Ei the Friends. It's me Joshum for this WEEK'SYSK Select. I've chosen our twenty nineteen episode on the Yetti. It's really fun to talk about serious attempts people make to find cryptids, because we're just like tourists looking in on a world that's new to us and that turns out to be pretty neat. And if the story about Jimmy Stewart and here sounds familiar, we also recently covered it in our Tom Slick episode. So you're not experiencing deja vu,
which is another episode that we did before. So you're not experiencing deja vu, which is another episode we did before.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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. The Continuing Cryptozoology edition.
Oh this finishes it right.
Oh, I don't know about that. We've done Bigfoot, Lockness Monster YETI we haven't done like Mothman, the Chewpacabra Chewpacabra. That's a big one too. Yeah.
This slender Man.
Slender Man's more Internet folklore than anything.
Did we do that one or did we think about it and.
Not do it the latter of those two.
If I remember correctly, I said it stinks or something.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, it hurt my feelings. Oh man, I think it was. I think we could do slender Man now. It was just so early on that it was very thin. Now I think it would be more robust.
It was slender.
Yeah, that's right. Well, today we're talking about the yetti, which is not slender, depending on which YETI you're talking about, Chuck, it's either enormous and and like eight feet tall, covered in gray or white or maybe sometimes reddish hair, sure, weighing four hundred five hundred pounds easily, Yeah, 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 lets out a squeal or a cry every once in a while, just to I guess know that they're alive. And there's really two competing versions of what those of us in the Western world would think was the yetti. But the one we're really talking about is the first one, what we also think of as the Abominable Snowman.
How tall was Hippie Rob?
He was average, like five something, I guess, like high fives. Probably he was a little shorter than me.
Okay, yeah he was.
He was not the 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.
It kind of doesn't.
Yelping in the mountains, grubbing for roots.
Yep, covered 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 legendary beast that lives in Asia.
Yeah, around the Himalayas typically.
Yeah, so it's known as Asia's Bigfoot, or maybe Bigfoot is known as North America's Yeti. I don't know. I guess YETI came first, right.
Yeah, I think Yeti's been around with the Shirpa 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 Yeti has been told for many, many years, and traditional stories in that area there was someone named Shiva do Hall that collected a bunch of these stories in a book called folk Tales of Sherpa and Yeti, and all of them kind of figured the same way, which was, whether it's a story called the Annihilation of the Yeti in which this
is pretty good. It's 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 message at the end, which is it's sort of like a Grim's fairy tale, like be careful out on the woods.
Exactly, yeah, exactly. I think it serves the exact same purpose too in the Grim's fairy tales. And I thought the same thing. 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 Yetti will get you, and you will all sorts of terrible things will happen to you.
Which is funny because there are all sorts of real things that could kill you in the Tibetan plateau.
Well that's what I think. What they were saying was, you know, you can't just be like, look out for the bears.
You can't.
Kid'll be like, I don't know. I can see a brash kid being like, no, a bear. Everybody knows what a bear is. I'll wrestle a bear any day of the week maybe. And then you know, along the way it gets into a drinking contest with Marion from Indiana Jones. Oh yeah, right, exactly. That was one of the best scenes in the history of film. Yeah, yeah, I think so,
and Tibetan kids tend to agree with me too. But before we move on, I want to say one thing that Annihilation of the Yetie, keep that in the back of your mind. The story was that, like, there are a bunch of yetti that were hanging around and the
Shripa were sick of them hanging around. So the Shirpa basically threw a yetti party and got drunk and fought with each other to kind of provide an example to the YETI, Hey, you should get drunk and fight with each other too, in the hopes of the Yeti would destroy each other. It didn't work, and the Yeti all managed to escape, except for one, who was supposedly killed by a Lama, one of the Buddhist monks in the area.
That's part of the story. That's the end.
That's the annihilation of the Yeti.
Wow. Story, I didn't know Alama figured in.
