May 31, 2025 • 45 mins
We've covered Nessie and Bigfoot, so why not tackle the Yeti? Listen to this classic episode and hear Josh and Chuck cover what used to be known as the Abominable Snowman.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Oh this finishes it right.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
This slender Man.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Slender Man's more Internet folklore than anything.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Did we do that one or did we think about
it and.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Not do it the latter of those two.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
If I remember correctly, I said it stinks or something.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
It was slender.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
How tall was Hippie Rob?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
He was average, like five something, I guess, like high fives.
Probably he was a little shorter than me.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Okay, yeah he was.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
He was not the He was not the the Yeti
of legend as far as I know. He could be
now though.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Well, I don't know. It just sounded an awful lot
like him.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It kind of doesn't.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yelping in the mountains, grubbing for roots.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yep, covered in dirt and with wild, crazy hair.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, around the Himalayas typically.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, I think Yeti's been around with the Shirpa of
Tibet for a very long time.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
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
(04:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
I would be very surprised if it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
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
(05:00):
the Yetti will get you, and you will all sorts
of terrible things will happen to you.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Which is funny because there are all sorts of real
things that could kill you in the Tibetan plateau.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Well that's what I think. What they were saying was,
you know, you can't just be like, look out for
the bears.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
You can't.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
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,
(05:39):
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
(05:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
That's part of the story. That's the end.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
That's the annihilation of the Yeti.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Wow. Story, I didn't know Alama figured in.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
That's a good point.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I think so too.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
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,
(07:00):
I'd like to see one of your famous a yeties.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
If that's what Alexander the Great sounded like.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
No, no, what did ancient Roman sound like? If not?
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Was he Roman? I think he was Greek? Was he? Uh? Huh? Jeez?
Speaker 3 (07:17):
How about uh really screwed that up?
Speaker 1 (07:20):
I say, let's see, I knew that to a German accent. Oh,
I'm just slot.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I'm just gonna leave.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
No, hang, hang tight, Chuck, you can rebound.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah. Why did I think he was Roman in that Greek?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Well, because the Romans like to pretend they were Greek themselves.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
There you go.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
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
(08:23):
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
(08:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
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
(09:16):
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
(09:37):
sherpa did me determine it?
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah. That was a good episode, by the way, everyone.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
It was go back and listen to that one.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
What was the title of Warm, Friendly Living.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, because that's I think what ten Zing Norgay said.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
It's so great.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
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
(10:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yeah. He really great journalist.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
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
(10:59):
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
(11:22):
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
(11:42):
as the Westerners kind of immediately made it out to be.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
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
(12:07):
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
(12:31):
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,
(12:51):
walking upright, right.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
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
(13:15):
a very long, hairy overcoat and that was reddish and
like that's just basically perfect abominable snowman sighting.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah, yeah, agreed, But it's one.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
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,
(13:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
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
(14:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Okay, is here a third act? Yeah, there's gotta be Okay,
we're in big trouble. If there's not, well, why.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
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
(15:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It was Time Life books for me, was it? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yeah, I mean I remember that it's a very famous
picture of a like a pic like you know pickaxe.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yeah, use for scale, yeah, right next to it.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And I remember that very distinctly. When I saw this picture,
I was like, oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
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.
(16:23):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:30):
around the world that the Yeti definitely exists.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
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
(17:54):
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
(18:16):
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
(18:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
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
(19:20):
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,
(19:42):
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
(20:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
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
(20:56):
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
(21:16):
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
(21:39):
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
(22:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
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
(22:41):
were proven genuine. But I think by genuine that just
means they weren't faked.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Yeah, that's what I That's how I understand.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
It, because wasn't this the photo that they said, actually
those are just rocks standing up, Yeah, like rock outcropping
or whatever.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
This photo of rocks has not been doctored exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
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
(23:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Yeah. They even made a movie about it called This
goes Hiking.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
I think there was, right, No.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
The only one I'm one hundred percent sure of is
Ernest goes to camp.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
I never saw any of those.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
My family saw that movie in the theater the top.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Dollar, top dollar, which was three dollars.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, we know that move in our family.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
It works works really well.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
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
(25:05):
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?
Speaker 1 (25:15):
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
(25:37):
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
(25:57):
of scientific person who kept his mind open until the
evidence was in Man, can.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
You imagine a time when an encyclopedia company would send
Sir Edmund Hillary out on assignment? Like how great is that?
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I know that was the mid twentieth century. It was
a great, great time to be alive in the way
of wondering curiosity.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
You have some poor Siro got scalped.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, from again from a monastery. I believe it might
have been the same monastery.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Yeah. And wasn't he just on vacation there and just
got sort of mixed up in this plan.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah. We got to mention Tom Slick, the oil man.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
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
(27:35):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
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
(28:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
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.
