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Abominable Snowman is known in various localities by names such as Yeti, Bigfoot, Meh-Teh, and Sasquatch. This unsubstantiated creature is said to be seven to ten feet tall with feet twice the size of a human’s, and a noticeably disagreeable aroma. It has been reported in Tibet, Nepal, China, Siberia, Canada and the US Northwest.

In 1832, a report from the UK representative in Nepal described a hirsute creature that reportedly had attacked his servants. This appears to be the first report of the Snowman made by a Westerner. An impressive report was made by mountaineers who crossed a Himalayan glacier in 1951 and photographed giant footprints measuring thirteen inches by eighteen inches. However, tracks left in snow tend to enlarge when exposed to direct sun, and this may well explain many of the accounts of Snowman tracks, since smaller tracks of native animals tend to spread under warmth.

Other tracks found in Canada and the USA are the admitted results of hoaxers, even though the “experts” have sometimes validated the artifacts as genuine tracks of an unknown species. A short piece of film made in 1967 by Roger Patterson at Bluff Creek, California, appears to show a female Bigfoot casually walking away from the camera. The film has been hotly contested over the years, and is the best of all the evidence ever offered.

It is possible that Patterson himself was hoaxed; the figure he saw and filmed might have been a person in costume. In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the 1989 film Gorillas in the Mist, most viewers were not aware that the apes shown were actors in costume. The Patterson figure is nowhere near as good as those representations, though we cannot expect that a genuine Bigfoot must move like an ape, and may very well move like a human dressed in an uncomfortable costume.

While the existence of such a creature is not at all impossible, two elements speak against it: first, there would need to be a very considerable number of them available to maintain the gene-pool and ensure survival of the species; it is difficult to imagine that the population of such a large animal could so successfully avoid detection. Second, the fact remains that to date, not one bit of material evidence (hair, skin, bones and droppings) of this creature has ever been produced, though a chimpanzee scalp was once offered and is still occasionally brought up by devotees of this fascinating legend.