):
is kind of a strong word if you think about it,
because if you just killed one out of I think
two and forty Yeti, it's hardly annihilation. That's a good point.
I think so too. Uh So, throughout history, these legends
have been pervasive in the region so much so that
supposedly the great Alexander or Alexander the Great, I'm that's
(06:14):
sure why I did that. When he came through town
and conquered the Indus Valley, he said, Uh, I can
see one of your famous I don't know if that's
what Alexander the Great sounded like. No, No, what did
ancient Roman sound like? I was he Roman? I think
(06:35):
he was Greek? That was he? Cheeze? How about really
screwed that up? Usa? I knew that do a German accent.
I'm just slow. I'm just gonna leave. No, han, hank,
tight chuck, you can rebound. Yeah. Why why did I
(06:55):
think he was Roman in that Greek? Well, because the
Romans like to pretend they were Greek themselves. I'm not
firing on all cylinders. But regardless of my bad accent,
or maybe I should just edit back in and say
that was my Greek accent. There you go. Uh he said,
I want to see a YETI and they the local
locals that were like, you know, we totally would do that. However,
(07:18):
um that you can't get them down this low, and
you'd have to hike really high up in those mountains.
And I know you're not down with that, so sorry, yeah, exactly.
So I guess Alexander the Great was like, I'm board,
I can't believe we're still talking about this. Give me
some wine. Pretty gotten a drinking contest, and that was that.
So the yett he continued on in in Scherpa tradition
(07:40):
in Tibetan, Nepal, and Bhutan, but um in the West
it kind of disappeared from view until the twentieth century.
And so remember these are tall tales that the the
Scherpa teach their kids, although there is supposedly some I
guess general belief as well, but I can't I can't
(08:02):
quite penetrate it. But just imagine that it was just
strictly tall tales Serpa people told their kids. Then Westerners
came in and said, what is this you're talking about?
Tell us about this and just bought the whole thing
hook line and sinker. Yeah, and things really took for him.
In nine there's a journalist named Henry Newman. He did
an interview with some British explorers. And this is a
(08:26):
time of great exploration, especially from the British. Uh these
sort of uh these, I guess uh, Indiana Jones, like
mountaineers who would go all over the world in search
of these you know, jungles and mountains in church of
crazy beasts and treasures and things like that. So, uh,
(08:46):
he interviewed some of these guys and they said, you
know what, we found these huge footprints up in the
mountains and the locals there. I guess Serpa said, because
with in arpa the plural sharpa didn't me did from it?
I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Um, that was a good episode,
by the way, everyone, it was go back and listen
(09:06):
to that one. What was the title of Warm, Friendly Living, Yeah,
because that's I think what tending Nor said. So great.
So they said that their guides are Sherpa guides. Um
called them mito kangm which the translation, the real translation
is a little awkward man bear snowman. Right, but Newman
(09:30):
confused all that. He got the snowman part right, but
he translated that first part to mean mato m e
t o h two mean filthy or dirty, and then
he changed that on his own to the word abominable,
and that's the way we get the abominable snowman. Yeah,
he was like, I don't like filthy Snowman. I'm going
(09:50):
to change the name that I've already gotten wrong, right
and turned it into abominable Snowman. Yeah, he really great journalist,
But it's fascinating that you can trace it back to
this one dummy. That's the whole the abominable Snowman. That's
where it came from, was this one guy, and that
obviously just completely captured the attention of the rest of
(10:11):
the world when he he wrote this, because like this
was not just like, oh yeah, they heard about an
abominable snowman. It was these these explorers found tracks and
they're sure, but guides told them the trucks belonged to
this abominable snowman. Therefore, there are abominable snowmen living in
the Himalayas. And the explorer who was who led that
(10:33):
particular expedition was Charles Howard Berry Um Howard Hyphen Berry
b U R y and Um. Apparently he and Newman
were really big into promoting the idea of an abominable
snowman or men living in the Himalayas, and that it
just being like this giant, huge creature with shaggy hair
(10:53):
and very much akin to Bigfoot. But if you look
at the descriptions, the aditional descriptions of the YETI they're
they're much smaller and not nearly as huge as um.
The Westerners kind of immediately made it out to be. Yeah,
there was one description, one of the earlier written descriptions
from two There was a researcher named Mira Shackley, and
(11:17):
I believe that she got this information from uh, two
hikers that reported seeing the yetti. Uh, and this is
what they said. The height was not much less than
eight feet so tall for sure, but it's not like
it was ten ft tall. Uh. The head were the heads,
(11:39):
because there were two of them, were described as squarish,
and the ears must lie close to the skull because
there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow.
The shoulders sloped slowly down to a powerful chest covered
by reddish brown hair which formed a close body fur
mixed with long, straight hairs hanging downward about the size
(11:59):
and bill to a small man. The head covered with
long hair, but the face and chest not very hairy
at all. This this all sounds like they always describe
him as or it is bipedal right, means you know,
walking upright, right. But if you if you go back
and look at that description and how detailed it was.
(12:21):
Those hikers who gave the description said that they they
saw they saw all this from observing two black specks
moving across the snow about a quarter mile below them.
And yet they could see that it had a thick
undercoat and like a very long, hairy overcoat and that
was reddish, and like that's just just basically perfect abominable
(12:44):
snowman sighting. Yeah, but but it's one of like many
like after after that Howard Berry expedition came back in
and Newman broadcasts to the world, people started going to
the Himalayas and droves, and they weren't just necessarily looking
for the abominable Stowe Man. Everest was there, and everybody
knew Everest was there, and a lot of people wanted
(13:06):
to be the first one to summit Everest, the first Westerner,
i should say, to summit Everest, so that while a
lot of them were in the area, they're like, well,
we'll look for the abominable snowman while we're here too. Yeah,
and some pretty legendary mountaineers um and granted these are
not like zoologist or anything, but their respected men in
(13:26):
their field, people like Reinhold Messner and one Sir Edmund
Hillary both searched for evidence of the Eddy while they
were hiking. Uh and Messner even wrote a book called
My Quest for the Yetty, Confronting the Himalayas Deepest Mystery.
But I mean, well, well, we'll save the big reveal
(13:47):
to the end or the third act of this show.
Okay is your third act? Yeah, there's gotta be Okay,
we're in big trouble. If there's not, well, why don't
we take a break and then we'll come back and
talk a little bit about a couple more of these
reported sightings. Let's do it all right, Well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn
(14:08):
a thing or two from Josh Damp Chuck stuff you
should know, all right, to Chuck? Okay, Chuck. So, uh,
(14:31):
we've we've started to get some sightings from expeditions that
are going to Everest and just hanging around the Himalayas
um and then I think in nineteen one, something really
big happened. One of those explorers, Eric Shipton, took a
photograph of a track that to this day looks pretty remarkable.
(14:53):
Actually yeah. I mean this is again it's not like
hard evidence, but this is a very famous otto. I
remember seeing this when I was a kid, and like,
I guess it was probably the Guinness or Ripley's Believe
It or Not or something. It was Time Life books
for me, was it? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I remember that.
It's a very famous picture of a like a a
(15:14):
pick because you know pick axe yeah, used for scale, Yeah,
right next to it. And I remember that very distinctly.
When I saw this picture, I was like, oh yeah.
And then when you look at it, you're like, wait,
that that doesn't look quite right. That's a really weird track.
It's it looks like an elongated human foot, but rather
than a left toe. Um, it's it's got, it's kind
(15:39):
of bulbous and weird. It doesn't look like the other toes,
and it certainly doesn't look like what a human toe
should look like. And it's also huge. I think it
was measured about thirteen inches, which is a pretty typical
size for a YETI track from what I understand over
the ages. But the thing about it is it is
a nice, crisp, fresh track. And the other thing about
(16:04):
and this is what really captured the attention of the world.
Eric Shipton was not known to be a particularly fraudulent person.
He was a very respected explorer and mountaineer. He knew
the area well and as a guy who has tracked
Yettie his whole life. Um, I believe his name is
Daniel Taylor. Um. Daniel Taylor put it. If if Shipton
(16:26):
is coming back with a picture of a track, you
just you know, it's a real track. It's not faked,
it's not a hoax. So the question was what was it?
And this is one and it hit the world. That picture,
that track hit the world like the surgeon's photo of
the Lockness Monster hit the world at back in ninety three.