And really, annihilation is kind of a strong word if you think about it, because if you just killed one out of I think two hundred and forty Yeti, it's hardly annihilation.
That's a good point.
I think so too.
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 not sure why I did that. When he came through town and conquered the Indus Valley, he said, I'd like to see one of your famous a yeties. I don't know.
If that's what Alexander the Great sounded like.
No, no, what did ancient Roman sound like? If not?
Was he Roman? I think he was Greek? Was he? Uh? Huh? Jeez?
How about uh really screwed that up?
I say, let's see, I knew that to a German accent. Oh, I'm just slot.
I'm just gonna leave.
No, hang, hang tight, Chuck, you can rebound.
Yeah. Why did I 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.
He said, I want to see a YETI and they the local locals that were like, you know, we totally would do that. However, you can't get him down this low and you'd have to hike really high up 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 bored. I can't believe we're still talking about this. Give me some wine. Yeah, gotten a drinking contest, and that was that. So the yetti continued on in Sherpa tradition in Tibetan, Nepal, and Bhutan, but in the West it kind of disappeared from view until the twentieth century. And so remember these are tall tales that the Sherpa
teached their kids. Although there is supposedly some I guess general belief as well, but I can't I can't quite penetrate it. But just imagine that it was just strictly tall tales the Sherpa 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 nineteen twenty one, there's a journalist named Henry Newman. He did an interview with some British explorers, and this is a time of great exploration, especially from the British. These sort of these I guess Indiana Jones, like mountaineers who would go all over the world in search of these you know, jungles and mountains, in search of crazy beasts and treasures and
things like that. Right, sure, So 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 Sherpa said, because what in shirpa the plural sherpa did me determine it?
I'm pretty sure.
Yeah. That was a good episode, by the way, everyone.
It was go back and listen to that one.
What was the title of Warm, Friendly Living.
Yeah, because that's I think what ten Zing Norgay said.
It's so great.
Yeah.
So they said that their guides are Sherpa guides called them mito kangmi, which the translation, the real translation is a little awkward man bear snowman. Right, but Newman confused all that. He got the snowman part right, but he translated that first part to mean mato m EtOH to mean filthy or dirty, and then he changed that on his own to the word abominable, right, and that's where we get the abominable snowman.
Yeah, he was like, I don't like filthy snowman. I'm going 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. Yeah, 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 the world when 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 there sure, but guides told them the treks belonged to
this abominable snowman. Therefore, there are abominable snowmen living in the Himalayas. And the explorer who led that particular expedition was Charles Howard Berry Howard hyphen Barry bu Ry, and 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, very much akin to Bigfoot. But if you look at the descriptions of the traditional descriptions of the Yeti, they're much smaller and not nearly as huge as the Westerners kind of immediately made it out to be.
Yeah, there was one description, one of the earlier written descriptions from nineteen forty two. There was a researcher named Mira Shackley, and I believe that she got this information from two hikers that reported seeing the Yetti, right, 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 feet tall. Right the head were the heads, 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 and build of a small man that had covered with long hair, but the face and chest
not very hairy at all. This all sounds like they always describe him as it as bipedal, right, means you know, walking upright, right.
But if you go back and look at that nineteen forty two description and how detailed it was, Yeah, hikers who gave the description said that 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 basically perfect abominable snowman sighting.
Yeah, yeah, agreed, But it's one.
Of like many after that Howard Berry expedition came back and Newman broadcasts to the world. People started going to the Himalayas and droves, and they weren't just necessarily looking for the abominable Snowman. Everest was there, and everybody knew Everest was there, and a lot of people wanted to be the first one to summ at Everest, the first Westerner,
I should say, to some at Everest. So while a lot of them were in the area, they're like, well, well, look for the Abominable Snowman while we're here too.
