London Daily Mail Expedition
The Legend:
In 1954, an expedition was sponsored by the London Daily Mail with the intention of capturing, or at least photographing, a Yeti. The expedition lasted fifteen weeks, and found just footprints and droppings. When the droppings were analyzed, they proved to contain both animal and vegetable matter.
Variations:
The Encylopedia of Unsolved Mysteries says that the expedition found Yeti scalps, not footprints and droppings. In this version, they tracked down several Yeti scalps that were in monestary's being revered as holy objects. They were long, conical, and covered with hair with a crest in the middle of raised hair. One of the scalps was fake, obviously sewn together from fragments of animal skin; but others were just as obviously one complete piece of skin. Hair from the scalps was said to be analyzed with the result that experts declared that they came from no known animal.
The Encyclopedia goes on to tell how Sir Edmund Hillary, being held in high regard in Tibet, was able to borrow one of these scalps for examination. Bernard Huevelmans, the Dutch zoologist who put forward the theory in 1952 that Yeti were descendents of a prehistoric giant ape, was given the opportunity to do the examination of the scalp. The skin reminded Huvelmans of a goat called the southern serow, which exist all through Nepal; so he tracked down a specimen of the animal in the Royal Institute in Brussels, and compared its skin to the Yeti scalp... and concluded they were a match. It was probably not a deliberate fake; the goat's skin had been steamed and stretched into a hat for religious rituals, and over the years people simply forgot how it had been made and attributed it to the Yeti.
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