A
full-scale animatronic yeti (Dr Karl Shuker)
I’m always
pleased to receive an update of an ostensibly long-forgotten cryptozoological
story, especially when it’s a personal favourite of mine, like this one.
As reported by
Heuvelmans, myself, and others, back in 1953 a Tibetan lama called Chemed
Rigdzin Dorje Lopu announced that he had personally examined the mummified
bodies of two yetis – one at the monastery at Riwoche in the Tibetan province of Kham, the other in
the monastery at Sakya, southern Tibet.
Reconstruction
of the yeti (Michael Playfair)
According to
Heuvelmans’s account of this lama’s very interesting claim:
They were enormous monkeys about 2.40 m high. They had thick
flat skulls and their bodies were covered with dark brown hair about 3 to 5 cm
long. Their tails were extremely short.
The thought that
such extraordinarily significant cryptozoological relics (if genuine) may still
survive today has long intrigued me. Consequently, I was delighted when on 13 February 2010 I was contacted by correspondent
Peter Pesavento who informed me that he had been actively pursuing this mystery
himself, and had emailed both monasteries. Unfortunately, he did not receive a
reply from Sakya, but Samten O’Sullivan had very recently replied to him on
behalf of Riwoche.
Reconstruction
of the yeti (Richard Svensson)
Samten informed
Peter that, tragically, the monastery had been razed to the ground following China’s annexing of Tibet and all of its
precious contents had been looted or burnt. Consequently, although the
monastery was subsequently rebuilt (and as an exact replica of the original),
any yeti mummy that may have been in the original building is certainly not
present in the new one. Whether it was removed and taken elsewhere or simply
destroyed, however, is another matter, which seems unlikely ever to be
resolved.
Yeti
footprint cast, based upon the Shipton yeti footprint photos of 1951 (Dr Karl
Shuker)
Nevertheless,
even knowing where something is not (namely, in the new Riwoche monastery) is
still better than knowing nothing about it at all.
Reconstruction of the yeti (Tim Morris)
And if they have
survived and are one day rediscovered, how fascinating it would be (judging at
least from his revelation on tonight's Channel 4 television programme 'Bigfoot
Files' regarding yeti hair DNA) if DNA could be extracted from them and
examined by expert geneticist Prof. Bryan Sykes from Oxford University. Then at
last we would finally know what these mysterious 'mega-monkey' mummies really
were.
Reconstruction
of the yeti (LeCire/Wikipedia, public domain)
This
ShukerNature blog is excerpted from my book Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo
(2010), soon to be available from CFZ Press as an e-book!
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