(16:47):
It just became like proof to people who believe in
the Yettie around the world that the Yetie definitely exists. Yeah,
I mean, like you said, it was really Um what
what made it different than other photos? That it was
so sharp, it was a really good picture. Um. And
that that little um toe thing basically looked like a
(17:09):
thumb and it just, you know, it looked odd. But
this this Daniel Taylor guy, he actually when I started
reading that article, I thought, oh boy, this crack pot.
But he actually turned out to be a pretty cool
guy because he'd spent a lot of his life looking
for the Yeti. Went over there, even met with the
King of Nepal, and the King of Nepal said, well,
(17:31):
if you want to go like to the wildest place
and the most you know, remote place in our land,
go to Barroon b a r U n this Baroun valley.
And he went there and he looked around and he
uh did not find a yeti. But what he did
do was ended up helping to work towards conservation of
(17:53):
that area, which was kind of a nice silver lining
to his story was he got there and he was like,
this is of the most beautiful places on Earth, right
and one of the greatest wilderness wildernesses I've ever been to.
He realized it wasn't protected and that like Chinese loggers
were infringing on one side and farmers were infringing on
the other. So he kind of spun it into like
(18:16):
good work doing conservation work in that area, which was
kind of cool. Yeah, you got it turned into a
national park in Nepal. It's a protected area now, which
is significant. Have you seen pictures of the valley it's astounding.
It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen
in my life, and it was just being used because
the people living there like, well, we need this land. Yeah,
(18:39):
it's beautiful, but we can't afford to preserve it because
a lot of people around here live on fifteen dollars
a year um. So they were just making use of
it however they could. And he he came in with
the government said no, no, no more of that, get
out of here. This is protected now. But it is
gorgeous and his his he had actually been raised there.
Daniel Taylor's grandparents were miss canaries in the Himalayas, and
(19:02):
his parents kind of took over his grandparents work, so
he was raised in the Himalayas. So he'd been looking
for the eddies whole life. But when he went to
the baron Um, he feels like he found the answer
to that track that it was a kind of tree bear.
But there's there's a big problem with that. The Barun
Valley is a subtropical rainforest, so a tree bear living
(19:24):
in there wouldn't survive very very well in the snow
and the Tibettan Tibetan plateau, you know, ten ten thousand
or more feet higher up the mountain, So it doesn't
really solve the mystery much, no, but his notion that
it could have been a tree bear makes a little
more sense with these tracks, because a tree bear does
(19:44):
have a um I don't I don't know if you
call it a thumb, but some sort of opposable digit
to make climbing easier, and that that would at least
explain this weird thumblike thing in these prints. It would.
So he's got like half of the thing explained. The
other half is what the heck was that tree bears,
the subtropical rainforest tree bear doing up in the mountains
(20:06):
of the Himalayas, you know what I'm saying, Like in
the snow above the snow line, I guess, is what
I'm trying to say. But the other thing about that
um that shipped in photo that became world famous for
the yetti um was that, like the track itself, was
very crisp. And there's a guy named Benjamin Radford who's
(20:26):
a skeptic who has written a lot about the Yetti
um and in particular how how difficult obtaining yetti tracks
could be, or actually, more to the point how easy
it would be to confuse the normal animals tracks or
something weird because of the fact that the snow is
a terrible medium for tracks, because like say a bear
(20:50):
walks through an area, leaves some tracks in the snow.
The next morning, as the sun comes up and it
hits the tracks and it shoots all that heat on
this under that track, it starts to melt the sides,
maybe elongate it, maybe make the toes look splayed, And
it just doesn't resemble a bear track anymore at all.
It looks like something weird and and and um not
(21:13):
previously known, like an entirely new species. That's the thing
about the shift in photograph that captured everyone's attention. It
doesn't look like that at all. It looks sharp new,
it doesn't look melted at all. The edges are clean
and crisp. That's why I think really kind of struck everybody.
It wasn't like a melted, mangled track. It was like
(21:34):
a new track by something that was not immediately identifiable. Yeah,
for sure. So there have been other photographs through the years.
Uh as you know, supposed evidence in hiker name Anthony
Wooldridge UM said there's a YETI over there, he's about
five feet away, and uh, he saw a bunch of
(21:56):
tracks in the snow that looked like that was going
that way, and he took some photographs that were proven genuine.
But I think by genuine that just means they weren't faked. Yeah,
that's what I That's how I understand it, because wasn't
this the photo that they said, actually those are just
rocks standing up, Yeah, like rock outcropping or whatever. Yeah,
(22:19):
this guy was also a respected mountaineer and explorer in
New the area really well. And so when he came
back with this photo and they said this photo wasn't faked,
it's not been doctored. People people listen to him too.
But it just turns out he was wrong. This photo
of rocks has not been doctored exactly. That's that's ultimately
(22:39):
what they were saying. Because another expedition went back to
the same spot the next year and we're like, oh, yeah,
that's that's those rocks over there. And even even in
his account, um, that guy what was his name, Woodridge,
Woodridge says like, yeah, they just stood there motionless, Yeah
they were they were still his boulders up brave boulders.
(23:03):
But the other thing is he swore that there were
tracks leading up to it, so he he seemed to
think that that they really were there. But from what
I understand, he was earnest in his report. It wasn't
like a fraud or a hoax or anything like that.
And I think he was a little a little red
faced afterward. Probably. Yeah, they even made a movie about
it called Ernest Goes Hiking. All right, Ernest Saves Christmas
(23:26):
with the Abominable Snowman. I'll bet Ernest did save Christmas
in one movie. I guarantee there was a movie called
Ernest Saves Christmas. I think I think there was right now.
The only one I'm a d percent sure of his
Ernest Goes to Camp. I never saw any of those.
My family saw that movie in the theater Top Dollar,
(23:47):
Top Dollar, which was three dollars. Yeah, I guess, I
hope so at the time, which is surprising because my
mom used to sneak in bolt candy from like the
little store across the way from the movie theater in
Southwick Mall. Yeah, we know that move in our family.
It works works really well. Uh So, over the years,
there have been not only things like, oh, look footprints,
(24:09):
or hey, look at that rock across the valley. Uh.
There there have been Uh. I don't want to call
it evidence, but um alleged evidence brought forward by legitimate scientists. Uh,
and people like Sir Edmund Hillary, like he brought back
a scalp and said he didn't say I scalped the Yetti,
(24:31):
but he said, hey, I think this is a Yettie scalp. Yeah.
He was trying to fool anyone, though, was he? No? No, No,
he was supposedly kind of a casual believer in it.
He'd been sent on a Yetti expedition by New World
Encyclopedia years before, and he came back with a a
Yeti skull cap that he'd gotten from a monastery in Nepal.
(24:53):
They had a Yetti skull cap and a hand, a
Yetie hand and mummified Jetti hand. And what's crazy is
the Yeti skull cap was supposedly the the scalp of
the one Jetti that had been killed during the annihilation
of the Yetti story. So he brings it back. I
think it wasn't that he was gullible, And I also
(25:15):
I'm sure it wasn't that it was. He was a hoaxter.
He was the kind of scientific person who kept his
mind open until the evidence was in. Man, can you
imagine a time when an encyclopedia company would send Sir
Edmund Hillary out on assignment? Like, how great is that?
