This episode looks at evidence for both Bigfoot in North America and the Yeti, or abominable snowman, in the Himalayas. There are several interviewees and also consideration is given to the famous film of Bigfoot. Arthur C. Clarke offers his take on the evidence, recognizing that alternate explanations are possible. Originally broadcast in September 1980, Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World brought an innovative approach to exploring natural and supernatural phenomenon.
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TVTranscript
00:00Tonight, the hunt for the world's missing ape men.
00:30In the wild tracts of the Pacific Northwest of America,
00:34men are now out to try to kill the ape man.
00:39Indeed, is this uniquely film of Bigfoot,
00:42the yeti of the United States?
00:47Is this the footprint of the abominable snowman
00:50of the Himalayas?
00:53Lord Hunt of Everest fame is a believer.
00:58Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clark, author of 2001
01:02and inventor of the communications satellite.
01:05Now in retreat in Sri Lanka after a lifetime of science,
01:08space, and writing, he ponders the riddles
01:10of this and other worlds.
01:13It may seem incredible that creatures like large man apes
01:17can still exist in the modern world.
01:20Yet the evidence for this is now quite considerable.
01:29MUSIC PLAYS
01:53It's in the high valleys around Mount Everest
01:56that the yeti, the abominable snowman of the Himalayas,
01:59seems most vivid.
02:06For the Sherpas of the high mountains, there are no doubts.
02:10The yeti is woven into their rituals and their lives.
02:18Kunjo Chumbi is the headman of the Kumjong village.
02:23He has seen the yeti.
02:27HE CHANTS
02:37In the monastery above the village,
02:39he keeps what he believes to be its scalp,
02:42preserved as a relic in a box.
02:43HE CHANTS
02:56HE CHANTS
03:09With some assurance, he imitates the yeti's cry.
03:12HE CHANTS
03:14HE CHANTS
03:24That cry is listened to in fear by the Sherpas.
03:28Six years ago, Lakhpa Damani heard it close by.
03:32HE SPEAKS
03:34A yeti came and attacked me and threw me in the river.
03:38His face was very black and he looked like a very old man.
03:43I was unconscious for a couple of hours.
03:46When I woke up, I saw the yeti had killed some yaks and a cow.
03:53She says the yeti had picked up and threw her into the river.
04:00HE CHANTS
04:12The yeti looms throughout the myths and legends of the Nepalese people.
04:21Desmond Doig, with Sir Edmund Hillary,
04:23led the biggest expedition to hunt for the yeti.
04:26He found that the Sherpas had the most precise physical description of the creature.
04:31To the Sherpas, he's got a conical scalp, rather pointed ears,
04:37a splayed nose, he's shaggy,
04:40he's bald around the chest and his tummy,
04:44and has a fairly human face.
04:47He's very nasty-tempered, very, very nasty indeed,
04:52and is known to rip people apart if he gets a chance.
04:58Doig's expedition wrote off the yeti,
05:01wrongly, he now feels, as an Oriental fantasy.
05:05I'm afraid our expedition was a great gaudy mess.
05:09Any self-respecting yeti would have kept way, way away from us.
05:13We had 600 coolies, we had about 200 Sherpas,
05:17and there were about 40 of us
05:19in the most beautifully designed and coloured anoraks.
05:22Our tents were all vividly coloured.
05:25We smelt different, we looked different,
05:28we behaved differently to the local people,
05:31and the smells of our cooking must have horrified everything
05:35within smelling distance.
05:38Well, the hard, rather soulless results of the expedition
05:42was that the yeti didn't exist.
05:45Other expeditions have also failed to snare the abominable snowman.
05:49But for 50 years now,
05:51Westerners have continually been coming back with new testimony.
05:55Emil Wick is one of the world's most experienced mountain flyers.
06:04Two years ago, he was taking a party of Japanese tourists
06:08on a flight over Kanchenjunga.
06:11I saw on one of the hills some tracks
06:14I have never seen before in my life, really.
06:18So I went closer with the plane.
