Yeti: An Abominable History. Graham Hoyland

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       Shipton’s ice axe and the footprint: true and false?

      The photographs caused a sensation. Shipton’s extraordinary footprint led all who saw it to conclude that the creature that made it was an enormous snow-dwelling ape. On his return flight, Shipton was told by an air hostess at Karachi that journalists were waiting for him when they landed at London. He was mobbed at the airport on arrival and photographs of the footprint with an ice axe for scale, the footprint with a boot and another one featuring a trail of footprints made up the whole front page of The Times.

      Scientists took the photographs seriously. John Napier was a British primatologist and paleoanthropologist who was widely considered as the leading authority on primate taxonomy. He was also the author of the first authoritative study of our subject: Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality.⁵ He explains in his book that it was Shipton’s photograph which really kicked off his own interest in the yeti. He thought that the previous eyewitness stories were merely travellers’ tales. ‘But with the publication of Shipton’s picture – sharp, undistorted and precisely exposed – the legend of the yeti took a giant step forward and entered the public domain.’

      Scientific publications took it seriously, too. In the New Scientist, an editorial gasped: ‘The discovery would have profound scientific importance, as well as being a certain winner at the Zoo.’⁶ The Zoo?! Well, yes. Not to mention TV chat shows and a royal presentation. And, just by the way, overturning most theories of human evolution.

      Shipton’s story was later corroborated by his companion Dr Michael Ward, who wrote: ‘This was no hoax and the events occurred exactly and precisely as described in Shipton’s book on the Everest reconnaissance and by myself in this article. There must, therefore, be some rational explanation.’

      Dr Ward was one of the uncelebrated men behind the success of 1953. During his national service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, he had come across a roll of 35mm film shot by an RAF Mosquito fighter-bomber during an ‘accidental’ flight over Everest.⁷ He saw at once that there was a climbable route from the Western Cwm. He helped to persuade the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society to approve the Everest reconnaissance of 1951, and joined the successful British expedition of 1953 as doctor. James Morris gave us a thumbnail sketch of Ward at the top of the icefall: ‘He was a slender, lithesome man, and it always gave me great pleasure, even in those disagreeable circumstances, to watch him in action. His balance was so sure, and his movements so subtle, that when he turned his grinning and swarthy face upon you it was as if someone had drawn in a moustache upon a masterpiece by Praxiteles.’

      Meanwhile, John Napier was making an exhaustive study of the yeti/Bigfoot phenomenon for his 1973 book on the subject, concentrating on the Shipton photograph, in particular. Napier was well qualified to pronounce on primate footprints, as before his career as a primatologist and paleoanthropologist he had worked as an orthopaedic surgeon and later became an expert on human and primate hands and feet. He was the founder of the Primate Society of Great Britain (they must have had great tea parties), and helped to name Homo habilis (‘handy man’) in the 1960s. Later, he became the Director of the Primate Biology Program at the Smithsonian Institution, where he examined the footage of an actual walking Bigfoot (the Patterson film, see Chapter Eight), and he also investigated the frozen Bigfoot specimen, the Minnesota Iceman.