Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

The footprints were quite large. John R. Napier considered the possibility that the particular size and shape of the best Shipton footprint could have been caused by melting of the snow. Napier, however, noted (1973, p. 140): “Eric Shipton agrees that melting and sublimation might be responsible for the appearance, but he points out quite correctly that it would be reasonable to expect the narrow ridges behind and between the little toes to be the first features to disappear in these circumstances.” For Napier, Shipton’s observation appeared to rule out the snow-melting explanation, or at least make it far less likely. Napier proposed another possibility: “that the footprint is double—two tracks superimposed. But a double—what? I don’t know.”

Napier (1973, p. 141) concluded: “Something must have made the Shipton footprint. Like Mount Everest, it is there, and needs explaining. I only wish I could solve the puzzle; it would help me sleep better at night. Of course, it would settle a lot of problems if one could simply assume that the Yeti is alive. . . . The trouble is that such an assumption conflicts with the principles of biology as we know them.” In the end, Napier suggested that the Shipton footprint was the result of superimposed human feet, one shod and the other unshod. In general, Napier, who was fully convinced of the existence of the North American Sasquatch, was highly skeptical of the evidence for the Yeti. But, as we shall see later in this section, new evidence would cause Napier to become more inclined to accept the Himalayan wildmen.

In the course of his expeditions to the Himalaya Mountains in the 1950s and 1960s, Sir Edmund Hillary gave attention to evidence for the Yeti, including footprints in snow. He concluded that in every case the large footprints attributed to the Yeti had been produced by the merging of smaller tracks of known animals, by superimposition and melting. To this Napier (1973, pp. 57– 58), himself a skeptic, replied: “The signs of melting are so obvious that no one with any experience would confuse a melted footprint with a fresh one. Not all the prints seen over the years by reputable observers can be explained away in these terms; there must be other explanations for footprints, including, of course, the possibility that they were made by an animal unknown to science.”

But although Napier was unwilling to completely reject the existence of an unknown hominid, he was nevertheless inclined to regard this as the least probable or desirable alternative. In 1956, Professor E. S. Williams photographed some prints on the Biafo glacier in the Karakoram mountains. Napier, who thought it likely that they were the superimposed prints of the front and rear paws of a bear, said (1973, p. 130): “It is impossible to state categorically that Williams’s prints are those of a bear and not of a Yeti, but in the spirit of Bishop of Ockham it seems more reasonable to explain a phenomenon in terms of the known rather than the unknown.”

Of course, in avoiding the relatively straightforward explanation that a peculiar set of tracks in snow was made by an unknown animal, one is forced to come up with all kinds of speculative hypotheses about the superimposition of prints of various animals and humans, or the transformation of such prints by melting, in a manner not clearly understood. And this would also appear to be a violation of a key aspect of Ockham’s razor—namely, that the simplest of competing theories is preferable to the more complex.

In addition to Westerners, native informants also gave a continuous stream of reports on the Yeti. Lord Hunt, who headed a Mount Everest expedition in 1953, told of an incident recounted by the Tibetan Buddhist abbot of the Thyangboche monastery: “he gave a most graphic description of how a Yeti had appeared from the surrounding thickets, a few years back in the winter when the snow lay on the ground. This beast, loping along sometimes on its hind legs and sometimes on all fours, stood about five feet high and was covered with gray hair” (Shackley 1983, p. 62).

In 1958, Tibetan villagers from Tharbaleh, near the Rongbuk glacier, came upon a drowned Yeti, said Myra Shackley in her book on wildmen. The villagers described the creature as being like a small man with a pointed head and covered with reddish-brown fur (Shackley 1983, p. 1983).