After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - What is the Yeti?

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Did you know legendary mountaineer Edmund Hillary found evidence of the Yeti? Or that David Attenborough is on board with the idea it exists? Today we explore the history of the hunt for the Yeti.We're delighted to be joined by Pranaya Rana, a writer based in Kathmandu whose blog is at https://recordnepal.substack.com/Written by Maddy Pelling. Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Hello and welcome to After Dark and this our third and final episode where we're exploring all things Bigfoot, Yeti and Sasquatch. We have been talking to Dan Schreiber in our previous two episodes and in this episode it's just Maddy and I and we're going to be talking a little bit more about the Yeti. So to set up that scene,

Maddy has an introduction that will take us right to the heart of this very story. It's 1960 in northeastern Nepal and we're standing inside the Sherpa village of Kumjung. We are 3790 meters above sea level here and in the dazzling sunshine the air seems to shimmer along the roof of the world. Rising magnificent above this glacial valley is Mount Kumbila, the sacred mountain. Its jagged tips threaten to cut into perfect blue sky. No one goes there. To climb it would be to dishonor the old god who lends his name to its rocky form. Beyond, in the distance, are the snow-capped peaks of Mount Everest. We're following two men. They're European. One is tall, with a face that cracks and crinkles around his eyes and mouth. The other is shorter, with hair bleached by the sun.

He's struggling to keep up with the colossal strides of his companion. The pair soon turn the corner of a street lined with low, whitewashed buildings. There, opening up in front of us, is a magnificent monastery. Coloured prayer flags flap in the breeze, drawing our eye to the red and white frontage of the building from which they emanate in long strings. Gold accents on the door and windows of this place wink in the light. Legendary Everest mountaineer Edmund Hillary and his friend and colleague,

the artist and writer Desmond Doig, head inside. We wait a while. The sun rises higher in the sky, and the tinkling of bells fastened at the necks of mountain goats drifts towards us. When, finally, Hilary and Doeg emerge, they look triumphant. And why wouldn't they? The pair have just collected a vital piece of evidence of a legendary creature. Now they plan to use it to convince the world of its existence. So one of the things that I have often, and you know this when we've been planning for these episodes, where I've gone, where's the history in this? I don't quite get what we're talking about.

And even when we were chatting with Dan, I was struggling to locate some of these stories. However, here we have some actual dates. There's a journey here. There's a history here that's far more connected. So how far back into the past are we going with this Yeti figure? What's brought Hilary and Doeg to this point? So in terms of the story that we're telling in this episode, this is very much a 20th century history. That's not to say that the history of the Yeti doesn't go back further than that. That's what I'm thinking, right? Yeah. We'll get to that. There's an interaction here, an encounter, a meeting of West and East

in the Himalayas when it comes to the cultures that are telling this story, that are adopting, appropriating this story. And that's really the moment that Edmund Hillary, the mountaineer who climbs Everest, is coming to this moment. So we've already spoken in the series about Bigfoot, now we're on the Yeti or the Abominable Snowman. And again, we're going to talk about some of the language around that. So the Abominable Snowman and the Yeti are the same thing? Yes. For all intents and purposes, broadly speaking, there's nuance. We'll get there. So whatever you want to call this being, and as we've discussed with Dan Schreiber in the

previous episodes, it's really multiple beings. Bigfoot in different places means different things to different people. He looks differently, all of that stuff. But what really interests me, I think, about this story is this really almost near universal desire to prove the existence of animals, beasts, monsters like this in broad terms. And I think as human beings, we really crave evidence. I think especially if something that exists on our peripheral vision, this is a being that people claim to have seen, but it lives on the edge of our lands, our environments. We see it out of the corner of our eye. We see it fleetingly move through the forest or shuffle away in the snow. I think we feel a desire to capture it. And we're going to talk about what capturing an animal like this or a being like this might mean. But I think we have a desire to understand it and

