Knight said that the wild man was ‘… a little under six feet high, almost stark naked in that bitter cold: it was the month of November. He was kind of pale yellow all over, about the colour of a Chinaman, a shock of matted hair on his head, little hair on his face, highly-splayed feet, and large, formidable hands. His muscular development in the arms, thighs, legs, back, and chest was terrific. He had in his hand what seemed to be some form of primitive bow.’ The article went on to claim that the porters had seen the creatures moving around on the snow slopes above them.
The only problem is that William Hugh Knight wasn’t one of the best-known explorers of Tibet, and the British Royal Societies club didn’t exist. However, there was a Captain William Henry Knight, who had obtained six months’ leave to explore Kashmir and Ladakh over sixty years earlier, in 1860, and wrote the Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet,5 but nothing in his book resembles the reported description. It would seem that the journalist had plucked the name of a long-dead real Tibetan explorer, changed the name slightly, invented an explorer’s club and made up the quote.6 This was indeed part of a growing pile: a pile of lies. Incidentally, note that at this stage the wild man is recognisably human: he is partly clothed, he has little hair on his face and he carries a bow. It is only later that he becomes more like the furry ape of legend.
Howard-Bury was well aware of the sensation his report had caused. In his book about the expedition, Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921, he wrote: ‘We were able to pick out tracks of hares and foxes, but one that at first looked like a human foot puzzled us considerably. Our coolies at once jumped to the conclusion that this must be “The Wild Man of the Snows”, to which they gave the name of metoh kangmi, “the abominable snowman” who interested the newspapers so much. On my return to civilised countries I read with interest delightful accounts of the ways and customs of this wild man who we were supposed to have met.’7
What was needed now, of course, was a sighting, and so along it came. In 1925 the British-Greek photographer N. A. Tombazi was on a British Geological Expedition near the Zemu glacier, when he spotted a yeti-like figure between 200 and 300 yards away. He reported: ‘Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes. It showed up dark against the snow and as far as I could make out, wore no clothes. Within the next minute or so it had moved into some thick scrub and was lost to view.’
Later, Tombazi and his companions descended to the spot and saw footprints ‘similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long by four inches wide … The prints were undoubtedly those of a biped.’8 Tombazi did not believe in the Abominable Snowman and thought what he had seen was a wandering pilgrim. One wonders why he bothered to report the sighting at all, but this suggests that thoughts of mysterious bipedal beasts were beginning to enter the minds of Himalayan explorers.
Undaunted by this conclusion, writers of books about Mount Everest, fuelled by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine’s mysterious disappearance near the summit in 1924, embroidered the tale even further. In 1937, Stanley Snaith produced a pot-boiler, At Grips with Everest, covering the five Everest expeditions to date, filled with speech-day guff about how Everest was ‘spiritually within our Empire’. He described how the Abominable Snowman’s footprints were made by ‘a naked foot: large, splayed, a mark where the toes had gripped the ground where the heel had rested.’9 This is not what Howard-Bury reported, but from then on these tracks were made by a man-like monster.
The Case of the Abominable Snowman was a whodunit written in 1941 by one of our poets laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis, using the pen-name Nicholas Blake. Although not featuring the yeti but instead a corpse discovered inside a melting snowman, it indicated that the term had entered the public mind.
Our next book which exaggerated and distorted the Howard-Bury and Waddell reports was Abominable Snowmen by Ivan T. Sanderson. According to Sanderson, in 1920 (the wrong date) the Everest team led by Howard-Bury were under the Lhapka-La [sic] at 17,000 feet (the wrong altitude) watching ‘a number of dark forms moving about on a snowfield far above’. (They didn’t.) They hastened upwards and found footprints a size ‘three times those of normal humans’. (No!) Ivan T. Sanderson then states that the porters used the term yeti (and no, they didn’t).
Furthermore, Sanderson completely misrepresented Major Waddell’s report, making up details about bare feet making the footprints and completely omitting Waddell’s conclusion that they were made by a bear. Abominable Snowmen became the starting point for many subsequent yeti writers. But Sanderson listed both Howard-Bury’s and Waddell’s books in his bibliography and thus knew that neither of the expedition leaders believed their porters’ interpretation. But why spoil a good story?
If the first Western sightings of yeti prints were exaggerated and distorted, did this necessarily mean that all subsequent sightings were unreliable? As a BBC producer, I sometimes felt the temptation to embroider stories, but I can honestly say that in thirty years with the Corporation I saw little fakery. The temptation was always there, though.
Let me give an example. A good friend of mine was shooting a documentary series for an un-named TV company about a certain tribe in a certain country. It was horribly hot, and the director was loud, sweltering and increasingly angry that the local men he was filming on a hunting trip couldn’t even find and kill a rabbit. The budget was fast running out and he had a mortgage to pay. Aware, no doubt, that his next gig depended on a kill, he phoned a game park in a neighbouring country and ordered a small antelope to be shot and airlifted in. The resulting film shows a clip of grainy footage of a similar animal running away, and then cuts to a spear sticking out of the bullet hole in the corpse. The audience were shown this as a representation of truth and were deceived. The director got another job and his executive producer was satisfied. The problem is this: it was a lie.
As a rule, though, newspapers seem to be worse than TV, and the Internet is worse still. The rise of US President Donald Trump was accompanied by the rise of the so-called false news sites, where there are no editorial controls over content, and the only driver is the number of dollars racked up by click-bait.
I decided to check a few more of the famous yeti sightings and try to get to the bottom of them. Was the beast going to disappear before my eyes?
Our next account of the yeti, from 1937, is to be found in The Valley of the Flowers,10 by the English mountaineer, Frank Smythe. He was the first climber to make a living by writing books about his expeditions, unlike the Alpine Club set who were often independently wealthy. Smythe’s particular genius was the way in which he brought the wonder and pleasure of mountaineering to a wider public. However, in person he was famously grumpy, a condition which a companion wryly noted ‘decreased with altitude’. He initiated a furious volley of letters in The Times after his encounter with the yeti.
In The Valley of the Flowers, he wrote a chapter dedicated to the Abominable Snowman. This is worth quoting at length as it gives a flavour of Smythe’s writing style with his love of flowers, his gentle humour and his scientific approach to the subject of the yeti. It also contains all the classic ingredients of a yeti hunt: the exotic location, the find, the puzzlement and fear, the tracking and the deductions. His conclusions led to a public rebuttal, which would have consequences later.
Smythe was with a small party of Sherpas in an unexplored valley parallel to the Bhyundar valley, now in the state of Uttarakhand, northern India:
On July 16th I left the base camp, taking with me Wangdi, Pasang and Nurbu with light