Yeti: The Asian Bigfoot

That's a big one too. Yeah. This slender Man, Slenderman is more Internet folklore than anything. Uh did we do that one? Or did we think about it and not do it? The ladder of those two? If I remember correctly, I said it stinks or something. Yeah, if I remember correctly, hurt my feelings. Oh my in I think it was. I think we could do slender Man now, it was just so early on that Um it was very thin.

Now I think it would be more robust. Yeah that's right. Um, well, today we're talking about the Yeti, which is not slender Depending on which yetti you're talking about, Chuck, it's either enormous and like eight feet tall, covered in gray or white or maybe sometimes reddish hair, weighing four pounds easily

or actually it is kind of slender. It could be basically what amounts to a wild hippie, basically a somebody who likes to grub roots out of the ground and lets out a squeal or a cry every once in a while just to I guess know that they're alive. And um. There's really two competing versions of what those of us in the Western world would would inc was the Yeti. But the one we're really talking about is the first one, what we also think of as the

abominable Snowman. How tall it was, hippie rob uh? He was average like five something, I guess, like high five. He was a little shorter than me. Yeah right, he was not. He was not the uh. He was not the the Yeti of legend as far as I know. He could be now though well I don't know. It just sounded an awful lot like him, kind of test he opened in the mountains grubbing for roots, yep, covered

in dirt and with wild, crazy hair. So I think we should just tell, like, if you don't know what we're talking about, this is the um the legendary beasts that lives in Asia. Yeah, around the Himalayas typically. Yeah, so it's known as Asia's Bigfoot, or maybe Bigfoot is known as North America's Yetti. I don't know, Uh, I guess Yetti came first, right, Yeah, I think yet he's been around with the Sherpa of Tibet for a very long time. Yeah. And that's sort of the deal of this.

The origin story of this thing is the Yetti has been told um for many, many years in traditional stories in that area. Um, there's a there was someone named um Shiva dot Call that collected a bunch of these stories in a book called folk Tales of Sherpa and Yetti, and all of them kind of figured the same way, which was whether it's a story called the Annihilation of

the Yetti uh, in which this is pretty good. It's about sherpas seeking revenge on a tormenting group of Yettis this sounds like something that should be on like the Sci Fi channel. I would be very surprised if it wasn't. But all of these stories basically have the same moral um message at the end, which is because it's sort of like a grim's fairy tale. Like be careful out on the woods. Actually, yeah exactly. I think it serves the exact same purpose to like in the Grimm's fairy Tales,

and I thought the same thing. Um, you know, there's witches that live in candy houses, so don't go wandering off in the woods kids, because you'll end up getting eaten. For little kids in Tibet, it was don't wander off into the Tibetan plateau or the YETI will get you, and you will all sorts of terrible things will happen to you, which is funny because they are all sorts

of real things that could kill you in the Tibetan plateau. Well, that's why I think what they were saying was, you know, you can't just be like, look out for the bears. You can. Kid will be like, I don't know. I can see a brash kid being like, no bear, everybody knows what a bear is. All rustle a bear any day of the week. And then you know, along the way it gets into a drinking contest with Marion from Indiana Jones right, right exactly. That was one of the

best scenes in the history of film. Yeah, I think so, And Tibetan kids tend to agree with me too. But before we move on, I want to say one thing, that annihilation of the Yetti. Keep keep that in the back of your mind. And the story was that, like, there are a bunch of Yetti that, um, we're hanging around and the Sherpa we're sick of them hanging around. So the sherp but basically through a YETI party and got drunk and fought with each other to kind of

provide an example to the Yetti. Hey, you should get drunk and fight with each other too, in the hopes of the Yeti would destroy each other. It didn't work, and the Yetti all managed to escape, except for one who was supposedly killed by a a llama, one of the Buddhist monks in the area. That's part of the story. That's the end. That's the annihilation of the Yetti story.

