1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:21,000
Tonight, the hunt for the world's missing ape men.

2
00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:41,000
In the wild tracts of the Pacific Northwest of America, men are now out to try to kill the ape man.

3
00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:48,000
Indeed, is this uniquely film of Bigfoot, the Yeti of the United States?

4
00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:55,000
Is this the footprint of the abominable snowman of the Himalayas?

5
00:00:55,000 --> 00:01:00,000
Lord Hunt of Everest fame is a believer.

6
00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:08,000
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communications satellite.

7
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:17,000
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, after a lifetime of science, space and writing, he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.

8
00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:24,000
It may seem incredible that creatures like large man apes can still exist in the modern world.

9
00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:27,000
Yet the evidence for this is now quite considerable.

10
00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:53,000
The Yeti of the Himalayas

11
00:01:54,000 --> 00:02:10,000
It's in the high valleys around Mount Everest that the Yeti, the abominable snowman of the Himalayas, seems most vivid.

12
00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:22,000
For the Sherpas of the high mountains, there are no doubts. The Yeti is woven into their rituals and their lives.

13
00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:30,000
Kunjo Chumbi is the head man of the Kumjong village. He has seen the Yeti.

14
00:02:42,000 --> 00:02:49,000
In the monastery above the village, he keeps what he believes to be its scalp, preserved as a relic in a box.

15
00:02:53,000 --> 00:03:05,360
The

16
00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:17,000
With some assurance, he imitates the Yeti's cry.

17
00:03:23,000 --> 00:03:37,000
That cry is listened to in fear by the Sherpas. Six years ago, Lakhba Damani heard it close by.

18
00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:48,000
A Yeti came and attacked me and threw me in the river. His face was very black and he looked like a very old man.

19
00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:56,000
I was unconscious for a couple of hours. When I woke up, I saw the Yeti had killed some yaks and a cow.

20
00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:05,000
She says the Yeti had picked up and threw her into the river.

21
00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:22,000
The Yeti looms throughout the myths and legends of the Nepalese people.

22
00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:31,000
Desmond Doig with Sir Edmund Hillary led the biggest expedition to hunt for the Yeti.

23
00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:37,000
He found that the Sherpas had the most precise physical description of the creature.

24
00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:09,000
Doig's expedition wrote off the Yeti. Wrongly, he now feels as an oriental fantasy.

25
00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:18,000
I'm afraid our expedition was a great gaudy mess. Any self-respecting Yeti would have kept way, way, away from us.

26
00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:24,000
We had 600 kooliards. We had about 200 Sherpas and there were about 40 of us.

27
00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:30,000
In the most beautifully designed and coloured anoraks, our tents were all vividly coloured.

28
00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:36,000
We smelled different. We looked different. We behaved differently to the local people.

29
00:05:36,000 --> 00:05:43,000
And the smells of our cooking, as to horrify everything within smelling distance.

30
00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:50,000
Well, the hard, rather sturdest results of the expedition was that the Yeti didn't exist.

31
00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:55,000
Other expeditions have also failed to snare the abominable snowman.

32
00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:00,000
But for 50 years now, westerners have continually been coming back with new testimony.

33
00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:04,000
Emil Wick is one of the world's most experienced mountain flyers.

34
00:06:09,000 --> 00:06:15,000
Two years ago, he was taking a party of Japanese tourists on a flight over Kansanjunga.

35
00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:23,000
I saw on one of the hills some tracks I have never seen before in my life, really.

36
00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:28,000
So I went closer with the plane. I was watching.

37
00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:33,000
Are there some paper? Are there some empty tins, cigarettes, whatever.

38
00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:38,000
But it was absolutely clear only the prints were there.

39
00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:46,000
And from there, four of these tracks went to the Chamlangside, to the north.

40
00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:53,000
And I wanted to follow also, but the lady which was sitting on my right seat said,

41
00:06:53,000 --> 00:07:01,000
Captain, very sorry for that, but we paid the Kansanjunga flight another pleasure flight for you.

42
00:07:01,000 --> 00:07:06,000
In 1951, photographs of footprints were taken on the borders of Tibet

43
00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:10,000
by the late Eric Shipton and Dr. Michael Ward.

44
00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:16,000
There was no doubt about it. They were unlike anything that either Eric Shipton or I had ever seen

45
00:07:16,000 --> 00:07:21,000
or even imagined before. They were very clearly etched in the snow.

46
00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:27,000
The snow was about, I suppose, three inches deep on top of hard ice.

47
00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:32,000
And you can see that there are five toes definitely outlined.

