Japan Yeti Hunters Hope 3rd Time's a Charm

By Gopal Sharma
Wed Aug 20, 2008 2:51pm IST

KATHMANDU (Reuters Life!) - It seems the search for mythical creatures goes on.

Less than a week after two men in the United States claimed they had found the remains of a half-man, half-ape Bigfoot, which actually turned out to be a rubber gorilla suit, a team of Japanese climbers began trekking on Wednesday to a mountain in Nepal hoping to find the Yeti, or abominable snowman.

Seven climbers, supported by sherpas and carrying cameras and telescopes, will spend 50 days on the lower reaches of the 7,661-metre (25,134-ft) Dhaulagiri IV to try and collect evidence of the beast's existence, team leader Yoshiteru Takahashi said.

Takahashi, who carried out similar missions in the same area in 1994 and 2003, told Reuters that one of his team members and three sherpas had seen "something like the Yeti" from a distance five years ago.

"We believe that was the Yeti," said Takahashi, a 65-year-old employee of a Tokyo furniture company. "So we are going to search for a third time. We need photographs and video tapes to prove it. It is very important."

Sherpas and climbers often narrate stories about a wild hairy creature roaming the Himalayas. Those tales have captured the imagination of foreign climbers of Mount Everest since the 1920s prompting many, including Everest hero Sir Edmund Hillary, to carry out hunts for the Yeti.

Some climbers even claim to have found Yeti footprints, but no one has yet actually seen it or produced irrefutable proof.

The Japanese will pitch three camps, manned by two researchers each, between 3,400 meters (11,154 feet) and 4,300 meters (14,100 feet) above base camp.

They will use binoculars during the day and also have long-lens cameras to take pictures at night.

"I want to shake hands if I meet him," said T. Onishi, another member of the team. "But it is very difficult. They are shy, so we want to just take pictures."

(Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee and Miral Fahmy)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

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Darn Good Bigfoot Research

hey BfRL Clubber's theres some darn good research goin' on at http://sopebocks.blogspot.com/ they go into far greater detail into the georgian gorilla. Too much to repost here. From all of us at the Bigfoot Researcher's Lunch Club We salute you Charlie and keep up the good work!

'There's something out there,' Sasquatch expert tells Edmonton

Bill Mah , Canwest News Service
Published: Sunday, August 17, 2008
EDMONTON - When news broke Friday that two self-proclaimed sasquatch trackers in the state of Georgia claimed to have one of the fabled ape creatures in their freezer, Jeff Meldrum was quickly pulled into the story. After all, he's one of the few PhDs conducting field work on Bigfoot and reporters were quick to search him out for comment.

He was unimpressed about photos posted by the Georgians on the Internet.

And on Sunday, speaking in Edmonton Sunday at the Royal Alberta Museum on his research into Bigfoot that started when he discovered an unexplained set of tracks in the mountains of Washington state, he hadn't changed his mind.


Rick Dyer, 31, holds a picture he claims is the mouth of Bigfoot in Palo Alto, California, August 15, 2008. Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is a mythical ape-like creature said to live in forests of the Pacific northwest region of the United States.
Reuters

"It was not compelling in the least," said Meldrum, an associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University and an affiliate curator at the Idaho Museum of Natural History.

"It didn't have the bulk or the mass. It seemed to be vacuous, the hair did not look natural and the face bears a striking resemblance to an off-the-shelf costume."

Still, he's quick to point out the real creature could very well be out there in the woods somewhere. There's just too much evidence to ignore.

Meldrum, author of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, said such likely hoaxes as the one in Georgia are damaging to the few scientists researching the field.

"People who are not well-informed on this subject matter then use this incident as a litmus test of the veracity of the entire subject."

His talk was part of the museum's lecture series entitled Here Be Dragons . . . and Other Creatures.

He said such evidence as many footprints and digitally enhanced versions of the grainy Patterson film shot in 1967 of a female Sasquatch show anatomical details that are difficult to fake.

"The amassed evidence of the footprints is strong evidence that there is a real animal that exhibits a consistent anatomy that is distinct from human anatomy and yet shows adaptations that are very elegantly suited to the habitat where they are reported to exist," Meldrum elaborated after his presentation.

Meldrum said he hasn't encountered face-to-face a sasquatch himself, but has seen fresh footprints on several occasions and had brushes where something has come into his camp and rifled through his backpacks, opening clasped flaps without tearing them. He's also had stones thrown at him in isolated woods.

"I'm not here to convince you that sasquatch exists," he told the audience.

"I was hoping to convey to you that there is a body of data that is extremely compelling," said Meldrum.

"I am convinced there is something out there. Something is leaving footprints. There's something out there that begs for our consideration."




© Edmonton Journal 2008