From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noman.
They call be Bed. We're joined as always with our super producer Andrew the try Force Howard. Most importantly, you are you. You are here that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. And fellow Cryptid fans, friends and neighbors, we have something special for you this evening. I think we're all excited about this. I hope that's the case. We all love a Cryptid episode, right, Can we.
Talk about in the past? We had too, because this seems like a question that would obviously come up Cryptid like fighting games or sort of Pokemon style or Magic the Gathering style card games. I feel like one came up.
There are characters that occur in there, there are I feel like that You're right, there has to be one, because we know there are a couple of deity fighting games. We talked about that previously, and we know there are crypto zoological characters that occur in like Magic, the Gathering, and so on.
There's a game on Steam called Beasts of Mystery. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see Mothman fight the flat Woods Monster? Well now you can find out in Beasts of Mystery, the cryptid fighting game with hand drawn animation and approachable gameplay inspired by the greatest fighting games of past and present.
What a time to be alive? What a time? May twenty third, twenty twenty five. As we record this, we're going to talk about one cryptid that may not be a Beast of Mystery and may not be familiar to a lot of us in the West. Our exploration takes us far far from our home base of the Atlanta metro area to the rugged, mountainous and forbidding interior of the Hubei Province in China. Also in the research here, I don't know about you, guys. I learned a new word.
We've got a local sparkling water company here called Montane. Did you guys know Montane's an actual word. I thought it was like a car name, like you made up something that sounded like a real thing.
I guess it just sounds like a sort of like a crooner from the fifties. You know, Johnny Montane.
Sounds like Fontaine to me. That's just something I'm familiar with. Yeah, our buddy bre mm hmm.
Yeah, yeah, that would be Debri right.
Yeah, and our buddy pre the famous runner, right, wasn't that Prefontaine?
Oh? Okay, comes and Montane. Just for any etymology, nerds is a word that, weirdly, I don't think we had encountered before. I didn't know was a real word. It means of growing in were inhabiting mountain areas. Nice, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's what you know. Really, it's my fault for not having a good vocabulary. That was like this Sparkling Water company just made up a BS word.
Anyway, Man, I got to call you back for being self deprecating. There to a fault. You have the best vocabulary at anybody that I know.
Yeah, if you have a bad vocabulary, But I don't know what I am, I'm speaking dumb ass, not at all.
Can I really quickly just say this beast of mystery game? Not to harp on it too. It looks like it was created an MS paint, so that that alone is worth the price of admission.
Do check it out. It looks ridiculous. Oh, and Triforce points out there are a couple of Japanese role playing games with Yo Kai. I am in dude, Yo Kai are amazing.
Well, the guy we're talking about today is a little bit Yo Kai esque, though it's not from Japan, it is from China, but it has that mythical quality, right.
Oh, one hundred percent. Yeah. For thousands and thousands of years, local rural populations in Hubay have have been or whubey have been convinced they share the land with something not quite ape, not quite human, you quite skunk, not quite skunk, not quite swamp, not quite abominable. Uh yeah, it's a huge thing. We've all heard of bigfoot, We've heard of the abominable snowman. But what about the yarn And by
the way, what the heck is yarn fever? Uh yeah, We're gonna pause for a second check in with our medical experts to make sure we're still inoculated. Here are the facts when we talk about bigfoot. And we've run into this so often over the years. We continually see this strange, near ubiquitous, ancient myth about something that inevitably translates to either wild men or hairy men.
And one of my favorite Bigfoot superpowers I guess that he would be able to use in a fighting game is this idea that he can teleport and that he can sort of fold time and space. And maybe that accounts for some of the proliferation of these types of creatures, you know, globally speaking.
Interesting and that's something our our, our good friend David Bikera remarked about briefly when we interviewed him. How long ago was that lo those many years ago?
And what is it called, guys Operation Bigfoot their expedition expedition, But it very much is that, and I know we harp on it every time, but like it has the quality level to build the quality of like a really rat Disney Universal Studios type exhibit. It is pretty badass. If you find yourself in the North Georgia Mountains, do give it a check.
Ry day of it. Yeah, yeah, cherry log near LJ and make a day of it. Because it's also right up the road from a place where you can rent a tank, which our accounting department did not allow us to do. Deny, Yes, I'm not going to let go of that.
Yeah, yes, And just to the point of the number of hairy man wild man stories that exist even within the US and the different varieties of it. We had another person we ended up speaking to that makes this thing called map in black. You can check it out. All of us have a copy now at this point and it shows well, it's not for me, it's from a listener.
Yeah, but you got us the maps. Thank you.
Well, he sent us the maps. But the concept here is that there are spread across just the United States. I think, I want to say, around five or six varieties of this specific form of cryptid just here in the US, and then you look globally, it just there's so many more.
Yeah, proliferates. That's a great point too. I remember seeing that map and thinking, you know, this is somewhat similar to regional variations of squirrels right or where, you know, And if it's a natural organism that makes sense living
in the same place over vast swalls of time. It's weird because everything we find when we look into historical strangeness is that no matter how different a given culture may be or when that culture occurs, they share surprising commonalities, Like every single human civilization throughout history has at one point managed to predict the passage of the seasons, and they have all attempted to explain the movements of the
heavens in relation to the Earth. But the other really strange thing is this weird myth that continues in the modern day. Like you said, Matt, we call it bigfoot. Regional variations here would be swamp ape, skunk ape, the Irali from native culture and so on. You can find ancient petroglyph depicting hairy people and then the entire lore about them, and this dates back, you know, thousands of years.