I know that was the mid twentieth century. It was
(25:37):
a great, great time to be alive in the way
of wonder and curiosity. Uh so, Yeah, he comes back
with a scalp and it turns out they did a
little research and it was a It's an animal called
a sero. It's kind of like a goat. You have
some poor serro got scalped. Yeah, but that happened a
lot like, Um, there was this finger and this is
(25:59):
a pretty good story or um that actor Jimmy Stewart,
believe it or not, was involved in smuggling out supposed
yetti finger. Yeah, from from again from a monastery. I
believe it might have been the same monastery. Yeah. And
wouldn't he just on vacation there and just got sort
of mixed up in this plan? Yeah. We gotta mention
(26:20):
Tom Slick, the oil man, Yeah, because he figures into
this story. Uh. He was a rich guy who uh
he was one of these dudes is sort of adventuring
rich guys. That was like, I'm a Yeti hunter for
this year. Yeah, and when when you say hunter, like
he was a hunter. His entire point to finding the
(26:41):
yet he was to shoot and kill it and to
take it back and have it stuffed. And um, the
government Nepaul had a real problem with that and basically said,
your expedition is is banned. Nobody can come in here
and kill the Yetti. And apparently the U. S. State
Department got in touch with Nepal and said, hey, by
the way, we have the same feeling. We we have
(27:01):
a policy of not killing Yeti either. So apparently with that, um,
Tom Slick's expedition was allowed back in on the basis
that they would never try to kill the Yeti except
in self defense. And I guess later on, when he
became interested in bigfoot, he had a change of heart
(27:22):
and he stopped decided he stopped hunting to kill and
started hunting just to find and maybe capture on photograph
and that was it. And that his change of heart
um change the way that bigfoot is searched for to
this day, and the Yeti now much more. Yeah, it's
much more peaceful search. He was like the last of
(27:42):
the UM big game hunters involved in like trying to
find unidentified animals again to kill them so they could
be stuffed and kept at the National Geographic Society or
something like that. Yeah, I mean, and that was a
big thing that um Daniels guy talks about, just these
legends and history and how quote unquote science back then
was in the Victorian age were we're because you know,
(28:05):
all these tales of Tarzan and these fantastic beasts. People
would just these rich people would go into the jungle
and search for animals that no one had ever seen
before so they could shoot and kill them and bring
them back and say, look at this weird thing, right,
And I mean a lot of people like don't really
(28:26):
like you. You point to the guys who were out
there like doing the hunting and killing and the exploitation
and all of that, but they were very frequently working
at the behest of museums, sure, who for a very
long time got to pass even though they were the
source of the um those expeditions and the funders of
those expeditions, and the reason people were out there in
the first place was to go get specimens for the
(28:48):
museum's collections and ostensibly to study or whatever, but it
was to study them dead. And I think probably because
there wasn't really any reliable way to ship a live
specimen back in a lot of ways, but also there
there was um so I think Tom Slick kind of
represented the the end of that and at the beginning
of the new, this new era of much more peaceful
(29:11):
exploration and expeditions. Yeah, And I don't want to leave
everyone hanging on Jimmy Stewart. He was only he was
on vacation I think in Calcutta, got mixed up in
this uh in this yetie finger helps smuggle it back
and they finally did DNA testing about seven or eight
years ago and they said, oh, this is a human finger, right,
(29:34):
But I mean for a while there they weren't sure.
And I guess Tom Slick was friends had a common
friend h with Jimmy Stewart, and Jimmy Stewart happened to
be in India, and so Tom Slick's agents and Nepaul
managed to get this finger to Jimmy Stewart, who agreed
to smuggle it out on the basis that Jimmy Stewart's
(29:56):
luggage is not gonna get searched. And Jimmy Stewart's smuggled
a jettie finger out of India and to the UK
for it to be studied. I'll go go, go ahead
and put the finger in my bag. So ho big
you're gonna do Jimmy Stewart Eddie. In my head, I
(30:16):
was like, Jimmy Stewart, can I blow that off? You did? Man?
You nailed it? All right. Well, let's take another break
and we'll come back and talk more about DNA and
how that has figured in uh in the search of
more recent years. Right after this, well, now we're on
the road driving in your truck. Want to learn a
thing or two from Josh Damn Chuck. Stuff you should know,
(30:41):
all right, Chuck, so check you remember in the Lochness episode,
the Lockness Monster episode, we talked about how there's like
a new search going on where they're sampling the lock
(31:04):
itself and examining it for d NA UM. Apparently, applying
modern genetics and genetic analysis to cryptozoology is like the
next chapter and rather than saying like, oh, well that's
say for us, are are big? Fraud? Is over with?
Cryptozoologists are like, awesome, good, we finally have the tools
(31:26):
now to find out to get to the bottom of
this stuff and to actually discover new new specimens or
new um species um. So there seemed to be quite
happy about it and quite excited, although the there a
lot of their beliefs hang in the balance and could
just be have the legs cut out from under him
by science. That's science wins. In two thousan, there's a
(31:50):
geneticist at Oxford named Brian Sykes who said, all right, yetti, Uh,
holders of Yetti pieces, send them to me. If you
have any Yetti hair, Yetti teeth, Yetti tissue, send it
Oxford University. And he got it. He got fifty seven samples. Uh.
They picked thirty six of those to do some DNA
(32:12):
analysis on and uh most of these turned out to
be animals that we all know, like bears and cows
and horses um. At the time though that he found
a couple of samples from Bhutan in India that he said,
we're a percent match for jaw bones of a polar
(32:35):
bear from the Pleistocene era. Yeah, and this kind of
excited people because this may have been I mean not
the Yetti. But this may have been sort of a combination,
a hybrid of a polar bear and a brown bear,
because this is when they were diverging genetically, and that
in itself would be a pretty cool find. Yeah, oh yeah,
it would be a new type of bear that was
(32:58):
a direct descended from bears that went extinct about forty
years ago, and it would be a type of polar bear.
There aren't polar bears in the Himalayas. There's black bears
as brown bears, there's him Alaan bears, there's tree bears,
but there's not polar bears. So and the fact that
like he accidentally found this by putting out this call
(33:18):
for for samples of Yeti or Bigfoot or whoever, Um
just made it all the all the sweeter that like
he had just accidentally discovered a new type of polar
bear living in the Himalayas. Yeah, but sadly that was
not even the case. Um. Some more scientists came along later.
They did re analysis, and I think what they landed
(33:39):
on was, you know, unfortunately these uh, I think you're
getting a bad reading because of a damaged sample. What
these really are are just brown bears. They're brown bears. Yes,
some other people followed up because, um, it's not like
it was any kind of hoax or anything like that. Wike, Um,
it's white, right. His last name is Wike Pikes Sikes.
(34:01):
Sikes is like a leading expert on um analyzing mitochondrial DNA,
wrote the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which kind
of introduced the world to genetic analysis through m M
T d n A. But um, he just made a
mistake or leapt to a conclusion. I think is the
the the thing that everyone's being too polite to to
(34:23):
maybe say. But he he shared all of his data
on gen Bank, which is this huge database, and other
people came and analyzed and said, now it's just regular bears.
And then other people analyzed and said, yeah, it's totally
just regular regular brown bears that we already know about. Yeah,
but that science at least was getting involved, and scientists
(34:44):
kind of round me were like, you know what, this
is great because we're using real science finally, and regardless
of what result we get, like we're doing it the
right way and that's really kind of the thing that counts, Like,
don't don't be disappointed that we're not finding the Ettie
because um, and if it's not clear to everyone listening,
(35:04):
it seems like the yetti are are almost always just bears. Yes,
that not just the the the the like tissue samples
or the fecal samples or the hair samples, but also
the tracks, the sightings, all of it are probably just
Himalayan bears, brown bears, and black bears. And that's actually
(35:26):
the opinion of Reinhold Messner, who actually is such a
mountaineer around the area. He has a um A museum
in the mountains and his one of his yettie samples
were one of the ones that Psykes analyzed. His turned
out to be the tooth of a dog. But he
says that doesn't surprise me, because I think they're all bears.
(35:48):
I think all of his bears, including his own sighting.
He became uh infatuated with searching for the yetti because
he spotted something in the Himalayas that he couldn't explain,
and then through his own with thought goal research, he
wrote a book about it. Um, he talked to other
people about it, he did his own studies, and he
kept his mind open and his mind became converted to
(36:08):
it's all bears. Yeah, pretty much. Um, the Russians got involved,
you would think, oh, and what like the nineteen sixties.
Now they got involved about eight years ago and went
searching for uh, the Yetty and Siberia. Uh. And what
they came back with were things like, oh, look at this,
these twisted tree branches were made into beds or sleeping
(36:32):
pods by the Yetty and they twisted these branches and
look at this, it's evidence. But it turns out that
they were clearly man made. There were tool made cuts,
and uh, they were located on a not in a
remote area at all, and just like right off a trail.
I think. Yeah, And what people think is, oh, they
just cooked this stuff up to try and bring tourism
(36:54):
to a not very tourist friendly area, right Siberia like
And apparently there's a longstanding tradition among um Russians and
former Soviets of basically drumming up tourism by playing on
people's beliefs in the Yetti and the abominable snowman um.
(37:15):
And I think there was a period of time. One
of the people interviewed in this great BBC article about
the Yetti Um, the the the this Russian scientist says,
there's a period of time where it was like very
fashionable for the intelligencia of Russia and the Soviet Union
to basically go on trips in the summer looking for
(37:36):
the abominable snowman. And they would show up in these towns,
and every town had a designated Yeti witness, and the
Yeti witnesses job was to basically regale them with tall
tales that were supposedly true, take them on these tours
into the forest um and then make a bunch of
money off of them and say thanks a lot, chump,
(37:57):
sorry we didn't see anything this time, but that they Apparently,
in two thousand and eleven, the Russian government orchestrated another
one of those um through this conference, and from the
conference they announced to the world they had found indisputable
proof that Yetti exists from this bed in these broken
branches and supposedly a few hairs attached to a clump
(38:18):
of moss. But some other people who were attending anthropolo
anthropologists and biologists were like, no, it's totally made up.
