Speaker 1: You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
Speaker 2: On Occomber twenty third, twenty sixteen, we attempted our first
Speaker 2: ever live Monster Talk event. We were joined by Eugenie Scott,
Speaker 2: Brian Regal, Daniel Loxon, myself, Blake Smith, and Karen Stolesnow
Speaker 2: for a discussion of the Yetti. We use Google's YouTube
Speaker 2: Live software. This free software is undergoing a lot of
Speaker 2: changes and sometimes has problems. In this case, the live
Speaker 2: stream started late and was, according to viewers, quite shoppy.
Speaker 2: The recording itself, the audio sounds fine, but it had
Speaker 2: this curious technical shortcoming of having the first six minute
Speaker 2: start early and then cut off six minutes early. So
Speaker 2: what follows is the audio of that live recording that
Speaker 2: I was able to extract from the video. I'll be
Speaker 2: working to try to sync up the audio and video
Speaker 2: and make what actually came out available on YouTube in
Speaker 2: the near future. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. It
Speaker 2: was a lot of fun to record, and we plan
Speaker 2: to try this again in the future, hopefully with fewer
Speaker 2: technical difficulties. So welcome to Monster Talk, the science show
Speaker 2: about monsters and what Brian Regal refers to as Yetti Palooza.
Speaker 2: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 3: A giant, hairy creature.
Speaker 2: Part eight party masts in Luckness, a twenty four mile
Speaker 2: long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland. It's a
Speaker 2: creature known as the Luckness Monster. Monstertal is it starting?
Speaker 3: This?
Speaker 2: Says we're live, so congratulations, welcome boom. All right, so
Speaker 2: we're here for the first Monster Talk Live podcast video
Speaker 2: cast vodcast. I don't know. I'm delighted to say. We've
Speaker 2: got Brian Regal with us from the University. Hi, Brian,
Speaker 2: Daniel Loxton from Skeptic magazine and hopefully Daniel's sound will
Speaker 2: be working soon. Let's see. I'm not sure we heard you, Daniel.
Speaker 2: And then we've got Eugenie Scott formerly of in CSC
Speaker 2: Is that right, that's correct and I can hear you now, Daniel.
Speaker 2: I believe that's perfect. And then from Monster Talk and
Speaker 2: we've got me Blake Smith and special guest is Brian
Speaker 2: Gregory who is from the Virtual Skeptics and he's going
Speaker 2: to be helping us with the audio. So, Daniel, just
Speaker 2: because we're getting some background noise, I would ask when
Speaker 2: you're not talking, would you mind muting your mic. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's awesome, Thank you so much, beautiful, this is gonna
Speaker 2: be great. Okay, So for this very first episode, we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about a creature that we've only talked
Speaker 2: about sort of tangentially and hopefully I said that right
Speaker 2: up until now. We're gonna be talking about the Yeti.
Speaker 2: And the reason I've got these particular folk on is
Speaker 2: because we've got this book from Brian Regal called Searching
Speaker 2: for Sasquatch, which I'm holding up since this will also
Speaker 2: be a bit a podcast. At some point, I'll just
Speaker 2: tell you what I'm doing with my hands here. I've
Speaker 2: got Abominable Science, which was written with Daniel Lockson and
Speaker 2: Don Prothero. I've got Eugenie Scott's book, which is Evolution
Speaker 2: Versus Creationism. Her work with the NCSSE has been tremendous
Speaker 2: and dealing with trying to keep science as the core
Speaker 2: of our curriculum in schools. And the novel Hits and
Speaker 2: Misses from Karen Stolesnow.
Speaker 1: Which is all about Yeah, it's completely completely love story.
Speaker 2: So let's just sort of get started. I know that
Speaker 2: from from my experience, it seems like the Yeti really
Speaker 2: sort of became a topic of the I guess cultural
Speaker 2: immediacy in the nineteen fifties. Brian Regal, your book on
Speaker 2: Searching for Sasquatch talks a lot about the origins of
Speaker 2: crypto zoology. Can you give us kind of a little
Speaker 2: historical overview of how this creature, the Yeti, became so
Speaker 2: famous in America in Europe?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, the legend in Nepalese and Tibetan history supposedly
Speaker 4: goes back quite a ways. There's a medieval manuscript from
Speaker 4: like the fourteen or the thirteen hundreds with a drawing
Speaker 4: of a supposed man creature, but in the West doesn't really.
Speaker 3: Get exposed to this.
Speaker 4: Around nineteen twenty, a British mountain climber called C. K.
Speaker 4: Howard Berry is on an expedition climbing mountains in Tibet
Speaker 4: and he sees what he thinks is some strange creature
Speaker 4: of from the distance, and he asked the sharp of guides,
Speaker 4: you know what is that thing? And they give him
Speaker 4: a couple of different local dialect names, which he immediately
Speaker 4: mangles when he tries to say them again. And he's
Speaker 4: so impressed by this that he sends a telegraph to
Speaker 4: the Calcutta Statesman to say, I saw this creature and
Speaker 4: it's called whatever you know. He tries to recreate the
Speaker 4: name of it, and the guys at the Calcutta Statesmen
Speaker 4: they don't pronounce it correctly either, and they try to
Speaker 4: translate into English and it eventually comes out abominable snowman.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 4: And so that's how it kind of hits the scene.
Speaker 4: There had been a few scattered Western, mostly British reports
Speaker 4: from mountain climbers back back into the early nineteenth century,
Speaker 4: but it was this this message about an abominable snowman
Speaker 4: that really kind of gets things going. And it's a
Speaker 4: few years later that the uh, the Luckness monster begins
Speaker 4: to become well known. And I think what really kind
Speaker 4: of kicks the the abominable snowman into the Western public
Speaker 4: eye are the are the Eric Shipton photographs, the famous
Speaker 4: Eric Shipton photographs.
Speaker 2: And those about to say those are actually a footprints
Speaker 2: next to an ice axe, right.
Speaker 3: Yes, and there was there were.
Speaker 4: So that's the most famous one is the is the
Speaker 4: single print with the ice ACKs next to it, But
Speaker 4: there's a couple of others. Uh. Probably the next best
Speaker 4: known one was he took a picture of sort of
Speaker 4: a long row of these footprints.
Speaker 2: Heading off into the distance. So those prints don't look
Speaker 2: as much like the sort of classic big foot prints
Speaker 2: that become so popular, and they're very different. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: what do you think, uh, Daniel, in your book you
Speaker 2: talked a lot about that sort of early history as well. Uh,
Speaker 2: anything else you want to add to what Brian said.
