February 11, 2007

The Great Days of Yeti Hunting

Harry Trumbore’s drawing of a Yeti.

Ask yourself, where are all the great Yeti hunters from the 1950s?

Take for example, what is Peter Byrne, the leader of the Tom Slick expeditions of the 1950s, up to these days?

Byrne is often remembered, for example, online at such sites as The Anomalist and Wikipedia, with regard to his involvement with the late actor Jimmy Stewart and the Pangboche Hand. My favorable overview of Byrne’s Yeti-related life appeared in Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology. The book contains an updated version of what I had previously written about Byrne and his apparent involvement in the escape of the Dalai Lama from Tibet with the help of the CIA and the late Tom Slick, noted here. (The Dalai Lama, exiled from Tibet, was recently named a presidential distinguished professor at Emory University in Georgia.)

So where is Peter Byrne?

Today, Byrne, 80, divides his time between the [tiger] preserve in Nepal and his summer home in Los Angeles. His latest project is building a conservation center to accommodate scientists and tourists. Derek Burnett, Reader’s Digest

In the January 2007 issue of Reader’s Digest, reporter Burnett updated the tiger conservation work of Peter Byrne in “Eye of the Tiger: A hunter’s change of heart”.

Peter Byrne stopped by Texas in April 2006, to talk about Tom Slick, at an event hosted by Craig Woolheater. Photograph courtesy of Chris Buntenbah.

Craig carried the Readers Digest’s article here previously, but I wanted to revisit it. As I reflect on the “greatest generation” of Yeti hunters from the modern era of the search, the one beginning during the middle of last century, rich remembrances are still in our midst.

For instance, I heard about another famed name from those days being highlighted in the media recently.

In the May 1957 issue of Sports Afield, George Moore , M.D. authored an article, “I Met the Abominable Snowman” (A True Story). It told of Moore’s and his companion, George K. Brooks’ face to face meeting with what they took to be Yetis, the mystery animal of the Himalayas.

In The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates, I summarized Moore’s and Brooks’ sighting:

The encounter occurred in June 1953, in the Gosainkund Pass, Nepal.

The two physicians–George Moore, chief of the Public Health Division of the U.S. Operations Mission and public health advisor to the Nepalese Government, along with staff member George Brooks, an entomologist–were on foot, trekking back to Katmandu. They had moved a bit ahead of their pack-laden porters when the doctors found themselves in a thick mist at the edge of a forest at 17,000 feet. Hearing first a frightening “raucous” scream then the sound of thrashing leaves, they clutched their .38 S&Ws and quickly scrambled to the top of a large boulder to locate the sounds.

Soon, a “hideous face,” according to Moore, appeared from the bushes. It had a “grayish skin, beetling black eyebrows, a mouth that seemed to extend from ear to ear and long, [and] yellowish teeth.” Its “beady, yellow eyes” stared at them “with obvious demoniacal cunning and anger.”

The creature that then emerged from the leaves was about five feet tall, half-crouching, with black hands against a gray, thin, but well-built and sinewy hairy body. Two long fangs were apparent, and the “sharp flicking movement behind it” came from its long tail.

Before the men could react, six or seven other creatures approached through the mist. One carried a baby around its neck. All the two could think to do was scare the creatures, now only ten feet away, by firing their guns above the heads of the great monkeys. The tactic worked as the animals retreated.

The Americans thought they had encountered the “Abominable Snowmen” seen in the area but the creatures’ obvious tails indicates that what they saw was something else entirely. In the plateau of Kontum, northern Indo-China, and in the neighboring territory of Jolong, the locals know of an enormous monkey that walks on its hind legs, is vicious, and attacks people. They call them kra-dhan, and bekk-bok, respectively.

In passing references, the Abbé Pere David, discoverer of the giant panda, noted that a giant mountain Macaque (a baboon-like monkey) may exist in eastern Tibet.

The Sports Afield article contains a remarkable piece of art done by Mort Kunstler who reconstructed the scenes from descriptions furnished by Dr. Moore (which you can see via Bobbie Short’s excellent archival site, here).

Today, Moore may be little aware of his historical toehold in Yeti chronicles. Instead, he is only now, belatedly, being recognized for his life-saving public health good works in Nepal in the early 1950s. National Public Radio broadcast a comprehensive interview entitled “Dr. Moore’s Mountaintop House Calls” by Marcus Rosenbaum. NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” told of how “Dr. George Moore was one of the first western doctors to go to Nepal. His goal was to try to reduce health problems such as malaria and smallpox. He reflects on efforts that may have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Peter Byrne has moved on to save tigers’ lives, and Dr. Moore never stopped saving human ones. They are to be congratulated for those pursuits. For cryptozoology and hominology, there will always be a place for them in the history of the Yeti or whatever is up there. As the Abbé Pierre Bordet has pointed out, the name that Indians give to Mt. Everest is Mahalanguar Himal, “The Mountains of the Great Monkeys.” It is so-called not because of the Yeti, but due to the concurrent tradition of the Giant Monkeys.

Filed under Abominable Snowman, Artifacts, Conspiracies, Cryptomundo Exclusive, Cryptotourism, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoologists, Cryptozoology, Yeti