This is all just a big tourist pr stunt, which
is hilarious. Russia and putin supposedly tried to do it again.
In two thousand and sixteen, he announced that he saw
three yetti from a helicopter tour of Siberia. Oh that's funny. Yeah,
(38:47):
I think so too. So, I mean, I don't have
much else, Yettie your bears, right, Yeah, we couldn't. We
couldn't talk about crypto zoology though, without mentioning that Cela
canth argument. And and the thing about the YETI is
that there there was actually a species of ape called
(39:07):
gigant Epithecus that was like a nine ft tall ape,
the biggest ape that ever lived. UM, that lived in
that very area, and when extinct about a hundred thousand
years ago. So the people who really believe in this are, like,
you know, with that the cela can't went extinct like
sixty million years before. We just think this guy went
extinct a hundred thousand years before. Who's to say? So
(39:30):
that seems to be the thing that's carrying on this belief.
That and the fact that, as somebody put in one
of these um articles, uh, all it would take is
one yetti to prove that YETI exists. But no matter
how much, there's no such thing as evidence they can
prove it doesn't exist, so people are always going to
believe it exactly exactly. So there you go. Uh, if
(39:58):
you want to know more about yetti, go to the
Himalayas and look for it yourself. And since I said that,
it's time for a listener mail or we should mention.
If you're in Disney World, there's a roller coaster ride
called Expedition Everest Colon because you know every good roller
(40:18):
coaster has a colon in the name, uh, colon Legend
of the Forbidden Mountain there are there is a track
on display there that the reason it's not in a
scientific museum and it's a Disney World is because it's
a Yeti track. But you can go look at one
from a TV show. Yeah, this guy named Gates who
(40:39):
is not a zoologist at all, but he's an actor
and an animal track or I don't even think he's
an animal track or is he? No, No, he's he's
an actor and the TV presenter and a producer. Yeah.
So they presented one on his TV show and now
that's a Disney World. Yeah. So um, And if you're
in Disneyland, there's a Yetty on the Matterhorn ride. Oh,
(41:00):
really like a real yetti. Yeah, they have one chained
by the neck inside the matter horns. Really scrawny. They
clearly aren't taking very good care of amazing. I already
said it's time for listener mail, Charlis, Yeah, I got distracted. Sorry,
So I'm gonna call this, uh follow up on the
chili finger that Jimmy Stewart planted at Windy's. Uh And
(41:26):
and quick shout out there's a local listener from Georgia Tech.
But I just wanted to say hello to a couple
of people I met last weekend at the High Museum
when I went to the Infinity Mirrors exhibits. Oh isn't
that amazing? Yeah you always kusama um, Yeah, I thought
it was. Here's what I think. I think it was
really cool. And it would have been a lot cooler
(41:48):
if it's just like, yeah, you just walk through all
these things and you don't wait thirty minutes to spend
twenty seconds in the room. Yep. That took away from
it a bit, you you mean? And I went at
the into the day and people thinned out and we
could just keep going in and staying as long as
we wanted and them, so I I totally get what
you're saying. It was cool though, and I also think
(42:10):
like I went with my brother and his family, and
Scott was kind of like I could build one of
these in my backyard. By next weekend, I wanted to
see Scott's Infinity mirror. I thought the same thing. Would
be awesome to build one of those and just like
hang out in it. For sure, I don't want to
take anything away from her though. She's a great artist
and it was really neat. I love the uh. I
(42:30):
think the one that was sort of like the Christmas
lights was my favorite one. What about the one that's
like a kind of like an octagonal box that you
look in? That was awesome. Yeah, it's just like you
see your future in the eighties or something like that. Yeah.
I got a couple of cool photos, and but I
largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried
to be in it. Man, yeah, man, I'm with you.
(42:52):
So anyway, I met a couple of listeners that were
just happen to be there, and they both came up
and like are you Chuck, and so my brother got
to kick out of that as well. Oh that's awesome. Um,
but this was not one of those people. It just
reminded me because it's a Georgia Tech student. Hey, guys,
relatively new listener have probably listened to about a hundred
episode so far and tend to hop around. As you
(43:14):
can tell, I'm a Georgia Tech student and really hope
to run into you guys. At some point in Atlanta,
did I mention I go to Georgia Tech. Anyway, I
finally sort of had something to write in about it.
Was listening to the Wendy's Chili podcast suddenly heard the
name of a place. It sounded very familiar, Cole's Custard.
Remember we mentioned that at the end as a as
a place where there was a finger. Oh yeah, he
(43:35):
said it was one of the places where a finger
had been found. And it shocked me as it is
just a tiny little custard shop that is not a
chain on quite expensive beach property in North Carolina. I've
been as a Georgia Tech student. I was shocked. I've
been to the place probably five or ten times as
a frequent wizard of Rightsful Beach and then never heard
(43:55):
of anyone mentioned this incident. I just think it's very
impressive that a small little store managed stay afloat after
such an incident occurred. Hearing about the finger incident will
not determine from going again, though, And that is from
Ethan Lyons and Ethan. Maybe that is exactly why it endured.
It's because people just want that custard so bad. It
must be pretty good custard though, if you think about it. Yeah,
(44:18):
and it didn't make like big national news, probably because
it's not a chain I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm
sure that's part of it. Plus they also did a
better job spending the pr than Wendy's didn't. Sure, I'm betting. Well,
thanks a lot, Ethan for letting us know, just kind
of bringing that home. Hadn't really envisioned the place where
that finger was found in the custard until now, so
(44:40):
thanks for that. If you want to get in touch
with us and kind of paint a more illustrative picture
than we did about something we talked about, we love that,
you can join us on Stuff you Should Know dot com.
Check out all of our links there, or you can
send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
(45:04):
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M hmm.
Welcome to Stuff you should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over
there somewhere over there, And this is stuff you should know,
(00:22):
the Continuing Cryptozoology Edition. Oh, this finishes it, right. Oh,
I don't know about that. We've done Bigfoot, Locknest monster yetti.
Well you haven't done like, um, moth Man. That's the Chupacabra. Chupacabra.
That's a big one too. Yeah. This slender Man, Slenderman
(00:43):
is more Internet folklore than anything. Uh did we do
that one? Or did we think about it and not
do it? The ladder of those two? If I remember correctly,
I said it stinks or something. Yeah, if I remember correctly,
hurt my feelings. Oh my in I think it was.
I think we could do slender Man now, it was
(01:05):
just so early on that Um it was very thin.
Now I think it would be more robust. Yeah that's right. Um, well,
today we're talking about the Yeti, which is not slender
Depending on which yetti you're talking about, Chuck, it's either
enormous and like eight feet tall, covered in gray or
(01:26):
white or maybe sometimes reddish hair, weighing four pounds easily
or actually it is kind of slender. It could be
basically what amounts to a wild hippie, basically a somebody
who likes to grub roots out of the ground and
(01:46):
lets out a squeal or a cry every once in
a while just to I guess know that they're alive.
And um. There's really two competing versions of what those
of us in the Western world would would inc was
the Yeti. But the one we're really talking about is
the first one, what we also think of as the
abominable Snowman. How tall it was, hippie rob uh? He
(02:11):
was average like five something, I guess, like high five.
He was a little shorter than me. Yeah right, he
was not. He was not the uh. He was not
the the Yeti of legend as far as I know.
He could be now though well I don't know. It
just sounded an awful lot like him, kind of test
he opened in the mountains grubbing for roots, yep, covered
(02:35):
in dirt and with wild, crazy hair. So I think
we should just tell, like, if you don't know what
we're talking about, this is the um the legendary beasts
that lives in Asia. Yeah, around the Himalayas typically. Yeah,
so it's known as Asia's Bigfoot, or maybe Bigfoot is
(02:55):
known as North America's Yetti. I don't know, Uh, I
guess Yetti came first, right, Yeah, I think yet he's
been around with the Sherpa of Tibet for a very
long time. Yeah. And that's sort of the deal of this.