I didn't know a Lama figured in. And really, annihilation is kind of a strong word if you think about it, because if you just killed one out of I think two and forty Yeti, it's hardly annihilation. That's a good point. I think so too. Uh So, throughout history, these legends have been pervasive in the region so much so that supposedly the great Alexander or Alexander the Great, I'm that's

sure why I did that. When he came through town and conquered the Indus Valley, he said, Uh, I can see one of your famous I don't know if that's what Alexander the Great sounded like. No, No, what did ancient Roman sound like? I was he Roman? I think he was Greek? That was he? Cheeze? How about really screwed that up? Usa? I knew that do a German accent. I'm just slow. I'm just gonna leave. No, han, hank, tight chuck, you can rebound. Yeah. Why why did I

think he was Roman in that Greek? Well, because the Romans like to pretend they were Greek themselves. I'm not firing on all cylinders. But regardless of my bad accent, or maybe I should just edit back in and say that was my Greek accent. There you go. Uh he said, I want to see a YETI and they the local locals that were like, you know, we totally would do that. However, um that you can't get them down this low, and you'd have to hike really high up in those mountains.

And I know you're not down with that, so sorry, yeah, exactly. So I guess Alexander the Great was like, I'm board, I can't believe we're still talking about this. Give me some wine. Pretty gotten a drinking contest, and that was that. So the yett he continued on in in Scherpa tradition in Tibetan, Nepal, and Bhutan, but um in the West it kind of disappeared from view until the twentieth century.

And so remember these are tall tales that the the Scherpa teach their kids, although there is supposedly some I guess general belief as well, but I can't I can't quite penetrate it. But just imagine that it was just strictly tall tales Serpa people told their kids. Then Westerners came in and said, what is this you're talking about? Tell us about this and just bought the whole thing hook line and sinker. Yeah, and things really took for him.

In nine there's a journalist named Henry Newman. He did an interview with some British explorers. And this is a time of great exploration, especially from the British. Uh these sort of uh these, I guess uh, Indiana Jones, like mountaineers who would go all over the world in search of these you know, jungles and mountains in church of crazy beasts and treasures and things like that. So, uh, he interviewed some of these guys and they said, you know what, we found these huge footprints up in the

mountains and the locals there. I guess Serpa said, because with in arpa the plural sharpa didn't me did from it? I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Um, that was a good episode, by the way, everyone, it was go back and listen to that one. What was the title of Warm, Friendly Living, Yeah, because that's I think what tending Nor said. So great. So they said that their guides are Sherpa guides. Um called them mito kangm which the translation, the real translation

is a little awkward man bear snowman. Right, but Newman confused all that. He got the snowman part right, but he translated that first part to mean mato m e t o h two mean filthy or dirty, and then he changed that on his own to the word abominable, and that's the way we get the abominable snowman. Yeah, he was like, I don't like filthy Snowman. I'm going to change the name that I've already gotten wrong, right

and turned it into abominable Snowman. Yeah, he really great journalist, But it's fascinating that you can trace it back to this one dummy. That's the whole the abominable Snowman. That's where it came from, was this one guy, and that obviously just completely captured the attention of the rest of the world when he he wrote this, because like this was not just like, oh yeah, they heard about an

abominable snowman. It was these these explorers found tracks and they're sure, but guides told them the trucks belonged to this abominable snowman. Therefore, there are abominable snowmen living in the Himalayas. And the explorer who was who led that particular expedition was Charles Howard Berry Um Howard Hyphen Berry

b U R y and Um. Apparently he and Newman were really big into promoting the idea of an abominable snowman or men living in the Himalayas, and that it just being like this giant, huge creature with shaggy hair and very much akin to Bigfoot. But if you look at the descriptions, the aditional descriptions of the YETI they're they're much smaller and not nearly as huge as um.

The Westerners kind of immediately made it out to be. Yeah, there was one description, one of the earlier written descriptions from two There was a researcher named Mira Shackley, and I believe that she got this information from uh, two hikers that reported seeing the yetti. Uh, and this is what they said. The height was not much less than eight feet so tall for sure, but it's not like

it was ten ft tall. Uh. The head were the heads, 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 bill to a small man. The head covered with long hair, but the face and chest not very hairy

at all. This this all sounds like they always describe him as or it is bipedal right, means you know, walking upright, right. But if you if you go back and look at that description and how detailed it was. Those hikers who gave the description said that they they saw they saw all this from observing two black specks moving across the snow about a quarter mile below them.

