What’s In Your Yeti Collection?
Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 4th, 2008
Henry Stokes is to be congratulated for taking his passion for Yeti, and turning it into an important and significant online archive of Yeti in popular culture.
His site, “I Love the Yeti” definitely deserves your visits, now and then. Of course, being a devotee of the Abominable Snowmen, Snowwomen, and Snowpeople, in general, myself, I love Henry’s love site.
But I am always interested in pulling the curtain aside. So, the other day, I asked Henry to send me a photograph of his own personal collection of Yeti and related kin collectibles.
He did and also posted it at his site. Here it is below: “My Yeti Collection.
Okay, what do you notice? Right, they are all white. The reality appears entirely different.
What kind of Yeti replicas and toys do you have? Show me yours.
Meanwhile, Henry and I are posting two separate but linked blogs about the evolution of Yeti in popular culture.
Stay tuned.
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.
Last night in Belfast, I was interested to hear you talk about the fact that the abominable snow man is often portrayed as white but is, in fact, brownish or redish in color. It is too bad there is yet another highly popularized misconception about a cryptid.
A note on color and culture: in the Yeti episode of Jonny Quest (the original series from the 70s), the bad guys using yeti disguises wore brown fur. The real yeti, who had a brief appearance at the end of the episode, was white.
Added thought: the color confusion in popular culture seems likely related to the mistaken assumption that the yeti lives in the snowfields. If you live in a snowy area all or most of the time, white fur makes sense. If you live in the high forested valleys (which is more likely, since there is food there) and only transit snowy areas, then you are more likely to go with a brownish coat. There are exceptions (e.g., pandas), but most mammals dress to fit their environment.
And, gee, we wouldn’t think the moniker “snowman” had anything to do with this white-yeti stuff, would we…?
Does someone, in their yeti collection, have, say, access to a yeti database? If there’s something like that out there, I’d love to know about it. I think that the evidence I’ve read for an unknown primate in the Himalayan region seems pretty compelling. But I haven’t seen anything like the BFRO or the TBRC have to back that up.