The origin story of this thing is the Yetti has
been told um for many, many years in traditional stories
(03:18):
in that area. Um, there's a there was someone named
um Shiva dot Call that collected a bunch of these
stories in a book called folk Tales of Sherpa and Yetti,
and all of them kind of figured the same way,
which was whether it's a story called the Annihilation of
the Yetti uh, in which this is pretty good. It's
(03:39):
about sherpas seeking revenge on a tormenting group of Yettis
this sounds like something that should be on like the
Sci Fi channel. I would be very surprised if it wasn't.
But all of these stories basically have the same moral
um message at the end, which is because it's sort
of like a grim's fairy tale. Like be careful out
(04:01):
on the woods. Actually, yeah exactly. I think it serves
the exact same purpose to like in the Grimm's fairy Tales,
and I thought the same thing. Um, you know, there's
witches that live in candy houses, so don't go wandering
off in the woods kids, because you'll end up getting eaten.
For little kids in Tibet, it was don't wander off
into the Tibetan plateau or the YETI will get you,
(04:23):
and you will all sorts of terrible things will happen
to you, which is funny because they are all sorts
of real things that could kill you in the Tibetan plateau. Well,
that's why I think what they were saying was, you know,
you can't just be like, look out for the bears.
You can. Kid will be like, I don't know. I
can see a brash kid being like, no bear, everybody
knows what a bear is. All rustle a bear any
(04:44):
day of the week. And then you know, along the
way it gets into a drinking contest with Marion from
Indiana Jones right, right exactly. That was one of the
best scenes in the history of film. Yeah, I think so,
And Tibetan kids tend to agree with me too. But
before we move on, I want to say one thing,
(05:06):
that annihilation of the Yetti. Keep keep that in the
back of your mind. And the story was that, like,
there are a bunch of Yetti that, um, we're hanging
around and the Sherpa we're sick of them hanging around.
So the sherp but basically through a YETI party and
got drunk and fought with each other to kind of
provide an example to the Yetti. Hey, you should get
drunk and fight with each other too, in the hopes
(05:27):
of the Yeti would destroy each other. It didn't work,
and the Yetti all managed to escape, except for one
who was supposedly killed by a a llama, one of
the Buddhist monks in the area. That's part of the story.
That's the end. That's the annihilation of the Yetti story.
I didn't know a Lama figured in. And really, annihilation
(05:50):
is kind of a strong word if you think about it,
because if you just killed one out of I think
two and forty Yeti, it's hardly annihilation. That's a good point.
I think so too. Uh So, throughout history, these legends
have been pervasive in the region so much so that
supposedly the great Alexander or Alexander the Great, I'm that's
(06:14):
sure why I did that. When he came through town
and conquered the Indus Valley, he said, Uh, I can
see one of your famous I don't know if that's
what Alexander the Great sounded like. No, No, what did
ancient Roman sound like? I was he Roman? I think
(06:35):
he was Greek? That was he? Cheeze? How about really
screwed that up? Usa? I knew that do a German accent.
I'm just slow. I'm just gonna leave. No, han, hank,
tight chuck, you can rebound. Yeah. Why why did I
(06:55):
think he was Roman in that Greek? Well, because the
Romans like to pretend they were Greek themselves. I'm not
firing on all cylinders. But regardless of my bad accent,
or maybe I should just edit back in and say
that was my Greek accent. There you go. Uh he said,
I want to see a YETI and they the local
locals that were like, you know, we totally would do that. However,
(07:18):
um that you can't get them down this low, and
you'd have to hike really high up in those mountains.
And I know you're not down with that, so sorry, yeah, exactly.
So I guess Alexander the Great was like, I'm board,
I can't believe we're still talking about this. Give me
some wine. Pretty gotten a drinking contest, and that was that.
So the yett he continued on in in Scherpa tradition
(07:40):
in Tibetan, Nepal, and Bhutan, but um in the West
it kind of disappeared from view until the twentieth century.
And so remember these are tall tales that the the
Scherpa teach their kids, although there is supposedly some I
guess general belief as well, but I can't I can't
(08:02):
quite penetrate it. But just imagine that it was just
strictly tall tales Serpa people told their kids. Then Westerners
came in and said, what is this you're talking about?
Tell us about this and just bought the whole thing
hook line and sinker. Yeah, and things really took for him.
In nine there's a journalist named Henry Newman. He did
an interview with some British explorers. And this is a
(08:26):
time of great exploration, especially from the British. Uh these
sort of uh these, I guess uh, Indiana Jones, like
mountaineers who would go all over the world in search
of these you know, jungles and mountains in church of
crazy beasts and treasures and things like that. So, uh,
(08:46):
he interviewed some of these guys and they said, you
know what, we found these huge footprints up in the
mountains and the locals there. I guess Serpa said, because
with in arpa the plural sharpa didn't me did from it?
I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Um, that was a good episode,
by the way, everyone, it was go back and listen
(09:06):
to that one. What was the title of Warm, Friendly Living, Yeah,
because that's I think what tending Nor said. So great.
So they said that their guides are Sherpa guides. Um
called them mito kangm which the translation, the real translation
is a little awkward man bear snowman. Right, but Newman
(09:30):
confused all that. He got the snowman part right, but
he translated that first part to mean mato m e
t o h two mean filthy or dirty, and then
he changed that on his own to the word abominable,
and that's the way we get the abominable snowman. Yeah,
he was like, I don't like filthy Snowman. I'm going
(09:50):
to change the name that I've already gotten wrong, right
and turned it into abominable Snowman. Yeah, he really great journalist,
But it's fascinating that you can trace it back to
this one dummy. That's the whole the abominable Snowman. That's
where it came from, was this one guy, and that
obviously just completely captured the attention of the rest of
(10:11):
the world when he he wrote this, because like this
was not just like, oh yeah, they heard about an
abominable snowman. It was these these explorers found tracks and
they're sure, but guides told them the trucks belonged to
this abominable snowman. Therefore, there are abominable snowmen living in
the Himalayas. And the explorer who was who led that
(10:33):
particular expedition was Charles Howard Berry Um Howard Hyphen Berry
b U R y and Um. Apparently he and Newman
were really big into promoting the idea of an abominable
snowman or men living in the Himalayas, and that it
just being like this giant, huge creature with shaggy hair
(10:53):
and very much akin to Bigfoot. But if you look
at the descriptions, the aditional descriptions of the YETI they're
they're much smaller and not nearly as huge as um.
The Westerners kind of immediately made it out to be. Yeah,
there was one description, one of the earlier written descriptions
from two There was a researcher named Mira Shackley, and
(11:17):
I believe that she got this information from uh, two
hikers that reported seeing the yetti. Uh, and this is
what they said. The height was not much less than
eight feet so tall for sure, but it's not like
it was ten ft tall. Uh. The head were the heads,
(11:39):
because there were two of them, were described as squarish,
and the ears must lie close to the skull because
there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow.
The shoulders sloped slowly down to a powerful chest covered
by reddish brown hair which formed a close body fur
mixed with long, straight hairs hanging downward about the size
(11:59):
and bill to a small man. The head covered with
long hair, but the face and chest not very hairy
at all. This this all sounds like they always describe
him as or it is bipedal right, means you know,
walking upright, right. But if you if you go back
and look at that description and how detailed it was.
(12:21):
Those hikers who gave the description said that they they
saw they saw all this from observing two black specks
moving across the snow about a quarter mile below them.
And yet they could see that it had a thick
undercoat and like a very long, hairy overcoat and that
was reddish, and like that's just just basically perfect abominable
(12:44):
snowman sighting. Yeah, but but it's one of like many
like after after that Howard Berry expedition came back in
and Newman broadcasts to the world, people started going to
the Himalayas and droves, and they weren't just necessarily looking
for the abominable Stowe Man. Everest was there, and everybody
knew Everest was there, and a lot of people wanted
(13:06):
to be the first one to summit Everest, the first Westerner,
i should say, to summit Everest, so that while a
lot of them were in the area, they're like, well,
we'll look for the abominable snowman while we're here too. Yeah,
and some pretty legendary mountaineers um and granted these are
not like zoologist or anything, but their respected men in
(13:26):
their field, people like Reinhold Messner and one Sir Edmund
Hillary both searched for evidence of the Eddy while they
were hiking. Uh and Messner even wrote a book called
My Quest for the Yetty, Confronting the Himalayas Deepest Mystery.
But I mean, well, well, we'll save the big reveal
(13:47):
to the end or the third act of this show.