to possess it in some way, whether that's through storytelling, whether it's through literally capturing and killing an animal like this that is causing the tracks that people claim to have found. We're going to see in this story, there's all kinds of objects that are brought up as evidence of the Yeti, including parts of the Yeti itself, supposedly. And there's a real sense of trying to prove this in the 20th century, of course, when this story is taking place, we've got huge advancement in photography and filmmaking. We've seen this in the Bigfoot story already with the- Patterson-Gimbal. Yes, yeah. With that footage that's so iconic now, and that's still put through all kinds of tests

to try and prove its validity or the fact that it's false. So this is the kind of context of what we're going into. Now, the main difference you might be asking. No, I do need to know. Are you going to say what's the difference between the Bigfoot and the Yeti? Yes. I see the Yeti as white. Yeah. So it's, well, yes and no. Oh. That's one version. Okay. So the main difference is geographical. So Bigfoot is North America. The Yeti is mostly around the Himalayas. But again, in an episode we're done about Bigfoot in Japan, or a is a millennia old being potentially. And certainly the stories have been told for hundreds of years, if not thousands, of something that lives up in the snow that is covered in hair. If you look into the taxonomic discussion around these things,

big word. So lots of people try and come up with the types of yeti there may be and there's debate around whether the yeti is as you say white and covered in fur or whether he is for example there's one subspecies or distinct species of yeti described as being six to eight foot something in that region like six foot's not that tall i'm six foot yeah like human beings are six foot are you six foot all right wow 183 centimeters thanks very much i'm nearly as tall as you that's interesting well we all have our crosses to bear yeah oh wow moving swiftly on um this is the last episode of abstract yeah we hate each other um yeah so this is really tall creature who is described as having sometimes blonde or white fur, but sometimes black or red or even grey fur.

So it's a bit of a mixture. It's vegetarian. I don't know how they know that, but it sometimes hunts cattle for the sake of it. So there's that. And then there's another creature that's the size of a small man. So this is a much smaller creature that's described as being covered in black or red hair with a mane that always comes down over its eyes. So it kind of looks like Thing from the Addams Family is kind of what I'm imagining.

Wait, so, well, this is a departure, although we did see this in the carvings that we described in episode two, I think, of this trilogy, which was different sized hairy men. And this was the Native American rock. So that feeds into that. I always think they're big, but there's depictions where they're not big. So I think the reason why you're imagining a Yeti that is white

is not all because of Westerners going into the Himalayas, but this is very much, yes, this is the version of the Yeti that comes to the West that is in films. And we'll talk about some of those film depictions later on. This is very much the Western pop culture version that we know. I think that the story of the Yeti, it's a story about a cultural encounter and colonialism.

It's West meets East, as I've said. But there's nuance within that. It's not this binary or adversarial meeting. There's lots of borrowing and exchange of stories in amongst that. It's also a story of exploration and endurance because don't forget the Yeti is always sighted really high up in the mountains. We've got Mount Everest in the Himalayas and we've got this sense of adventure, of challenge. And the Yeti kind of falls within that culture, the culture of challenging oneself, searching for something beyond yourself, pushing your boundaries. And of course, so many people go there now from the West, and indeed from Nepal, to climb mountains, to explore that region. And so since the beginning of that in the 20th century,

when it really took off in the mid 20th century, and we're going to talk about the details of that in a little bit, but this is a moment when Yeti sightings are reported beyond the Nepalese region and the Indian region and start to be taken very seriously in the West, to the point where people are going to climb mountains, but also to search for the Yeti alongside that. So to tell us a little bit more about this cultural meeting and what the Yeti means and the industry that's been built off the back of it means to the people in Nepal, we're going to hear from a journalist who's in Kathmandu. His name is Pranay Arana, and he's the author of, if you want to look him up, Off the Record on Substack amongst some other short stories. And he spoke to us so enthusiastically