48
00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:36,000
The big toe here, second there, third there, fourth there.

49
00:07:36,000 --> 00:07:43,000
And you can see a small toe there. You can see that the actual track itself is very, very clear cut.

50
00:07:43,000 --> 00:07:52,000
And you can also see that over here at the heel is obviously a place where there has been a lot of weight there.

51
00:07:52,000 --> 00:07:58,000
And I suggest that probably what happened was that the animal put down its heel there and walked.

52
00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:06,000
The dimensions of the print are approximately 12 inches long and probably something of the order of five to six inches wide.

53
00:08:06,000 --> 00:08:11,000
I don't think there's any possibility of there being distortions for other animals' tracks at all.

54
00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:19,000
The various ideas have been put forward that this one, for instance, might have been the imprint of two feet,

55
00:08:19,000 --> 00:08:24,000
one on top of the other, but I just don't think that's on at all. I just don't think that's possible.

56
00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:35,000
This print was photographed in the Dutkosi Valley in 1978 by the leader of the team which first conquered Everest, Lord Hunt.

57
00:08:35,000 --> 00:08:44,000
The creature had broken through some pretty heavy crust on the snow. It was deep snow on a rather steep little slope.

58
00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:50,000
And the creature was a heavy one because he'd broken through hard crust on which, as far as we were concerned,

59
00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:55,000
we could walk around without making any impression through the snow at all.

60
00:08:55,000 --> 00:09:03,000
And you could see through the snow, in the soft snow underneath the crust, the toe impressions.

61
00:09:03,000 --> 00:09:07,000
I don't think they were bear tracks because the Sherpas, whenever I've talked to them about this,

62
00:09:07,000 --> 00:09:15,000
and in fact when I've been with Sherpas seeing tracks, they have been quite infatuated that these are not bears, but they are yeti.

63
00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:22,000
In pictures taken by a French Jesuit priest, Abbe Borde, the toes again show very clearly.

64
00:09:28,000 --> 00:09:35,000
It is certainly not an ape, nor a bear, because a bear has claws and this creature has not.

65
00:09:36,000 --> 00:09:45,000
So I think it is a special kind of animal that we don't really know anything about because we don't have an exact description.

66
00:09:45,000 --> 00:09:55,000
But I have spoken about it to some paleontologists and they are rather inclined to believe that we are dealing with an animal from the pre-human ear.

67
00:09:55,000 --> 00:09:58,000
That is to say one of our distant ancestors.

68
00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:06,000
The Outward Abound School at Owlswater is run by squadron leader Lester Davis, Royal Air Force.

69
00:10:06,000 --> 00:10:11,000
That's great. That's lovely. Good. Well done.

70
00:10:11,000 --> 00:10:17,000
He was on the 1959 RAF expedition to the Coltee Valley when he too came across tracks in the snow.

71
00:10:17,000 --> 00:10:27,000
It sunk in about five inches high with cine cameras and things, weighing about 12 and a half stone, and only went in about one and a half inches.

72
00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:34,000
This thing is huge. The snow had been undercut by this fast laser stream and I fell in.

73
00:10:34,000 --> 00:10:40,000
I held my camera above my head because it came up to my armpits before my feet touched the bottom.

74
00:10:40,000 --> 00:10:46,000
I was icy cold and I scrambled out just beside these footprints.

75
00:10:46,000 --> 00:10:56,000
Immediately we suddenly realised this animal, or yeti or whatever, it had just stepped out using only its two hind legs.

76
00:10:56,000 --> 00:11:04,000
And the chance of the British Museum, so this, this terraces its height as about eight foot and its weight as about 60 stone.

77
00:11:05,000 --> 00:11:16,000
Sightings of the Yeti by Westerners are rare, but in 1970 the English climber Don Willens was on his way to the conquest of one of the world's toughest mountains.

78
00:11:19,000 --> 00:11:21,000
Anna Perner by the South Face.

79
00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:28,000
I heard what sounded like bird cries from at the back of me.

80
00:11:28,000 --> 00:11:35,000
And I looked at the Sherpa and he said, Yeti coming, Saab.

81
00:11:35,000 --> 00:11:46,000
So I whipped around and looked up the mountain and I saw two black crows flying away and a black shape drop behind the ridge.

82
00:11:47,000 --> 00:11:52,000
Well my first thoughts were Christ, what do we do now? Grab the ice axe or what?

83
00:11:52,000 --> 00:11:58,000
What he did do was photograph the tracks. Next night it reappeared and he was watching it again.

