Abominably elusive

In 1969 the body of an ape-like creature, preserved in ice inside an insulated box, came to light in Minnesota. Its provenance was unclear, but the rumour went round that it was a Bigfoot, the North American equivalent of the Himalayan yeti. After two days peering through the box’s glass cover, the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans convinced himself that the rumour was correct. His description of the Minnesota Iceman was published in the Bulletin of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. It included the detail that ‘when erect, the penis would certainly not have been particularly striking in its dimensions’.

As if this wasn’t bad enough for the poor animal, it later transpired that its penis, along with the rest of its body, was made of latex. The whole thing was a hoax, constructed by a fairground huckster so that he could charge people 35 cents a look. As such, the Minnesota Iceman is perfectly at home in this book. The mountaineer Graham Hoyland has collected together all the claims and counter-claims surrounding the yeti and its equivalents around the world. His conclusion? There is ‘a total lack of solid evidence’.

Not that Hoyland wanted it this way. On one of his own expeditions to the Himalayas he saw footprints that locals believed had been made by a yeti. His desire to agree with them reminded him of The Third Eye, a book he read at school, in which the Tibetan T. Lobsang Rampa recounted his own meeting with a yeti. Hoyland was gripped. Unfortunately the story was a complete fabrication. T. Lobsang Rampa was actually a plumber’s son from Devon called Cyril Hoskins.

Hoyland gives every claim a fair hearing. He includes sherpas’ accounts, many of which describe female yetis possessing ‘pendulous breasts which they slung over their shoulders when they ran’.