about what the Yeti means to him, his friends, his family, his colleagues, and what he thinks about the Westerners who arrive each year in search of this enigmatic monster. this enigmatic monster. My name is Pranay Arana. I'm a journalist and writer from Kathmandu, Nepal. I write a weekly newsletter. It's called Off the Record. It's basically a newsletter that sums up all of the happenings in Nepal, political, social, cultural. So if anyone's interested in learning about what's happening in nepal you know give my newsletter a read it's on sub stack so the yeti you know it's a big part of nepali culture nepali you know traditions we've all really like heard of the yeti here and there ever since we were children for most of us the yeti is more of like a boogeyman, like a creature that will come and take you away if you don't eat your meals or if you stay out too late.

I do have a couple of friends who are Sherpas. They tell me that they personally have not seen the Yeti, but their grandparents or their grand uncle or one of their grand aunts has glimpsed the Yeti while they were you know herding yaks or taking their goats out to pasture they glimpsed this wild creature that either came running towards them or tried to attack them there's all these stories that they tell and the story is always followed by something bad happening to the family so my friends they connect the yeti with kind of like an omen you know that seeing the yeti means that something bad an omen, you know, that seeing the Yeti means that something bad is going to happen to you. If you come to Kathmandu, you will definitely see signs of the Yeti like everywhere. Yetis on t-shirts, on mugs, on basically anything

that you can put something on, you will see the Yeti. And the Yeti is also, you know, there's also statues of the Yeti all around Kathmandu. These statues were produced for what was supposed to be Visit Nepal 2020. But we all know what happened in 2020. So Visit Nepal got cancelled. But the statues are still all around Kathmandu. We love it. It brings more tourists to Nepal. We really want to play off that idea that maybe there is a Yeti out there. And if a documentary filmmaker or maybe some enthusiast wants to

come and look for the Yeti, yes, please, you're welcome to. Come hire a bunch of porters, take a flight, take some guides with you, and do your documentary. That benefits us in the end. So we really, Nepal just wants just play up the story of the Yeti as much as possible because we know that, you know, it's attractive, right?

People want to learn about the Yeti. And while they're learning about the Yeti, they'll probably learn a little bit about Nepal and about the Sherpas and about our different communities and ethnicities. So we see that as a good thing. You should learn more. We need to really pick our battles, right? So we can't get angry over all of the stereotypes. We need to fight the big ones first

and then we'll get to the other ones. We'll see you next time. new breakfast deal. Mix and match two items of your choice for only $4. Breakfast wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's. Available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. I love this because I love the idea that it's embraced and not taken too seriously. And yes, please come visit us. You're doing us a service nationally by bringing this money. We want you to come and look for the Yeti. But I also love, my favorite bit of the whole thing was when he said he knows Sherpas who have grandfathers who've seen Yeti, but they haven't seen him themselves. And I love that kind of myth building and that intergenerational myth building that grandparents tell their grandchildren as a way of bringing the landscape to life. I mean, it is taken relatively seriously in that it is a tradition to be handed down. It is something that people do feel that they have seen or their relatives have seen. But equally, there is a welcoming of Westerners. And, you know, ultimately, an industry has built up on this and there's money to be made.

And as Pranayya said, there is no shame in that. They're very welcoming to that. They're very enthusiastic about that. If you want to come from the West and spend your money searching for the Yeti. Knock yourself out, guys. Knock yourself out. So we're going to go to the 1950s and 60s now and the time of Edmund Hillary. But before we do that. God, it was that late. It was the 50s and 60s. It was, yes.

Which I thought was much earlier than that. Yeah. So we're going to talk about it in a minute. But first, I want you to guess who these words belong to. Okay. going to talk about it in a minute but first i want you to guess who these words belong to okay i believe the abominable snowman may be real i think there may be something in that there are footprints which stretch for hundreds of miles and we know that in the 1930s a german fossil was found with these huge molars that were four or five times the size of human molars they had to be the molars of a large ape one that was was huge, about 10 or 12 feet tall. It was immense, and it is not impossible that it might exist. If you've walked the Himalayas, there are these immense rhododendron forests that go on for hundreds of square miles, which could hold a yeti.