84
00:11:58,000 --> 00:12:06,000
And then quite suddenly it was as almost as if I, as if it realised that it was being watched, so to speak.

85
00:12:07,000 --> 00:12:12,000
Quite suddenly it shot across the whole slope of the mountain.

86
00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:25,000
It must have travelled half a mile in a diagonal line downwards and it was obviously heading towards a rocky cliff, some rocky outcrop there.

87
00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:36,000
And it disappeared into the shadow by the rocks and that was the last I actually ever saw of it.

88
00:12:36,000 --> 00:12:38,000
So how strong is the evidence?

89
00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:46,000
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a creature like the Yeti does exist in some remote parts of the world.

90
00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:50,000
I personally now stick my neck out and say I'm a firm believer in the Yeti.

91
00:12:50,000 --> 00:13:03,000
I think it's a very strong case to answer. Having illuminated bears in my own mind I can find no other explanation but that there is an unidentified creature still to be discovered.

92
00:13:03,000 --> 00:13:13,000
It's noticeable that the hard evidence comes from western visitors and consists mostly of photographs of footprints which vary considerably.

93
00:13:13,000 --> 00:13:18,000
However we do know that melting snow can play strange tricks.

94
00:13:19,000 --> 00:13:28,000
As for the Sherpas, their stories of the Yeti seem inextricably bound up with their religion and it's hard to separate myths from reality.

95
00:13:28,000 --> 00:13:33,000
In America however, the evidence for a big foot is much more straightforward.

96
00:13:33,000 --> 00:14:01,000
Indeed Dr Grover Krantz, one of the anthropologists who has studied Bigfoot or the Sasquatch as the Indians call it, is so certain that a man ape exists in the northwest of the United States, that he goes out regularly to try to track and kill just one specimen.

97
00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:15,000
I'm convinced that these creatures exist for a variety of reasons. One of these, perhaps the most important to me, is a careful study of the footprints that has satisfied me in least some cases these footprints could not have been faked.

98
00:14:15,000 --> 00:14:22,000
But more than that there are sightings by reputable citizens, some by disreputable citizens.

99
00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:33,000
But the number of good sightings that seem to be unshakable is now numbering in the many hundreds that I am personally aware of and they probably number in the thousands at least.

100
00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:52,000
The number of Sasquatch is very difficult to estimate of course, but within the northwestern part of the United States I would be inclined to estimate in the vicinity of 200, with perhaps at least an equal number in the adjacent parts of western Canada.

101
00:14:52,000 --> 00:15:01,000
If there were fewer than that then it does not seem to be a viable breeding population. Any more than that I would think they'd be seen more often.

102
00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:19,000
Here in the Pacific Northwest there are thousands of square miles of empty, desolate country where nobody lives, almost never does anybody travel through it.

103
00:15:19,000 --> 00:15:28,000
And something like the Sasquatch could quite easily live here, being only occasionally seen and no remains ever being found is not at all surprising.

104
00:15:29,000 --> 00:15:35,000
The sightings of Bigfoot spread right across the northwest United States. This is Washington State.

105
00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:40,000
Sergeant Larry Gamache was driving home one night with his family and sister-in-law Kathy.

106
00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:50,000
I noticed quite a distance ahead of me, an object move out of the dense forest towards the clearing between the forest and the highway.

107
00:15:51,000 --> 00:16:03,000
And I started to slow then and as I got a little bit closer I noticed it was walking, very much like a human. Arms down at the side swinging just in a normal walking gate.

108
00:16:03,000 --> 00:16:12,000
It just got bigger and bigger as we went closer to it and it was hairy and just didn't look...

109
00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:18,000
Well, I wanted to close my eyes but you didn't want it. You want to look, you want to see what you're going to see but yet you don't.

110
00:16:18,000 --> 00:16:23,000
The most impressive thing was the human features in a way that it walked.

111
00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:28,000
The fact that the facial area wasn't really covered with a lot of hair.

112
00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:36,000
The eyes seemed normal as I looked through the windshield at him and the height, the sheer physical size.

113
00:16:36,000 --> 00:16:42,000
But it had been in comparison to what I can relate back to today, maybe 7.5 feet tall.

114
00:16:42,000 --> 00:16:48,000
Because I had to physically look up through the windshield to see the face and the head.

115
00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:56,000
And I was in a pickup truck so they set up quite a bit higher than a car so it was at least 7 feet, maybe 300, 350 pounds.

116
00:16:56,000 --> 00:17:03,000
Bigfoot now emerges often enough to get on television news. This is KFYR, Bismarck, North Dakota.