Yeah, and some pretty legendary mountaineers. And granted these are not like zoologists or anything, but they're respected men in their field. People like Ryan Hold Messner and one Sir Edmund Hillary both searched for evidence of the Eddie while they were hiking, and Messner even wrote a book called My Quest for the Eddie, confronting the Himalaya's deepest mystery. But I mean, well, we'll save the big reveal to the end or the third act of this show.
Okay, is here a 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 of more of these reported sightings.
Let's do it, all right, Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. I want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck. It's stuff you should know. Should all right, okay, Chuck. So we've started to get some sightings from expeditions that are going to Everest and just hanging around the Himalayas. And then I think in nineteen fifty one, something really big happened. One of those explorers, Eric Shipton, took a photograph of a track that to
this day looks pretty remarkable. Actually yeah, I.
Mean this is again it's not like hard evidence, but this is a very famous photo. 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 pic like you know pickaxe.
Yeah, use 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 doesn't look quite right. That's a really weird tracks. It looks like an elongated human foot, but rather than a left toe. Got it's kind 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
yetti 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 it, 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
yetdy his whole life. I believe his name is Daniel Taylor. Yeah, Daniel Taylor put it, if Shipton's coming back with a picture of a track, 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 nineteen fifty one, and it hit the world, that picture, that track hit the world like the surgeon's photo of the Lochness Monster
hit the world back in nineteen thirty three. It just became like proof to people who believe in the Yeti around the world that the Yeti definitely exists.
Yeah, I mean, like you said, it was really what made it different than other photos that it was so sharp. It was a really good picture. And that little toe thing basically looked like a thumb and it just you know, it looked odd. But this Daniel Taylor guy, he actually when I started reading that article, I thought, oh boy,
this crackpot. But he actually turned out to be a pretty cool guy because he spent a lot of his life looking for the YETI, went over there, even met with the Kingdom Nepal, and the Kingdom Nepal said, well, if you want to go, like to the wildest place in the most remote place in our land, go to bhun b a r u n this Barun valley. And he went there and he looked around and he did
not find a Yeti. But what he did do was ended up helping to work towards conservation of that area, which was kind of a nice silver lining to his story was he got there and he was like, this is one of the most beautiful places on Earth 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 good work doing conservation work in that area, which was kind of cool.
Yeah, he got it turned into a notional 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, it's beautiful, but we can't afford to preserve it because a lot of people around here live on fifteen dollars a year, so they were just making use of it however they could.
And he came in with the government and said, no, no, no more of that, get out of here. This is protected now. But it is gorgeous. And he had actually been raised there. Daniel Taylor's grandparents were missionaries in the Himalayas, and his parents kind of took over his grandparents' work, so he was raised in the Himalayas, so he'd been looking for the eddy his whole life. But when he went to the Bahun he feels like he found the answer to that track, that it was a kind of
tree bear. But there's a big problem with that. The Barun Valley is a subtropical rain forest, so a tree bear living in there wouldn't survive very very well in the snow of the Tibetan plateau, you know, 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 have a I don't know if you call it a thumb, but some sort of a posable digit to make climbing easier, and that would at least explain this weird thumb like 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 of the Himalayas. You know what I'm saying, Yeah, like in the snow above the snow line, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. But the other thing about that ship ten photo that became world famous for the yetti was that, like the track itself was very crisp.
And there's a guy named Benjamin Radford who's a skeptic who has written a lot about the yetti and in particular how difficult obtaining YETI tracks could be, or actually, more to the point, how easy it would be to confuse the normal animal's tracks or something weird because of the fact that the snow is a terrible medium for tracks. Because like say, a bear walks through an area and
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 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 not previously known, like an entirely new species. That's the thing about the Shipton photograph that captured everyone's attention. It doesn't like that at all. It looks sharp new. It
doesn't look melted at all. The edges are clean and crisp. That's what I think really kind of struck everybody. It wasn't like a melted, mangled track. It was like a new track by something that was not immediately identifiable.