Speaker 5: Excuse me, well, regarding the very famous print that that
Speaker 5: story is quite confused. There's you know, there's a number
Speaker 5: of conflicting accounts of how many photographs were taken, whether
Speaker 5: there was two trackways, whether the photographs were seeing all
Speaker 5: the reflect the same trackway.
Speaker 3: It's it's quite confusing.
Speaker 5: And there there is some suggestion as well that the
Speaker 5: very famous print that we see against the ice accent
Speaker 5: against a boot could have been modified by Shipton himself.
Speaker 2: Actually, you know, there there there was some discussion about that.
Speaker 2: The idea that you don't need to again, sorry about that, Uh,
Speaker 2: the perfect I would say, the idea that there was
Speaker 2: so much press related to this, and that the funding
Speaker 2: for these these mountain climbs seemed to become somewhat dependent
Speaker 2: on the revenue being generated by the stories for the
Speaker 2: search for the Yetti.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: Is that an accurate statement that that that there was
Speaker 2: sort of financial pressure that can keep these stories coming
Speaker 2: in once they started.
Speaker 5: It is accurate, and there there are some accounts of
Speaker 5: important figures in the Yetti history mountaineers saying on the
Speaker 5: you know, on the down load. Uh, you know, don't
Speaker 5: make too much noise about this. This is you know,
Speaker 5: it's important for us to get our get our funding
Speaker 5: together and get our expeditions together.
Speaker 4: When I was when I was doing research for my
Speaker 4: book in London, I came across this was at the
Speaker 4: the archives at the universe See College of London. I
Speaker 4: came across this little obscure article in a kind of
Speaker 4: society page where John Napier, the man who writes probably
Speaker 4: the first scholarly book on on anomalous primates.
Speaker 2: At a party.
Speaker 4: They're talking because he knew Eric Shipton, and Napier's wife
Speaker 4: says to the effect, well, we know all no, that's fake.
Speaker 4: Shipton fakes everything. Yeah, he apparently right from the start
Speaker 4: there where there were suggestions that this was you know
Speaker 4: put on.
Speaker 2: Are you saying it's bullshipting?
Speaker 5: I think it is yes, there are some kind of
Speaker 5: hearsay accounts of that Shipton may have may have improved
Speaker 5: the print, and may have admitted that Earns Schaefer the
Speaker 5: SS the German SaaS Mountaineer, alleged that Shipton had said,
Speaker 5: you know, I had had asked him personally not to
Speaker 5: cast too much doubt on on the brend there. It
Speaker 5: seems that Shipton also had something of a reputation as
Speaker 5: a as a jokester meant hillary position in that in
Speaker 5: those kinds of terms, as some of the pays or tolltails.
Speaker 1: So let's just get to a more basic question that
Speaker 1: I'll put to everyone. What's the yetty supposed to be?
Speaker 1: You mean, you mean to the believers or as a
Speaker 1: creature as what How do we describe the Yetti? I
Speaker 1: guess is it a relative to or would believers think
Speaker 1: that the the is a relative to this sasquatch and
Speaker 1: the Yawi and other similar cryptids.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there are problem The descriptions vary so much, just
Speaker 6: like with all of the wild men of the woods.
Speaker 6: Is it's ten feet tall, it's got gray fur or
Speaker 6: silver or white fur? No, it's got brown fur, or
Speaker 6: it's really only five feet tall most of them. Most
Speaker 6: of the accounts like to have it. You know, bigger
Speaker 6: is always better when you're dealing with cryptos zoology, But
Speaker 6: how big it is, how much it weighs, what color
Speaker 6: it is, all of those things seem to be fairly
Speaker 6: flexible depending on who you're talking to and what they
Speaker 6: consider to be the evidence. So that's one of the
Speaker 6: problems with the bigfoot sasquatch, Shawe, et cetera. Is pinning
Speaker 6: down what exactly are we looking for? Whatever looking for?
Speaker 6: This is going to sort of spoil the punchline for
Speaker 6: everybody watching this, but they haven't actually found it yet.
Speaker 2: Sorry.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, Ivan Sanderson I thought had the best
Speaker 4: approach because he was completely imperturbable. He said, you know
Speaker 4: that you get all these different citing classifications and descriptions.
Speaker 4: That just proves that there's great biological diversity amongst anomalist primates.
Speaker 4: It's not just one, it's a it's a whole genus
Speaker 4: of different related species.
Speaker 6: Sure, in all of those places everywhere in the world
Speaker 6: where they've seen one or more of these large primates
Speaker 6: that are as yet underscribed, you don't have to look
Speaker 6: very far and you'll find people who also see ghosts
Speaker 6: and see other things. I mean, you know, the whole
Speaker 6: idea that just because just because an idea is widespread
Speaker 6: that therefore me it's true doesn't hold up very well.
Speaker 6: I mean, that's the lovely thing about looking at these
Speaker 6: phenomena from the standpoint of folklore. Because the folkloreists will
Speaker 6: tell you about widespread stories, some of them, like flood myths,
Speaker 6: could have an origin that's actually true most early civilizations,
Speaker 6: most early cities, human beings need water, So you settle
Speaker 6: someplace where there's water. If it's a river, probably at
Speaker 6: some time in the history of the community it's going
Speaker 6: to flood. So a lot of people independently have flood stories.
Speaker 6: And then there's also the phenomenon of diffusion, where a
Speaker 6: flood story will start in one place and diffuse to
Speaker 6: another neighboring or more distant culture, and so the same
Speaker 6: stories get swapped around. That doesn't mean that the same
Speaker 6: phenomena is actually being described everywhere. Folklorists also will tell
Speaker 6: you that the versions of the Cinderella story are almost
Speaker 6: as widespread as the flood. Does that actually mean there
Speaker 6: was a real Centerella who married the prince? Probably not,
Speaker 6: but it's a very popular motif, and the motif of
Speaker 6: the wild man of the woods is also something that
Speaker 6: shows up very widely in many cultures around the world.
Speaker 6: That doesn't necessarily mean that there are wild men of
Speaker 6: the woods running all over the place, or that they're
Speaker 6: certainly not that they're all a related form of undescribed primates.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that is that these stories seem
Speaker 1: to show up all around the world, similar stories you
Speaker 1: mean about well about about yes and squad Yeah, I.
