Yeti (Abominable Snowman)
A hairy, man-like creature of the Himalayan snows; the English name "abominable snowman" comes from the British reconnaissance of Mount Everest in 1921.
Meaning
C. K. Howard-Bury, who led the 1921 expedition, wrote that tracks in the snow which at first looked like a human foot were taken by the expedition's porters for "the Wild Man of the Snows", whom they called Metohkangmi, "the abominable snow man", and that the story interested the newspapers greatly. He thought the tracks had probably been made by a large loping grey wolf, whose double tracks in soft snow looked like a barefoot man's. Yeti is the name used in Nepal (The Nome Nugget, 28 December 1960).
Origin and history
Howard-Bury also recorded the tale as it was told in Tibet: a hairy man who lives in the snows, used to frighten naughty children, who can escape him by running downhill, because his long hair then falls over his eyes.
By the 1950s expeditions were going to look for it. In 1957 Moscow radio announced a Soviet expedition to the Pamir Mountains, where Russian scientists believed it also lived (The Nome Nugget, 23 August 1957).
What did the Hillary expedition find?
Sir Edmund Hillary's Himalayan expedition of 1960 brought back two scalps that local people said came from a yeti. Lawrence Swan of San Francisco State College, one of the expedition's two biologists, said the hair on them was fake and that the Abominable Snowman never existed (The Nome Nugget, 28 December 1960).
See also
Bigfoot (Sasquatch), Kraken, Sea serpent, Loch Ness Monster, Champ (Lake Champlain monster), Bigfoot (Sasquatch).
Sources
- Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921 (C. K. Howard-Bury and others, 1922), C. K. Howard-Bury and others, Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921 (London, 1922), Internet Archive, p. 141; p. 141 (continued)
- The Nome Nugget (Nome, Alaska), 23 August 1957, The Nome Nugget, 23 August 1957, page 7, Library of Congress, Chronicling America, page 7
- The Nome Nugget (Nome, Alaska), 28 December 1960, The Nome Nugget, 28 December 1960, page 5, Library of Congress, Chronicling America, page 5
Last reviewed September 28, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research