If there are some still alive and you walk near their habitat, you can bet that these creatures may be aware of you, but you won't be aware of them. Okay, 50s, 60 be aware of them. Okay. 50s, 60s? Not necessarily. Oh, okay. So this is not from that time. No.

Okay. I mean, I'm not saying it's not. Okay. I'm not going to make it that easy for you. I'm really bad at guessing. It's not. Okay, it's not. So it's someone we've actually already mentioned.

It's going to be Arthur Conan Doyle. Can you imagine? Who's now my poster boy for believing all kinds of things. Doing a seance on top ofest with some fairies dancing around um no so we've already mentioned him in a previous episode it is sir david attenborough that's what i was gonna say yeah were you though yeah i actually was and i think i think this really sums up a fascination that we still have today about this region of the world that we're talking about here, the Himalaya. There are so many unexplored places still. Although recently I did see

in a news article somewhere that the base camp at Everest is absolutely full of Westerner's trash. Now people are coming to climb and then just leaving all their stuff. So not great. And that makes it feel quite mundane and a bit run down but generally that whole area it's so vast and there are so many areas that people just haven't been able to get to or you know that are so challenging only the most well-trained most enduring athletes essentially can get to it and there's a sense that there could be other things up there, things that are human-like that are physically better than us, that are surviving up there. I'm going to just offer that perhaps, and I don't mean to discredit anybody's belief systems,

but I'm going to just offer that that may have more to do with the intrigue of the landscape than with any kind of zoological possibility, potentially, where this vastness, we struggle as humans, I think, with vastness. We need to populate. We want to fill it. We have to put something in there. We can't just have it be. We need to go, and actually it's full of mysteries. And it is full of mysteries and full of natural mysteries. And the Yeti might be one of those natural mysteries, but it always feels to me like we're trying to control stuff, including the natural landscape,

by placing these creatures in them so that we then have to go hunting to control again. So we're trying to control the narrative, trying to control the landscape

by placing a narrative on it and then trying to control that narrative by going hunting for it. Do you know what I mean? It's a sort of downward spiral. Yeah.

I mean, now, I'm talking about that Western influence there. I'm not talking about what's more culturally important to Nepalese people themselves or to the Sherpa. That's different because that has a cultural legacy. Yes, although I think there is something universal in the Yeti. It might mean different things to different people, but there is a universal desire to put it into the landscape there. It's interesting just thinking about the landscape and anxiety that human beings have. Let's speak a little bit about mountaineering in the 1950s and 60s, because this is coming in the wake of the Second World War, a time when

people are reassessing, you know, we've had global conflict. The world means something different now. Yeah, we've had nuclear weapons used for the first time. The atom bomb has been used twice in Japan. And there are further tests going on. We've got the Cold War going into the 60s. There's a race to get to the top of Everest. And Hillary is the first person to get there. So he's a New Zealand mountaineer and explorer. And in 1953, him and a Sherpa who is called Tenzing Norgay, famously,

I know you might recognize, they become the first climbers ever to have reached the summit of Everest. I absolutely don't recognize that name at all. Oh, okay. It's a very famous pairing. Oh, really? Yeah. Sorry.