Speaker 6: Mean, you know, there's the idea, the idea that that
Speaker 6: that that the woods are scary places, that remote areas
Speaker 6: are kind of frightening places. You could get hurt there.
Speaker 6: There's danger there. That's very common and not not exactly
Speaker 6: you know, even paranoids have enemies. I mean, bad things
Speaker 6: can happen to you in the wild, so that's not
Speaker 6: an unreasonable to believe. And it's also not unusual for
Speaker 6: there to be hermits and other people out living in
Speaker 6: the woods all by themselves. And not in every woods obviously,
Speaker 6: but you know, homeless people today is what we'd call them.
Speaker 6: But back in the medieval Europe or other parts of
Speaker 6: the world as well, there are some people who wander
Speaker 6: off into the woods and maybe they're not mentally stable,
Speaker 6: but certainly you could run into some of these people
Speaker 6: and they act bizarrely, and so stories arise. It's quite
Speaker 6: possible that stories about folklore, stories about wild men of
Speaker 6: the woods could be widespread for very understandable reasons.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 6: One of the handicaps that we have in the skeptics
Speaker 6: movement is we look at things scientifically, and that means
Speaker 6: that we actually look for the simplest explanation, the simplest
Speaker 6: explanation for all of these stories of Yetti's and Yellowie's
Speaker 6: and sasquatches and ETCeteras. The simplest explanation is not that
Speaker 6: a huge Miocene primates Gigantopithecus left relic populations around the
Speaker 6: planet which are all somehow related to one another and
Speaker 6: have yet to be properly discovered and properly described. That's
Speaker 6: a whole lot more ifs and possibilities and low priorities
Speaker 6: than just folkloric explanations.
Speaker 2: So, you know, that's always been a curiosity to me.
Speaker 2: The amount of bone material we actually have from Giganopithecus.
Speaker 2: Last time I read up on it was some teeth
Speaker 2: and part of the models for them that we see.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've seen full blown gigantic, you know, sized
Speaker 2: models for what people think they look like. And some people.
Speaker 6: Have that modern day forms are most closely related to
Speaker 6: fossil forms from the same area. It would be very
Speaker 6: unusual if giganopithicas look more like African apes. But it doesn't.
Speaker 6: It looks like Asian apes. So that's where the link
Speaker 6: to orangutans come from. That said, the idea that orangutans
Speaker 6: are a really good model for what gigantopithicas look like
Speaker 6: is not a very good one because Gigantopithecus was probably
Speaker 6: pretty big, you know, judging from the jaws and teeth.
Speaker 6: You know, there are elementric relationships that you can use
Speaker 6: to estimate how big it would be. I think I
Speaker 6: have no very good reason for saying this other than
Speaker 6: that I've spent some of my early academic life as
Speaker 6: a dental anthropologist, but I never studied the Gigantopithecus materials.
Speaker 6: But I think a lot of the estimates of ten
Speaker 6: and twelve feet tall are probably bigger than it really is.
Speaker 6: But you know, I can't defend that in any way.
Speaker 6: That's just a gut feeling from having looked at a
Speaker 6: lot of teeth in my life, teeth size varies a
Speaker 6: lot and is not a direct one to one kind
Speaker 6: of relationship with body size. But setting that aside, it
Speaker 6: was probably a pretty darn good sized ape, which you know,
Speaker 6: brings up a whole lot of other questions about the
Speaker 6: adaptation and the way of life that that creature had,
Speaker 6: that not only Gigantopithecus had, but any modern relic giant
Speaker 6: ape would have had, which you know, my colleagues here
Speaker 6: concertainly deal with as well ecological factors. I know that
Speaker 6: Dan has written about this, and the rest of you
Speaker 6: have too, so hold forth.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: You know, when when Grover Krantz did a reconstruction of
Speaker 4: the Jacob skull, he made it basically an oversized gorilla skull,
Speaker 4: and he did uh. He was very interested in the
Speaker 4: in the biometric approach to trying to reconstruct Bigfoot, and
Speaker 4: in his papers I went through all the stuff down
Speaker 4: at the Smithsonian, just reams and reams of mathematical calculations
Speaker 4: he did to try to figure out the bulk of
Speaker 4: one of these and these wonderful little drawings sketches he made,
Speaker 4: these little sort of mannequin drawings with you know how
Speaker 4: long the limb proportions were going to be, and you know,
Speaker 4: he put a lot of effort into it, and he
Speaker 4: just assumed that Gigantopithecas was a very big gorilla like biped.
Speaker 6: Well, actually, that's that's probably not you know, too crazy,
Speaker 6: because you know, the teeth are really big. Those are
Speaker 6: humongous big molars, and generally speaking in primates where we
Speaker 6: find that kind of dentition, big molars, especially relative to
Speaker 6: the anterior dentation. This is an This is a creature
Speaker 6: that I ate a lot of fullivorous kinds of food,
Speaker 6: hard objects, or a lot of vegetarian kinds of These
Speaker 6: are not the teeth of a of a carnivores, shall
Speaker 6: we say, maybe an omnivore, but an animal for whom
Speaker 6: vegeta vegetables, vegetation, I should say, not vegetables.
Speaker 2: That's different.
Speaker 6: Vegetation was a very big part of the of the diet.
Speaker 6: That makes sense if it's a very large body primate.
Speaker 6: You know, look at gorillas there the biggest primate on
Speaker 6: the planet today, and their diet is almost entirely low calorie,
Speaker 6: high bulk kinds of foods, which is why when you
Speaker 6: go to the zoo, and especially if it's a zoo
Speaker 6: that's overfeeding its grelus, you tend to find big guts
Speaker 6: because most of the viscera is involved in digesting this
Speaker 6: high cellulos diet. You know, you just don't find giant
Speaker 6: primate dietary support in places like the Himalayas or the
Speaker 6: northwest coast of North America. You just don't find that
Speaker 6: kind of dietary possibilities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it almost ends up being the same sort
Speaker 2: of argument you have about NeSSI, where there's just not
Speaker 2: the caloric availability to support the size of the animal,
Speaker 2: that seems to be a good argument against. I guess
Speaker 2: went back to the question about what is it supposed
Speaker 2: to be? Though we've got some people report something that
Speaker 2: sounds like a bear, some people report something that sounds
Speaker 2: like a primate. But am I right in thinking that
Speaker 2: there is?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 2: Well, I guess maybe a better question with this, maybe
Speaker 2: a folklore question, is what did the people of Nepal
Speaker 2: think it is? I mean, what are the people who
Speaker 2: live in that area? I think is because it seems
Speaker 2: like in their folklore in mythology, that the creature is
Speaker 2: more supernatural than necessarily biological.