And yet they could see that it had a thick undercoat and like a very long, hairy overcoat and that was reddish, and like that's just just basically perfect abominable snowman sighting. Yeah, but but it's one of like many like after after that Howard Berry expedition came back in and Newman broadcasts to the world, people started going to the Himalayas and droves, and they weren't just necessarily looking

for the abominable Stowe Man. Everest was there, and everybody knew Everest was there, and a lot of people wanted to be the first one to summit Everest, the first Westerner, i should say, to summit Everest, so that while a lot of them were in the area, they're like, well,

we'll look for the abominable snowman while we're here too. Yeah, and some pretty legendary mountaineers um and granted these are not like zoologist or anything, but their respected men in their field, people like Reinhold Messner and one Sir Edmund Hillary both searched for evidence of the Eddy while they were hiking. Uh and Messner even wrote a book called My Quest for the Yetty, Confronting the Himalayas Deepest Mystery.

But I mean, well, well, we'll save the big reveal to the end or the third act of this show. Okay is your third act? Yeah, there's gotta be Okay, we're in big trouble. If there's not, well, why don't we take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about a couple more of these reported sightings. Let's do it all right, Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh Damp Chuck stuff you

should know, all right, to Chuck? Okay, Chuck. So, uh, we've we've started to get some sightings from expeditions that are going to Everest and just hanging around the Himalayas um and then I think in nineteen one, something really big happened. One of those explorers, Eric Shipton, took a photograph of a track that to this day looks pretty remarkable. Actually yeah. I mean this is again it's not like

hard evidence, but this is a very famous otto. I remember seeing this when I was a kid, and like, I guess it was probably the Guinness or Ripley's Believe It or Not or something. It was Time Life books for me, was it? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I remember that. It's a very famous picture of a like a a pick because you know pick axe yeah, used for scale, Yeah, right next to it. And I remember that very distinctly. When I saw this picture, I was like, oh yeah.

And then when you look at it, you're like, wait, that that doesn't look quite right. That's a really weird track. It's it looks like an elongated human foot, but rather than a left toe. Um, it's it's got, it's kind of bulbous and weird. It doesn't look like the other toes, and it certainly doesn't look like what a human toe should look like. And it's also huge. I think it was measured about thirteen inches, which is a pretty typical size for a YETI track from what I understand over

the ages. But the thing about it is it is a nice, crisp, fresh track. And the other thing about and this is what really captured the attention of the world. Eric Shipton was not known to be a particularly fraudulent person. He was a very respected explorer and mountaineer. He knew the area well and as a guy who has tracked Yettie his whole life. Um, I believe his name is Daniel Taylor. Um. Daniel Taylor put it. If if Shipton is coming back with a picture of a track, you

just you know, it's a real track. It's not faked, it's not a hoax. So the question was what was it? And this is one and it hit the world. That picture, that track hit the world like the surgeon's photo of the Lockness Monster hit the world at back in ninety three. It just became like proof to people who believe in the Yettie around the world that the Yetie definitely exists. Yeah, I mean, like you said, it was really Um what what made it different than other photos? That it was

so sharp, it was a really good picture. Um. And that that little um toe thing basically looked like a thumb and it just, you know, it looked odd. But this this Daniel Taylor guy, he actually when I started reading that article, I thought, oh boy, this crack pot. But he actually turned out to be a pretty cool guy because he'd spent a lot of his life looking

for the Yeti. Went over there, even met with the King of Nepal, and the King of Nepal said, well, if you want to go like to the wildest place and the most you know, remote place in our land, go to Barroon b a r U n this Baroun valley. And he went there and he looked around and he

