The story of the cryptid began to spread beyond the Himalayas in 1832, when English scholar James Prinsep published naturalist B. H. Hodgson’s account of an alleged Yeti sighting in his Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Later explorers claimed to find footprints, hairs, and even appendages that supposedly belonged to the Abominable Snowman.
Then, in the 1950s and ’60s, a series of British mountaineers put forth evidence of the Yeti’s existence. Several men photographed tracks, and Sir Edmund Hillary led an entire expedition in search of the enigmatic creature.
In recent years, advances in science have allowed researchers to test the DNA of purported Yeti body parts — and so far, all of them have been connected to other, known animals. Still, the supposed Yeti sightings detailed below captured the imaginations of people all over the world, and they may even inspire future scientists to find real evidence that the Abominable Snowman exists.
Explorer Eric Shipton’s Photographs Of Yeti Tracks
Eric Shipton/Christie’sAlleged Yeti footprints photographed by Eric Shipton at the Menlung Basin near Mount Everest in 1951.
In 1951, renowned British mountaineer Eric Shipton and his colleague Dr. Michael Ward were in the Himalayas for a reconnaissance expedition to search for potential routes to the top of Mount Everest. While walking across a glacier near the Menlung Basin at an elevation of between 15,000 and 16,000 feet, they stumbled upon a series of peculiar footprints in the snow.
As Ward later wrote in an article for the Alpine Journal in 1999, “We followed the tracks some way down the easy glacier and noted that whenever a narrow, six-inch-wide crevasse was crossed there seemed to be ‘claw’ marks in the snow.”
Each print was between 12 and 13 inches long and roughly six inches wide with one big toe and four or five smaller ones. The men didn’t have a ruler or measuring tape with them, so they used their own boots and ice picks as a size reference.
Shipton and Ward asked Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who was accompanying them on their expedition, about the tracks, and he “had no doubt at all that the footprints belonged to the Yeti.” Norgay explained that there were two types of Yetis: “the yak-eating and the man-eating.” He also described the creatures as “walking on two legs, standing about five feet high and covered with brown hair” with “a face like a man, with a high forehead.” However, Norgay also confessed that he had never seen a Yeti himself.
The photographs that Shipton and Ward captured of the tracks were printed in newspapers around the world, and some people have called them the best proof of the Yeti’s existence to date. However, others are convinced that the men’s Yeti sighting wasn’t what it seemed, and the footprints were simply the tracks of another creature that had been warped by melting snow.
But while the images made waves across the globe, they weren’t actually the first photos captured of alleged Yeti prints.
In June 1944, British mountaineer C. R. Cooke and his wife, Maragaret, embarked on an expedition along the Singalila Ridge near Darjeeling, India, climbing to an elevation of roughly 14,000 feet.
There, the Cookes came across a set of large footprints imprinted in the mud. C. R. Cooke documented this discovery through a series of photographs, using items at his disposal for scale.
In his autobiography Dust and Snow: Half a Lifetime in India, Cooke recalled, “We laid Maragaret’s sunglasses beside each print to indicate its size and took photographs. These prints were strange and larger than any normal human foot, 14 inches heel to toe, with the great toe set back to one side, a first toe, also large, and three little toes closely bunched together.”
At the time, Cooke’s local porters attributed the tracks to “Jungli Admi” or the “wild man,” but the mountaineer believed they belonged to the Yeti.
Although Cooke’s photographs did not create the same stir that Shipton’s later would, the fact that they predate Shipton’s has regularly been cited as evidence of their authenticity. Cooke’s encounter came long before the slew of purported Yeti sightings that were reported after Shipton’s photos were printed.
Still, some people have said that the Cooke prints belonged to other animals, like bears, or even unknown primate species in the region. While it’s still unclear exactly what made the tracks, Cooke’s photographs remain a vital part of Yeti lore.
Richard Steinwinkler’s Yeti Sighting That Was Caught On Camera
The same year that Shipton came across strange footprints in the Himalayas, fellow mountaineer Richard Steinwinkler, a member of the Adventure Club of Europe, had his own bizarre encounter in the Asian mountain range.
Late one night in May 1951, Steinwinkler reached a remote plateau — and spotted something unexpected. As reported by the Adventure Club of Europe, Steinwinkler later recalled, “I was looking for a suitable place to rest, as I suddenly saw in the corner of my eye, a large figure disappearing behind an overhang. Instinctively I thought immediately: The Yeti.”