You also to that point again, you hear legends about this and other parts of the world, often remote mountainous wildernesses right or stretches of forest cover. Russia had a lot, or the Soviet Union, I should say, had a lot of research into this, as did pre communist Russia. And then you'll hear about the Yeti, the snowman, and of
course in China the Yarin. But they're all again, they're all variations on the same idea that Homo sapien shares earth with some reclusive, enigmatic, oddly intelligent species of something that looks a little like a human, a little bit
like an ape. And I think, or I would posit guys that in some of our previous explorations, we found a really good answer for some of these common legends, not just bigfoot stuff, but things like trolls or orcs or goblins or hobbits, and they were kind of kissing cousins to the humans.
Yeah, and this extends into the modern day, this legacy of ancient hominids and remains in the form of trace amounts of DNA that's found in some modern humans. Unfortunately, not those actual facts hobbits that you mentioned ben Homofluoresciensis, though we don't. I don't think there are like, you know, tolkien Esque hobbits. You know, they have their own little hobbit holes and don't like their china to be yeah, don't like their their plates to be chipped and crabs yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We haven't found the Bilbo Baggins yet, but I love the point you're making there. In all the so called hobbits of Southeast Asia, along with the Denisovans you mentioned the poor Neanderthal. Further current science theorizes humanity may discover yet more evidence of these ancient home sapient hominid interactions and maybe even hidden somewhere in human DNA remnant lines of other hominid groups. We don't know. That's the pickle of it. And if you're a scientist,
that's either very exciting or very frustrating. If you're a team of hapless podcasters, that's amazing, because that's an episode if we find one for sure. So with all this in mind, folks, we have proven that things close to human existed at the same time as modern Homo sapiens, and we also have solid proof through as you said,
old DNA evidence that these groups interacted. So there's this compelling argument that at least some of these bigfoot myths could be based on oral history about genuine encounters with these things not quite Homo sapien. I don't know what do you guys think.
Oh, just a quick shout out to you yourself, mister Ben Bollen. You gifted both Matt Frederick and myself a lovely graphic novel version of the book Sapiens. Credible illustrated volume. I think it's part one of this book, but it is absolutely fantastic. I haven't made my way all the way through it yet, but it talks a lot about these Dennis Ovins and some of these early hominives and beautifully illustrates what that world might have looked like.
Oh man, you've all Noah Harari, what a guy.
Yeah, what a cool project to translate to visuals.
In that way. Agreed. Agreed, man, Ah that guys. I love the way he writes. So, as any fan of the History Channel can assure you, there is no shortage of attempts to document Bigfoot or even to capture a living specimen. We don't want to sound hyperbolic, but to date, as far as modern science is concerned, all of these attempts have failed, every single one. Even the expeditions that found you know, the purported yetty scalp. Later testing proved I think it was from like a mountain goat or
something of that nature. Yeah. Still it's important, you know, we have to remember that even when science fails to find the thing it's looking for, it has at least provide a value by establishing that thing does not exist. But what if we're looking at the wrong place. What if the real Bigfoot is not in the Pacific Northwest, but instead, what if it's half a world away, deep
into the interior of China. Unlike Western science's overall dismissal of Bigfoot, China seriously scientifically investigated this creature's existence and it became a social phenomenon. It became like a good version of a moral panic hit the zeitgeist.
Yeah, that is kind of like that concept that we talked about with Yeah, correct, Yeah, the opposite of paranoia, which is pro noia. The I guess it is inherently misinformed. The other people are trying to help you. I don't know if that in misinformed aspect is key to it, but man, I love the idea of a positive moral panic.
Yeah, a moral euphoria, a moral panic.
We're doing a good job with this panic morally.
So let's get into it. Now. Here's where it gets crazy. This is the story of the Yarin. It's a weird word. In translation, you would spell it y e r e n. People are going to throw, you know, little diacritics at different points or little accent marks, but it roughly translates to savage or wild man and Mandarin, so it'd be like Jillian or Cantonese sweat Gin suasion. We should go ahead I think and say, or at least I have
to say, we are not native Mandarin speakers. We don't speak the dialects that we are going to be approaching in part of this. So please bear with us. And if we're what about this guys, if we're not sure about our pronunciation, maybe we just spell the word yeah.
And I will also defer to Ben because you have done some studies of the language. All I've done is seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Which is you know they make you watch that when you study Chinese.
Well, if I'm not mistaken, I do remember that being the first time that was like identified as this is like a dialect, a particular dialect of Mandarin that was used in that film, at least in my experience. But I'm also joking. Ben, you really do have kind of expertise and studied time on this stuff. So but we will do our level best.
As always, it's too kain noel, and got to be honest, as anybody who studied Chinese knows, they really string you along with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. They make you watch it early and they strongly imply that you'll learn how to run and jump from tree tops.
