Tracks of the yeti?
Massive prints in Himalayas prove abominable snowman really exists, says Indian army
HIGH in the Himalayas, gigantic tracks in the snow prove the existence of the yeti – according to the Indian army, at least.
Soldiers from the country’s Mountaineering Expedition Team yesterday revealed images of what they claimed were footprints of the mythical beast.
The team stumbled across them at an altitude of 17,000ft close to a base camp at Makalu, on the border of Nepal and Tibet.
Each one measured an incredible 32 inches by 15 inches – which would leave the yeti’s supposed North American cousin bigfoot feeling pretty small.
Largely regarded by the scientific community as a myth, the yeti or abominable snowman is part of Nepali folklore and is said to live high in the Himalayas, Siberia, and parts of central and east Asia.
The latest images were taken on April 9, the army said, but were only released this week.
However, a peculiar feature of the tracks is that they are in a completely straight line, meaning any bipedal beast which left them would have been carefully placing one foot in front of the other.
Posting several images on Twitter, the army team wrote: ‘For the first time, an Indian Army Mountaineering Expedition Team has sighted Mysterious Footprints of mythical beast “Yeti”.’
They said the ‘elusive snowman has only been sighted at MakaluBarun National Park in the past’, referring to footprints seen by British explorer Eric Shipton in 1951 on the west side of Everest.
Tales of a wild hairy beast roaming the Himalayas have captured the imagination of climbers in Nepal since the 1920s.
Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis popularised the myth with his novel The Case Of The Abominable Snowman, published under a pseudonym, in 1941.
Tintin encountered the yeti in Herge’s Tintin In Tibet, published in 1958, when the boy reporter was searching for his friend after a plane crash in the Himalayas.
But experts were unconvinced by the latest evidence. Daniel C Taylor, who has explored the Makalu-Barun area and written a book on the mystery of the yeti, said the footprints were likely to belong to bears.
‘If that is the footprint of an aniprofessor mal or a single animal, it’s the size of a dinosaur,’ he said.
‘One needs to confirm those measurements of the footprint size because we know for sure there are no dinosaurs living in the Barun valley.’
Sathyakumar Sambandam, a at the Wildlife Institute of India, suggested a possible explanation for the remarkable size of the markings in the snow. ‘This is probably a footprint of a brown bear,’ he said. ‘ The footmarks get enlarged due to strong sun and winds in the heights and the overlapping of hind and front legs gives an impression of single giant mark.’ Scientists have found little evidence of the yeti’s existence over the decades. In 1954 the Daily Mail spent the equivalent of £1million in today’s money on an unsuccessful 15-week expedition to capture a yeti in the Himalayas. Japanese climbers returning from a mountain in western Nepal in 2008 said they had seen footprints, which they thought belonged to the yeti. And in 2017 a group of international researchers studied multiple purported yeti samples collected from across the Himalayan region and concluded they belonged to bears. An Indian army spokesman said its soldiers will seek more evidence of the abominable snowman. with ‘We will the share domain whatever experts we get to analyse,’ he said. ‘ We will be contacting the team on the satphone for more details about it. The idea is to find out more, to look for an answer.’
‘Must be the size of a dinosaur’