Okay is your third act? Yeah, there's gotta be Okay,
we're in big trouble. If there's not, well, why don't
we take a break and then we'll come back and
talk a little bit about a couple more of these
reported sightings. Let's do it all right, Well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn
(14:08):
a thing or two from Josh Damp Chuck stuff you
should know, all right, to Chuck? Okay, Chuck. So, uh,
(14:31):
we've we've started to get some sightings from expeditions that
are going to Everest and just hanging around the Himalayas
um and then I think in nineteen one, something really
big happened. One of those explorers, Eric Shipton, took a
photograph of a track that to this day looks pretty remarkable.
(14:53):
Actually yeah. I mean this is again it's not like
hard evidence, but this is a very famous otto. I
remember seeing this when I was a kid, and like,
I guess it was probably the Guinness or Ripley's Believe
It or Not or something. It was Time Life books
for me, was it? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I remember that.
It's a very famous picture of a like a a
(15:14):
pick because you know pick axe yeah, used for scale, Yeah,
right next to it. And I remember that very distinctly.
When I saw this picture, I was like, oh yeah.
And then when you look at it, you're like, wait,
that that doesn't look quite right. That's a really weird track.
It's it looks like an elongated human foot, but rather
than a left toe. Um, it's it's got, it's kind
(15:39):
of bulbous and weird. It doesn't look like the other toes,
and it certainly doesn't look like what a human toe
should look like. And it's also huge. I think it
was measured about thirteen inches, which is a pretty typical
size for a YETI track from what I understand over
the ages. But the thing about it is it is
a nice, crisp, fresh track. And the other thing about
(16:04):
and this is what really captured the attention of the world.
Eric Shipton was not known to be a particularly fraudulent person.
He was a very respected explorer and mountaineer. He knew
the area well and as a guy who has tracked
Yettie his whole life. Um, I believe his name is
Daniel Taylor. Um. Daniel Taylor put it. If if Shipton
(16:26):
is coming back with a picture of a track, you
just you know, it's a real track. It's not faked,
it's not a hoax. So the question was what was it?
And this is one and it hit the world. That picture,
that track hit the world like the surgeon's photo of
the Lockness Monster hit the world at back in ninety three.
(16:47):
It just became like proof to people who believe in
the Yettie around the world that the Yetie definitely exists. Yeah,
I mean, like you said, it was really Um what
what made it different than other photos? That it was
so sharp, it was a really good picture. Um. And
that that little um toe thing basically looked like a
(17:09):
thumb and it just, you know, it looked odd. But
this this Daniel Taylor guy, he actually when I started
reading that article, I thought, oh boy, this crack pot.
But he actually turned out to be a pretty cool
guy because he'd spent a lot of his life looking
for the Yeti. Went over there, even met with the
King of Nepal, and the King of Nepal said, well,
(17:31):
if you want to go like to the wildest place
and the most you know, remote place in our land,
go to Barroon b a r U n this Baroun valley.
And he went there and he looked around and he
uh did not find a yeti. But what he did
do was ended up helping to work towards conservation of
(17:53):
that area, which was kind of a nice silver lining
to his story was he got there and he was like,
this is of the most beautiful places on Earth, right
and one of the greatest wilderness wildernesses I've ever been to.
He realized it wasn't protected and that like Chinese loggers
were infringing on one side and farmers were infringing on
the other. So he kind of spun it into like
(18:16):
good work doing conservation work in that area, which was
kind of cool. Yeah, you got it turned into a
national park in Nepal. It's a protected area now, which
is significant. Have you seen pictures of the valley it's astounding.
It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen
in my life, and it was just being used because
the people living there like, well, we need this land. Yeah,
(18:39):
it's beautiful, but we can't afford to preserve it because
a lot of people around here live on fifteen dollars
a year um. So they were just making use of
it however they could. And he he came in with
the government said no, no, no more of that, get
out of here. This is protected now. But it is
gorgeous and his his he had actually been raised there.
Daniel Taylor's grandparents were miss canaries in the Himalayas, and
(19:02):
his parents kind of took over his grandparents work, so
he was raised in the Himalayas. So he'd been looking
for the eddies whole life. But when he went to
the baron Um, he feels like he found the answer
to that track that it was a kind of tree bear.
But there's there's a big problem with that. The Barun
Valley is a subtropical rainforest, so a tree bear living
(19:24):
in there wouldn't survive very very well in the snow
and the Tibettan Tibetan plateau, you know, ten ten thousand
or more feet higher up the mountain, So it doesn't
really solve the mystery much, no, but his notion that
it could have been a tree bear makes a little
more sense with these tracks, because a tree bear does
(19:44):
have a um I don't I don't know if you
call it a thumb, but some sort of opposable digit
to make climbing easier, and that that would at least
explain this weird thumblike thing in these prints. It would.
So he's got like half of the thing explained. The
other half is what the heck was that tree bears,
the subtropical rainforest tree bear doing up in the mountains
(20:06):
of the Himalayas, you know what I'm saying, Like in
the snow above the snow line, I guess, is what
I'm trying to say. But the other thing about that
um that shipped in photo that became world famous for
the yetti um was that, like the track itself, was
very crisp. And there's a guy named Benjamin Radford who's
(20:26):
a skeptic who has written a lot about the Yetti
um and in particular how how difficult obtaining yetti tracks
could be, or actually, more to the point how easy
it would be to confuse the normal animals tracks or
something weird because of the fact that the snow is
a terrible medium for tracks, because like say a bear
(20:50):
walks through an area, leaves some tracks in the snow.
The next morning, as the sun comes up and it
hits the tracks and it shoots all that heat on
this under that track, it starts to melt the sides,
maybe elongate it, maybe make the toes look splayed, And
it just doesn't resemble a bear track anymore at all.
It looks like something weird and and and um not
(21:13):
previously known, like an entirely new species. That's the thing
about the shift in photograph that captured everyone's attention. It
doesn't look like that at all. It looks sharp new,
it doesn't look melted at all. The edges are clean
and crisp. That's why I think really kind of struck everybody.
It wasn't like a melted, mangled track. It was like
(21:34):
a new track by something that was not immediately identifiable. Yeah,
for sure. So there have been other photographs through the years.
Uh as you know, supposed evidence in hiker name Anthony
Wooldridge UM said there's a YETI over there, he's about
five feet away, and uh, he saw a bunch of
(21:56):
tracks in the snow that looked like that was going
that way, and he took some photographs that were proven genuine.
But I think by genuine that just means they weren't faked. Yeah,
that's what I That's how I understand it, because wasn't
this the photo that they said, actually those are just
rocks standing up, Yeah, like rock outcropping or whatever. Yeah,
(22:19):
this guy was also a respected mountaineer and explorer in
New the area really well. And so when he came
back with this photo and they said this photo wasn't faked,
it's not been doctored. People people listen to him too.
But it just turns out he was wrong. This photo
of rocks has not been doctored exactly. That's that's ultimately
(22:39):
what they were saying. Because another expedition went back to
the same spot the next year and we're like, oh, yeah,
that's that's those rocks over there. And even even in
his account, um, that guy what was his name, Woodridge,
Woodridge says like, yeah, they just stood there motionless, Yeah
they were they were still his boulders up brave boulders.
(23:03):
But the other thing is he swore that there were
tracks leading up to it, so he he seemed to
think that that they really were there. But from what
I understand, he was earnest in his report. It wasn't
like a fraud or a hoax or anything like that.
And I think he was a little a little red
faced afterward. Probably. Yeah, they even made a movie about
it called Ernest Goes Hiking. All right, Ernest Saves Christmas
(23:26):
with the Abominable Snowman. I'll bet Ernest did save Christmas
in one movie. I guarantee there was a movie called
Ernest Saves Christmas. I think I think there was right now.
The only one I'm a d percent sure of his
Ernest Goes to Camp. I never saw any of those.
My family saw that movie in the theater Top Dollar,
(23:47):
Top Dollar, which was three dollars. Yeah, I guess, I
hope so at the time, which is surprising because my
mom used to sneak in bolt candy from like the
little store across the way from the movie theater in
Southwick Mall. Yeah, we know that move in our family.
It works works really well. Uh So, over the years,
there have been not only things like, oh, look footprints,
(24:09):
or hey, look at that rock across the valley. Uh.