Come on. So they're the first recorded human beings to get to the top. I mean, who knows, right? Yeah, yeah. But they get there and there's this whole influx of people who want to go and do this challenge. Interestingly, with Edmund Hillary, I will say later in his life in the 80s, just thinking about Westerners in Asia, that he later works as the New Zealand High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and as an ambassador to Nepal. And I think it's fair to say it's because of his

relationship with that part of the world. But there is something there about sort of old colonial administration just to bear in mind his relationship with that part of the world but there is something there about sort of old colonial administration just to bear in mind particularly in that part of the world i think so so it's in this context this race to get to everest and this new interest in you know trying to get literally to the roof of the world to look down on everything in a post-war world and kind of make sense of it i guess and it becomes this challenge particularly a challenge for western men it's this kind of make sense of it, I guess. And it becomes this challenge, particularly a challenge for Western men. It's this kind of thing of masculinity and proving yourself. And rich people. And rich people, exactly. And the Yeti comes into play here. People start to claim that they've seen

them. Now, one of the most famous, and I'm going to make you do a picture, so get ready. One of the most famous examples, the early evidence for the Yeti comes in 1951. This is before Hillary has done his ascent in Everest, but there are other mountaineers already in that region. And there's a guy called Eric Shipton who's a mountaineer, and he takes a photo in 1951, and it becomes famous immediately. It's sold around the world, of a giant footprint. It's in front of you. Tell me what you think of it in terms of the scale, in terms of what we can maybe surmise from the footprint itself.

Okay, so what we have is a rather large footprint, or what appears to be a footprint, in the snow. And right beside it, there is one of those pick things that you climb mountains with for scale. And it is, it's the same kind of size as the pick. Now, this is the benefit of having done three episodes on this now because dan in the previous episode said that sometimes these are just footprints that melt and therefore enlarge as they melt and it looks you're spot on the money but no one realized this in 1951 and so there's huge excitement oh my god am i a scientist now did i just solve that i mean we're usually a mass podcast now we're a science podcast i love it it's brilliant yeah so this photo kicks off not only the race for everest but the race to find the

yeti i love this fact so in 1953 two years after this photo was taken the daily mail in england launches its own expedition to nepal the trip cost for each person going on it the equivalent of £1.35 million today. And of course, no proof of the Yeti was found. So I feel like that was not a great use of money and time. That's a lot of money. But that shows you how mainstream this desire to find the Yeti had become. Does it though? Or does it actually show you how niche it is?

Because not everybody's going on a trip well not no not everyone can go but the fact that it's advertised in the daily mail that it's the daily mail who's offering this i just i find that fascinating a british newspaper yeah is offering people to go out to nepal for a huge astronomical fee it's also it's really important i think to say at this point that people didn't view this as a mythical beast. People really thought there might be something in this, there might be. And the Nepalese government, as early as 1947, so right two years after the war had ended, actually outlined in a memo that they circulated in Nepal and eventually elsewhere, kind of etiquette of Yeti hunting. So they said, for example, there's a national park now

and they sort of cornered off land to protect the Yeti. And this memo was actually published in the American Embassy in Kathmandu in the 1950s. So a few years after Eric Shipton's photograph, but certainly during this high peak, point unded, of people, this intended, of people, this influx of people coming in to search for it.

And it stipulates that the search for the Yeti requires a permit. That's very important for the Nepalese government. And that the Yeti must not be killed except in self-defense.

Because don't forget it's vegetarian. Yes, so actually there'd be no attack forthcoming from the Yeti. But it does go to show that they're putting... Unless it was really cross.

Well, but it does go to show that unless it was really cross well but it does go to show that there's no that there is rather regulation coming around this there's law and you know ideas there's a philosophical way to approach this and there's an ethical issue here like people are really thinking about this and this brings me to edmund hillary so hillary puts together a team to go and do this and it's an expedition that is looking for the Yeti. It's going to do some mountaineering, because don't forget, they go hand in hand in this era. And he's going to go for all kinds of scientific reasons.

