Bigfoot Files: Episode 1 The Yeti
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on October 25th, 2013
Episode 1 The Yeti
Mark Evans travels to the Himalayas to find the real story behind the centuries-old Yeti legend.
He risks altitude sickness at Everest Base Camp, where the photograph of a footprint in the snow set off Yeti mania in 1951. He traces the legend through ancient manuscripts, holy relics and a Nazi expedition, and meets people convinced they have come face-to-face with the creature known in the west as the Abominable Snowman.
Meanwhile Professor Sykes reveals the results of his DNA tests on the Yeti hair samples he’s collected. The results are spectacular and unexpected.
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
I will be watching this after I take my kids to school
…and what is all the fuss about?!
Sykes’s findings aside (pretty hard to argue with a DNA comparison to a known specimen):
Most of what precedes amounts to one of the least scientific leaps-to-what-one-wants-to-conclude that I’m aware of.
There even seems an implication that Evans’s work presaged Sykes’s conclusion. Hogwash.
Sykes says he gets irritated at cryptozoologists who say science has failed them. He then goes on to accurately say what science is supposed to do.
What he neglects to mention is that scientists, on this question, have failed us. They have also failed science, from which the rest follows.
I’m happy to see Sykes starting, I hope, to set that right. What I’m hoping is that he doesn’t think he’s going to solve anything. The best he can do is move science forward. Don’t get me wrong. That is much.
Very very interesting! It was a shame that the Yeti killed in the Nazi expedition didn’t have any usable DNA, but the findings of the Bhutan Yeti, the hairs previously labeled “Unknown” having now been concluded as something akin to Prehistoric Polar Bear, was perplexing: I knew the two samples turned out to be Polar Bear before, but I did not know one of them was the mystery Bhutan sample.
I wonder what the episodes on Sasquatch and Almasti will reveal….and when the episodes will air…?
I should add to my earlier comment that Sykes comes dangerously close to saying this closes the book on yeti. It doesn’t.
Hapa:
To outline for folks the essential incompleteness of what Sykes is doing – and he’d be the first one to admit it even if he might not admit this, I don’t know:
Who’s to say that somewhere else on that “Nazi yeti” there wasn’t testable hair? From the technique he’s shown to have used I’m not sure he could make that assessment with 100% certainty.
As to the other specimens: he’s testing, what, 27? Although he will fulfill, to the letter, what he was asked to do, that won’t close the yeti question, not at all.