Speaker 5: It's it's a really complicated, complicated question that actually makes
Speaker 5: me feel quite uneasy. Of all the major cryptods, I
Speaker 5: think the Yetti is the one that makes me feel
Speaker 5: the most kind of unsure because it's it is the
Speaker 5: most international of the mysteries. You know, we're we're talking
Speaker 5: about creature that spans several countries, a vast part of
Speaker 5: the world, a number of different languages. We've got dozens
Speaker 5: of names for this thing. Through through that, we've got
Speaker 5: some implication of bears, some implication of supernatural creatures. But
Speaker 5: teasing these things apart is really difficult, particularly for Western skeptics,
Speaker 5: you know, sitting at a desk somewhere as I am.
Speaker 5: We're very dependent on, you know, people who have spent
Speaker 5: a lot of time looking at you know, meeting local
Speaker 5: people talking about the beliefs, talking about mountaineers and expeditions
Speaker 5: that have gone in search of the Yeddie. And then
Speaker 5: those are also international. You know, we've got to Germans
Speaker 5: and Swiss and British and Americans, with large expeditions by
Speaker 5: the Russians, by the Chinese, and trying to put together
Speaker 5: all those pieces to answer the deeper question what is
Speaker 5: the eddie. It's extraordinarily daunting in my opinion. You know,
Speaker 5: the more kind of popular culture question, what is the eddy?
Speaker 5: Is itself sort of complicated. You know, with cryptids, we
Speaker 5: have our lumpers and our splitters for our kind of
Speaker 5: cryptozoological taxonomy. There are people who believe, for example, that
Speaker 5: every major like monster belongs to the same species across
Speaker 5: the entire planet, or that every kind of phenomenal as
Speaker 5: he belongs to the same species across the entire planet.
Speaker 5: But as Genie pointed out earlier, you know, that's not
Speaker 5: what we see in the eyewitness record. We see tremendous diversity.
Speaker 5: So how are you going to deal with that? Do
Speaker 5: you conclude that eyewitnesses are not terribly reliable, as skeptics
Speaker 5: tend to conclude, or do you conclude that there are
Speaker 5: dozens of species of big feet stomping about the planet,
Speaker 5: all of them equally undiscovered, practically invisible.
Speaker 1: Do you think that people in countries like the poll
Speaker 1: and to Base I really believe in the YETI today
Speaker 1: or do you think it's more of a tongue in
Speaker 1: cheek thing or tourism draw.
Speaker 5: I think it really depends, you know what country you're
Speaker 5: in what sense you mean to believe, whether you're in
Speaker 5: the countryside of the city. It's a kind of a
Speaker 5: complex folklore ecology of ideas.
Speaker 2: So kind of going back to the Yeah, thanks Dane,
Speaker 2: it's kind of going back to the historical side of things.
Speaker 2: The the two most famous aside from the photographic evidence
Speaker 2: that the two most famous sort of yetty things the
Speaker 2: evidence for them are a mummified hand and a mummified scalp.
Speaker 2: And there's this amazing story about how some of that
Speaker 2: material came out for US Western scientists to have a
Speaker 2: look at. Can we talk about that a little bit? Yeah.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 4: There is a monastery in Tibet called pangbo Chet and
Speaker 4: they supposedly have this story about a Yetti helping them
Speaker 4: build the monastery or protect the monastery, and they claim
Speaker 4: they had a hand Yeti's hand and a Yeti scalp
Speaker 4: that they kept as sort of religious artifacts. And in
Speaker 4: the nineteen fifties, one of the legendary anomalous primate hunters,
Speaker 4: David Byrne, winds up going there and he sees this
Speaker 4: thing and he tries to steal it. He managed to
Speaker 4: somehow sweet talk his way in to be able to
Speaker 4: get his hands on this hand, and apparently he stole
Speaker 4: a couple of fingers. He tore off a couple of
Speaker 4: fingers and replaced it with modern human finger bones, but
Speaker 4: then didn't exactly tell anybody when he got back to
Speaker 4: Europe that he had done this. And then one of
Speaker 4: the last expeditions to go there, the one that involved Edmund,
Speaker 4: Hillary and and the guy from Mutual of Omaha's Wild
Speaker 4: Kingdom Perkins, the Hillary Perkins Expedition, Marlon Perkins, thank you.
Speaker 4: They go out there and they say, okay, we want
Speaker 4: to see the hand too, So the monks bring him in, uh,
Speaker 4: and they say, here's the here's the hand. And they
Speaker 4: don't know that David Byrne had chopped some fingers off
Speaker 4: of this and had replaced it with human finger bones.
Speaker 4: And they Marlon Perkins looks at this and he says,
Speaker 4: wait a minute, this is a human hand. It's obviously
Speaker 4: modern human bones. So it's all fake. And that's basically
Speaker 4: what they said to the world. Perkins was very skeptical
Speaker 4: of the whole yetti idea. There's a famous photograph of
Speaker 4: him wearing the Yeti scalp sort of dancing around with
Speaker 4: it that got a lot of people upset. But then
Speaker 4: the hand I believe the hand went and disappeared completely,
Speaker 4: So we don't know. There are photographs, there's a couple
Speaker 4: of photographs of it floating around, and a couple of
Speaker 4: photographs of the of the of the skull cap, but.
Speaker 3: I believe the hand is missing.
Speaker 4: And Bernard Hoovelman's the other famous pioneer cryptosologists. He believed
Speaker 4: that the whole YETI thing was just a misinterpretation of
Speaker 4: local wildlife.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a popular view. I think that. Of course,
Speaker 2: then there's stories where you know, people have much more
Speaker 2: profound in direct interactions. But that seems to be true
Speaker 2: for like Bigfoot as well, where you get stories where oh,
Speaker 2: that sounds like a bear, you know, or that sounds like, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, an animal that I recognize, and then they
Speaker 2: get kind of mixed up with stories of you know,
Speaker 2: these animals have a language and they talk to me
Speaker 2: and they tell me things that sort of thing. So, uh,
Speaker 2: it's a it's a hodgepodge of stuff. But I did
Speaker 2: one when we're talking about removing material from those areas. Uh,
Speaker 2: there's that famous bit with the Jimmy Stewart can can
Speaker 2: we can we add that bit had I hate to
Speaker 2: not have our Jimmy Stewart story. They want to cover that.