There there have been Uh. I don't want to call
it evidence, but um alleged evidence brought forward by legitimate scientists. Uh,
and people like Sir Edmund Hillary, like he brought back
a scalp and said he didn't say I scalped the Yetti,
(24:31):
but he said, hey, I think this is a Yettie scalp. Yeah.
He was trying to fool anyone, though, was he? No? No, No,
he was supposedly kind of a casual believer in it.
He'd been sent on a Yetti expedition by New World
Encyclopedia years before, and he came back with a a
Yeti skull cap that he'd gotten from a monastery in Nepal.
(24:53):
They had a Yetti skull cap and a hand, a
Yetie hand and mummified Jetti hand. And what's crazy is
the Yeti skull cap was supposedly the the scalp of
the one Jetti that had been killed during the annihilation
of the Yetti story. So he brings it back. I
think it wasn't that he was gullible, And I also
(25:15):
I'm sure it wasn't that it was. He was a hoaxter.
He was the kind of scientific person who kept his
mind open until the evidence was in. Man, can you
imagine a time when an encyclopedia company would send Sir
Edmund Hillary out on assignment? Like, how great is that?
I know that was the mid twentieth century. It was
(25:37):
a great, great time to be alive in the way
of wonder and curiosity. Uh so, Yeah, he comes back
with a scalp and it turns out they did a
little research and it was a It's an animal called
a sero. It's kind of like a goat. You have
some poor serro got scalped. Yeah, but that happened a
lot like, Um, there was this finger and this is
(25:59):
a pretty good story or um that actor Jimmy Stewart,
believe it or not, was involved in smuggling out supposed
yetti finger. Yeah, from from again from a monastery. I
believe it might have been the same monastery. Yeah. And
wouldn't he just on vacation there and just got sort
of mixed up in this plan? Yeah. We gotta mention
(26:20):
Tom Slick, the oil man, Yeah, because he figures into
this story. Uh. He was a rich guy who uh
he was one of these dudes is sort of adventuring
rich guys. That was like, I'm a Yeti hunter for
this year. Yeah, and when when you say hunter, like
he was a hunter. His entire point to finding the
(26:41):
yet he was to shoot and kill it and to
take it back and have it stuffed. And um, the
government Nepaul had a real problem with that and basically said,
your expedition is is banned. Nobody can come in here
and kill the Yetti. And apparently the U. S. State
Department got in touch with Nepal and said, hey, by
the way, we have the same feeling. We we have
(27:01):
a policy of not killing Yeti either. So apparently with that, um,
Tom Slick's expedition was allowed back in on the basis
that they would never try to kill the Yeti except
in self defense. And I guess later on, when he
became interested in bigfoot, he had a change of heart
(27:22):
and he stopped decided he stopped hunting to kill and
started hunting just to find and maybe capture on photograph
and that was it. And that his change of heart
um change the way that bigfoot is searched for to
this day, and the Yeti now much more. Yeah, it's
much more peaceful search. He was like the last of
(27:42):
the UM big game hunters involved in like trying to
find unidentified animals again to kill them so they could
be stuffed and kept at the National Geographic Society or
something like that. Yeah, I mean, and that was a
big thing that um Daniels guy talks about, just these
legends and history and how quote unquote science back then
was in the Victorian age were we're because you know,
(28:05):
all these tales of Tarzan and these fantastic beasts. People
would just these rich people would go into the jungle
and search for animals that no one had ever seen
before so they could shoot and kill them and bring
them back and say, look at this weird thing, right,
And I mean a lot of people like don't really
(28:26):
like you. You point to the guys who were out
there like doing the hunting and killing and the exploitation
and all of that, but they were very frequently working
at the behest of museums, sure, who for a very
long time got to pass even though they were the
source of the um those expeditions and the funders of
those expeditions, and the reason people were out there in
the first place was to go get specimens for the
(28:48):
museum's collections and ostensibly to study or whatever, but it
was to study them dead. And I think probably because
there wasn't really any reliable way to ship a live
specimen back in a lot of ways, but also there
there was um so I think Tom Slick kind of
represented the the end of that and at the beginning
of the new, this new era of much more peaceful
(29:11):
exploration and expeditions. Yeah, And I don't want to leave
everyone hanging on Jimmy Stewart. He was only he was
on vacation I think in Calcutta, got mixed up in
this uh in this yetie finger helps smuggle it back
and they finally did DNA testing about seven or eight
years ago and they said, oh, this is a human finger, right,
(29:34):
But I mean for a while there they weren't sure.
And I guess Tom Slick was friends had a common
friend h with Jimmy Stewart, and Jimmy Stewart happened to
be in India, and so Tom Slick's agents and Nepaul
managed to get this finger to Jimmy Stewart, who agreed
to smuggle it out on the basis that Jimmy Stewart's
(29:56):
luggage is not gonna get searched. And Jimmy Stewart's smuggled
a jettie finger out of India and to the UK
for it to be studied. I'll go go, go ahead
and put the finger in my bag. So ho big
you're gonna do Jimmy Stewart Eddie. In my head, I
(30:16):
was like, Jimmy Stewart, can I blow that off? You did? Man?
You nailed it? All right. Well, let's take another break
and we'll come back and talk more about DNA and
how that has figured in uh in the search of
more recent years. Right after this, well, now we're on
the road driving in your truck. Want to learn a
thing or two from Josh Damn Chuck. Stuff you should know,
(30:41):
all right, Chuck, so check you remember in the Lochness episode,
the Lockness Monster episode, we talked about how there's like
a new search going on where they're sampling the lock
(31:04):
itself and examining it for d NA UM. Apparently, applying
modern genetics and genetic analysis to cryptozoology is like the
next chapter and rather than saying like, oh, well that's
say for us, are are big? Fraud? Is over with?
Cryptozoologists are like, awesome, good, we finally have the tools
(31:26):
now to find out to get to the bottom of
this stuff and to actually discover new new specimens or
new um species um. So there seemed to be quite
happy about it and quite excited, although the there a
lot of their beliefs hang in the balance and could
just be have the legs cut out from under him
by science. That's science wins. In two thousan, there's a
(31:50):
geneticist at Oxford named Brian Sykes who said, all right, yetti, Uh,
holders of Yetti pieces, send them to me. If you
have any Yetti hair, Yetti teeth, Yetti tissue, send it
Oxford University. And he got it. He got fifty seven samples. Uh.
They picked thirty six of those to do some DNA
(32:12):
analysis on and uh most of these turned out to
be animals that we all know, like bears and cows
and horses um. At the time though that he found
a couple of samples from Bhutan in India that he said,
we're a percent match for jaw bones of a polar
(32:35):
bear from the Pleistocene era. Yeah, and this kind of
excited people because this may have been I mean not
the Yetti. But this may have been sort of a combination,
a hybrid of a polar bear and a brown bear,
because this is when they were diverging genetically, and that
in itself would be a pretty cool find. Yeah, oh yeah,
it would be a new type of bear that was
(32:58):
a direct descended from bears that went extinct about forty
years ago, and it would be a type of polar bear.
There aren't polar bears in the Himalayas. There's black bears
as brown bears, there's him Alaan bears, there's tree bears,
but there's not polar bears. So and the fact that
like he accidentally found this by putting out this call
(33:18):
for for samples of Yeti or Bigfoot or whoever, Um
just made it all the all the sweeter that like
he had just accidentally discovered a new type of polar
bear living in the Himalayas. Yeah, but sadly that was
not even the case. Um. Some more scientists came along later.
They did re analysis, and I think what they landed
(33:39):
on was, you know, unfortunately these uh, I think you're
getting a bad reading because of a damaged sample. What
these really are are just brown bears. They're brown bears. Yes,
some other people followed up because, um, it's not like
it was any kind of hoax or anything like that. Wike, Um,
it's white, right. His last name is Wike Pikes Sikes.
(34:01):
Sikes is like a leading expert on um analyzing mitochondrial DNA,
wrote the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which kind
of introduced the world to genetic analysis through m M
T d n A. But um, he just made a
mistake or leapt to a conclusion. I think is the
the the thing that everyone's being too polite to to
(34:23):
maybe say. But he he shared all of his data
on gen Bank, which is this huge database, and other
people came and analyzed and said, now it's just regular bears.