uh did not find a yeti. But what he did do was ended up helping to work towards conservation of that area, which was kind of a nice silver lining to his story was he got there and he was like, this is of the most beautiful places on Earth, right and one of the greatest wilderness wildernesses I've ever been to. He realized it wasn't protected and that like Chinese loggers were infringing on one side and farmers were infringing on

the other. So he kind of spun it into like good work doing conservation work in that area, which was kind of cool. Yeah, you got it turned into a national park in Nepal. It's a protected area now, which is significant. Have you seen pictures of the valley it's astounding. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life, and it was just being used because

the people living there like, well, we need this land. Yeah, it's beautiful, but we can't afford to preserve it because a lot of people around here live on fifteen dollars a year um. So they were just making use of it however they could. And he he came in with the government said no, no, no more of that, get out of here. This is protected now. But it is gorgeous and his his he had actually been raised there.

Daniel Taylor's grandparents were miss canaries in the Himalayas, and his parents kind of took over his grandparents work, so he was raised in the Himalayas. So he'd been looking for the eddies whole life. But when he went to the baron Um, he feels like he found the answer to that track that it was a kind of tree bear.

But there's there's a big problem with that. The Barun Valley is a subtropical rainforest, so a tree bear living in there wouldn't survive very very well in the snow and the Tibettan Tibetan plateau, you know, ten ten thousand or more feet higher up the mountain, So it doesn't really solve the mystery much, no, but his notion that it could have been a tree bear makes a little more sense with these tracks, because a tree bear does have a um I don't I don't know if you

call it a thumb, but some sort of opposable digit to make climbing easier, and that that would at least explain this weird thumblike thing in these prints. It would. So he's got like half of the thing explained. The other half is what the heck was that tree bears, the subtropical rainforest tree bear doing up in the mountains of the Himalayas, you know what I'm saying, Like in the snow above the snow line, I guess, is what

I'm trying to say. But the other thing about that um that shipped in photo that became world famous for the yetti um was that, like the track itself, was

very crisp. And there's a guy named Benjamin Radford who's a skeptic who has written a lot about the Yetti um and in particular how how difficult obtaining yetti tracks could be, or actually, more to the point how easy it would be to confuse the normal animals tracks or something weird because of the fact that the snow is a terrible medium for tracks, because like say a bear walks through an area, leaves some tracks in the snow.

The next morning, as the sun comes up and it hits the tracks and it shoots all that heat on this under that track, it starts to melt the sides, maybe elongate it, maybe make the toes look splayed, And it just doesn't resemble a bear track anymore at all. It looks like something weird and and and um not previously known, like an entirely new species. That's the thing about the shift in photograph that captured everyone's attention. It doesn't look like that at all. It looks sharp new,

it doesn't look melted at all. The edges are clean and crisp. That's why I think really kind of struck everybody. It wasn't like a melted, mangled track. It was like a new track by something that was not immediately identifiable. Yeah, for sure. So there have been other photographs through the years.

Uh as you know, supposed evidence in hiker name Anthony Wooldridge UM said there's a YETI over there, he's about five feet away, and uh, he saw a bunch of tracks in the snow that looked like that was going that way, and he took some photographs that were proven genuine. But I think by genuine that just means they weren't faked. Yeah, that's what I That's how I understand it, because wasn't this the photo that they said, actually those are just

rocks standing up, Yeah, like rock outcropping or whatever. Yeah, this guy was also a respected mountaineer and explorer in New the area really well. And so when he came back with this photo and they said this photo wasn't faked, it's not been doctored. People people listen to him too. But it just turns out he was wrong. This photo of rocks has not been doctored exactly. That's that's ultimately

what they were saying. Because another expedition went back to the same spot the next year and we're like, oh, yeah, that's that's those rocks over there. And even even in his account, um, that guy what was his name, Woodridge, Woodridge says like, yeah, they just stood there motionless, Yeah they were they were still his boulders up brave boulders. But the other thing is he swore that there were tracks leading up to it, so he he seemed to think that that they really were there. But from what

