NatGeo: Hunt for the Abominable Snowman April 4th

At National Geographic they are getting ready to kick off Expedition Week. On Monday (April 4th) of Expedition Week they are going to hunt for the Abominable Snowman. The description of the Episode is as follows:

Across the Himalayas are stories of the yeti, or abominable snowman. Half man, half ape, the yeti is said to roam only the most remote peaks, where people rarely venture. Now, veteran explorer and climber Gerry Moffatt sets out to find proof in a hunt that will test his stamina. As conventional scientific theories challenge ancient beliefs and credible witnesses, he works to separate fact from fiction and find hard evidence that the legend is real.

The embedded video below is directly from the site.



A staff writer, Sabina Dana Plasse, from the Idaho Mountain Express, interviewed Moffet and was able to get his perspective on the show.

"It's cool," Moffat said. "I didn't know if I wanted to do a show on the yeti, but it turned out to be an insight into the Sherpa culture. It's an amazing intricate culture that is still alive in the Himalayas. Searching for the yeti tells the story of these people's belief systems. The yeti is very much a part of their lives."

The idea of an abominable snowman, yeti or Bigfoot is a mystical one. "Hunt for the Abominable Snowman" explores and discovers why the mystical notion of these creatures is an intricate part of Himalayan culture.

"It's in their art and spiritual beliefs," he said. "It's similar to stumbling upon a church in Europe where you would find the bones of a saint."

Moffat said the most amazing discovery in his exploration was how the stories from Native Americans were exactly the same as those of people in the Himalayas even though neither group of people has any connection to the other.

"These people are separated by oceans and continents, but have identical stories to tell about a creature that lives in the wilderness and up in the mountains," he said.

Moffat's skepticism was met with never-before-seen evidence including a yeti scalp kept under lock and key at a remote Himalayan monastery and stories by eyewitnesses.

"The yeti scalp is not just a museum piece, it's a sacred object," he said. "We were following leads and went to the Everest region and to the Sherpa people, where various people have claimed to have encountered a yeti or knew someone who had. We married these stories with Western science and used top trackers and scientists and analyzed data as to what was fiction and what was real."

On top of all of this, National Geographic has made it possible to follow the Abominable Snowman on Twitter. His tweets can be found @MrAbominable

"I love snow and mountains, and hate when people try to take my picture. Fortunately I'm very good at keeping a low profile...except on Twitter!"

EXTERNAL LINKS
NatGeo's Abominble Snowman Page
Idaho Mountain Express Article
Mr Abominable on Twitter

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April Fool Cryptids from Museum of Hoaxes

Not surprisingly, April fools brings it share of "new found" cryptids. Even less surprising, these "cryptids" would show up on a top 100 list of April Fools Hoaxes at MuseumofHoaxes.com.

Consider this as Bigfoot Lunch Club's Public Service Announcement that April 1st is a fallacious day for discovering new cryptids.

#9: Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers
1995: Discover Magazine reported that the highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo had found a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures had bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, could become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consumed them. After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. "To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin," the article quoted her as saying. Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had received for any other article in their history.

#12: Flying Penguins
2008: The BBC announced that camera crews filming near the Antarctic for its natural history series Miracles of Evolution had captured footage of Adélie penguins taking to the air. It even offered a video clip of these flying penguins, which became one of the most viewed videos on the internet. Presenter Terry Jones explained that, instead of huddling together to endure the Antarctic winter, these penguins took to the air and flew thousands of miles to the rainforests of South America where they "spend the winter basking in the tropical sun." A follow-up video explained how the BBC created the special effects of the flying penguins.