Yeah, for sure. So there have been other photographs through the years, as you know, supposed evidence. In nineteen eighty six, a hiker named Anthony Wooldridge said there's a yetty over there. He's about five hundred feet away and he saw a bunch of tracks in the snow that looked like it 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. This guy was also a respected mountaineer and explore and knew 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, right, people people listened 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 what they were saying, because another expedition went back to the same spot the next year and we're like, oh uh, yeah, that's it's those rocks over there. And even even in his account, that guy what was his name, Woodridge, Yeah, Woodridge says like, yeah, they just stood there motionless. Larry Gavic like, rocks, Yeah they were
they were still his boulders, upright boulders. But the other thing is he swore that there were tracks leading up to it, so 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 This goes Hiking.
Ernest Saves Christmas with the Abominable Snowman. I'll bet Ernest did save Christmas in one movie. I guarantee there's a movie called Ernest Saves Christmas.
I think there was, right, No.
The only one I'm one hundred percent sure of is Ernest goes to camp.
I never saw any of those.
My family saw that movie in the theater the top.
Dollar, 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 bulk candy from like the store across the way from the movie theater in Southwick Mall.
Yeah, we know that move in our family.
It works works really well.
So over the years there have been not only things like oh look footprints or hey, look at that rock across the valley, there have been I don't want to call it evidence, but alleged evidence brought forward by legitimate scientist and people like Sir Edmund Hillary, like he brought back a scalp and said he didn't say I scalped the Yeti, but he said, hey, I think this is a YETI scalp. Yeah he got 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 Yeti expedition by New World Encyclopedia years before, and he came back with a Yeti skull cap that he'd gotten from a monastery in Nepal. They had a Yeti skull cap and a hand, a Yeti hand, a mummified Yetti hand. And what's crazy is that Yeddi's skull cap was supposedly the scalp of the one Yetti that had been killed during the annihilation of the Yeti story. I didn't know, so
he brings it back. I think it wasn't that he was gullible, and I also am 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 a great, great time to be alive in the way of wondering curiosity.
So, yeah, he comes back with his 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 Siro got scalped.
Yeah, but that happened a lot, like there was this finger And this is a pretty good story that actor Jimmy Stewart, believe it or not, was involved in smuggling out supposed YETI finger.
Yeah, from again from a monastery. I believe it might have been the same monastery.
Yeah. And wasn't he just on vacation there and just got sort of mixed up in this plan.
Yeah. We got to mention Tom Slick, the oil man.
Yeah, because he figures into this story. He was a rich guy who he was one of these dudes, this sort of adventuring rich guys that was like, I'm a YETI hunter for this year.
Yeah. And when you say hunter, like he was a hunter. His entire point to finding the YETI was to shoot and kill it, Yeah, and to take it back and have it stuffed. And the government and Nepaul had a real problem with that and basically said, your expedition is banned. Nobody can come in here and kill the Yeti. And apparently the US State Department got in touch with Nepal and said, hey, by the way, we have the same feeling.
We have a policy of not killing YETI either. So apparently with that, Tom Slick's expedition was allowed back in on the basis that they would never try to kill
the YETI. Except in self defense, okay. And I guess later on when he became interested in bigfoot, he had a change of heart 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 changed the way that bigfoot is searched for to this day, and the yetty now really
much more. Yeah, it's much more peaceful search. He was like the last of the big game hunters involved in like trying to find unidentified animals again to kill them so they could be stuffed and kept to the National Geographic Society or something like that.
Yeah, I mean, and that was a big thing that Daniel's guy talks about, just these legends and history and how quote unquote science back then was in the Victorian age were where because you know, 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 like 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 a pass, even though they were the source of 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 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 was so I think Tom Slick kind of represented the end of that and then the beginning of this new era of much more peaceful exploration and expeditions.