I understand, he was earnest in his report. It wasn't like a fraud or a hoax or anything like that. And I think he was a little a little red faced afterward. Probably. Yeah, they even made a movie about it called Ernest Goes Hiking. All right, Ernest Saves Christmas with the Abominable Snowman. I'll bet Ernest did save Christmas in one movie. I guarantee there was a movie called Ernest Saves Christmas. I think I think there was right now. The only one I'm a d percent sure of his

Ernest Goes to Camp. I never saw any of those. My family saw that movie in the theater Top Dollar, Top Dollar, which was three dollars. Yeah, I guess, I hope so at the time, which is surprising because my mom used to sneak in bolt candy from like the little store across the way from the movie theater in Southwick Mall. Yeah, we know that move in our family. It works works really well. Uh So, over the years, there have been not only things like, oh, look footprints,

or hey, look at that rock across the valley. Uh. There there have been Uh. I don't want to call it evidence, but um alleged evidence brought forward by legitimate scientists. Uh, and people like Sir Edmund Hillary, like he brought back a scalp and said he didn't say I scalped the Yetti, but he said, hey, I think this is a Yettie scalp. Yeah. He was trying to fool anyone, though, was he? No? No, No, he was supposedly kind of a casual believer in it.

He'd been sent on a Yetti expedition by New World Encyclopedia years before, and he came back with a a Yeti skull cap that he'd gotten from a monastery in Nepal. They had a Yetti skull cap and a hand, a Yetie hand and mummified Jetti hand. And what's crazy is the Yeti skull cap was supposedly the the scalp of the one Jetti that had been killed during the annihilation of the Yetti story. So he brings it back. I think it wasn't that he was gullible, And I also

I'm sure it wasn't that it was. He was a hoaxter. He was the kind of scientific person who kept his mind open until the evidence was in. Man, can you imagine a time when an encyclopedia company would send Sir Edmund Hillary out on assignment? Like, how great is that? I know that was the mid twentieth century. It was a great, great time to be alive in the way

of wonder and curiosity. Uh so, Yeah, he comes back with a scalp and it turns out they did a little research and it was a It's an animal called a sero. It's kind of like a goat. You have some poor serro got scalped. Yeah, but that happened a lot like, Um, there was this finger and this is a pretty good story or um that actor Jimmy Stewart, believe it or not, was involved in smuggling out supposed yetti finger. Yeah, from from again from a monastery. I

believe it might have been the same monastery. Yeah. And wouldn't he just on vacation there and just got sort of mixed up in this plan? Yeah. We gotta mention Tom Slick, the oil man, Yeah, because he figures into this story. Uh. He was a rich guy who uh he was one of these dudes is sort of adventuring rich guys. That was like, I'm a Yeti hunter for this year. Yeah, and when when you say hunter, like he was a hunter. His entire point to finding the yet he was to shoot and kill it and to

take it back and have it stuffed. And um, the government Nepaul had a real problem with that and basically said, your expedition is is banned. Nobody can come in here and kill the Yetti. And apparently the U. S. State Department got in touch with Nepal and said, hey, by the way, we have the same feeling. We we have a policy of not killing Yeti either. So apparently with that, um, Tom Slick's expedition was allowed back in on the basis that they would never try to kill the Yeti except

in self defense. And I guess later on, when he became interested in bigfoot, he had a change of heart and he stopped decided he stopped hunting to kill and started hunting just to find and maybe capture on photograph and that was it. And that his change of heart um change the way that bigfoot is searched for to this day, and the Yeti now much more. Yeah, it's

much more peaceful search. He was like the last of the UM big game hunters involved in like trying to find unidentified animals again to kill them so they could be stuffed and kept at the National Geographic Society or something like that. Yeah, I mean, and that was a big thing that um Daniels guy talks about, just these legends and history and how quote unquote science back then was in the Victorian age were we're because you know,

