Er, maybe...
Black 'yeti hairs' brought back from Bhutan by a TV documentary
team looking for the legendary creature were subjected to DNA
analysis and turned out to be unidentifiable.
"We've never encountered any DNA that we couldn't recognise
before, but then, we weren't looking for the Yeti," said Bryan Sykes,
professor of human genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in
Oxford.
You can read the full
story on the New Scientist web site.
More worryingly, we're indebted to Steve Duffy, editor of On The
Hill magazine for this...
A Yeti In Cumbria
An anonymous correspondent to a local Cumbrian paper described the
following encounter. He was walking his dog on 25 January on the road
out of Beckermet, near Egremont, towards the A595, which runs to the
giant Sellafield nuclear complex. At about 4.45pm, he passed Nursery
woods as it was getting dark and heard a snapping of branches.
Looking through the trees, he saw "a large creature covered in a
sort of ginger brown hair" that seemed to be drinking from a pond
about 500ft (150m) into the woods. It appeared to catch sight of him,
whereupon "it reared up on its hind legs and moved off slowly further
into the woods."
He reckoned it was 6ft 6in (2m) tall and weighed about 200lb
(90kg). It was not a deer as it made off on its hand legs. He was
going to report the sighting to the police, but his wife persuaded
him not to for fear of ridicule. Our correspondent Kevin Haney
suggests it might be the same ape-like animal encountered near
Silecroft a few years ago. - The Whitehaven News (Cumbria), 19 Feb, 5
Mar 1998.
If you've seen a yeti recently, please let
us know....
Paul Smith