Speaker 5: It's been a while since I've looked at that. But yeah,
Speaker 5: the the story of how this material of the hand
Speaker 5: material got taken out by Burns a little bit. There
Speaker 5: are some different accounts of that. He said that he
Speaker 5: had permission, it wasn't stolen, so on. The material still exists,
Speaker 5: the material that he carried out, It was DNA tested
Speaker 5: just a few years ago, and that was also human.
Speaker 2: So was it Jimmy Stewart, Not that.
Speaker 5: I know, but there is there is a story about
Speaker 5: the material being carried out by Jimmy Stewart's wife in her.
Speaker 2: Right, in her Lageride luggage. Right, yeah, it's a different time,
Speaker 2: it's different.
Speaker 6: Wait wait, what what was Jimmy Stewart's wife carrying out?
Speaker 6: I missed a piece of.
Speaker 5: This someplace, A piece of a Yetti's hand, Mamma Yetti's hand.
Speaker 6: The same hand. I mean, how many yet hands are there?
Speaker 6: I mean I've heard about the earlier one, the one, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the same one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's apparently how it was carried out of
Speaker 5: the country.
Speaker 2: Through this, so it's like a movie title person yet
Speaker 2: hand right, So.
Speaker 1: Does it seem like they're saucing today contemporary signings of
Speaker 1: the It.
Speaker 4: Not that I'm aware of. I don't think there has
Speaker 4: been a major sighting, you know, there there was the
Speaker 4: there was the material that was tested a couple of
Speaker 4: years ago that turned out to be an extinct version
Speaker 4: of a polar bear.
Speaker 3: But I don't, I don't.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Of any publicized sighting lately.
Speaker 5: There's there's a little trickle photographs and television shows and
Speaker 5: say they found footprints and things like that, But it's
Speaker 5: the heyday of the YEDDI seems to have seems to
Speaker 5: have passed, at least in terms of the cryptid that
Speaker 5: we know in Love in the in the West, the House.
Speaker 2: And Days of the Eddy was it. We We do
Speaker 2: have a new series out from Josh Gates, which is
Speaker 2: I think. I think it's a four part series. In
Speaker 2: episode three I've got I've got the three episodes digitally
Speaker 2: to watch them, but I haven't had a chance to
Speaker 2: sit down with them yet, so I'm not sure. I know.
Speaker 2: In the commercials though, it does look like he sees
Speaker 2: an animal, so I would just have to assume that
Speaker 2: he found the Yeddy and that all that scientific turial
Speaker 2: is coming out soon.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the.
Speaker 5: Case closed, Our job is done.
Speaker 6: We can go home. Now, it's a little early. We're
Speaker 6: half hour short. But as part of my reviewing for
Speaker 6: this program of yours like and Karen, I mean, I
Speaker 6: actually don't think about Yetti all the time in real life.
Speaker 6: So I went back, Okay, you know, what do I
Speaker 6: know about Yetti? And back in the nineteen nineties I did.
Speaker 6: I was asked to be the scientist for a show
Speaker 6: that was on that splendid example of scientific accuracy, the
Speaker 6: History Channel, in the In Search of series and with
Speaker 6: which I'm sure you were all quite familiar. This was,
Speaker 6: of course, In Search of the Abominable Snowman, and they
Speaker 6: went through all kinds of kind of bombfog to get
Speaker 6: to what was really the kicker, which was the last
Speaker 6: ten minutes or fifteen minutes or so, which was their
Speaker 6: presentation of new footage of the snow Walker. Don't remember
Speaker 6: the snow Walker video, right? And the snow Walker video
Speaker 6: was just just classic, It's just wonderful because it was
Speaker 6: a mysterious Belgian couple who were camping in the snowy
Speaker 6: Himalayas and they were filming, you know, sort of their
Speaker 6: vacation here, and they turned the camera back to record
Speaker 6: their their footprints as they had walked up this steep slope,
Speaker 6: and then they saw this strange creature get up and
Speaker 6: walk away, and of course the camera was jiggling and
Speaker 6: banging around and everything like that. This was and is
Speaker 6: this the Jetty? And I, of course my whole role.
Speaker 6: I mean, I know you guys have been in a
Speaker 6: comfortable role for other programs. The role of the scientist
Speaker 6: is to have all the g whiz stuff go on
Speaker 6: and then doctor Scott as a scientist and somebody really boring,
Speaker 6: what do you have to say about this? And your
Speaker 6: job was to say something halfway sensible. There it is,
Speaker 6: There it is. That's the snow walker. Oh fabulous, you've
Speaker 6: got it. I'm sorry for your podcasts. Exactly. Well, that's
Speaker 6: basically what I said on this program. I said, you know,
Speaker 6: a how do you know this couple is Belgium. They're
Speaker 6: they're speaking Flemagh to each other, But did you act
Speaker 6: get a native Flemish speaker to I don't know what
Speaker 6: Flemish sounds like. These people could be, you know, saying
Speaker 6: so you know linguistics, that's what we need. So a
Speaker 6: you know, we don't know who these people are. We
Speaker 6: don't know where this was filmed. It could have been
Speaker 6: filmed in the Sierras for all we know. It's just
Speaker 6: a couple of rocks and you've got there's nothing there.
Speaker 6: It was very cleverly done so that you couldn't actually
Speaker 6: figure out where it was. And then you know, they
Speaker 6: labor up at this hill and then they turn around
Speaker 6: and there's this dark form at the bottom of the hill.
Speaker 6: And you know what's going on in my mind is
Speaker 6: they're saying, okay, Fred, time to get up and walk.
Speaker 6: And the guy in the gorilla suit stands up and
Speaker 6: he starts walking away. And I tell you, if this
Speaker 6: is actually a creature that lives in this environment, it's
Speaker 6: going to be dead in a week because it could
Speaker 6: barely get through the thick snow. It was extremely clumsy.
Speaker 6: This was not a creature that was used to this environment,
Speaker 6: whereas a man in a gorilla suit would probably not
Speaker 6: do terribly well in that environment. Actually, but I did
Speaker 6: I did bring up a couple of points about this
Speaker 6: is not really a very reliable bit of footage. But
Speaker 6: that was that must have been the late nineties because
Speaker 6: I had short hair and really big glasses. So that's
Speaker 6: kind of that's when I can pinpoint that.