Secretly though, guys, they used wires.
That's the word on the street, and that's why I got a B plus instead of any movie though.
In that fricking soundtrack with Yo Yo ma, oh my god, excellent stuff.
It's amazing, you know. It's this thing. The Erin is often referred to as sort of the Chinese version of the Tibetan. YETI kind of like how the skunk Ape or swamp ape might be referred to as the insert region x here version of the Bigfoot.
It's interesting that it's that just Okay, So I don't know much about this as well, but I do know that it is we're basically talking about a forested area. Is it an area? Do we know if it is covered in snow? Often? It seems just from its latitude that it maybe isn't covered in snow.
Right exactly. It's a much more hospitable region to wildlife than say Everest or the upper reaches of the Himalayas. It's the shinong Jia Forestry District. I messed up to tone there. If you had to pick a spot for the Chinese Bigfoot, this would be peak real estate. Okay, it's free real estate. It's like about the more than one thousand, two hundred square miles of mountainous forest right just approaching the timber line. Right, it's which makes it
technically montane. There we go, and it's the elevation is pretty high, about six thousand, five hundred to six nine hundred feet up. Okay, yeah, so it's like it's a pretty dope spot if you're looking for a creature like this.
Well, it does make sense. Then why the YETI would be the comparison there because of it must get highly cold there at times, simply because of the elevation, which is why you may see it as more of a snow creature than a you know, the way we'd imagine a big foot, which is very much just a forest boy, you know, just in the tree line, in the trees, not with the you know, the even the coloring of the fur, if there is fur.
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Also reminds me of the various I can't remember the specific cards in magic the gathering, but the various troll uh specializations. Right, aren't there different kinds of trolls? I might be thinking of something.
You've got your bridge trolls, you got your your your your your mal trolls. Yeah, what are the ones with the funny hair and the jewels in their belly?
Buttons?
Troll dolls, that's the one.
You got, your doll?
Trolls is a smurf A kind of troll.
A smurf is more akin to a smaller for spirit, maybe like a brownie and gnome.
Do you know what they call the smurfs in Germany?
What do they call the smurfs in Germany? And I like that that's not true. Why does everything sound so aggressive in that language? I'm so prejudiced? All right, sorry, but uh, this this area, Yeah, I'm thinking in terms of, you know again, regional variations like with squirrels or whatever, geographic variations. I'm thinking it would make sense, to your point, Matt, for a very similar kind of animal to adapt to different environmental pressures. And this forest we're talking about is
one of the most biodiverse areas in the nation. It's home to tons of rare species with pretty great names.
Correct per our Pals over at Onesco in their Delightful World Heritage sites. The area in question here is already home to tons of actual facts. To quote Lauren Vogel, bum identifiable species like the Chinese giant salamander, the golden or Sichuan snubnosed monkey.
I don't like him.
He's two snubnosed, so snobby. What's up with that? Why's he got his nose turned up like?
And also there's the clouded leopard.
Not what makes it clouded? Is it just something about its pattern?
No, it's it's just it's sketchy and it has a bad memory.
Got it the cloud We've also got the much less remarkable common leopard, which I don't know why that even made the list, to be.
Honest, guys, it's crazy because they're I don't know, to the point about slightly different regions. It's not Neither of these are the same as the snow leopard, right, So it feels like there's a gradiation or gradation there from common to cloud it to snow. I don't know anyway.
It's also just something to note there there are dangerous species in these forests, right that you should be aware of if you're going to be trekking out there looking for stuff. And also there are things like the Chinese giant salamander that don't seem real. It doesn't seem like a salamander should get that large if you've seen pictures of it. I remember watching a video way back in the day of one of the largest salamanders ever, you know, in captivity or was caught, and these things are huge.
It looks like the size of a dog. But it is a salamander.
So it's not just a clever name.
No, no, no. They are actually giant and harrison to the vast majority of salamanders. And they're kind of cool man. I'll be honest. They're no Asian black bear, because those guys are hanging out in this area as well. It's just important for us to establish the biodiversity here. It's another point to the argument for the real estate right, especially in a country that is rapidly industrialized over such
a short span of time. You know, often in the West, when you see pictures of China, you see pictures of these crazy factories, right, these huge works of human beings. Or you see a picture of a panda in the middle of nowhere that is just doing its best to figure out how to eat bamboo.
Oh yeah, we're going to look in a little lonely. I'm not gonna lie. He's a panda, friend.
Oh yes, and pop hube Providence into your maps Google like, yeah, but yeah, pop pop it into your maps app and just look at the spaces between the civilization talking about that the way the expansion is occurring, right, and you can really see exactly what Benn is saying. There are still extremely remote areas here where there's just humans are not there.
M yeah, even in even in such a populous country. You know, the population of China is huge, but it's quite unevenly distributed, so such that you know, you think most Americans live in cities or urban areas, You're absolutely right, but that is exacerbated in China so much so that the current government has some hard laws about who can move where and when and why you have to get a license to do so.
And do you know what's in the eastern side of Hubay Province.
What's in the eastern side of Hubei Province?
Wuhan?