Yeah, and I don't want to leave everyone hanging on Jimmy Stewart, he was on the really he was on vacation, I think in Calcutta, got mixed up in this and this yetti finger helped 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, But I mean, for a while there they weren't one hundred percent sure, and I guess Tom Slick was friends had a common friend with Jimmy Stewart, and Jimmy Stewart happened to be in India, and so Tom Slick's agents in Nepal managed to get this finger to Jimmy Stewart, who agreed to smuggle it out on the basis that Jimmy Stewart's luggage is not going to get searched. And Jimmy Stewart smuggled a yetti 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.
I was so hoping you're going to do a Jimmy Stewart. YETI impression in my head.
I was like, Jimmy Stewart, can I plow that off?
You did? Man, you nailed it right.
Well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk more about DNA and how that is figured in UH in the search in more recent years. Right after this, well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right.
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 locke itself and examining it for DNA. Apparently applying modern genetics in genetic analysis to cryptozoology is like the next chapter. And rather than saying like, well, that's it for us, our big fraud is over with, cryptozoologists are like, awesome, good, we finally have the tools now to find out to get
to the bottom of this stuff. And I actually discovered new new specimens or new species. So they seem to be quite happy about it and quite excited, although there are a lot of their beliefs hang in the balance and could just be have the legs cut out from under them by science.
That's true, so science wins. In twenty thirteen, there's a geneticist at Oxford named Brian Sykes who said, all right, YETI holders of YETI pieces, send them to me. If you have any yetti hair YETI teeth, YETI tissue, send it to Oxford University. And he got it. He got
fifty seven samples. They picked thirty six of those to do some DNA analysis on and most of these turned out to be animals that we all know, like bears and cow and horses at the time, though, he found a couple of samples from Bhutan and India that he said were one hundred percent match for the jawbones of
a polar bear from the Pleistocene era. Yeah, and this is kind of excited people because this may have been, I mean, not the Yeti, 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 a direct descendant from bears that went extinct about forty thousand years ago, and it'd be a type of polar bear. There aren't polar bears in the Himalayas. There's black bears, there's brown bears, there's Himalaean 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 for samples of Yeti or Bigfoot or whoever or 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. Some more scientists came along later. They did re analysis, and I think what they landed on was, you know, unfortunately these I think you're getting a bad reading because of a damage sample. What these really are are just brown bears.
They're brown bears. Yeah. Some other people followed up, because it's not like it was any kind of hoax or anything like that. Wyke, it's Wit, right. His last name is Wit Sikes. Sikes. Sykes is like a leading expert on analyzing mitochondrial DNA. Wrote the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which kind of introduced the world to genetic analysis through MT DNA. But he just made a mistake or leaped to a conclusion. I think is the the the thing that everyone's being too polite to maybe say.
But he shared all of his data on gen Bank, which is this huge database, and other people came and analyzed and said, no, it's just regular bears. And then other people analyzed and said, yeah, it's totally just regular brown bears that we already know about.
Yeah, but that science at least was getting involved, and scientists 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 be disappointed that we're not finding the yetti because and if it's not clear to everyone listening, it seems like the yeti are almost always just bears.
Yes, that not just the the 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 the opinion of Ryan hold Messner, who actually is such a mountaineer around the area. He has a museum in the mountains, and one of his YETI samples were one of the ones that Sykes 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. I think all of his bears, including his own sighting. He became infatuated with searching for the yetti because he spotted something in the Himalayas that he couldn't explain, and then through his own methodical research, he wrote a book about it. He talked to other people about it, he did his own studies, and he kept his mind open and his mind became converted to it's all bears.
Yeah, pretty much. 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 the Yeti in Siberia, And what they came back with were things like, oh, look at this. These twisted tree branches were made into beds or sleeping pods by the Yeti, 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 they were located not in a remote area at all.
And just like right off a trail, I think, right.
Yeah, And what people think is, oh, they just cook this stuff up to try and bring tourism to a not very tourist friendly area.