(29:22):
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
(29:44):
that and then the beginning of this new era of
much more peaceful exploration and expeditions.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
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
(30:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I'll go go, go ahead and put the finger in
my bag.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I was so hoping you're going to do a Jimmy Stewart.
YETI impression in my head.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
I was like, Jimmy Stewart, can I plow that off?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
You did? Man, you nailed it right.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
It's stuff you should know, all right.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
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
(31:55):
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
(32:17):
are a lot of their beliefs hang in the balance
and could just be have the legs cut out from
under them by science.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
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
(32:45):
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
(33:08):
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
(33:30):
cool find.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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
(33:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
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
(34:50):
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
(35:12):
other people analyzed and said, yeah, it's totally just regular
brown bears that we already know about.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
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,
(35:42):
it seems like the yeti are almost always just bears.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
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
(36:08):
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
(36:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
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
(37:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
And just like right off a trail, I think, right.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
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
(37:57):
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,
(38:18):
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
(38:38):
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,
(39:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Oh that's funny.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, I think so too.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
So, I mean I don't have much else YETI your
bears right.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
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
(39:55):
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,
(40:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Just like NeSSI exactly and Bigfoot exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
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
(41:06):
in a scientific museum and it's a Disney World is
because it's the Yetti track.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
But you can go look at one from a TV show.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
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?
Speaker 1 (41:24):
No? No, he's an an actor and a TV presenter
and a producer.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Yeah, so they presented one on his TV show and
now that's a disney World Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
So, and if you're in Disneyland, there's a yetti on
the Matterhorn ride.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
Oh really like a real yetti.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
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
(42:13):
to the Infinity Mirrors exhibits.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Oh isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Yeah, y always Kusama.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah, I thought it was.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
What about the one that's like a kind of like
an octagonal box that you look in?
Speaker 3 (43:17):
That was awesome.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, it's just like you see your future in the
eighties or something like that.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Yeah. I got a couple of cool photos, but I
largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried
to be in it.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Man, yeah, man, I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Oh that's awesome, But.
Speaker 3 (43:41):
This was not one of those people.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Did I mention I go to Georgia Tech.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I've been as a Georgia Tech student. I was shocked.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
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
(44:48):
why it endured. It's because people just want that custard
so bad.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
It must be a pretty good custard though, if you
think about it.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Yeah, and it didn't make like big national news proba
because it's not a chain.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
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
(45:22):
of paint a more illustrative picture than we did about
something we talked about, we love that. You can join
us on stuff youshould know dot com check out all
of our links there, or you can send us an
email to stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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
(00:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Oh this finishes it right.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
This slender Man.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Slender Man's more Internet folklore than anything.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Did we do that one or did we think about
it and.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Not do it the latter of those two.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
If I remember correctly, I said it stinks or something.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
It was slender.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
How tall was Hippie Rob?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
He was average, like five something, I guess, like high fives.
Probably he was a little shorter than me.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Okay, yeah he was.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
He was not the He was not the the Yeti
of legend as far as I know. He could be
now though.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Well, I don't know. It just sounded an awful lot
like him.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It kind of doesn't.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yelping in the mountains, grubbing for roots.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yep, covered in dirt and with wild, crazy hair.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, around the Himalayas typically.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah, I think Yeti's been around with the Shirpa of
Tibet for a very long time.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
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
(04:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
I would be very surprised if it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
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
(05:00):
the Yetti will get you, and you will all sorts
of terrible things will happen to you.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Which is funny because there are all sorts of real
things that could kill you in the Tibetan plateau.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Well that's what I think. What they were saying was,
you know, you can't just be like, look out for
the bears.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
You can't.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
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,
(05:39):
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
(05:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
That's part of the story. That's the end.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
That's the annihilation of the Yeti.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Wow. Story, I didn't know Alama figured in.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
That's a good point.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I think so too.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
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,
(07:00):
I'd like to see one of your famous a yeties.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
If that's what Alexander the Great sounded like.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
No, no, what did ancient Roman sound like? If not?
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Was he Roman? I think he was Greek? Was he? Uh? Huh? Jeez?
Speaker 3 (07:17):
How about uh really screwed that up?
Speaker 1 (07:20):
I say, let's see, I knew that to a German accent. Oh,
I'm just slot.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I'm just gonna leave.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
No, hang, hang tight, Chuck, you can rebound.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Yeah. Why did I think he was Roman in that Greek?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Well, because the Romans like to pretend they were Greek themselves.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
There you go.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
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
(08:23):
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
(08:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
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
(09:16):
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
(09:37):
sherpa did me determine it?