And then other people analyzed and said, yeah, it's totally
just regular regular brown bears that we already know about. Yeah,
but that science at least was getting involved, and scientists
(34:44):
kind of round me were like, you know what, this
is great because we're using real science finally, and regardless
of what result we get, like we're doing it the
right way and that's really kind of the thing that counts, Like,
don't don't be disappointed that we're not finding the Ettie
because um, and if it's not clear to everyone listening,
(35:04):
it seems like the yetti are are almost always just bears. Yes,
that not just the the the the like tissue samples
or the fecal samples or the hair samples, but also
the tracks, the sightings, all of it are probably just
Himalayan bears, brown bears, and black bears. And that's actually
(35:26):
the opinion of Reinhold Messner, who actually is such a
mountaineer around the area. He has a um A museum
in the mountains and his one of his yettie samples
were one of the ones that Psykes analyzed. His turned
out to be the tooth of a dog. But he
says that doesn't surprise me, because I think they're all bears.
(35:48):
I think all of his bears, including his own sighting.
He became uh infatuated with searching for the yetti because
he spotted something in the Himalayas that he couldn't explain,
and then through his own with thought goal research, he
wrote a book about it. Um, he talked to other
people about it, he did his own studies, and he
kept his mind open and his mind became converted to
(36:08):
it's all bears. Yeah, pretty much. Um, the Russians got involved,
you would think, oh, and what like the nineteen sixties.
Now they got involved about eight years ago and went
searching for uh, the Yetty and Siberia. Uh. And what
they came back with were things like, oh, look at this,
these twisted tree branches were made into beds or sleeping
(36:32):
pods by the Yetty and they twisted these branches and
look at this, it's evidence. But it turns out that
they were clearly man made. There were tool made cuts,
and uh, they were located on a not in a
remote area at all, and just like right off a trail.
I think. Yeah, And what people think is, oh, they
just cooked this stuff up to try and bring tourism
(36:54):
to a not very tourist friendly area, right Siberia like
And apparently there's a longstanding tradition among um Russians and
former Soviets of basically drumming up tourism by playing on
people's beliefs in the Yetti and the abominable snowman um.
(37:15):
And I think there was a period of time. One
of the people interviewed in this great BBC article about
the Yetti Um, the the the this Russian scientist says,
there's a period of time where it was like very
fashionable for the intelligencia of Russia and the Soviet Union
to basically go on trips in the summer looking for
(37:36):
the abominable snowman. And they would show up in these towns,
and every town had a designated Yeti witness, and the
Yeti witnesses job was to basically regale them with tall
tales that were supposedly true, take them on these tours
into the forest um and then make a bunch of
money off of them and say thanks a lot, chump,
(37:57):
sorry we didn't see anything this time, but that they Apparently,
in two thousand and eleven, the Russian government orchestrated another
one of those um through this conference, and from the
conference they announced to the world they had found indisputable
proof that Yetti exists from this bed in these broken
branches and supposedly a few hairs attached to a clump
(38:18):
of moss. But some other people who were attending anthropolo
anthropologists and biologists were like, no, it's totally made up.
This is all just a big tourist pr stunt, which
is hilarious. Russia and putin supposedly tried to do it again.
In two thousand and sixteen, he announced that he saw
three yetti from a helicopter tour of Siberia. Oh that's funny. Yeah,
(38:47):
I think so too. So, I mean, I don't have
much else, Yettie your bears, right, Yeah, we couldn't. We
couldn't talk about crypto zoology though, without mentioning that Cela
canth argument. And and the thing about the YETI is
that there there was actually a species of ape called
(39:07):
gigant Epithecus that was like a nine ft tall ape,
the biggest ape that ever lived. UM, that lived in
that very area, and when extinct about a hundred thousand
years ago. So the people who really believe in this are, like,
you know, with that the cela can't went extinct like
sixty million years before. We just think this guy went
extinct a hundred thousand years before. Who's to say? So
(39:30):
that seems to be the thing that's carrying on this belief.
That and the fact that, as somebody put in one
of these um articles, uh, all it would take is
one yetti to prove that YETI exists. But no matter
how much, there's no such thing as evidence they can
prove it doesn't exist, so people are always going to
believe it exactly exactly. So there you go. Uh, if
(39:58):
you want to know more about yetti, go to the
Himalayas and look for it yourself. And since I said that,
it's time for a listener mail or we should mention.
If you're in Disney World, there's a roller coaster ride
called Expedition Everest Colon because you know every good roller
(40:18):
coaster has a colon in the name, uh, colon Legend
of the Forbidden Mountain there are there is a track
on display there that the reason it's not in a
scientific museum and it's a Disney World is because it's
a Yeti track. But you can go look at one
from a TV show. Yeah, this guy named Gates who
(40:39):
is not a zoologist at all, but he's an actor
and an animal track or I don't even think he's
an animal track or is he? No, No, he's he's
an actor and the TV presenter and a producer. Yeah.
So they presented one on his TV show and now
that's a Disney World. Yeah. So um, And if you're
in Disneyland, there's a Yetty on the Matterhorn ride. Oh,
(41:00):
really like a real yetti. Yeah, they have one chained
by the neck inside the matter horns. Really scrawny. They
clearly aren't taking very good care of amazing. I already
said it's time for listener mail, Charlis, Yeah, I got distracted. Sorry,
So I'm gonna call this, uh follow up on the
chili finger that Jimmy Stewart planted at Windy's. Uh And
(41:26):
and quick shout out there's a local listener from Georgia Tech.
But I just wanted to say hello to a couple
of people I met last weekend at the High Museum
when I went to the Infinity Mirrors exhibits. Oh isn't
that amazing? Yeah you always kusama um, Yeah, I thought
it was. Here's what I think. I think it was
really cool. And it would have been a lot cooler
(41:48):
if it's just like, yeah, you just walk through all
these things and you don't wait thirty minutes to spend
twenty seconds in the room. Yep. That took away from
it a bit, you you mean? And I went at
the into the day and people thinned out and we
could just keep going in and staying as long as
we wanted and them, so I I totally get what
you're saying. It was cool though, and I also think
(42:10):
like I went with my brother and his family, and
Scott was kind of like I could build one of
these in my backyard. By next weekend, I wanted to
see Scott's Infinity mirror. I thought the same thing. Would
be awesome to build one of those and just like
hang out in it. For sure, I don't want to
take anything away from her though. She's a great artist
and it was really neat. I love the uh. I
(42:30):
think the one that was sort of like the Christmas
lights was my favorite one. What about the one that's
like a kind of like an octagonal box that you
look in? That was awesome. Yeah, it's just like you
see your future in the eighties or something like that. Yeah.
I got a couple of cool photos, and but I
largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried
to be in it. Man, yeah, man, I'm with you.
(42:52):
So anyway, I met a couple of listeners that were
just happen to be there, and they both came up
and like are you Chuck, and so my brother got
to kick out of that as well. Oh that's awesome. Um,
but this was not one of those people. It just
reminded me because it's a Georgia Tech student. Hey, guys,
relatively new listener have probably listened to about a hundred
episode so far and tend to hop around. As you
(43:14):
can tell, I'm a Georgia Tech student and really hope
to run into you guys. At some point in Atlanta,
did I mention I go to Georgia Tech. Anyway, I
finally sort of had something to write in about it.
Was listening to the Wendy's Chili podcast suddenly heard the
name of a place. It sounded very familiar, Cole's Custard.
Remember we mentioned that at the end as a as
a place where there was a finger. Oh yeah, he
(43:35):
said it was one of the places where a finger
had been found. And it shocked me as it is
just a tiny little custard shop that is not a
chain on quite expensive beach property in North Carolina. I've
been as a Georgia Tech student. I was shocked. I've
been to the place probably five or ten times as
a frequent wizard of Rightsful Beach and then never heard
(43:55):
of anyone mentioned this incident. I just think it's very
impressive that a small little store managed stay afloat after
such an incident occurred. Hearing about the finger incident will
not determine from going again, though, And that is from
Ethan Lyons and Ethan. Maybe that is exactly why it endured.
It's because people just want that custard so bad. It
must be pretty good custard though, if you think about it. Yeah,
(44:18):
and it didn't make like big national news, probably because
it's not a chain I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm
sure that's part of it. Plus they also did a
better job spending the pr than Wendy's didn't. Sure, I'm betting. Well,
thanks a lot, Ethan for letting us know, just kind
of bringing that home. Hadn't really envisioned the place where
that finger was found in the custard until now, so
(44:40):
thanks for that. If you want to get in touch
with us and kind of paint a more illustrative picture
than we did about something we talked about, we love that,
you can join us on Stuff you Should Know dot com.
Check out all of our links there, or you can
send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
(45:04):
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M hmm.
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