Speaker 2: So the Abominable Stumbler reminds me of the Bumbler from
Speaker 2: the Rudolph the Red Near. Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Uh so I don't think you're that's right? Yeah? In
Speaker 2: what's the elf that wants to be a dentist? I
Speaker 2: think and I think a lot of people learned about
Speaker 2: the Abominable Snowman from that documentary about the Rudolph the
Speaker 2: Reda's Reindeer.
Speaker 6: So I missed this whole thing. How did I How
Speaker 6: did this pass me by months?
Speaker 1: That will come out for Christmas?
Speaker 2: That's a classic. How can you see that? You're boring scientists?
Speaker 6: Case some points, my daughter probably knows about. I'll last
Speaker 6: her and I'll get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can. When Christmas comes around, You'll you'll find it.
Speaker 2: It's a it's an important part of the Roodolph the
Speaker 2: Redness Reindeer mythology. If you don't mind me, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm not I'm not Okay, let's be clear. I am
Speaker 2: a skeptic, but I'm open minded about the existence of
Speaker 2: Santa Claus, so totally yeah, no spoilers here.
Speaker 6: I mean, Santa Claus comes to my house every Christmas.
Speaker 6: I don't know whether you are good girls and boys,
Speaker 6: but Santa Claus definitely comes to us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Santa Claus seems pretty forgiving around here because I've
Speaker 2: got some bad.
Speaker 1: I'm seventeen month old, so he'll probably be coming soon.
Speaker 2: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to ask about but some of the
Speaker 1: footprints that have been found in the snow, and I know,
Speaker 1: with big foot footprints are often a key piece of evidence.
Speaker 1: How would the snow in that particular climate affect those footprints?
Speaker 1: Do you think do you think it could affect them
Speaker 1: in any particular way.
Speaker 6: Well, in the sense that snow melts and changes its
Speaker 6: shape pretty well and pretty quickly, I would think that
Speaker 6: snow prints would be the least reliable kinds of prints
Speaker 6: that you would want to depend upon.
Speaker 2: That's a recurring thing I've heard as well, is that
Speaker 2: they've melt and refreeze and melt and refreeze and become unrecognizable.
Speaker 6: Bigger and bigger. Yeah, and they increase in size as well,
Speaker 6: and their footprints, you know, do look a lot like
Speaker 6: people footprints if you kind of forget about the glass
Speaker 6: in the front which can melt off, are easily the
Speaker 6: plexi river man tracks. You know, we have all sorts
Speaker 6: of experience with footprints being rather under liable sources. Question,
Speaker 6: are you guys familiar with Jeff Meldrum's uh uh that's
Speaker 6: what sorry, big foot footprints and uh he claims to
Speaker 6: have found dermal ridges him.
Speaker 2: We are right, we've we've we've talked to Jimmy Chilcott,
Speaker 2: who was he was a fingerprint expert who yeah, and
Speaker 2: his idea was that these were primate uh dermal ridges
Speaker 2: like basically like fingerprints. But Matt Crowley was able to
Speaker 2: demonstrate that, uh, this effect can be created when you
Speaker 2: have your casting material dry, and he called them, let
Speaker 2: you call them the desiccation ridges instead of dermal ridges,
Speaker 2: and so was able to reproduce the effects guaranteed not
Speaker 2: a primate because he was just making casts and they
Speaker 2: were getting the same sort of effects. So I think
Speaker 2: he's pretty well uh killed that as a viable explanation,
Speaker 2: so that no, Chilcut is a trained fingerprint expert, but
Speaker 2: that doesn't and he's as much as said that, yeah,
Speaker 2: that does does explain the at least potentially explain those.
Speaker 5: Sorry, well, I was just going to say that I
Speaker 5: think Matt's demonstation about the dermal and bridges is pretty
Speaker 5: definitive and quite interesting, a rare case of truly experimental
Speaker 5: work in skeptical investigation. You pretty much put a nail
Speaker 5: in that whole thing, which was a really important cornerstone
Speaker 5: of the pro bigfoot.
Speaker 3: Argument for quite a while.
Speaker 2: It is, yeah, and it's sad too, because it's the
Speaker 2: most iconic thing about Bigfoot. I mean, you can have
Speaker 2: blurry photos all day long, but it's those giant footprints
Speaker 2: that I think really are the most memorable part of
Speaker 2: my growing up thinking about big Foot. As people holding
Speaker 2: up those casts, I was like, you know, so.
Speaker 5: It's it's one of the important distinctions maybe between the
Speaker 5: big Foot lore and the Yetti lore and those cookie
Speaker 5: cutter footprints that we associated with the Sasquatch. Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: quite quite different from from what we see and across
Speaker 5: historical accounts of yetti tracks. They're really variable. They don't
Speaker 5: really they don't match each other. They don't match the
Speaker 5: Sasquatch template at all, So we see they.
Speaker 6: Don't look like something they don't look like something that
Speaker 6: you would scrap on your your cat caterpillar as you're
Speaker 6: going through the through the.
Speaker 5: Califun you know the Yetti footprint history, It didn't kids
Speaker 5: wild animals quite quite strongly in a range of them,
Speaker 5: monkeys and wolves and the bears certainly.
Speaker 2: Well, we have a lack of physical evidence to support
Speaker 2: this animal lots of lore. But in that sort of
Speaker 2: highlight time, right before and right around the same time
Speaker 2: that the Bigfoot became popular in America, we had this
Speaker 2: this funding that was coming from a private individual. Uh,
Speaker 2: Tom Slick, which greatest name in in cryptology, because because
Speaker 2: I was a big fan of the Tom Slick cartoons,
Speaker 2: which is not related. Uh.
Speaker 6: But and then there's Gray Slick r.
Speaker 2: Never mind, It's like that's a singer. I know that,
Speaker 2: but she from Starship? Is that right?
Speaker 6: It's like, I forget what Jefferson airplane.
Speaker 2: Okay, Jefferson airplane.
Speaker 6: I just I just broke your total train of thought.
Speaker 2: So always precariously to go off the rails. Don't worry
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 4: I sidly can't believe that two of the people on
Speaker 4: this panel don't know that Gray Slick was in Jefferson airplane.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I thought was gration I have.
Speaker 4: I have freshmen in my World history class never sold
Speaker 4: raids of the Lost Arc.