06:21I was watching, are there some paper,
06:24are there some empty tins, cigarettes, whatever.
06:28But it was absolutely clear only the prints were there.
06:33And from there, four of these tracks
06:37went to the Chamlang side, to the north.
06:40And I wanted to follow also,
06:43but the lady which was sitting on my right seat said,
06:47Captain, very sorry for that,
06:50but we paid the Kanchenjunga flight,
06:53not the pleasure flight for you.
06:56In 1951, photographs of footprints
06:59were taken on the borders of Tibet
07:02by the late Eric Shipton and Dr. Michael Ward.
07:05There was no doubt about it, they were unlike anything
07:08that either Eric Shipton or I had ever seen
07:11or even imagined before.
07:14They were very clearly etched in the snow.
07:17The snow was about, I suppose, three inches deep,
07:20on top of hard ice.
07:23And you can see that there are five toes,
07:26definitely outlined, the big toe here,
07:29second there, third there, fourth there,
07:32and you can see a small toe there.
07:34But the actual track itself is very, very clear cut.
07:37And you can also see
07:40that over here at the heel
07:43is obviously a place where there has been a lot of weight there.
07:47And I suggest that probably what happened was
07:50that the animal put down its heel there and walked.
07:53The dimensions of the print are approximately 12 inches long
07:57and probably something of the order of 5 to 6 inches wide.
08:01I don't think there's any possibility
08:03of there being distortions for other animals' tracks at all.
08:06The various ideas have been put forward
08:09that this one, for instance, might have been the imprint of 2 feet,
08:13one on top of the other, but I just don't think that's on at all.
08:17I just don't think that's possible.
08:21This print was photographed in the Dudkosi Valley in 1978
08:25by the leader of the team which first conquered Everest, Lord Hunt.
08:30The creature had broken through some pretty heavy crust on the snow.
08:35It was deep snow on a rather steep little slope.
08:38And the creature was a heavy one
08:41because he'd broken through hard crust
08:43on which, as far as we were concerned,
08:45we could walk around without making any impression
08:48through the snow at all.
08:50And you could see through the snow,
08:53in the soft snow underneath the crust,
08:56the toe impressions.
08:58I don't think they were bear tracks
09:00because the Sherpas, whenever I've talked to them about this,
09:03and, in fact, when I've been with Sherpas seeing tracks,
09:06they have been quite emphatic that these are not bears,
09:09that they are yeti.
09:11In pictures taken by a French Jesuit priest, Abbé Bordet,
09:15the toes again show very clearly.
09:22It is certainly not an ape, nor a bear,
09:25because a bear has claws and this creature has not.
09:30So I think it is a special kind of animal
09:33that we don't really know anything about
09:36because we don't have an exact description.
09:39But I have spoken about it to some paleontologists
09:43and they are rather inclined to believe
09:45that we are dealing with an animal from the pre-human era,
09:49that is to say, one of our distant ancestors.
09:53The outward-bound school at Owlswater
09:56is run by squadron leader Lester Davis, Royal Air Force.
10:00That's great. That's lovely.
10:03Good. Well done.
10:05He was on the 1959 RAF expedition to the Colty Valley
10:09when he, too, came across tracks in the snow.
10:12It sunk in about five inches.
10:15I, with cine-cameras and things, was weighing about 12½ stone
10:19and only went in about 1½ inches.
10:22I thought, well, this thing is huge.
10:24The snow had been undercut by this vast glacier stream
10:27and I fell in.
10:29And I held my camera above my head
10:31because it came up to my armpits before my feet touched the bottom.
10:35Well, it was icy cold and I scrambled out
10:38just beside these footprints.
10:41And immediately we suddenly realised
10:44this animal, or yeti or whatever,
10:46it had just stepped out using only its two hind legs.
10:50And the Chancellor of the British Museum,
10:53they said this establishes its height as about 8 foot
10:56and its weight as about 60 stone.
11:00Sightings of the yeti by Westerners are rare,
11:03but in 1970, the English climber Don Willans
11:06was on his way to the conquest
11:08of one of the world's toughest mountains...
