Yeti Institute Established
Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 23rd, 2011
Are there even Yetis in Siberia?
One of the world’s worse Siberian Snowman reconstructions.
The Russian enjoy calling their reported hairy hominoids by the names “Snowman” and “Yeti,” although most people associate the Abominable Snowmen and the Yeti with the mountains, like the Himalayas, in and around Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal. It has been that way for a long time. Back in the 1950s, the USSR established the Snowman Commission, and then before the end of the 20th century, the Russians created the Center for Hominology at the Darwin Museum in Moscow.
Now comes word that there is going to be the Yeti Institute at The Kemerovo State University. The host university was established in 1973 as a successor to Kemerovo Pedagogical Institute. It is a leading educational and scientific center of Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, with five branches throughout the region in Belovo, Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Novokuznetsk, Prokopyevsk, and in Ulan Bator (Mongolia). The main campus has 17 educational laboratory and administrative buildings with the total space of 120,000 m. There are 20 departments, 70 chairs, with over 10,000 full-time students (500 of them post-grad and doctoral students), with a grand total of about 21,000 students including part-time, and over 900 faculty members. This university holds between six and ten Russian and international scientific conferences annually. The annual number of scientific publications runs up to over 1,500, including 600-700 articles in the central press.
The Daily Mail reports that the university research institute is being formed to study the “Yeti after a spate of claimed recent sightings in Siberia.”
Scientists say they have found 15 witnesses in the past year who gave statements that they saw the Abominable Snowman in one remote area.
‘We spoke to local residents’, said Dr Igor Burtsev, who conducted an expedition last summer and will head the new institute at Kemerovo State University. ‘They told us Yetis were stealing their animals.’
The academic claims around 30 Yetis live in a remote region of Mount Shoria in in southern Siberia.
He strongly denies accusations that the ‘sightings’ are a bizarre ruse to attract tourists to the far-flung region.
Reports say the two-legged creatures are heavy-set, more around 7ft tall and resemble bears.
‘Their bodies were covered in red and black fur, and they could climb trees,’ said one account.
One villager, Afanasy Kiskorov, even claimed to scientists that he rescued a Yeti on a hunting trip a year ago.
The creature was screaming in fear after falling into a swollen mountain river, he said.
His version suggested a ‘strange creature, looking like a huge man which tried several times to get out of water and to stand up on both feet, but dropped into the water each time and was howling’.
As his fellow-hunters ‘froze’ in amazement, Kiskorov held out a dry tree trunk.
‘The creature clutched to it and crawled to the bank,’ he said.
The Yeti allegedly then ran off. This ‘sighting’ was in the Tashtagol district of the Kemerovo Region, only accessible by helicopter. However, no photographic evidence exists.The Daily Mail
On the trail: Scientists believe there could be a community of up to 30 unknown hairy hominoids existing in the remote Russian wilderness.
Russian Scientist: Igor Burtsev will head the new Yeti institute at Kemerovo State University.
A gallery of alleged Siberian Snowmen tracks.
Burtsev told the media of his theory that “Yetis” are surviving Neanderthals, a favored hypothesis of Russian hominologists. He said about thirty Russian scientists from across Russia who are “engaged in studying the phenomenon of the Abominable Snowman…will be integrated into this institute,” with their primary goal to “establish contact” with one of the hominoids, noted the Daily Mail.
We wish them well, and hope they achieve their objective. I would like to establish cooperative efforts between the Yeti Institute and the International Cryptozoology Museum, needless to say, in a worldwide interactive organization of cryptozoological groups.
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.
Me and a few of my friends are planning to establish our own cryptozoological research organization. We will be going on a month long expedition to the Pacific Northwest in search for Sasquatch. There will be a group of about six or seven of us on this expedition which will be the first field expedition of the North American Cryptozoological Research Association (which is what we plan on calling our organization). We will spend a month camping in the wilderness of Washington State and hope to capture Bigfoot on film. We will be setting up several baited and non-baited motion sensitive wildlife cams in areas know for high levels of activity.
The expedition is still in the planning stages for financial reasons, but my fellow Cryptomundians will be the first to hear of our findings.
Good going Russian scientists! Wish mainstream science in the United States would have the same attitude toward our Sasquatch and Bigfoot.
This is a part of Russia I would love to go to.
I have previously been to the Caucasus with the CFZ, but I have watched these stories on Cryptomundo about Siberia, with growing interest!
Cryptidhunter1, I am very interested in the progress of your expedition. I would like to venture seriously into the Sasquatch field soon.
Please keep me, and all of us, updated.
On a side note to this story, there are apparently various claims that due to a food shortage in the area, Yeti are clashing with bears over resources. This battle with the stronger and smarter Yeti in turn is allegedly pushing bears into areas they don’t typically go.
This is exactly what bears might do, well, during a food shortage.
Anyway, I find the mention of tree climbing here interesting.
The Siberian/Mongolian area is definitely the best hope for finding a hominid in my opinion. Although I believe there was a Pacific NW hominid, it just seems that it may have died out by now unfortunately. Another reason I think the asian hominid is more likely is because of the possibility of disease. Not sure anyone has made this correlation, but based on some recent research, over 90% of the indigenous Indians died out because of disease. (1491 by Charles Mann). If Sasquatch is hominid, is it possible that small pox and typhoid type diseases had an impact on that population? Since Yeti is old world, it wouldn’t be endangered by those germs. Just an idea. Man, if we could go back in time to around the 1850s, I am sure there were Bigfoots running all over the west.