I got you all in Czech yea famous Muhan clan. And I still true, I still am so flummoxed by I rememberer when uh when wu Ha came out, not Wuhan. And when Wuha came out, I was texting with some fellow hip hop heads, and this was I. I had not searched the lyrics myself, and I thought when he was saying I thought he was saying stuff like I've got that eggnog shit that makes you sweat your neck. Who haw, I've got you all in check. And I thought it was c Z E C H.
And I'm certain this has come up before, I remembering.
Not to tell the same story twice. But you know, I hated. I hated for it that myth to be busted because I love the idea that New York slang was just that extreme and wild, and it still is very colorful and wild, it sure is. And what on earth is a flip mode squad? I've never fully.
Wrapped my head around that you haven't flipped No, well never, No, I am loyal. I would slip them. So that's drop a dime on no one.
So the reason we're pretty especially that this economy, but the reason we're we're already we're bringing up the idea of busting the myth is because in our conversations with some of our friends who have searched for Bigfoot or other cryptids, you get the feeling at times that maybe they don't want to find the thing. Maybe it's more about the journey, and so maybe I should have never checked on those buster rhyme lyrics and kept the mystery alive.
But even without the hunt for a creature called a cryptid like the yarin, this area has been a hotbed for scientific inquiry. From eighteen eighty four to eighteen eighty nine alone, scientists found five hundred news more than five hundred new species of plant. It was kind of like that older movie with Sean Connery in the Amazon Medicine Man.
Where dude, that was not a good movie.
It was not a good movie. The previce was that he is like, he's the guy who is an outsider, but he knows the jungle. He discovers these new species and he's like fighting big Pharma or something like that.
And I believe the love interest is Elaine Brocco, doctor Melfi from the Sopranos.
Uh.
And of course you know Goodfellows as well.
Ah. So we know that people have been searching this area. They've found strange animals already, they've found things that were not known to exist in the larger scientific record, and as we record today, there are perhaps there are certainly more plants and perhaps even animals that are still out there waiting to be discovered. Before we continue, we've got to point out that we're getting a lot of this information on the erin from one of the best academic
Western sources out there. It's a book called The People's Peaking Man, Popular Science and Human Identity in twentieth century China, written by Sigrid Schmolzer. And this was probably name I know right. This was published in two thousand and eight. So as the world of this kind of literature goes, and as world of cryptozoology goes, it's kind of recent. You know, it's not a breathless yellow journalism headline.
Oh yeah, But we've also found a bunch of sources from the late nineties up into pretty recently twenty twenty four where there are active discussions of the search for this specific cryptid through all of that time span.
Yes, very much so. And so deep do these searches go that it would be impossible for us to name every single expedition in this episode alone, but we'll we'll take you through several of the possibilities here as we get to the search. As a matter of fact, maybe now that we've done some intros for our sources, we pause for a word from our sponsors and then dive in.
All right, Mountain, Mama, take me home, countrys Country. The cat returns, and so we returned to Cigared Schmalzer, who traces the Chinese search for the Gharran from the days of ancient folklore to the discovery of something called the Peking Man. And we've all heard about the peking Man, which was for a long time considered a legend until it was discovered or hard evidence like fossils were discovered in the nineteen twenties. It's kind of homo erectus, correct.
The peking Man was a prominent symbol of bringing science to the people. That's kind of cool as a post revolutionary bit of kind of positive communist propaganda, wouldn't you say.
Yeah, Because we know that during the Communist Revolution, the new government was seeking to reframe popular narratives. Right, this is the people's move This is a world wherein the history of humankind is a history of progress through labor, through secular learning. This is not a result of divine intervention, ghost spirits, or the supernatural.
That's interesting, So sort of an imposed enlightenment and a mandated step away from the religious towards the secular.
Yeah, and I like imposed enlightenment. That's a that's a really great term for this because we see, you know, even now in Chinese authorities have a bad reaction to films with ghosts in them, things like that.
You know, Ben, I was thinking about this when looking through your research dot com before we went on the air, and it occurred to me that a lot of American films when they get Chinese releases, they have to be recut almost entirely to remove mentions of the supernatural.
Yeah, which we discussed in our previous episode.
I thought, yeah, doesn't isn't that a sort of aligned with that shift?
One hundred percent, dude, one hundred percent. And so as this government is seeking to undermine religion to move people away from previous superstitions, they also want to champion socialism and advanced science. So if you go to chapter seven of Schmalzer's work in specific, you get this fascinating anecdote that tells us how this phase of urine fervor urine fever, I should say, and scientific investigation begins to say, you're in fever. It's yeah, yeah, funny. Yeah. Well, if you
like terrible puns, you're in luck. Yeah. Well, let's let's share the story, guys, like, how how did this go from a thing of legend and folklore to a rush of scientific investigation.
Well, so let's begin with just the peaking man at least, reconstructions of some of the shards of the peaking man's skull and pieces of the peaking man's skull were thought to be Homo rectus, so a version of human before we the version of us. And there are a couple of professors there in nineteen fifty six that are checking it out. It's the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Natural
History Museum. They're looking at this reconstruction of the peaking Man's skull, and one of them made a little statement.