#14: The Body of Nessie Found
1972: On March 31 1972, a team of zoologists from Yorkshire's Flamingo Park Zoo, who were at Loch Ness searching for proof of Nessie's existence, found a mysterious carcass floating in the Loch. Initial reports claimed it weighed a ton and a half and was 15 ½ feet long. The zoologists placed the body in a van and began to transport it back to the zoo. However, the police chased down their truck and stopped it under a 1933 act of Parliament prohibiting the removal of "unidentified creatures" from Loch Ness. The body was then taken to nearby Dunfermline for examination. The discovery of the carcass received worldwide media attention. The British press dubbed it "Son of Nessie." But upon examination, Edinburgh scientists identified the creature as a bull elephant seal from the South Atlantic. The next day John Shields, Flamingo Park's education officer, confessed he had been responsible for the body. The bull elephant seal had died the week before at Dudley Zoo. He had shaved off its whiskers, padded its cheeks with stones, and kept it frozen for a week, before dumping it in the Loch and then phoning in a tip to make sure his colleagues found it. He had meant to play an April Fool's prank on his colleagues, but admitted the joke got out of hand when the police chased down their van.

#33: The Derbyshire Fairy
2007: In late March 2007, images of an 8-inch mummified creature resembling a fairy were posted on the website of the Lebanon Circle Magik Co. Accompanying text explained how the creature had been found by a man walking his dog along an old roman road in rural Derbyshire. Word of this discovery soon spread around the internet. Bloggers excitedly speculated about whether the find was evidence of the actual existence of fairies. By April 1 the Lebanon Circle website had received tens of thousands of visitors and hundreds of emails. But at the end of April 1, Dan Baines, the owner of the site, confessed that the fairy was a hoax. He had used his skills as a magician's prop-maker to create the creature. Baines later reported that, even after his confession, he continued to receive numerous emails from people who refused to accept the fairy wasn't real.

#48: Tasmanian Mock Walrus
1984: The Orlando Sentinel featured a story about a creature known as the Tasmanian Mock Walrus (or TMW for short) that many people in Florida were supposedly adopting as a pet. The creature was said to be four inches long, resembled a walrus, purred like a cat, and had the temperament of a hamster. What made it such an ideal pet was that it never had to be bathed, it used a litter box, and it ate cockroaches. In fact, a single TMW could entirely rid a house of its cockroach problem. Reportedly, some TMWs had been smuggled in from Tasmania, and there were efforts being made to breed them, but the local pest control industry was pressuring the government not to allow them into the country, fearing they would put cockroach exterminators out of business. Dozens of people called the paper trying to find out where they could obtain their own TMW. A picture of a Tasmanian Mock Walrus accompanied the article. Skeptics noted that the creature looked surprisingly similar to a Naked Mole Rat.

#66: Smaugia Volans
The April 1, 1998 online edition of Nature Magazine revealed the discovery of "a near-complete skeleton of a theropod dinosaur in North Dakota." The discovery was referred to in an article by Henry Gee discussing the palaeontological debate over the origin of birds. The dinosaur skeleton had reportedly been discovered by Randy Sepulchrave of the Museum of the University of Southern North Dakota. The exciting part of the discovery, according to the article, was that "The researchers believe that the dinosaur, now named as Smaugia volans, could have flown." In actuality, the University of Southern North Dakota does not exist, though it has been made famous by Peter Schickele who refers to it as the location where the music of the obscure eighteenth-century composer PDQ Bach was first performed; Smaug was the name of the dragon in Tolkein's The Hobbit; and Sepulchrave was the name of the 76th Earl of Groan in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. This Earl, believing that he was an owl, leapt to his death from a high tower, discovering too late that he could not fly.

EXTERNAL LINKS
The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time
Fictitious Creatures of April Fool's Day

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Yeti Hand Replica Delivered to Nepal

In our previous post New Search for Lost Yeti Artifacts of Nepal we mentioned how Kiwi adventurer and Air New Zealand pilot, Mike Allsop, plans on finding the Yeti skull and skeletal hand. These artifacts were stolen a monastery in the tiny Nepalese village of Pangboche, in the 1990s.