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. You point to the guys who were out there like doing the hunting and killing and the exploitation and all of that, but they were very frequently working at the behest of museums, sure, who for a very long time got to pass even though they were the source of the um those expeditions and the funders of those expeditions, and the reason people were out there in the first place was to go get specimens for the museum's collections and ostensibly to study or whatever, but it

was to study them dead. And I think probably because there wasn't really any reliable way to ship a live specimen back in a lot of ways, but also there there was um so I think Tom Slick kind of represented the the end of that and at the beginning of the new, this new era of much more peaceful exploration and expeditions. Yeah, And I don't want to leave

everyone hanging on Jimmy Stewart. He was only he was on vacation I think in Calcutta, got mixed up in this uh in this yetie finger helps smuggle it back and they finally did DNA testing about seven or eight years ago and they said, oh, this is a human finger, right, But I mean for a while there they weren't sure.

And I guess Tom Slick was friends had a common friend h with Jimmy Stewart, and Jimmy Stewart happened to be in India, and so Tom Slick's agents and Nepaul managed to get this finger to Jimmy Stewart, who agreed to smuggle it out on the basis that Jimmy Stewart's luggage is not gonna get searched. And Jimmy Stewart's smuggled a jettie finger out of India and to the UK for it to be studied. I'll go go, go ahead and put the finger in my bag. So ho big

you're gonna do Jimmy Stewart Eddie. In my head, I was like, Jimmy Stewart, can I blow that off? You did? Man? You nailed it? All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk more about DNA and how that has figured in uh in the search of more recent years. Right after this, well, now we're on the road driving in your truck. Want to learn a

thing or two from Josh Damn Chuck. Stuff you should know, all right, Chuck, so check you remember in the Lochness episode, the Lockness Monster episode, we talked about how there's like a new search going on where they're sampling the lock itself and examining it for d NA UM. Apparently, applying modern genetics and genetic analysis to cryptozoology is like the next chapter and rather than saying like, oh, well that's say for us, are are big? Fraud? Is over with?

Cryptozoologists are like, awesome, good, we finally have the tools now to find out to get to the bottom of this stuff and to actually discover new new specimens or new um species um. So there seemed to be quite happy about it and quite excited, although the there a lot of their beliefs hang in the balance and could just be have the legs cut out from under him by science. That's science wins. In two thousan, there's a geneticist at Oxford named Brian Sykes who said, all right, yetti, Uh,

holders of Yetti pieces, send them to me. If you have any Yetti hair, Yetti teeth, Yetti tissue, send it Oxford University. And he got it. He got fifty seven samples. Uh. They picked thirty six of those to do some DNA analysis on and uh most of these turned out to be animals that we all know, like bears and cows and horses um. At the time though that he found a couple of samples from Bhutan in India that he said, we're a percent match for jaw bones of a polar

bear from the Pleistocene era. Yeah, and this kind of excited people because this may have been I mean not the Yetti. But this may have been sort of a combination, a hybrid of a polar bear and a brown bear, because this is when they were diverging genetically, and that in itself would be a pretty cool find. Yeah, oh yeah, it would be a new type of bear that was a direct descended from bears that went extinct about forty years ago, and it would be a type of polar bear.

There aren't polar bears in the Himalayas. There's black bears as brown bears, there's him Alaan bears, there's tree bears, but there's not polar bears. So and the fact that like he accidentally found this by putting out this call for for samples of Yeti or Bigfoot or whoever, Um just made it all the all the sweeter that like he had just accidentally discovered a new type of polar bear living in the Himalayas. Yeah, but sadly that was not even the case. Um. Some more scientists came along later.

They did re analysis, and I think what they landed on was, you know, unfortunately these uh, I think you're getting a bad reading because of a damaged sample. What these really are are just brown bears. They're brown bears. Yes, some other people followed up because, um, it's not like it was any kind of hoax or anything like that. Wike, Um, it's white, right. His last name is Wike Pikes Sikes.

Sikes is like a leading expert on um analyzing mitochondrial DNA, wrote the book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which kind of introduced the world to genetic analysis through m M T d n A. But um, he just made a mistake or leapt to a conclusion. I think is the the the thing that everyone's being too polite to to maybe say. But he he shared all of his data on gen Bank, which is this huge database, and other people came and analyzed and said, now it's just regular bears.