117
00:17:03,000 --> 00:17:11,000
It's here, in and around Little Eagle, South Dakota, where there have never before been any sightings of the so-called Bigfoot or Sasquatch,

118
00:17:11,000 --> 00:17:19,000
where the people of this small community are now becoming believers. There have been 17 sightings of the creature in the past month.

119
00:17:19,000 --> 00:17:23,000
The latest sighting was at the Shooting Bear residence on a bluff overlooking the town.

120
00:17:23,000 --> 00:17:32,000
Last Tuesday night, Hannah Shooting Bear saw the creature from her house while it was looking in the window of her daughter's trailer about 30 yards away.

121
00:17:32,000 --> 00:17:41,000
Elderly, Hannah was the only one to see the creature, but her son-in-law is reported to have fired several rifle shots into the air after it had moved off.

122
00:17:41,000 --> 00:17:43,000
What do you think they ought to do about him around here?

123
00:17:43,000 --> 00:17:46,000
Kill him. He might hurt somebody.

124
00:17:46,000 --> 00:17:51,000
Despite that recommendation, the Bigfoot hunters want to keep him alive.

125
00:17:51,000 --> 00:17:57,000
Their plan is to lure him into an area where they can either take his picture or shoot him with a tranquilizer.

126
00:17:57,000 --> 00:18:03,000
They believe in the notion suggested by an outsider that Bigfoot is attracted to menstruating women.

127
00:18:03,000 --> 00:18:06,000
This bait consisted of some used feminine articles.

128
00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:10,000
Dennis Newman reporting from Little Eagle, South Dakota.

129
00:18:10,000 --> 00:18:21,000
Across the mountains on the Pacific Coast in Washington State, veteran hunter and Rockingham County police officer Kenny Cooper was driving along this road when he heard a weird noise.

130
00:18:21,000 --> 00:18:27,000
I was coming down north on this road here and I heard some noise screaming back in here.

131
00:18:27,000 --> 00:18:34,000
All the time I was going along he was screaming. Everybody in Rockingham County could hear it because I did have the police mic outside.

132
00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:37,000
So they were listening to whatever it was that I was hearing.

133
00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:43,000
And the noise that was coming from that creature is what was on the recorder here.

134
00:18:51,000 --> 00:19:01,000
The sound of the recorder was heard.

135
00:19:01,000 --> 00:19:10,000
We took that recording. We sent it into the lab to have it analyzed and they came back.

136
00:19:10,000 --> 00:19:13,000
There was no metallic noises in the recording.

137
00:19:13,000 --> 00:19:18,000
They came in and they said there was no voice.

138
00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:28,000
No human has vocal cords enough to throw the high pitches and low pitches at the same time that was coming from then.

139
00:19:28,000 --> 00:19:41,000
But it was Bob Gimlin and his friend Roger Patterson out trekking at Bluff Creek in Northern California who were the ones to suddenly find a large hairy creature appear in front of them when they actually had a loaded cine camera with them.

140
00:19:41,000 --> 00:19:50,000
We came around a bin in the creek and there stood a big hairy human like creature.

141
00:19:50,000 --> 00:19:55,000
It appeared to be between six and seven feet tall.

142
00:19:55,000 --> 00:20:01,000
The creature looked at us for a few seconds turned and walked slowly away.

143
00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:08,000
And it was kind of in a lomy type soil left good footprints.

144
00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:15,000
It walked directly away from us. It was just a slow stroll just like a man would be walking away from something downtown.

145
00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:19,000
It never did break into a run.

146
00:20:19,000 --> 00:20:27,000
Well the animal appeared to be a female due to the fact that it appeared to have mammary glands.

147
00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:34,000
And the thing walked very agile, very fluently and it had huge bulky muscles.

148
00:20:34,000 --> 00:20:38,000
An overall description it looked like a huge hairy human being.

149
00:20:38,000 --> 00:20:53,000
Music

150
00:20:56,000 --> 00:21:02,000
Well English and Russian scientists have analyzed this film very carefully.

151
00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:10,000
And they've concluded that the stride is quite unhuman and be very difficult for a man to imitate.

152
00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:20,000
However I think we showed in the beginning of 2001 that skilled mimes can make completely convincing eight men.

153
00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:26,000
So this is not proven.

154
00:21:26,000 --> 00:21:32,000
But the Patterson film did have backup evidence which is now in the hands of Dr. Grover Krantz.

155
00:21:32,000 --> 00:21:39,000
By far the most convincing evidence is the plaster casts that I've got here of the footprints.