Until that moment, Steinwinkler had thought the Yeti was a “made-up fantasy,” but he was so intrigued by what he’d seen that he decided to follow the creature. However, when he made it to the overhang, there was nothing there. Then, he looked down.
“If in front of me a huge footprint in the clay would not have appeared,” Steinwinkler said, “I would have thought everything was just imagination.”
Steinwinkler spent the next few hours following the tracks the creature left behind, eventually arriving at a slope that gave him a vantage point over another nearby plateau. There, he saw the Yeti.
“About 50 meters away, about four meters [13 feet] tall, he ran around on two legs and it was difficult to identify as long as he was moving,” said Steinwinkler. “My only thought was, I hope he doesn’t notice me. All the curiosity, all the euphoria was suddenly gone. There was only reverent fear. With shaky fingers, I reached for my camera and took several photographs. Then I crept slowly back. This was my first and last encounter with the Yeti.”
Steinwinkler shared his photos with others when he returned to Europe, but he faced ridicule from those who doubted the authenticity of the images. Still, he defended his Yeti sighting.
“I know that the Yeti exists,” Steinwinkler said. “But I am not saying that it is the mythical creature that people have been talking about for thousands of years. Perhaps it is a completely unknown animal species. Something ape-like or bear-like. I consider it naive that we humans have already discovered everything that is out there.”
The Khumjung Scalp And Edmund Hillary’s Hunt For The Yeti
Nuno Nogueira/Wikimedia CommonsThe “Yeti scalp” in Nepal’s Khumjung monastery was introduced to the Western world by famed explorer Sir Edmund Hillary.
In 1953, building upon Shipton’s reconnaissance mission, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Nepalese-Indian Sherpa Tenzing Norgay completed what is perhaps history’s greatest feat of exploration when they became the first people to successfully summit Mount Everest.
But while Hillary’s mountaineering is known the world over, few realize that he was also one of history’s foremost Yeti hunters.
During the course of Hillary’s historic ascent, he claimed to have spotted mysterious footprints in the snow, which Norgay believed came from a Yeti. However, unlike Shipton, Hillary didn’t photograph them, leaving that alleged Yeti evidence (along with the black Abominable Snowman hair he’d supposedly found in the Himalayas the year before) lost to history.
Still, Hillary’s fascination with finding the Yeti had not been snuffed out.
In 1960, Hillary launched a full-fledged Yeti hunting expedition into the mountains of Nepal. While there, Hillary and his team visited a temple in the village of Khumjung. There, they acquired a purported Yeti scalp that had been in the village’s possession for over 200 years.
Upon Hillary’s return to London, the world was abuzz at this incredible Yeti sighting — only to be let down after scientists quickly found that the “scalp” was actually the hide of a serow, a goat-like creature native to Asia. The object has since been returned to Khumjung, where it remains to this day.
As for Hillary, he ultimately concluded that many alleged sightings of the Yeti had rational explanations rooted in local fauna and environmental factors. He told Stars and Stripes newspaper in December 1960, “The Yeti is not a strange, superhuman creature as has been imagined. We have found rational explanations for most Yeti phenomena.”
Although Hillary’s faith in the Yeti may have wavered, other alleged Yeti sightings only reinforced the world’s belief in the cryptid.
John Angelo Jackson/Wikimedia CommonsDr. Biswamoy Biswas examines the alleged Yeti scalp uncovered at the Pangboche monastery during the 1954 Daily Mail expedition.
In 1954 — one year after Hillary reached Everest’s summit and near the height of Yeti mania — Britain’s Daily Mail financed a major expedition to Nepal in hopes of confirming a Yeti sighting. While the research team didn’t find much, they did come across a purported scalp, much like the one Hillary would study six years later.
Similarly to the Khumjung scalp, this one was found at a monastery in Pangboche, Nepal. Its hairs, ranging from black to brown to red, were analyzed with microscopes and then cross-referenced with samples from known animal specimens, including bears.
After completing this analysis, British scientist Frederic Wood Jones, an expert in human and comparative anatomy, was unable to identify the hairs’ origins — leaving believers with plenty of room for hope.
However, not all of Jones’ conclusions were good news for the Yeti community. Through microphotography and comparison with the fur of other animals, Jones ultimately determined that they did not come from a scalp. More likely, these were hairs from the shoulder of a coarse-haired, hoofed animal.