11:12..Annapurna by the South Face.
11:15I heard what sounded like bird cries from at the back of me.
11:22And I looked at the Sherpa and he said,
11:26''Yeti coming, Sam.''
11:29So I whipped round and looked up the mountain
11:34and I saw two black crows flying away
11:37and a black shape drop behind the ridge.
11:41Well, my first thoughts were,
11:43''Christ, what do I do now? Grab the ice axe or what?''
11:47What he did do was photograph the tracks.
11:50Next night it reappeared and he was watching it again.
11:53And then quite suddenly, it was almost as if I...
11:56..as if it realised that it was being watched, so to speak.
12:01Quite suddenly, it shot across the whole slope of the mountain.
12:06It must have travelled half a mile in a diagonal line downwards
12:11and it was obviously heading towards a rocky cliff,
12:16some rocky outcrop there.
12:19And it disappeared into the shadow by the rocks
12:24and that was the last I actually ever saw of it.
12:30So how strong is the evidence?
12:33It is not beyond the bounds of possibility
12:36that a creature like the Yeti does exist in some remote parts of the world.
12:41I personally now stick my neck out and say I'm a firm believer in the Yeti.
12:45I think it's a very strong case to answer.
12:48Having illuminated bears in my own mind,
12:51I can find no other explanation
12:53but that there is an unidentified creature still to be discovered.
12:58It's noticeable that the hard evidence comes from Western visitors
13:02and consists mostly of photographs of footprints,
13:06which vary considerably.
13:08However, we do know that melting snow can play strange tricks.
13:13As for the Sherpas, their stories of the Yeti
13:16seem inextricably bound up with their religion
13:19and it's hard to separate myths from reality.
13:22In America, however,
13:24the evidence for Bigfoot is much more straightforward.
13:38Indeed, Dr. Grover Krantz,
13:40one of the anthropologists who has studied Bigfoot,
13:43or the Sasquatch as the Indians call it,
13:46is so certain that a man ape exists in the northwest of the United States
13:51that he goes out regularly to try to track and kill just one specimen.
13:56I'm convinced that these creatures exist for a variety of reasons.
14:00One of these, perhaps the most important to me,
14:03is a careful study of the footprints that has satisfied me
14:06that in at least some cases these footprints could not have been faked.
14:10But more than that, there are sightings by reputable citizens,
14:14some by disreputable citizens,
14:16but the number of good sightings that seem to be unshakable
14:20is now numbering in the many hundreds that I am personally aware of,
14:24and they probably number in the thousands at least.
14:31The number of Sasquatch is very difficult to estimate, of course,
14:35but within the northwestern part of the United States
14:38I would be inclined to estimate in the vicinity of 200,
14:42with perhaps at least an equal number in the adjacent parts of western Canada.
14:47If there were fewer than that,
14:49then it does not seem to be a viable breeding population.
14:52Any more than that, I would think they'd be seen more often.
15:06Here in the Pacific Northwest there are thousands of square miles
15:09of empty, desolate country where nobody lives.
15:12Almost never does anybody travel through it,
15:14and something like the Sasquatch could quite easily live here,
15:17being only occasionally seen,
15:19and no remains ever being found is not at all surprising.
15:24The sightings of Bigfoot spread right across the northwest United States.
15:28This is Washington State.
15:30Sergeant Larry Gamache was driving home one night
15:33with his family and sister-in-law Kathy.
15:35I noticed quite a distance ahead of me
15:37an object move out of the dense forest
15:40towards the clearing between the forest and the highway.
15:46And it started to slow then,
15:48and as I got a little bit closer,
15:50I noticed it was walking, very much like a human.
15:54Arms down at its side, swinging just in a normal walking gait.
15:58It just got bigger and bigger as we went closer to it,
16:02and it was hairy and just didn't look...
16:06Well, I wanted to close my eyes, but you didn't want to.
16:09You want to look, you want to see what you're going to see,
16:11but yet you don't.