Speaker 1 (09:38):
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah. That was a good episode, by the way, everyone.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
It was go back and listen to that one.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
What was the title of Warm, Friendly Living.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Yeah, because that's I think what ten Zing Norgay said.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
It's so great.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
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
(10:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yeah. He really great journalist.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
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
(10:59):
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
(11:22):
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
(11:42):
as the Westerners kind of immediately made it out to be.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
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
(12:07):
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
(12:31):
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,
(12:51):
walking upright, right.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
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
(13:15):
a very long, hairy overcoat and that was reddish and
like that's just basically perfect abominable snowman sighting.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah, yeah, agreed, But it's one.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
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,
(13:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
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
(14:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Okay, is here a third act? Yeah, there's gotta be Okay,
we're in big trouble. If there's not, well, why.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
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
(15:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It was Time Life books for me, was it? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yeah, I mean I remember that it's a very famous
picture of a like a pic like you know pickaxe.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yeah, use for scale, yeah, right next to it.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And I remember that very distinctly. When I saw this picture,
I was like, oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
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.
(16:23):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:30):
around the world that the Yeti definitely exists.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
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
(17:54):
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
(18:16):
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
(18:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
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
(19:20):
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,
(19:42):
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
(20:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
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
(20:56):
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
(21:16):
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
(21:39):
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
(22:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
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
(22:41):
were proven genuine. But I think by genuine that just
means they weren't faked.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Yeah, that's what I That's how I understand.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
It, because wasn't this the photo that they said, actually
those are just rocks standing up, Yeah, like rock outcropping
or whatever.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
This photo of rocks has not been doctored exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
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
(23:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Yeah. They even made a movie about it called This
goes Hiking.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
I think there was, right, No.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
The only one I'm one hundred percent sure of is
Ernest goes to camp.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
I never saw any of those.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
My family saw that movie in the theater the top.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
Dollar, top dollar, which was three dollars.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, we know that move in our family.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
It works works really well.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
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
(25:05):
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?
Speaker 1 (25:15):
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
(25:37):
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
(25:57):
of scientific person who kept his mind open until the
evidence was in Man, can.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
You imagine a time when an encyclopedia company would send
Sir Edmund Hillary out on assignment? Like how great is that?
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I know that was the mid twentieth century. It was
a great, great time to be alive in the way
of wondering curiosity.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
You have some poor Siro got scalped.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, from again from a monastery. I believe it might
have been the same monastery.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Yeah. And wasn't he just on vacation there and just
got sort of mixed up in this plan.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Yeah. We got to mention Tom Slick, the oil man.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
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
(27:35):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
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
(28:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
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.
(29:22):
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
(29:44):
that and then the beginning of this new era of
much more peaceful exploration and expeditions.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
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
(30:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I'll go go, go ahead and put the finger in
my bag.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I was so hoping you're going to do a Jimmy Stewart.
YETI impression in my head.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
I was like, Jimmy Stewart, can I plow that off?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
You did? Man, you nailed it right.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
It's stuff you should know, all right.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
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
(31:55):
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
(32:17):
are a lot of their beliefs hang in the balance
and could just be have the legs cut out from
under them by science.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
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
(32:45):
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
(33:08):
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
(33:30):
cool find.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
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
(33:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
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
(34:50):
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
(35:12):
other people analyzed and said, yeah, it's totally just regular
brown bears that we already know about.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
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,
(35:42):
it seems like the yeti are almost always just bears.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
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
(36:08):
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
(36:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
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
(37:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
And just like right off a trail, I think, right.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
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
(37:57):
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,
(38:18):
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
(38:38):
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,
(39:01):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
Oh that's funny.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Yeah, I think so too.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
So, I mean I don't have much else YETI your
bears right.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
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
(39:55):
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,
(40:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Just like NeSSI exactly and Bigfoot exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
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
(41:06):
in a scientific museum and it's a Disney World is
because it's the Yetti track.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
But you can go look at one from a TV show.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
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?
Speaker 1 (41:24):
No? No, he's an an actor and a TV presenter
and a producer.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Yeah, so they presented one on his TV show and
now that's a disney World Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
So, and if you're in Disneyland, there's a yetti on
the Matterhorn ride.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
Oh really like a real yetti.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
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
(42:13):
to the Infinity Mirrors exhibits.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Oh isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Yeah, y always Kusama.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah, I thought it was.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
What about the one that's like a kind of like
an octagonal box that you look in?
Speaker 3 (43:17):
That was awesome.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
Yeah, it's just like you see your future in the
eighties or something like that.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Yeah. I got a couple of cool photos, but I
largely kept the phone in my pocket and just tried
to be in it.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Man, yeah, man, I'm with you.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
Oh that's awesome, But.
Speaker 3 (43:41):
This was not one of those people.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Did I mention I go to Georgia Tech.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I've been as a Georgia Tech student. I was shocked.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
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
(44:48):
why it endured. It's because people just want that custard
so bad.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
It must be a pretty good custard though, if you
think about it.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Yeah, and it didn't make like big national news proba
because it's not a chain.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
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
(45:22):
of paint a more illustrative picture than we did about
something we talked about, we love that. You can join
us on stuff youshould know dot com check out all
of our links there, or you can send us an
email to stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
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