- Would we love the Yeti so much if we knew for a fact that it’s out there?
The Abominable Snowman, the Yeti, the Migoi… Whatever you want to call it, the strange half-man, half-ape resident of the Himalayas has been part of the region’s folklore for thousands of years.
The creature became famous even in the Western world at the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, multiple expeditions have headed to the snowy mountains to try and find the mythical beast.
One such expedition recently concluded. British writer Andrew Benfield and political analyst Richard Horsey returned in June from Bhutan — and they got results.
The dynamic duo came back with a fistful of hair they recovered from the mountains. Supposedly, the fur came from the Yeti.
Yet, they wanted irrefutable proof of the Snowman’s existence. So, they submitted the hair for DNA analysis.
Unfortunately, the results weren’t what Benfield and Horsey hoped for. The DNA test showed that the hair came from an Altai horse.
But hey, that doesn’t mean the Yeti couldn’t be somewhere out there. He just probably won’t be hanging out in a horse enclosure.
A Trip Long in the Making
Benfield’s and Horsey’s expedition wasn’t a spontaneous affair. It had been in the works for quite a while.
Benfield, for his part, has been fascinated by the Yeti for years. However, he wasn’t always satisfied with the stories he heard and read.
With a background in international development, Benfield felt the usual Yeti accounts spread in Western media ignored the experiences and stories of Himalayan locals. You know, the people who actually would have a reasonable chance of running into the creature during their daily lives.
In comparison, it’s kind of like asking a Norwegian to tell you what Indian elephants are like. When put like that, you can see why Benfield thought the stories might be missing something important.
So, he decided to go straight to the source.
In 2019, Benfield set out to the Himalayas to hear local, first-hand accounts of the bizarre beast. But he wouldn’t be going alone.
Benfield invited his friend Horsey, who despite his current occupation has a PhD in cognitive psychology, to come with him and act as a skeptical voice to keep his own enthusiasm in check. He was also supposed to serve as a sounding board for the evidence Benfield gathered.
“If I could convince him, I knew I was on to something,” Benfield told LiveScience.
In 2022, the duo’s expedition got some official backing. The BBC hired them to produce “Yeti,” a radio program for BBC Radio 4.
The Mysterious Hair
With BBC’s backing, Benfield and Horsey headed into the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary. There’s probably no better place to look for the Yeti, as the national park was set up in part to protect the elusive creature.
And it turned out to be a good place to be in, indeed. Eventually, Benfield and Horsey recovered a bunch of strange hair.
The hair was reportedly about six inches long. With it in hand, the explorers returned to the U.K. in June 2023.
To find out whether the hair indeed belonged to the Yeti, Benfield sent a sample of it to Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo in New York. She has a lot of experience in analyzing Snowman hair.
Or well, at least hair that’s supposedly from the Abominable Snowman. The previous samples she’s analyzed have actually belonged to a whole slew of creatures, from bears to dogs — but no Yetis.
Sadly for Benfield and Horsey, their sample proved to be no different. They got the results back in October and they showed the undeniable truth.
The hair they’d recovered belonged to an Altai horse, a common Asian horse breed.
The Yeti in Our Hearts
Understandably, the two explorers were disappointed in the results.
“A horse was about as boring as we could get,” said Benfield.
Yet, they also said that it doesn’t really matter that they ended with nothing but a fistful of horse hair. That doesn’t take away from the adventure they shared or the stories they heard.
More than that, the DNA test doesn’t change the fact that many of the locals living all over the Himalayas are convinced that the Yeti is out there — at least in some form.
“We realized it doesn’t really matter to most of these people whether it physically exists. It’s the role that it plays in their world,” mused Horsey.
Whether the Yeti is a mysterious ape-man or just a beloved piece of local make-believe, the stories about it bring the people who share them together. In the end, perhaps the real Yeti was the friends we made along the way.