And then other people analyzed and said, yeah, it's totally

just regular regular brown bears that we already know about. Yeah, but that science at least was getting involved, and scientists kind of round me were like, you know what, this is great because we're using real science finally, and regardless of what result we get, like we're doing it the right way and that's really kind of the thing that counts, Like, don't don't be disappointed that we're not finding the Ettie because um, and if it's not clear to everyone listening,

it seems like the yetti are are almost always just bears. Yes, that not just the the the the like tissue samples or the fecal samples or the hair samples, but also the tracks, the sightings, all of it are probably just Himalayan bears, brown bears, and black bears. And that's actually the opinion of Reinhold Messner, who actually is such a mountaineer around the area. He has a um A museum in the mountains and his one of his yettie samples were one of the ones that Psykes analyzed. His turned

out to be the tooth of a dog. But he says that doesn't surprise me, because I think they're all bears. I think all of his bears, including his own sighting. He became uh infatuated with searching for the yetti because he spotted something in the Himalayas that he couldn't explain, and then through his own with thought goal research, he wrote a book about it. Um, he talked to other people about it, he did his own studies, and he kept his mind open and his mind became converted to

it's all bears. Yeah, pretty much. Um, the Russians got involved, you would think, oh, and what like the nineteen sixties. Now they got involved about eight years ago and went searching for uh, the Yetty and Siberia. Uh. And what they came back with were things like, oh, look at this, these twisted tree branches were made into beds or sleeping pods by the Yetty and they twisted these branches and look at this, it's evidence. But it turns out that

they were clearly man made. There were tool made cuts, and uh, they were located on a not in a remote area at all, and just like right off a trail. I think. Yeah, And what people think is, oh, they just cooked this stuff up to try and bring tourism to a not very tourist friendly area, right Siberia like And apparently there's a longstanding tradition among um Russians and former Soviets of basically drumming up tourism by playing on people's beliefs in the Yetti and the abominable snowman um.

And I think there was a period of time. One of the people interviewed in this great BBC article about the Yetti Um, the the the this Russian scientist says, there's a period of time where it was like very fashionable for the intelligencia of Russia and the Soviet Union to basically go on trips in the summer looking for

the abominable snowman. And they would show up in these towns, and every town had a designated Yeti witness, and the Yeti witnesses job was to basically regale them with tall tales that were supposedly true, take them on these tours into the forest um and then make a bunch of money off of them and say thanks a lot, chump, sorry we didn't see anything this time, but that they Apparently, in two thousand and eleven, the Russian government orchestrated another

one of those um through this conference, and from the conference they announced to the world they had found indisputable proof that Yetti exists from this bed in these broken branches and supposedly a few hairs attached to a clump of moss. But some other people who were attending anthropolo anthropologists and biologists were like, no, it's totally made up. This is all just a big tourist pr stunt, which is hilarious. Russia and putin supposedly tried to do it again.

In two thousand and sixteen, he announced that he saw three yetti from a helicopter tour of Siberia. Oh that's funny. Yeah, I think so too. So, I mean, I don't have much else, Yettie your bears, right, Yeah, we couldn't. We couldn't talk about crypto zoology though, without mentioning that Cela canth argument. And and the thing about the YETI is that there there was actually a species of ape called gigant Epithecus that was like a nine ft tall ape,

the biggest ape that ever lived. UM, that lived in that very area, and when extinct about a hundred thousand years ago. So the people who really believe in this are, like, you know, with that the cela can't went extinct like sixty million years before. We just think this guy went extinct a hundred thousand years before. Who's to say? So that seems to be the thing that's carrying on this belief. That and the fact that, as somebody put in one of these um articles, uh, all it would take is

one yetti to prove that YETI exists. But no matter how much, there's no such thing as evidence they can prove it doesn't exist, so people are always going to believe it exactly exactly. So there you go. Uh, if you want to know more about yetti, go to the Himalayas and look for it yourself. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail or we should mention.