He has commissioned special effects shop Weta Workshops, a multi-award winning conceptual design and physical manufacturing facility known for their work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia films, to create replicas of the skull cap and skeletal hand in order to replace what was stolen.

Ultimately Allsop is hoping someone will return the originals, "I am hoping that the person who has them wants to give them back."



We also mentioned Allsop will hand-deliver the replicas to the monastery when he and 17 Air NZ co-workers travel to Pangboche in April. Its April and the Dominion Post has an update on the story.

Pilot to return to Nepal with 'yeti hand'
STACEY WOOD

Yetis, monks, thieves and Jimmy Stewart. Mike Allsop's tale has all the makings of a Hollywood movie.

But there is nothing phony about his mission to help restore the pride of the 1000-year-old Pangboche monastery in Nepal, nestled high in the Himalayan foothills near Mt Everest base camp.

Mr Allsop, an Air New Zealand pilot, Everest climber and adventurer, will return to the monastery this month with a special gift from Sir Richard Taylor's Weta Workshop.

The replica hand is a copy of the monastery's "original" yeti hand, which was stolen by persons unknown in the 1990s.

The hand, and part of a skull that proved to be from a rare goat, provided the monastery's small source of income, from tourists who came to see the artefacts.

In the 1950s, explorer Peter Byrne and Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart conspired to take one finger from the hand and have it tested in Britain, but the results were inconclusive, Mr Allsop said.

"There's two stories – one says Peter Byrne got the monks drunk and switched the finger. But I've spoken to him, and he says he offered to pay the monks and they agreed to let him take it."

Since the rest of the skeletal hand and the skull part were pinched in the 1990s, the monastery and its leader, Lama Gershe, have been without their main source of income. Mr Allsop hopes the replica items will help it survive until he can track down the originals.

He admits being sceptical about the existence of yetis, but said the legend was real enough to the monks.

"I asked Lama Gershe if he believed in it, and he started arguing with his wife in front of me. His daughter was translating for me and I asked her what they were fighting about.

"She told me he'd said his wife's friend was attacked at her back door by a yeti five years ago – and she'd said no, it was 10 years.

"And the sherpas, if they're around other people, they'll tell you they don't believe, but get them alone and they'll say: 'We don't have problems with yetis ... except in monsoon season."'

Mr Allsop has had a special connection with Pangboche since he first visited on his way to climb Everest in 2007. Lama Gershe helped to name his youngest son, Dylan Michael Dalha Allsop.

Last year when his eldest son, Ethan, turned seven he took him to see Everest and Pangboche, and plans to do the same with his younger children when they reach the same age.

He will leave for the monastery, with 15 Air New Zealand staff, on April 17 to install the replica artefacts in a secure glass case.

He hopes his campaign, Return The Hand, will locate the original bones, but time may be running out for Lama Gershe, who suffered a stroke last year.

THE MYTH OF THE YETI

The yeti, or abominable snowman, is one of the most famous mythological creatures. It is said to inhabit the mountainous areas of Nepal, Tibet and India.

Several explorers, including Peter Byrne, believe they have found tracks and dung belonging to yeti.

Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mt Everest, led an expedition in 1960 with a team of 21 scientists, climbers and other specialists, along with 310 Sherpas, to do scientific research on acclimatisation to altitude and to hunt for yetis. They failed to find any but brought back hair samples. Fellow Everest conqueror Tenzing Norgay told Sir Ed his father had twice seen a yeti.

Sir Ed's long-time friend, Tom Scott, said Sir Ed did not believe in the yeti but liked the concept. "The locals believed in them and Ed felt really bad for myth-busting them. He liked the possibility of the yeti. If someone found one, he would have been delighted."

- The Dominion Post

EXTERNAL LINKS
Kiwi adventurer leads Yeti hunt (12/05/2010)
Pilot to return to Nepal with 'yeti hand' (04/01/2011)

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New Search for Lost Yeti Artifacts of Nepal (12/05/2011)
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