Speaker 6: That's scary.
Speaker 2: Why haven't being your class? I don't understand.
Speaker 3: I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 4: I couldn't believe they didn't they didn't get the reference.
Speaker 4: And I just stood there for a minute, dumbfounded, wow,
Speaker 4: saying anything and and one of the students says, what's
Speaker 4: wrong and I said, I was just thinking about the
Speaker 4: buffalo and they didn't get that either.
Speaker 1: Have to screen it in class someday.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I did get kind of derailed. I was
Speaker 2: talking about something with Yetti's I don't know, Oh, Tom slick, right,
Speaker 2: So you had this basically you had this independent uh
Speaker 2: oil millionaire funding working for the CIA, who may have
Speaker 2: been working for the CIA. That's a very good point. Uh,
Speaker 2: there's a whole there's a whole Yetti c I a
Speaker 2: thing we haven't even right. There's the whole using Yetti
Speaker 2: research to travel across borders because you know as a
Speaker 2: on the Chinese, right, but we don't. We don't really
Speaker 2: have anything like that in cryptozoology anymore. But we do
Speaker 2: have lear uh sort of funding the same kind of
Speaker 2: paranormal fringy references. So you've got this guy Lear who's
Speaker 2: a millionaire hotel owner from I think a budget hotels
Speaker 2: or a budget I forget the name, but but he's uh,
Speaker 2: there was the Skinwalker ranch research and at the same time,
Speaker 2: he's legitimately trying to put uh hotel habitats out into
Speaker 2: space and has a module that's going to be on
Speaker 2: I think it's on the International Space Station right now.
Speaker 2: I find this fascinating when you get these guys who
Speaker 2: are willing to put the money out there and try
Speaker 2: to do something scientific. I kind of worry that sometimes
Speaker 2: they go with fringe resources instead of mores or hardened
Speaker 2: science resources. But A Slick was actually tied into American
Speaker 2: Bigfoot investigations too, until he tragically died in a helicopter crash.
Speaker 2: Does ib you want to share any details that Am
Speaker 2: I covering that pretty accurately?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: He was.
Speaker 4: He's one of the guys, one of the few people
Speaker 4: who bridges the gap between both the Asiatic nomalost primate
Speaker 4: searchers in the North American primate anomalst primate searchers.
Speaker 3: He's was this.
Speaker 4: Kind of quirky Texas oil man who is born into
Speaker 4: a very traditional Republican world that included the Bush family
Speaker 4: and UH and and other sort of movers and shakers
Speaker 4: of the American century ideal. Yet at the same time
Speaker 4: he's got these sort of almost these progressive, almost liberal
Speaker 4: ideas about uh fixing the world not through the force
Speaker 4: of arms, but through spirituality. And along with the Yetti hunts,
Speaker 4: he also sponsors several sort of holistic institutes. A very
Speaker 4: unusual guy and depending upon who you talk to, may
Speaker 4: have been an operative for the CIA.
Speaker 5: You wanted to bring the US and the USSR and
Speaker 5: a kind of world peace police force. Yes, very optimistic character.
Speaker 4: Uh what what's what's really fascinating about the YETI hunt
Speaker 4: much less so for the bigfoot stuff. But if you
Speaker 4: look at the history of the people who actually went
Speaker 4: on these Yety expeditions, certainly the Americans, they all have
Speaker 4: oss connections. Dylan Ripley, who was the first guy that
Speaker 4: that Eric Shipton contacts after he gets these pictures, he
Speaker 4: contacts Dylan Ripley, who's an ornithologist at the Smithsonian about
Speaker 4: he knew that that Ripley had gone to Asia and
Speaker 4: he was a ass officer in the Asia theater and
Speaker 4: Carlton Kuhn, another major American member of the of the
Speaker 4: YETI search also documented OSS connections and even later CIA connections,
Speaker 4: because I dug through the Smithsonian records and found he
Speaker 4: Kuhn had been working for the for US intelligence in
Speaker 4: North Africa during World War two and he got badly
Speaker 4: injured in a in a Nazi bombing raid. And when
Speaker 4: the war was over, he put in an application for
Speaker 4: severance pay and medical pay, and he sort of goes
Speaker 4: back and forth in this paperwork is there He goes
Speaker 4: back and forth with the CIA saying, you know, I
Speaker 4: was working for you guys, and I my head got
Speaker 4: smashed open, and now I'm crazy. You got to give
Speaker 4: me some money, you give me some medical attention, And
Speaker 4: in wonderfully bureaucratic way, the CIA says, well, you know,
Speaker 4: you didn't work for the CIA, you worked for oss
Speaker 4: So the CIA is not responsible for what you did
Speaker 4: under the OSSU. And so they wound up giving him
Speaker 4: some sort of small pension.
Speaker 2: But all these.
Speaker 4: Guys that went on on this expedition have these very
Speaker 4: real but somewhat murky intelligence connections, And there are Russian
Speaker 4: newspaper articles from this time period where they say, we
Speaker 4: know all these these these monster guys are all working
Speaker 4: for the CIA.
Speaker 2: They're here to.
Speaker 4: Spy on us, the spying on the Chinese, the spine
Speaker 4: on Tibet, because this was around the time that the
Speaker 4: China really begin to crack down on Tibet and the
Speaker 4: Dalai Lama goes into exile and they say, you know,
Speaker 4: you're not fooling us.
Speaker 3: You're not looking for a monster, You're here to spy
Speaker 3: on us. The Eddy is.
Speaker 5: The most kind of politicized of the cryptids in that sense.
Speaker 5: I mean, you've got this large region of interface between
Speaker 5: these colonial powers originally and colonial interests and then eventually
Speaker 5: these Cold War interests. It's yeah, it's complicated. The Chinese
Speaker 5: eventually kicked all the monster hunters out they got sick
Speaker 5: of monster hunters watching them in Tibet.
Speaker 6: I think the Turks also kicked out all of the
Speaker 6: Arc hunters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the other raiders of the Lost Arc.
Speaker 3: That's that one's really lost.
Speaker 6: That one still lost.
Speaker 1: We still have a lot of Bigfoot sightings today and
Speaker 1: a lot of people who seem to think Bigfoot is plausible.
Speaker 1: And you guys have spoken about the Yetti and how
Speaker 1: they just aren't sightings today. Do you think that it's
Speaker 1: possible that the yetti is an urban legend that's on
Speaker 1: its way out?