So the team that he brings with him, they include, for example, a space physiologist. It's a space physiologist, okay? Because I know what that is. And then he also brings a glaciologist. You need one of those. I don't get the space thing oh the pressure thing yes i guess so i mean oh god science podcast science he also brings and i think this is so telling the director of lincoln park zoo with him in anticipation of finding and maybe capturing the yeti the other person that he brings

with him that we've heard in the opening to this episode is Desmond Doig. So he is a journalist, he's a photographer, he's an author, he's an artist, he's all of these things. And he afterwards writes a book called High in the Thin Cold Air, which I think is a great book title. And it's a collaboration with Hillary. And it's basically a narrative of their adventures in the Himalayas. It's published the year after they've been there in 1962. And in it, he outlines all the mountaineering they do and coming into contact with the Sherpas and their traditions and learning about their way of life in this really high region. But he also talks about the search for the Yeti. And it's very much in terms of science, in terms of taking a really sort of strategic approach to it

a taxonomic approach it's about working out what kind of animal this is what are they going to do if they catch it and there's a bit of tension between him and hillary because hillary he's absolutely convinced that they if they do capture it they should let it go they should not harm it might be human like we are not taking that back to the West. He's like, no, I'm not doing it. It's not coming off this mountain. And Doeg's like, hmm. The dollar signs are appearing.

I'm just going to read you a little bit from his book because I think this is so fascinating in terms of the things they do to try and catch the Yeti. So he says, Our objective in the first part of this expedition was to establish or disprove the existence of yetis to do this we would examine every available clue legends accounts of yeti sightings snowman relics tracks in the snow we would try to photograph yetis using powerful camera lenses

and self-operating cameras activated by tripwires if possible we would record the yetis commonly heard call the high whistling noise that our expedition Sherpas had apparently heard. Certainly, we could observe them through our extremely powerful viewing glasses. Our ambition, of course, was to capture a live snowman, though I'm certain that none of us knew quite what we would do with the beast if we succeeded in making one prisoner. Hillary had expressed more than once his opposition in keeping Yetis in captivity. Hillary had expressed more than once his opposition in keeping yetis in captivity. So they're bringing a lot of equipment with them to find an animal that probably does not exist. Although the key there, which he's putting in, I don't know if that's retrospective of the writing of the book, is to prove the existence or to disprove the existence of the yeti.

So he's setting himself up for success either way. I don't think he goes with that open mind. I think that's the version of himself he presents in his book but i think he's like i am making money we're finding the yeti yeah so they do find some things they find some of these giant snow prints which are just melted snow you know these huge footprints they do go to a monastery and they find a relic that is billed as being a yeti hand take photographs and they send them back home and actually it turns out it's a human hand that's been restrung on wire to make a different form. So a different hand, which is quite interesting. It is bleak and it makes you think, where's the hand come from in the first place?

They're presented by various people that they meet along the way and some things they find in the snow with different pieces of skin and fur, often bluey black. There's some white stripes across one of them. But the general consensus is that these are Tibetan blue bears that do live in that region and that are just shedding or have been killed. And that's the remains of them. And they thought that as they were being presented with that evidence, because I presume it didn't go for any analysis or anything. They were just like, we think we recognize this. When we heard about them at the beginning, they're going into a monastery. Now this is a monastery in Kumjung, which is really high up. And the relic in that monastery is supposedly a Yeti scalp. And you can look at pictures online. We'll put them on Instagram. Follow us on Instagram to

have a look at them. And they look like a huge domed head, like a really tall elongated head with sort of gingery red hair. And the monks in the monastery actually agree to hillary and doig taking the relic back to the west for testing as long as it can go with a monk accompanying it so three of them leave with the relic and actually and i really encourage people to go and see this because it's a really interesting bit of footage on the british path a website now you can see footage of them descending from the little plane, the little biplane that they've come down from the mountains on with the thing in a box. And there's the Sherpa Monk with them.

