Corwin’s Yeti
Posted by: Loren Coleman on April 14th, 2006
Corwin’s quest for Yeti is revealed, and the results are what we expected from a skeptic.
For months we’ve known that Jeff Corwin went to the Himalayas on October 20, 2005, to be filmed for the Discovery production (Animal Planet) documentary on the Yeti. See Cryptomundo postings here: 1; 2; and 3.
The program airs April 15, 2006, at 8:00 PM EDT/PDT on the Discovery Networks’ Animal Planet. “Corwin’s Quest: Realm of the Yeti” is two hours long.
Last weekend, “Expedition Everest: Journey to Sacred Lands” screened on the Travel Channel during a one-hour broadcast, on April 9, 2006. From a cryptozoologically point-of-view, it was an engaging program. Surprisingly, Joe Rohde, Walt Disney Imagineering executive designer, did a fairly commendable job, perhaps sometimes with a bit too much geez-whiz asides, now and then. But hey, he was having fun in Nepal and won’t we all enjoy that. Rohde went around to the native peoples, and he was shown by them the Abominable Snowman habitat, their art, and then given their descriptions of the Yeti.
Some of Rohde’s filmed interactions, where he is drawing the Yeti under the locals’ direction, are excellent. I want to see some of those drawings from the natives closeup. How Rohde turned those descriptions into a clawed creature that leaves clawed footprints (back at Disney World), escapes me. However, Rohde’s conclusion may have more to do with a Corwin-based, scientific side bias we see developing and then full blown in the Corwin show.
Tomorrow on the Animal Planet, the “findings” of Jeff Corwin’s quest for Yeti will play across your television screen. But word is leaking out early that he has a debunker’s surprise in store for us.
One Cryptomundo reader has sent this to me: “I just watched a clip on FoxNews in which Jeff Corwin states that he and his team tracked, found and treated a Yeti. He said it weighed 500 lbs. He also said that Bigfoot in the US could not exist. I just hope it’s not a bear that he is calling Yeti.”
Indeed, it looks like that is exactly what Corwin is going to do, and he will probably follow the lead of others, including a famed German mountain climber who wrote a less-than-clear book on the subject, by declaring the Yeti is a bear, perhaps a Tibetan bear or a nocturnal species of brown bear.
Oh well. There’s always reruns of Joe Rohde’s adventures gathering the Yeti info, with mostly an openmind, for the attraction’s creation.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
It’ll be interesting to see if the hair sample retrieved from Bhutan a few years back by Dr Rob McCall’s team and analysed by Bryan Sykes at the Oxford Institute of Molecular Medicine (and declared as unidentified and unknown) is mentioned in this documentary.
“He also said that Bigfoot in the US could not exist.”
Click heels together three times and repeat:
“CANNOT PROVE A NEGATIVE”
“CANNOT PROVE A NEGATIVE”
“CANNOT PROVE A NEGATIVE”!
Hoppy Easter, Searchers!
This reminds me very much of the recent airing of the Orang Pendek segment on “Is It Real?” on the National Geographic channel. The suspenseful build-up, the pseudo-objectivity, and of course the predictable conclusion. They came close to calling Dr. Martyr a liar. Did anybody else see the show?
I like Jeff Corwins style of teaching people about animals and he is lighthearted and fun to watch, but I don’t think he should get involved in this type of thing. Obviously he isn’t going to ‘ruin’ his reputation by saying he believes in the yeti or bigfoot because most other people in his field would just laugh at him. So the only option besides admitting to believing in these animals is to blame the sightings and footprints on something else so that he is off the hook. I’ll watch, but I’m sure I’ll be thoroughly disappointed in him.
I’ve been watching it for a minute and I’m disappointed already. 🙁
It was more evenhanded and openminded than I thought it would be, so overall it was pretty good. They didn’t show, or at least I didn’t see them show, the recent video footage that showed one moving through deep snow – which I find pretty believable.
Not very good form for them to so readily dismiss North American cryptid primates, especially when they have ten or more times the evidence and sightings supporting their existence.