Yeah, it's professors Mao Guangyan and Wang Ziatlin. And Mao is looking at this stuff. These guys are both att at professors, as you said, And he hears his colleague Wang say this, Yonren, I've seen it before. Ed. Mao says, basically, what is wrong with you? Are your nerves all right? Do you have a fever? Bro? Peeking mad is a human ancestor from five hundred thousand years ago. How could you have seen one living with your own eyes?
Oh yeah, he's already talking about the fever. The Wang goes on to explain that back in nineteen forty, while on safari or on an expedition for the Yellow River Water Control Committee, he and others in his group came across this sort of half ape, half human, chimera hybrid kind of creature who had been shot dead by indigenous
folks or folks local to that area. So let's keep in mind that these aren't just too you know, crotchety, old, get off my lawn type dudes shooting the breeze, you know, at the local coffee shop, t shop, you know, passing around tall tales, spinning yarns. No, these are experts in their fields, vetted professors, and their conversation at the museum launched and other like minded colleagues into you guessed it that you're in full blown You're in fever.
Yellow River. You're in fever. Come on, guys, what's going on here?
Think about it. Picture us as Charlie Day by the red string board and think about it.
But it does make sense, right, Okay, So if one of these Vetta professors says, hey, I've seen this thing before. Oh yeah, no, I have this specific instance where I saw something very much like this dead like a version
of it. Now, it would make you, as a professor, want to go check that out, because my god, guys, if there are versions of humanity that still exist somewhere, deep in a cave system, deep in a forest system, somewhere that's hidden, a population that is specifically attempting to hide from all of the stuff outside of their world, then we it would be awesome to find it. Right, You're at least as a professor, you're going to get some grants off of that.
Right.
Sorry, don't mean to make it about money, but yeah, I.
Mean it is. It's about money. It's about the things beyond money, like prestige and legacy. Right, And this is I think this is a fantastic point because it also incorporates some incredibly important social context. Now had probably heard stories like this fourth or fifth hand from rural populations, but even at the time when all people were supposed to be equal under the Party, there was a ton of prejudice from urban elites against rural people. The phrase
translates to stuff like country bumpkin. You know. So they had all these stereotypes about people who lived outside of the cities. This doesn't have that stereotype apply. It's a respected colleague, right, Well, we've both been to school, etc. We have quote unquote seeing the world or read about it. And because of this we see the origins of yarn fever. Now it doesn't take off right away. It's a bit artsy, like if you've ever met an academic in Williamsburg or Brooklyn,
you know it's a bit rarefied air. The nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, you see these relatively comparatively small scale research efforts on yerin documenting historical records, maybe sending a few expeditions. And these occur thanks to the work of Mao in particular, again not Mao Zedong different now, and then there are other Chinese scientists who kind of wu tang in on this, namely folks from what's called the Institute of Vertebrae, Palaeotology
and paleo Anthropology or IVPPP. See not gonna let you down right PPT. For about two decades after that museum conversation, the idea that we could leverage science to learn more about this. It was restricted to some rural communities and intellectuals who were at that time frankly considered eccentric, and maw was a one a man army. For a minute, he was looking at possible relations between the YearIn stories and legends of the Yetti. He was looking at fossil
records of apes and hominids. He was doing some bone comparison modern humans. And the further he went, even starting so skeptically, the further he went, the more convinced he was that he was on to something.
So in the closing years of the cultural revolution in China, which was kind of a big deal and not quite as cool as it sounds, guys, Right, doesn't it sound like a positive thing, like a really positive sea change, But it was very much an iron fisted grasp over culture, and that was the revolution in question, right, Ben.
Yes, sir, that's right.
No.
The idea is that we can get rid of all the beliefs of the past.
We need to embrace cleaners.
Yeah, clean clean house will remake the foundations of the house. It's very A lot of people died, right, and a lot and there you know, the idea of human rights is something that gets thrown out the window.
Oh there's just so many good little things about communism. No one's just figured out how to do it well.
I mean, yeah, socialism maybe more so.
But yeah, it's crazy how it starts off with good intentions and inevitably becomes a totalitarian dictatorship wherein anybody who is different is squashed.
And what makes the YearIn is such an electric, galvanizing subject of interest in research. It happens because of the social context in which this exploration occurs. It goes down to really three major factors. I don't know if we want to walk through these briefly, but I think they tell us about the story.
So at this point, some of these extreme, very aggressive political campaigns that sort of typified the beginning of the cultural revolution, we're starting to die down. So people were starting to be a little less afraid of the consequences of associating themselves with things that were identified as superstitious.
This started to be perhaps a little bit of a sense of maybe things were going to improve, perhaps or that I don't know, people were a little less terrified of stepping out and owning these you know, past beliefs.
Yeah, kind of like pilots and military aviation professionals reporting strange stuff in the sky. Once one person is coming out and talking about it and not getting punished, other people feel less hesitant to.
Do specially especially now that we even have government acknowledgment of some of those things to some degree. It feels like it does open the.
Floodgates, and then so people are less hesitant to talk about this. That's right. Second, a lot of Western writing is newly available where scientists in China we can't wait to read and translate this stuff. We have received a
directive right to push forward with science. And while we're reading this stuff, we find loads of reports from our neighbors, to the North Russia Soviet Union on their version of this kind of cryptid We see a lot of stuff about Yeti and Bigfoot, because that stuff was already in those other cultural zeitgeist. It was already getting written about a lot. So people are therefore more likely to read
about things related to this. And then what do we do when we read about something happening somewhere else, We immediately try to connect it to something closer to home. And that's what occurred.