If you're in Disney World, there's a roller coaster ride called Expedition Everest Colon because you know every good roller coaster has a colon in the name, uh, colon Legend of the Forbidden Mountain there are there is a track on display there that the reason it's not in a scientific museum and it's a Disney World is because it's a Yeti track. But you can go look at one

from a TV show. Yeah, this guy named Gates who is not a zoologist at all, but he's an actor and an animal track or I don't even think he's an animal track or is he? No, No, he's he's an actor and the TV presenter and a producer. Yeah. So they presented one on his TV show and now that's a Disney World. Yeah. So um, And if you're in Disneyland, there's a Yetty on the Matterhorn ride. Oh, really like a real yetti. Yeah, they have one chained by the neck inside the matter horns. Really scrawny. They

clearly aren't taking very good care of amazing. I already said it's time for listener mail, Charlis, Yeah, I got distracted. Sorry, So I'm gonna call this, uh follow up on the chili finger that Jimmy Stewart planted at Windy's. Uh And and quick shout out there's a local listener from Georgia Tech. But I just wanted to say hello to a couple of people I met last weekend at the High Museum when I went to the Infinity Mirrors exhibits. Oh isn't

that amazing? Yeah you always kusama um, Yeah, I thought it was. Here's what I think. I think it was really cool. And it would have been a lot cooler if it's just like, yeah, you just walk through all these things and you don't wait thirty minutes to spend twenty seconds in the room. Yep. That took away from it a bit, you you mean? And I went at the into the day and people thinned out and we could just keep going in and staying as long as we wanted and them, so I I totally get what

you're saying. It was cool though, and I also think like I went with my brother and his family, and Scott was kind of like I could build one of these in my backyard. By next weekend, I wanted to see Scott's Infinity mirror. I thought the same thing. Would be awesome to build one of those and just like hang out in it. For sure, I don't want to take anything away from her though. She's a great artist and it was really neat. I love the uh. I think the one that was sort of like the Christmas

lights was my favorite one. What about the one that's like a kind of like an octagonal box that you look in? That was awesome. Yeah, it's just like you see your future in the eighties or something like that. Yeah. I got a couple of cool photos, and but I largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried to be in it. Man, yeah, man, I'm with you. So anyway, I met a couple of listeners that were just happen to be there, and they both came up and like are you Chuck, and so my brother got

to kick out of that as well. Oh that's awesome. Um, but this was not one of those people. It just reminded me because it's a Georgia Tech student. Hey, guys, relatively new listener have probably listened to about a hundred episode so far and tend to hop around. As you can tell, I'm a Georgia Tech student and really hope to run into you guys. At some point in Atlanta, did I mention I go to Georgia Tech. Anyway, I finally sort of had something to write in about it.

Was listening to the Wendy's Chili podcast suddenly heard the name of a place. It sounded very familiar, Cole's Custard. Remember we mentioned that at the end as a as a place where there was a finger. Oh yeah, he said it was one of the places where a finger had been found. And it shocked me as it is just a tiny little custard shop that is not a chain on quite expensive beach property in North Carolina. I've

been as a Georgia Tech student. I was shocked. I've been to the place probably five or ten times as a frequent wizard of Rightsful Beach and then never heard of anyone mentioned this incident. I just think it's very impressive that a small little store managed stay afloat after such an incident occurred. Hearing about the finger incident will not determine from going again, though, And that is from Ethan Lyons and Ethan. Maybe that is exactly why it endured.

It's because people just want that custard so bad. It must be pretty good custard though, if you think about it. Yeah, and it didn't make like big national news, probably because it's not a chain I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure that's part of it. Plus they also did a better job spending the pr than Wendy's didn't. Sure, I'm betting. Well, thanks a lot, Ethan for letting us know, just kind

of bringing that home. Hadn't really envisioned the place where that finger was found in the custard until now, so thanks for that. If you want to get in touch with us and kind of paint a more illustrative picture than we did about something we talked about, we love that, you can join us on Stuff you Should Know dot com. Check out all of our links there, or you can send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of

other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M hmm.