Despite these findings, however, the “scalp” remained a significant artifact at the Pangboche monastery. This was not the only alleged Yeti body part in Pangboche, however — nor was it the most fascinating.
Peter Byrne/Wikimedia CommonsThe Pangboche hand, once believed to be that of a Yeti, as photographed by Peter Byrne in 1958.
Even for a Yeti sighting, the tale of the Pangboche hand is almost too fantastical to believe.
Having heard rumors of a Yeti hand housed in the same town that held the Pangboche scalp, American oilman and Yeti hunter Tom Slick asked explorer Peter Byrne to go to Nepal and retrieve it.
When the temple custodians told Byrne he couldn’t have the hand, he returned and gave his employers the bad news. Instead of calling it quits, Slick and Professor Osman Hill, a primatologist, hatched a new plan: Send Byrne back to Nepal to obtain a finger from the Pangboche hand and replace it with a human finger.
Over lunch with Byrne at a London restaurant, Hill took out a brown paper bag and tilted it over the table. A human hand spilled out. “It was several months old and dried,” Byrne told the BBC in 2011. “I never asked him where he got it from.”
Back in Nepal with the human hand in tow, Byrne offered to make a donation to the temple (only about $160 in today’s currency) in exchange for one finger from the Pangboche hand. He also offered a replacement human finger. The custodians accepted.
And even after all that, this is where the story fit for the big screen actually brings in a movie star.
Slick asked his friend, actor James Stewart (star of It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, and at least a dozen other classics), to help Byrne smuggle the finger back to London, believing a celebrity could slip through customs more easily.
Stewart and his wife, Gloria, were in India at the time, and once Byrne made it over the border from Nepal, he met Stewart in Calcutta. There, they stowed the finger in Gloria’s lingerie case, and the Stewarts made it out of India with no problems.
Except that when the couple arrived in London, the lingerie case was missing. A few days went by before a customs officer returned the luggage with the finger still inside.
And in an ending that’s either a total letdown or pure poetry (probably depending on whether or not you’re a Yeti believer), the “Yeti” finger for which they traded a human finger was found to be human itself in 2011.
Josh Gates’ Recent Investigations Into Yeti Sightings
Although the golden age of Yeti hunting came to an end several decades ago, the search continues to this day. In fact, in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in solving this mystery once and for all — some of which has been fueled by Josh Gates, host of Destination Truth and Expedition Unknown.
In 2007, during the filming of Destination Truth, Gates led an expedition to the Himalayas to investigate reported sightings of the Yeti. While exploring the region, he and his team, like many others before them, came across odd, roughly 13-inch footprints in the snow.
They didn’t settle for only photographs, though. Instead, they created casts of the prints, once again thrusting the Yeti into the international spotlight. Remarkably, the prints were incredibly similar to those found by Shipton half a century earlier.
“[The cast] is very, very similar,” Gates told Reuters in 2007. “I don’t believe it to be a bear. It is something of a mystery for us.”
Nine years later, in 2016, Gates would revisit the Yeti, this time for Expedition Unknown: Hunt for the Yeti. This second investigation took him across Nepal and Bhutan, where he explored remote villages, interviewed locals about their encounters, and examined sacred artifacts believed to be connected to the creature.
An alleged Yeti hand that turned out to belong to a young bear. Image Source: Discovery Channel
Upon returning to the United States, Gates submitted the various samples he’d collected for scientific analysis. The findings were intriguing, to say the least. A purported Yeti hair, for instance, was revealed to be human, a sample of alleged Yeti scat originated from a goat, and a hand that supposedly came from a Yeti was actually a young bear’s.
Ultimately, Gates and his team didn’t turn up any new evidence that supported the existence of the Yeti. What they did find, however, was a fascinating blend of how folklore and modern science could come together to shed new light on such mysteries.
It also showed that species previously thought to be extinct in the region might still inhabit some of the more remote areas. That’s not to say, of course, that there is no such thing as the Yeti — and perhaps one day, someone will find it.
After reading about the truth behind these Yeti sightings, learn more about the creature’s North American counterpart, Bigfoot. Then, discover the stories of 11 other cryptids around the world.
Stories of the Yeti, an ape-like cryptid said to roam the Himalayas, have circulated for centuries. Some Indigenous groups of the region believed in the existence of a “wild man,” and the creature even appears in several stories linked to Tibetan Buddhism. In the religion, Yeti sightings are sometimes considered a bad omen.