We talked about it in a couple of our primary Bigfoot episodes about signings in the US were occurring back in the eighteen hundreds, right with logging camps, Like way back in the day, people were seeing stuff stuff, Harry, wild guys out there in the forest as the forests are being chopped down. And you can only imagine that if those stories had been around for so long. Yeah, you're it's exactly right, Ben. You want to find the ones that are out near you if there are these things.
Right, yeah, exactly, especially when you see those The reports grow more vague the further back we go in history. But now you start, you're one of these Chinese scientists, researchers, you start reading about indigenous people's stories right in the Americas, in North America, on that continent specifically, and then you start saying, hang on a tick I remember. Because you're
unreasonably British, You're like, hey, got a tick I remember? These? Uh, these stories kind of beat for beat, go with the stories we ignored from all those country bumpkins, all those peasants. What if they were onto something They can't figure it out, But me a learned man, well, tally ho, they said, in right, and so now because like the point you made, it's easier to publish things without being arrested, right, without
being a target of a political campaign. Now people are able to publish more easily, and there is a proliferation therefore of popular science and science fiction. And the Errant is the perfect subject for this. It touches evolution, it touches the identity of the wild and the urban, It touches what it means to be a modern human and
the importance of science. So these three factors can buy and they make a feedback loop, an ouroboros of interest and reading and publishing that begins to consume itself and grow, which is not how consuming oneself works. We're going to leave that analogy. It's been a weird week for all of us. We'll pause for word from our sponsors, and then we'll get to the hunt, because there are some human characters in this story just as important as the Yarin itself.
And we've returned. Let's get to the actual physical attempt to find a urin, and we are jumping to a gentleman named Li Jian. This is an historian. He's working as the vice secretary of a propaganda department in this area that we talked about, Shenungia.
Oh and think about it. Propaganda, just gonna point that out.
Yeah, right, Propaganda, which it's information that seeks to sway somebody to whoever's writing it or whoever's controlling the writings way of thinking. So propaganda guy vice secretary in the same area where this Shenania forest is. He began collecting all kinds of reports from people who had been out in the forested area who had said, hey, hey, I saw something that I can't explain. I believe it's one
of these urine things. We think local villagers here, locals that have been seeing this four years, going all the way back to nineteen forty five. He this person Lee gained the nickname the Minister of Urine.
Y Yeah, yeah, king himself sorry y e ri e yes. And so in nineteen seventy six, the stuff he's collected, it gets the attention of a guy. He's a professor of evolutionary theory in East China Normal University. His name is Liu min Shuang, and he goes on to become the most prolific writer about yurin in China, and again he's a professor, so he gets a nickname as well, the Professor of Urine. I do think, if we're going with the pea puns, Minister of Urine is probably a
better name. Professor of Urine feels weird, even though we know urologists or a real thing. Anyway, Other scientists, including those from the IVPP, jump on board, and Schmalzer says there are teams of scientists and technicians, local officials and rural people who have had eyewitness accounts. They start tracking
the yeh in earnest. They get dozens of reports, they find footprints, even a few alleged hair samples, and by nineteen seventy seven, scientists are publishing articles about this in popular science magazines, but also they're publishing serious scientific research. These are where you see magazines like Scientific Experiment and an outfit called Fossils, which is the publication of IVPP, And then general interest magazines and newspapers start carrying stories
about the investigation referencing this other stuff. This is a huge win because unlike other Western papers, the Chinese experts aren't really debunking the erin. They're taking a different approach, and intellectuals experts stem. Experts in other fields are hopping into the game, and there are government officials, there are
professional writers who are working on this. If you want to be a cool party member or party official, why not make a little peace of the erin for your local paper and they'll be like, oh, deputy vice subprime assistant to the subprime deputy actual, he gets it. I wish I could vote, I'd vote for him.
Yeah, And just reminder, the IVPP as the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
So let's go into some of the inclusions of this kind of lore, I guess is the appropriate term here, into popular culture and into literature. So since it was the social trend as much as it was a scientific trend, there's not much of a surprise that year and fever started to expand beyond nonfiction and into the world of literary fiction. Plays were written, novels, poems. There's lines between genres was being crossed just as much as the line
between science and kind of zeitgeisty pop culture was being crossed. Maybe, if not crossed, then certainly blurred.
It feels a little bit like the propaganda thing is working.