156
00:21:39,000 --> 00:21:48,000
I'll show you some of them here. For instance here is a track that was cast right after Roger Patterson made his movie in Northern California.

157
00:21:48,000 --> 00:21:57,000
The imprint of the foot not only pressed into the ground but also in pushing off it raised amount of dirt in the middle of the footprint.

158
00:21:57,000 --> 00:22:02,000
And this indicates that it was a flexible foot and a rigid fake could not have made this.

159
00:22:02,000 --> 00:22:10,000
That's not as convincing as this other track. This is a 17 inch track that was picked up in northeastern Washington state.

160
00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:17,000
And this is what was evidently a crippled individual because here we have two tracks of the same individual.

161
00:22:17,000 --> 00:22:22,000
You're looking at the bottom of the feet and this right foot is crippled.

162
00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:28,000
It is distorted lengthwise bent missing one toe.

163
00:22:28,000 --> 00:22:34,000
And most critically the two bulges on the outside of the foot represent spaces between bones.

164
00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:42,000
And if this had been just a gigantic human foot or some kind of fake like that these bulges and bone spaces should have been set farther back.

165
00:22:42,000 --> 00:22:47,000
The fact of where they are indicates that this is a foot designed with different leverage.

166
00:22:47,000 --> 00:22:54,000
A longer heel, shorter fore part which is exactly what would have to be done to make a foot that would lift an 800 pound animal.

167
00:22:55,000 --> 00:23:04,000
Homesteader Grover Kiggins and his daughter Millie saw evidence that Bigfoot has a stride to match the size of its feet.

168
00:23:07,000 --> 00:23:11,000
They were out near their farm in Oregon when they saw some tracks.

169
00:23:11,000 --> 00:23:14,000
We measured them. Dad had his rule. We measured them when we went up.

170
00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:19,000
He stepped 67 and a half inches which is a long step.

171
00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:30,000
And then when he went down he came down the road and when he stopped at the edge of the road he went off the road into the timber down into the brush and timber.

172
00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:33,000
He stepped seven feet when he stepped down in there.

173
00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:42,000
And I followed him for a little ways down in there but I decided I didn't want to go down in there and see what made those tracks.

174
00:23:42,000 --> 00:23:49,000
And in one place he came to a fence about a four foot barbed wire fence and he stepped over there like it wasn't there.

175
00:23:49,000 --> 00:23:52,000
I had to crawl through her under.

176
00:23:53,000 --> 00:23:59,000
I think Bigfoot is an animal that we already know from the fossil record. I'll show you a specimen here.

177
00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:06,000
This is a cast of the lower jaw of what we call the Gigantopithecus.

178
00:24:06,000 --> 00:24:10,000
This lived in China about half a million to a million years ago.

179
00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:17,000
I'd like to compare this with the gorilla. This is a cast of a gorilla's skull so you can see the size of this thing.

180
00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:21,000
This was an animal that probably weighed about 400 pounds in the wild.

181
00:24:21,000 --> 00:24:31,000
And just looking at the lower jaw alone, what's perhaps most interesting is from the underside of the jaw there is a difference.

182
00:24:31,000 --> 00:24:39,000
In the gorilla the two sides of the jaw spread only modestly as you go back because the gorilla's neck is so far behind the lower jaw.

183
00:24:39,000 --> 00:24:43,000
If that neck were moved forward the jaw would have to widen to make space.

184
00:24:43,000 --> 00:24:51,000
In the Gigantopithecus the jaw is spreading at a much wider angle and the only obvious reason for that is the neck is in the way

185
00:24:51,000 --> 00:24:59,000
and that means the head was set on top of the body instead of hung forward and it's a fair presumption that this was an erect bipedal animal.

186
00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:09,000
So we end up with the description of Gigantopithecus being an erect biped standing perhaps 8 feet tall weighing about 800 pounds

187
00:25:09,000 --> 00:25:14,000
and being presumably covered with hair. This was too early to have cultural activity.

188
00:25:14,000 --> 00:25:20,000
Probably known more intelligent than an ape and this of course is an exact description of the living Sasquatch.

189
00:25:21,000 --> 00:25:28,000
Personally I'd be less skeptical of 8 men if there weren't so many of them.

190
00:25:28,000 --> 00:25:33,000
It's hard to believe that something like Bigfoot could remain undetected in America.

191
00:25:33,000 --> 00:25:43,000
If anyone gave me $100 to bet on it, well I'd put 40 on the Yeti, 10 on Bigfoot and I'd keep the 50 for myself.

192
00:26:20,000 --> 00:26:22,000
Only the gods could see.