16:12The most impressive thing was the human features,
16:15in the way that it walked.
16:18The fact that the facial area wasn't really covered with a lot of hair.
16:23The eyes seemed normal as I looked through the windshield at him.
16:27And the height, the sheer physical size of it,
16:30it had to have been, in comparison to what I can relate back to today,
16:34seven, maybe seven and a half feet tall.
16:36Because I had to physically look up through the windshield
16:38to see the face and the head.
16:42And I was in a pickup truck,
16:43so they sit up quite a bit higher than a car,
16:45so it was at least seven feet, maybe 300, 350 pounds.
16:50Bigfoot now emerges often enough to get on television news.
16:54This is KFYR, Bismarck, North Dakota.
16:57It's here, in and around Little Eagle, South Dakota,
17:01where there have never before been any sightings
17:04of the so-called Bigfoot or Sasquatch,
17:06where the people of this small community are now becoming believers.
17:10There have been 17 sightings of the creature in the past month.
17:14The latest sighting was at the Shooting Bear residence
17:16on a bluff overlooking the town.
17:18Last Tuesday night,
17:19Hannah Shooting Bear saw the creature from her house
17:22while it was looking in the window of her daughter's trailer
17:25about 30 yards away.
17:27Elderly Hannah was the only one to see the creature,
17:30but her son-in-law is reported to have fired several rifle shots
17:33into the air after it had moved off.
17:36What do you think they ought to do about him around here?
17:38Kill him. He might hurt somebody.
17:42Despite that recommendation,
17:43the Bigfoot hunters want to keep him alive.
17:46Their plan is to lure him into an area
17:48where they can either take his picture
17:50or shoot him with a tranquilizer.
17:52They believe in the notion suggested by an outsider
17:55that Bigfoot is attracted to menstruating women.
17:58This debate consisted of some used feminine articles.
18:01Dennis Newman reporting from Little Eagle, South Dakota.
18:05Across the mountains on the Pacific coast in Washington State,
18:09veteran hunter and Rockingham County police officer Kenny Cooper
18:13was driving along this road when he heard a weird noise.
18:16I was coming down north on this road here
18:19and I heard some noise screaming back in here.
18:22All the time I was going along, he was screaming.
18:24Everybody in Rockingham County could hear it
18:26because I did have the police mic outside,
18:28so they were listening to whatever it was that I was hearing.
18:32And the noise that was coming from that creature
18:35is what was on the recorder here.
18:38.
18:57We took that recording, we sent it into the lab to have it analyzed
19:03and it came back that there's no metallic noises
19:06in the recording, it came that it wasn't made by some kind of a machine.
19:10And they said there's no voice, no human has vocal cords
19:15enough to throw the high pitches and the low pitches
19:18at the same time that it was coming from them.
19:22But it was Bob Gimlin and his friend Roger Patterson
19:26out trekking at Bluff Creek in Northern California
19:29who were the ones to suddenly find a large hairy creature
19:32appear in front of them
19:34and had a loaded cine camera with them.
19:36We came around a bend in the creek
19:39and there stood a big hairy human-like creature.
19:45It appeared to be between six and seven feet tall.
19:50The creature looked at us for a few seconds,
19:53turned and walked slowly away.
19:56And it was kind of in a loamy type soil,
20:01left good footprints.
20:03It walked directly away from us, just a slow stroll,
20:06just like a man would be walking away from something downtown.
20:10It never did break into a run.
20:14Well, the animal appeared to be a female
20:18due to the fact that it appeared to have mammary glands.
20:22And the thing walked very agile, very fluently,
20:26and it had huge bulky muscles.
20:29On overall description, it looked like a huge hairy human being.
20:51Well, English and Russian scientists
20:54have analyzed this film very carefully.
20:57They have concluded that the stride is quite unhuman
21:01and would be very difficult for a man to imitate.
21:05However, I think we showed in the beginning of 2001
21:09that skilled mimes can make completely convincing ape men.
21:14So this is not proven.