And Doeg's there. Hilary's there. It's a news footage that's used for news broadcasts. And this was major news in the West. And the relic, it's tested in Chicago. It's tested in London. It's tested in Paris. And it basically goes on like, it's tested in Paris. And it basically

goes on like a tour of the Western world. And Hilary and Doug become kind of celebrities. Although Hilary is always, he's a very measured, calm man. And I think he always tries to give a sense of his skepticism the whole time. So he says to a newspaper in America, for example, the whole time so he says to a newspaper in america for example the scalp is hard to explain it's a convincing specimen but i'm still not sure and he's also really keen to iterate his respect for the sherpa people and their beliefs so he says the local people regard it as a yeti scalp and look upon it with respect he's very keen to give because he knows and loves that region of the world and the people that he's worked with there don Don't forget, when he gets to the top of Everest, it's with a Sherpa accompanying him and doing it with him, you know, as a partner in mountaineering. So he wants to kind of pay tribute to that as well.

But ultimately, it is found to be, I think it's a goat. Right. The scalp is goat hair. So it's a failed expedition. But what I think the expedition gives them, on the one hand, it gives Hillary a load of press coverage and it raises money for his mountaineering for the rest of his career pretty much. So there is that. It draws attention to that part of the world and arguably has encouraged people to go and

climb there and therefore bring in money to Nepal. And as we've heard, that's very much still an existing thing. And I think it's so interesting that this relationship between the Yeti and mountains, mountaineering, going into the mountains to climb something is a challenge, but also to try and see the Yeti.

That is an interrelated thing. It has a relationship. It's kind of twisted together. And it also isn't disappointing because you're there to do two things or potentially one and a half things. The one thing

is to climb the mountain and the other additional potential thing, which would be a huge great bonus would be to see something that might for you at least confirm that there is this creature but if you don't see it you still climb the mountain it's beautiful it's incredible you've experienced this culture so it's great but it feeds into this almost inhuman thing of having to climb such a vast mountain and it's beyond human ability obviously it's not because people do it but it's a difficult thing to do it'd be beyond my ability probably too and then so what what is beyond human ability and what is beyond the human imagination potentially is mushing together there and there's this creature then at the top or

on the way up where you can it's doubly special because you've done that and you're in this magical landscape because it is a magical landscape, regardless of the presence or the absence of a yeti. Despite failed attempts like Hillary's to prove the existence of the yeti, our fascination in the West with this enigmatic creature persists. But we tend to take a very binary view. It either exists or it doesn't. In 2013, National Geographic released a YouTube video discussing the evidence for the Yeti. Whilst in the US and the UK, headlines like, it's official, scientists conclude there is no such thing as the Yeti, and science solves the mystery of the elusive Yeti, claim to have put the mystery to bed. In 2023,

a BBC podcast saw two western mountaineers retrace some of Hillary's footsteps in their own hunt for the Yeti. We might instead find the Yeti in cultural imagination, where he or she skulks on screen, creeps through the pages of books and magazines, and whispers elusively in the background of podcasts. What I think our search for the Yeti has shown me is the incontrovertible power of stories. The very idea of the Yeti, or Bigfoot, has sent people up mountains, out into harsh wildernesses, has prompted them to write thousands of words on the subject, to dedicate their life to researching it, tracking down evidence. The idea has driven science, both real and fake, and technology. Its history is also the history of media, of art, of exploration.

It sits at the intersection between West and East, sometimes between indigenous and colonial cultures. It's compelling precisely because it's impossible to pin down. In a world of polarisation, perhaps we're drawn to this grey area. Because I think the Yeti and Bigfoot are just that, grey areas. If we let them, they can teach us nuance, storytelling, and, dare I say it, some fun. storytelling, and, dare I say it, some fun. Well, that concludes our three-part exploration of all things Bigfoot and Yeti.

I think we've learned an awful lot, actually, about the old and new versions of this story, this tale, and some of the history that goes along with it as well. Thanks to Dan Schreiber for being our guest in episodes one and two, and thanks to Maddy for that nice conclusion towards the end. it really sums up what we've learned throughout the three episodes if you've enjoyed this episode then you can find our podcast wherever you get your podcasts subscribe like and we'll see you again next time wendy's has a new breakfast deal mix and match two items of your choice for only four dollars Thank you. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can listen to all these podcasts ad-free

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