Exactly and you have to wonder too about motivation. We have not spoken with these scientists directly, by the way, many of them have passed away, but the science does continue, imperfect as it may be, there are legitimate, good faith inquiries. In nineteen eighty one, the newly minted Chinese Anthropological Society has their first get together, right, and in that get together they endorse the establishment of the Chinese Yarin Investigative
Research Association. This is a level of official approval that simply had not existed in the Western world for things like Bigfoot or in the United States in particular. And this association grows to have hundreds and hundreds of members, and the majority of these members are legit scientists, and the goal to find the Yarin still exists in step with the goal to push science over fantasy. So they're saying the Yarin is an organism, a living thing, right
that eats, sleeps, and shits and reproduces. It is not MP's obviously, and is not a legend, a ghost or a spirit. So this means that Yarin fever also becomes socially powerful for people. They can challenge these once sacracainct cognitive institutions like the hard belief in God. They can also kind of ask themselves what the yerin tells them
about themselves. It's a really rapidly industrializing nation. It's in a deep I don't want to call it an identity crisis, but it's in an interrogation of its own national identity. So now the Urin is representing an opportunity to ask questions about the line between man and animal science, superstition. People are reading about the Yurin and they're saying, what does it mean for me to be a human today? So it hits the zeitgeist perfectly. It's a bullseye, you know.
And then we have to get to the We have to say it. I don't love to say it because I think we're having a fun time with this exploration. But did they ever actually find one? No?
Do they ever?
Not that we know of, Not that we know of. I love a world where maybe they did find a yarin. It was far more intelligent than they assumed, and it gave him some like rousing al Pacino ted Lasso's speech, and they said, okay, we'll keep your secret. But as far as we know, that didn't happen either. The theories are increasingly scientifically based the idea that it could maybe have been descended from Gigantopithecus. Maw believed that was documented
in old Imperial era writing. He definitely didn't think it was supernatural stuff. We know that people became increasingly, i would say, first more secular and the more skeptical as time went on. There's the idea. I thought we'd love
this one. In nineteen seventy nine, a scholar named Seang Yu Cheng started advancing this idea that's already familiar to Western cryptozoology, and he basically said, look, the people who are giving us all these eyewitness reports, they're not experts, you know what I mean, they're not themselves bylogists or botanist or what have you. They may have seen something and then they mistook it for an extraordinary creature because
of the circumstances. I feel like that's a little dismissive, because, as we know, when you grow up and spend your entire life in a specific area of the world, a specific you know, a stretch of woods, you get to know those woods pretty well, you know what I mean.
Yeah, but it reminds me of I'm going to bring it back to Department of Truth one more time.
Guys.
It reminds me of this concept of once you believe hard enough in something or what Once enough people believe
in something, it kind of becomes more true. And I'm not saying that it creates a yurine out there, but now that the popular culture has swelled to a point where it feels as though it could be a thing out there lurking in the woods, you are probably more likely to mistake something that's far out in the distance or a certain sound that you're not familiar with it, even if you are familiar with the woods as like possibly this other thing right right.
It's the pattern you're primed to accept at that point.
I feel like that's a strong thing in all cultures when there is a tale of something like this that might be lurking out there.
One hundred percent, I'll see you on that. And add another factor that should be considered, which is that imagine you're growing up in a non wealthy, rural part of China. The urban and intellectual elites have historically just talks so much spack about you and been rude and dismissive, and now all of a sudden you have the opportunity to be an expert on a thing the errand therefore becomes
a possible means of income. Right, I'm a guide now in an expedition, and perhaps more importantly than the money, now, people who did not respect me are listening to me. So if I have therefore a yearn story, then I have raised to some degree my social status. That's that's just a sad part of human dynamics. Right. We also know, all right, this guy we mentioned, Shang, he said, yeah, I said, untrained observers might be mistaken, and he pointed
to one of our favorite examples. It's just how Western science eventually proved mermaids were probably just marine mammals cited by extremely horny, desperately lonely sailors to the point about primed to see a pattern. You know what I mean. I mean, you think a man, it is ugly man, but spend eight months at sea and then check back in.
Or don't just don't.
You could always write us, You could write us.
I think mandates have a certain kind of uncanny beauty to them personally.
Yeah, we're coming from, you know, a very anthrocentric aspect. You know, they probably think we're ugly as sin, you know what I mean?
Yeah, or then we're way too hairy and you're.
Way too hairy weird for yourself. I'm just hairy enough. So these later scholars will also we're talking about this a little bit off air. Later scholars, especially Western ones, like writing in twenty twenty one. In more recent years, they'll often posit that the myth of the rain is based on early encounters in Central and western China with more Semitic or European people who would tend to have more facial hair, would definitely speak unknown languages and maybe
a real shock to see him in the woods. But then the question becomes, why were they naked?
That's the way to be.
It is the natural state.
Yeah, not kidding. Boys, if you saw me just out naked in the woods in my natural state before I found manscaped, would not know what to think.
An ad not an ad.
So uh, yeah, we're actually not working with manscape. We're now working with yarinescapes. There we go, which is which, how far do we want to go into this? No, because it's the opposite of manscape. It's a thing you rub on and it just like creates strips of hair where you rub it so that you can cover yourself in hair, which is you, guys, listen to this episode years in the in the future, it's going to be pressing it. You're welcome erinescaped fifteen percent off.
If you can come up with that, whoever you are listening to that, and you just had a light bulb go off, you would make billions of dollars.
