HAVE THEY FOUND THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN? NOT YETI...
Yeti: An Abominable History Graham Hoyland William Collins €28
Graham Hoyland, the Everest-scaling mountaineer and TV producer, is an explorer of the old school. His book begins in the Himalayas, with his ominous discovery of giant footprints in the snow. Could they have been made by the Abominable Snowman of legend? The 10ft-tall, furry, human-eating Neanderthal-like creature?
Probably not, says Hoyland. Yeti: An Abominable History is an attempt to ‘disentangle myth from reality, cryptozoology from science’, and to ‘discover the truth about these beasts’. He debunks each known ‘encounter’ with the yeti, and in doing so treks across mountains of myth and through forbidding forests of fantasy.
We encounter a rogues’ gallery of conmen using an array of ludicrous props – goat hair, home-made wooden feet, even gorilla costumes – but whose hoaxes are eagerly accepted by the gullible.
There are Nazis bent on proving mystical pseudo-science; creationists intent on disproving Darwin’s theory of evolution; embittered mountaineers and scientists; Fleet Street charlatans churning out fake news; and Cold War enemies sending rival expeditions yeti-hunting.
We almost admire the tenacity of Ivan T Sanderson, an author of books about the paranormal and who was taken in multiple times, most hilariously in 1969 by the ‘Minnesota Iceman’ carnival exhibit. Tests proved it was made from latex rubber.
Hoyland lists the fakery behind the footage of huge, hairy bipeds that still fills TV schedules, with shows such as Finding Bigfoot, which has run for nine seasons on the Animal Planet channel without living up to its name.
He goes way off topic, considering crop circles, the Piltdown Man hoax, UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. But each sheds light on his real subject: the problem of distinguishing truth from lies.
His book is wildly entertaining, but it’s also an appeal to reason against the ‘alternative facts’ that stalk our discourse. As for the yeti itself, it remains elusive.