OLL LEWIS: How the West Learnt About the Yeti: Part 2

The first particularly notable Yeti sighting of the 20th century occurred in 1925 when a Greek geologist and photographer called N. A. Tombazi was on an expedition to Tibet with the Royal Geographical Society. Tombazi saw a figure that looked black against the snow but very human in shape. It was occasionally bending over to pick at rhododendron bushes and was, as far as he could tell, naked. When descending the mountain Tombazi and the other expedition members found what they took to be the footprints of what they had just seen. In his book Account of a Photographic Expedition to the Southern Glaciers of Kangchenjunga in the Sikkim Himalaya Tombazi described the prints as being 'undoubtedly those of a biped' and similar in shape to that of a man but 6-7 inches long by 4 inches wide.

What a lot of articles on the history of the yeti will omit is that Tombazi did not believe that he saw a yeti. He explained the sighting as being possibly that of a local hermit; however, several people at the time and since have contested that what he saw was a yeti.

After the end of World War 2 westerners made several serious attempts to summit Mount Everest and several of the mountaineers involved made claims to have seen a yeti or evidence of one while on the mountain. Eric Shipton, who had been involved in some capacity in most British attempts on the summit of the mountain since the 1930s, claimed to have found a series of strange footprints, which he concluded had been made by a yeti, when on an expedition in 1951 with Dr Michael Ward. Shipton stood down as expedition leader for the 1953 successful attempt on the summit but both Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay, who would eventually summit the mountain, at the time of the expedition believed that the yeti was a flesh and blood animal that could be found all over the Himalayas. During the expedition they both saw large footprints on the mountain that they thought may have been yeti prints but in subsequent years they revised their opinions on the yeti. Hillary believed the yeti was more likely a spiritual being from Sherpa belief rather than an actual flesh and blood creature and Norgay, who at one time thought the yeti could be a large ape, became sceptical of the creatures existence despite his father having told him of seeing the animal on two occasions.

The British public were particularly intrigued by the upsurge in evidence of the yeti's existence coming out of the Himalayas and this prompted the Daily Mail to fund an expedition to the mountains specifically to look for evidence of the yeti. The newspaper had previously got its fingers burnt when Marmaduke Wetherell, under the paper's pay at the time, was hoaxed by persons unknown on the banks of Loch Ness. The Mail had tried to capitalise on the public's new-found interest in Nessie and sent the charismatic big game hunter to the loch, and it seemed like a sure thing that he would find the monster, especially when he found the beast's tracks. However, those tracks turned out to be all made by the same left foot of a hippo and the Mail distanced themselves Wetherell. This time things would have to go differently; this time the Mail would take the expedition very seriously and it would start by hiring people who would be taken a lot more seriously than Wetherell. The expedition's team consisted of several well qualified scientists and experienced climbers. Members of the expedition photographed pictures of the yeti from monasteries, tracked footprints and obtained hairs from an alleged yeti scalp in Pangboche monastery.

The scalp was perhaps the most interesting of the expedition's findings. The hairs on the scalp were of a reddish colour and were extensively analysed by Professor Fredric Wood Jones. Jones concluded that the hairs were not from a scalp and were not from a bear or ape; he thought that the hair was from a coarse-haired hoofed animal but did not pinpoint an exact animal. Perhaps given more time he would have been able so to do, but Jones died that September.