Yeah, we're not saying fifteen percent off when you order. We're saying, if you come up with it, fifteen percent for us. Yeah, expliration, you can pay us in big foot hair. The So anyway, we know this social content of China. It helps create this craze, but it also complicates it because China is attempting to explain things through a very localized perspective. We mentioned embracing the concept of evolution,
but I don't know if every Western knows this. There's a popular belief in China that is sometimes accepted as hard science that modern humans did not originate on the African continent, that instead they originated in China and then spread from there. So the erin was used to justify that by some authors.
We'll see that's very interesting, and there's something I wanted to bring up here. I think there's a good place to do it. Recently, Popular Mechanics wrote a story about footprints, a very specific set of footprints from a tetrapod. So that's just a four legged creature that theoretically where they found it. When they found it within the fossil record, it pushes back the development of a type of humanity, right, not necessarily Homo erectus or Homo sapien, but way far back.
It pushes forward the development of tetrapods by forty million years potentially, which means we really could have some of our stuff way way wrong. I mean only because what we know is what we've found of us far and maybe we just haven't found those things, including all of these missing links, right, including all of the time scales and timelines that are mysterious to us.
Yeah, and I think that's a salient point. That's why it's also interesting to go back and revisit these episodes. As more investigation continues, we're continually learning, by we, I mean modern society human and not. We're continually learning that the timeline is a little bit longer than people thought it was. And that's why lost civilizations are also another fascinating exploit. We still don't know what caused the Bronze
Age collapse. We have no idea. Somewhere along the line, things just screwed up, and we still don't know so many things about what, when, and where breakthroughs and evolution occurred.
Oh yeah, and by the way, that forty million years thing makes me think about the I can't remember the name of the theory. The theory that there was potentially another advanced civilization.
That was hilary and hypothesis siluriing that.
Was potentially not based in ape human intelligence and advancement, but in maybe reptilian advancement or something other.
And that is spot on with that, folks. We do have an episode on that wall. We went through a phase with that one. I remember it and the research. The researchers there phrase that as a thought experiment. They make such a compelling argument for that conspiracy. We also know that the Erin fever has largely faded, but it's still got a significant mark on society. The IVPP their
magazine Fossils. A little while back they decided to stop publishing papers about the Erin because none of the expeditions produced any solid proof. But then after that they did a poll in their magazine, and the poll had some surprising results. These are all Chinese nationals who get pulled. Thirty two percent of the people in the poll say they don't believe the Erin ever existed. We got something
wrong in the folklore. Twenty three percent say I think it was around at some point, and like so many other animals, it went extinct. And then seventeen percent, almost twenty percent of the people that they asked, they said, yeah, I don't know, man, it might be like I've never been to that forest. I've never seen a giant salamander, but I have Google, you know, I could. I could
see it, Like, it's not impossible. And so all of this means that the Yarin is still kind of retreated to the position of fringe science, similar to that of the Western Bigfoot. But the weirdest thing is, as we record Friday, May twenty third, the search continues today. What do we think, guys, do we want to give an absolute yes no on Yerin? Do we want to pull ourselves? I'm gonna say maybe no.
I think it's might be a no for me, Doug, maybe a no for no.
I don't know.
I'm jumping over to China Daily real quick reading a little article here about nature observers and how the job postings in twenty twenty four in July lists that one of the things you need to be a nature observer is to have the capability of outrunning urine. So I mean, hey, come on, I.
Mean, no matter how you want to punt it, it's always good. It's always a good idea outrun. Now, don't let the urine run on you less it is. Is it matt from your sense when you're reading that, Is that meant to be like fun satirical or does it feel like okay, okay.
I'm being fun and satirical about it. I think I think if you destroy like you, if you go to the absolute position of this is hogwashing, dumb, and we shouldn't think about it. I think that it defeats the point of it, which is just like it's a way to get people out in the woods.
Yeah, and that's important.
Humans plus woods equals probably a cooler civilization just because and when you hang out in nature like that, you see things a little differently.
I think it has hard physicological effects on the human as well, like beneficial effects. I would say, all we need to caveat that with is humans hanging out in the woods without destroying the woods. A that's cool, you know what I mean?
Yeah, only you can prevent forest fires and urine attacks.
Yes, yeah, so go camping. That's one of our takeaways.
In order for urineto attack, doesn't it always kind of require a slight downhill slope. That's the only way that it can, you know, advance.
It depends on the pressure of the system, I think.
And you're talking about city urine.
That's right, you're talking about country urine.
Yeah, okay, we brought the prejudice back. Yeah, it's a good question. This is the last note we always like to end on with cryptid episodes. Humanity, as you hear this is reaching one of the most profound periods in history. As humans continue to encroach into wild areas, and as surveillance technology has more and more sophisticated breakthroughs year over year, civilization is now more than ever, thank you, Fox News, likely to find undiscovered animals, and there's a ticking clock
on this. There's a time window because those animals, those same organisms are now more than likely going extinct and compare. We're in the middle of what is called the sixth Great Mass Extinction, so we want to hear from you, folks. Tell us about the Erran, tell us if you've seen a bigfoot or some hominid cryptid, and tell us what if any creatures you think may be discovered in the coming decades. We're gonna call it evening. We're off to
octivigate and do our bigfoot hoots that thing. Remember that while we're practicing our bigfoot accent. We'd love to hear from you. You can give us a good old fashioned email. You can call us on the phone. You can find us on the lines.
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