Speaker 6: Good question, this goes. I mean, that's one that's one
Speaker 6: of those empirically determinable questions that there hasn't been a
Speaker 6: lot of action on the eddy front, and if there
Speaker 6: continues to be in action, then I think we would conclude. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's it's sort of drifted out of the public conscious.
Speaker 6: But you know, all it takes is one more on
Speaker 6: one exciting find people. People love to like stuff like this,
Speaker 6: and it wouldn't take long to put it back on
Speaker 6: the front page.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think since we don't have a body,
Speaker 2: and we will always probably be getting stories about them,
Speaker 2: So you know, if they are creatures of folklore, then
Speaker 2: they'll never die. If they're if they're purely folklore, they
Speaker 2: still never die. If they're real animals, we need a body.
Speaker 2: I don't know how to put it. We need a
Speaker 2: corpse or a live one. Could be a live one,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: So I just wonder if it could go the way
Speaker 1: of the unicorn and a lot of the other legendary
Speaker 1: creatures and that people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so like we're it basically loses cachet
Speaker 2: and becomes everybody.
Speaker 1: Everyone, everyone knows that.
Speaker 2: Although as our our special Halloween episode will show, people
Speaker 2: still believe in fairies, even though you would think that
Speaker 2: was kind of a dead belief system.
Speaker 6: So yeah, it was surprising flat.
Speaker 3: Earth beliefs are back.
Speaker 5: All these things just go in a big wheel truth.
Speaker 2: It's true, yep, yep.
Speaker 5: But I mean, as as we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 5: it's it's very difficult to tease apart these different levels
Speaker 5: of folklore. You know, people who are in the countryside
Speaker 5: in several different countries are dealing with these bears. They
Speaker 5: have ideas about this. You know, that's one level of folklore.
Speaker 5: What uh you know is current in the cities and townships.
Speaker 5: That's a different level. What filters out to us in
Speaker 5: the West. It's a different level. And it's uh, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's hard hard to know what to make about that.
Speaker 6: But I think we've know from studying the folklore that
Speaker 6: there may have been some event or experience that set
Speaker 6: off a folklore trope, but that doesn't mean that there
Speaker 6: is a there there, that there is an actual material being.
Speaker 6: So yeah, and then of course, especially with the Eddie.
Speaker 6: But you know, even with the North American wild man
Speaker 6: of the woods, there's there's supernatural aspects in the minds
Speaker 6: of some. There are some who look at bigfoot as
Speaker 6: a supernatural creature rather than just an undiscovered relectomatid.
Speaker 3: That is.
Speaker 5: Right, there are the they are the kind of the
Speaker 5: diversity of ideas in the modern bigfoot. You know, is
Speaker 5: bigfoot bulletproof? Is an animal?
Speaker 3: Is from another dimension?
Speaker 5: Can you read my mind? All those things. But then
Speaker 5: on the other side of this kind of westernized cryptid,
Speaker 5: if you go back in time, the source material that
Speaker 5: contributed to modern sasquatch belief, to the the archetype of bigfoot,
Speaker 5: that was also diverse. You know, people all over the
Speaker 5: continent and telling wild man stories, and they weren't the
Speaker 5: same stories. You know, sometimes their wild man had a
Speaker 5: you know, a six foot quartz spike on their big toe,
Speaker 5: or they lived underwater, or these kinds of things, and
Speaker 5: they have in common this kind of universal motif of
Speaker 5: the wild man. But otherwise they're not the same. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's it's not surprising that that is a universal motif.
Speaker 5: It's the easiest kind of monster to imagine, you know,
Speaker 5: like US, but bigger, wilder, more dangerous, and and for
Speaker 5: mostly people throughout history, it's these ideas developed. They are
Speaker 5: dealing with wild men. Sometimes you know, they're the other
Speaker 5: in the tribe next door, they're they're wild, the bandits
Speaker 5: in the hills, they're wild. And uh, as you're navigating
Speaker 5: a complex world, dangerous world, it's easy to develop mythological
Speaker 5: motives around this.
Speaker 6: And and also you get you get a certain homogenization
Speaker 6: of the characteristics with popular culture and better communication and
Speaker 6: movies and radio show and I mean even before that
Speaker 6: the printed newspapers, but especially especially with the advent of
Speaker 6: movies and visual videos. I mean, we all know that,
Speaker 6: you know, the origin of the almond eyed extraterrestrial, the
Speaker 6: little green men. I mean that's that can be traced
Speaker 6: back to a very specific incident of popular culture. And
Speaker 6: you know, Bigfoot's characteristics are are I think replacing I
Speaker 6: mean that the classic Northwest Coast Oregon, northern California and
Speaker 6: big Foot characteristics are I think replacing the wild man
Speaker 6: of the woods with the six foot spike on his toe.
Speaker 6: You know, there's much more coming together because of common
Speaker 6: exposure to the same ideas.
Speaker 4: And you know, when we said about you know, when
Speaker 4: we talked about folklore, we kind of think of it
Speaker 4: when talking about Bigfoot and Yetti about modern folklore. But
Speaker 4: one of the things that brings the Yeti to Western
Speaker 4: consciousness in the first place is in the late nineteenth
Speaker 4: and early twentieth century when there was a lot of
Speaker 4: interest in the West about finding a literal paradise on Earth.
Speaker 2: Morems. Trutle, thanks for listening to the special live recording
Speaker 2: of Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. You heard myself,
Speaker 2: Blake Smith and Karen Stolesno interviewing Daniel Loxton, Brian Riegal,
Speaker 2: and Eugenie Scott about the history and science surrounding the Yeti.
Speaker 2: As I said at the beginning, we lost about six
Speaker 2: minutes of audio due to technical problems with the Google software,
Speaker 2: but Brian Reegel did talk a bit more about how
Speaker 2: there was interest in the mystical idea of Shangri law
Speaker 2: at the turn of the twentieth century. You can learn
Speaker 2: more about those ideas in Regel's book Searching for Sasquatch
Speaker 2: and in Loxton's book Abominable Science. Links to works by
Speaker 2: all our guests will be in the show notes at
Speaker 2: MonsterTalk dot org. Monster Talk is an official podcast of
Speaker 2: Skeptic Magazine, and the opinions you hear on this show
Speaker 2: are those of myself and our guests and do not
Speaker 2: necessarily reflect the opinions of Skeptic Magazine or the Skeptic society.
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