21:21But the Patterson film did have backup evidence
21:24and is now in the hands of Dr. Grover Krantz.
21:27By far the most convincing evidence
21:30is the plaster casts that I've got here of the footprints.
21:34I'll show you some of them here.
21:37For instance, here is a track that was cast
21:40right after Roger Patterson made his movie in Northern California.
21:44The imprint of the foot not only pressed into the ground,
21:48but also in pushing off,
21:50it raised a mound of dirt in the middle of the footprint.
21:53It was a flexible foot, and a rigid fake could not have made this.
21:57That's not as convincing as this other track.
22:00This is a 17-inch track
22:02that was picked up in northeastern Washington state.
22:05And this is what was evidently a crippled individual
22:09because here we have 2 tracks of the same individual.
22:12You're looking at the bottom of the feet.
22:15And this right foot is crippled.
22:18It is distorted lengthwise, bent, missing one toe.
22:22And most critically, the 2 bulges on the outside of the foot
22:26represent spaces between bones.
22:29And if this had been just a gigantic human foot
22:32or some kind of fake like that,
22:34these bulges and these bone spaces should have been set farther back.
22:38The fact of where they are indicates
22:40that this is a foot designed with different leverage,
22:43a longer heel, shorter forepart,
22:45which is exactly what would have to be done
22:48to make a foot that would lift an 800-pound animal.
22:51Homesteader Grover Kiggins and his daughter Millie
22:54saw evidence that Bigfoot has a stride
22:57to match the size of its feet.
23:01They were out near their farm in Oregon
23:04when they saw some tracks.
23:06We measured him. Dad had his rule.
23:08We measured him when we went up.
23:10He stepped 67 1⁄2 inches, which is a long step.
23:14And then when he went down, he came down the road,
23:17and when he stopped at the edge of the road,
23:20off the road into the timber,
23:22down into the brush and timber,
23:25he stepped 7 feet when he stepped down in there.
23:28And I followed him for a little ways down in there,
23:32but I decided I didn't want to go down in there
23:35and see what made those tracks.
23:37And in one place, he come to a fence,
23:40about a 4-foot barbed wire fence,
23:42and he just stepped over that like it wasn't there.
23:45I had to crawl through or under.
23:48I think Bigfoot is an animal that we already know
23:51from the fossil record.
23:53I'll show you a specimen here.
23:55This is a cast of the lower jaw
23:58of what we call the gigantopithecus.
24:01This lived in China about half a million to a million years ago.
24:05I'd like to compare this with the gorilla.
24:08This is a cast of a gorilla's skull,
24:10so you can see the size of this thing.
24:12This was an animal that probably weighed
24:14about 400 pounds in the wild.
24:16Just looking at the lower jaw alone,
24:19what's perhaps most interesting is
24:22from the underside of the jaw, there is a difference.
24:25In the gorilla, the 2 sides of the jaw
24:28spread only modestly as you go back
24:31because the gorilla's neck is so far behind the lower jaw.
24:34If that neck were moved forward,
24:36the jaw would have to widen to make space.
24:39In the gigantopithecus, the jaw is spreading
24:42at a much wider angle, and the only obvious reason for that
24:45is because the neck is in the way,
24:47and that means the head was set on top of the body
24:50instead of hung forward, and it's a fair presumption
24:53that this was an erect bipedal animal.
24:55So we end up with the description of gigantopithecus
24:58being an erect biped, standing perhaps 8 feet tall,
25:02weighing about 800 pounds,
25:04and being presumably covered with hair.
25:06This was too early to have cultural activity,
25:09probably no more intelligent than an ape.
25:12This, of course, is an exact description
25:15of the living Sasquatch.
25:19Personally, I'd be less skeptical of ape men
25:22if there weren't so many of them.
25:24It's hard to believe that something like Bigfoot
25:27could remain undetected in America.
25:29If anyone gave me $100 to bet on it,
25:32well, I'd put $40 on the Yeti, $10 on Bigfoot,
25:36and I'd keep the $50 for myself.
25:42♪♪♪
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