Right Siberia like they And apparently there's a long standing tradition among Russians and former Soviets of basically drumming up tourism by playing on people's beliefs in the Yeti and the Abominable Snowman. And I think there was a period
of time. One of the people interviewed in this great BBC article about the Yeti, this Russian scientist, says, there's a period of time where it was like very fashionable for the intelligentsia of Russia and the Soviet Union to basically go on trips in the summer looking for the
abominable Snowman. And they would show up in these towns, and every town had a designated Yetti witness, and the Yeti witness's job was to basically regale them with tall tales that were supposedly true, take them on these tours into the forest, and then make a bunch of money off of them, and say thanks a lot, chump, Sorry
we didn't see anything this time. But they apparently in twenty eleven the Russian government orchestrated another one of those through this conference, and from the conference they announced to the world they had found indisputable proof that Yeti exists from this bed and these broken branches, and supposedly a few hairs attached to a clump of moss. But some other people who were attending anthropologists and biologists were like, no, it's totally made up. This is all just a big
tourist pr stunt. Yeah, which is hilarious way to go Russia, and Putin supposedly tried to do it again. In twenty sixteen, he announced that he saw three yeti from a helicopter tour of Siberia.
Oh that's funny.
Yeah, I think so too.
So, I mean I don't have much else YETI your bears right.
Yeah. We couldn't talk about cryptozoology though without mentioning that celacanth argument. And the thing about the yeti is that there was actually a species of ape called Gigantapithecus that was like a nine foot tall ape, the biggest ape that ever lived, that lived in that very area, and went extinct about one hundred thousand years ago. So the people who really believe in this are like, you know, we thought the Ceila cantwine extinct like sixty million years before.
We just think this guy went extinct one hundred thousand years before. Who's to say. So that seems to be the thing that's carrying on this belief. That and the fact that, as somebody put in one of these articles, 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.
Just like NeSSI exactly and Bigfoot exactly.
So there you go. If you want to know more about the YETI, 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 Colin because you know every good roller coaster has a colon in the name, right colon Legend of Forbidden Mountain. 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 the Yetti track.
But you can go look at one from a TV show.
Yeah, this guy named Gates who 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 tracker, is he?
No? No, he's an an actor and a TV presenter and a producer.
Yeah, so they presented one on his TV show and now that's a disney World Yeah.
So, and if you're in Disneyland, there's a yetti on the Matterhorn ride.
Oh really like a real yetti.
Yeah, they have one Shane by the neck inside the matter Horns. Really scrawny. They clearly aren't taking very good care of amazing. I already said his time for listener Maile Charles.
Yeah, I got distracted. Sorry, So I'm gonna call this follow up on the Chili Finger that Jimmy Stewart play in it at Wendy's. Nice and quick shout out. This is 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, y always Kusama.
Yeah, I thought it was.
Here's what I think. I think it was really cool, and it would have been a lot cooler 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 Me and I went at the end of the day and people thinned out and we could just keep going in and staying as long as we wanted in them. So I totally get what you were saying.
It was cool though, and I also think, 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 want to see Scott's infinity mirror. I thought the same thing. It'd be awesome to build one of those and just like to 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 I 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, but I largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried to be in it.
Man, yeah, man, I'm with you.
So anyway, I met a couple of listeners that were just happened to be there, and they both came up and like, are you chuck, and so my brother got a kick out of that as well.
Oh that's awesome, But.
This was not one of those people.
Okay.
It just reminded me because it's a Georgia Tech student. Hey, guys, relatively new listener, have probably listened to about one hundred episodes so far. Tend to hop around, as you 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 Windy'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 place where there was a finger. Oh yeah, he 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 Missouri of Rightsville Beach and had never heard 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 deter me 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 a pretty good custard though, if you think about it.
Yeah, and it didn't make like big national news proba 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 spinning the pr than Wendy's did. 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 thanks for that. If you want to get in touch with us and kind of paint a more illustrative picture than we did about
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