Yeti
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From: Shane Ivey <moc.ocsbe|yevis#moc.ocsbe|yevis>

Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 11:36:26 -0500

Considering the alternatives to the "yeti" legend which our sources have heard, prudent investigation of this new attempt to explain the myth may be advisable.

Mountaineer Destroys Myth Of The "Yeti''
Reuters 12.01 p.m. ET (1602 GMT) October 6, 1998

FRANKFURT - A Tyrolean adventurer said Tuesday he had destroyed the legend of the Yeti, the mythical creature that has terrified Tibetans for thousands of years.

Contrary to popular myth, the Yeti or Abominable Snowman is not a humanoid ape but a large bear and there are about 1,000 roaming Nepal and Tibet, usually at night, Reinhold Messner announced at the world's biggest book fair.

Bearded, rugged-faced Messner, himself a mountaineering legend since he climbed Mount Everest without using artificial oxygen in 1978, has devoted his life to tracking the creature after a close and terrifying encounter in 1986.

Over the years, several researchers have suspected that the Yeti may be a bear.

German researcher Ernst Schaefer expounded the theory after he was commissioned by the Nazis to seek out the missing link between apes and humans in the 1930s. He even shot a few.

Messner's book "Yeti,'' unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair, claims to confirm this with the help of photos taken during several encounters.

Messner, who has visited the Himalayas many times, said he had not believed in the Yeti but changed his mind after he came face to face with a dark creature one night in 1986 while hiking in a remote forest of eastern Tibet.

"I came across this indefinable, big, stinking exotic animal,'' he told a news conference. "I stood still and he walked off.

"If he had come towards me I would probably have died of a heart attack before he got to me.'' The creature walked on two legs.

Messner said he examined its footprints and discovered they were similar to a famous 1951 photo of a footprint taken on a Himalayan expedition which had helped to make the Yeti as famous as Scotland's fabled Loch Ness monster.

"It's clearly a Tibetan bear, similar to a grizzly but with longer hair,'' Messner said. It can grow up to 3.40 meters and can walk on all fours as well as on its hind legs. It lives at heights of between 4,000 and 6,000 meters (12,000-18,000 feet).

''Its feces are similar to that of humans because it eats the same food. That's because it follows humans and steals their food. It's easier.''

The bear is elusive because it mainly travels at night. It can be dangerous. "It will not harm people if they go out of its way. The local legend has it that it brings bad luck to anyone who sees it.

Messner kept his findings secret while he was writing the book. Several German newspapers have cast doubt on his findings.

He launched a counter-attack at the news conference, accusing the media of trying to destroy his reputation. "I can't help it if people expected King Kong and didn't get him,'' he said.

"As sure as I sit here, you will agree with me in 10 or 20 years.''


Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 19:47:58
From: Davide Mana

A few clarifications about the character we are talking about might be in order, together with a few random considerations.

A minor but relevant error: despite his Hitler-Jugend kind of name, this Reinhold Messner chap is in fact an Italian.

Something that he actually seems to remember only when hunting for funds in order to go chasing yetis (bah!) once again.

This attitude really puts me in a way bad mood.

The fact that he also spoke in favour of the Tyrolean right-wing separatist party (Karotekia at work) on a few occasions makes him only less pleasant.

Yeah, right.

I saw the first interview he gave, and I shared the interviewer's skepticism.

Only in 1986 he said it was an ape, not a bear.

And he was dead sure back then, too.

And used the Shipton photo from 1951 as supporting evidence.

Now this is interesting. How comes the Germans (and a _certain_ kind of German, if you catch my drift) show so much interest in the subject?

But how comes nobody ever found a set of quadrupedal footprints? And it may scare foreigners all right, but locals sure know better. "Those footprints? Ah, it's just a… what you call it… an animal, goes on all fours at times…"

Is it the "winking native" at work again?

People that spent some time in the area (and I met a few) usually explain the Yeti story with those incredible hermit characters that live alone on the mountainside. Human-looking, weird and wild-haired indeed.

He evidently thinks he is Professor Challenger.

He broke a leg a pair of years ago while climbing his own garden wall.
Reputation my foot (pun intended).

When the Stars are Right, most probably.

Now, somebody help me please: does not the Plateau of Leng interface with our reality somewhere in the neighborhood of the Yeti territory?


Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 15:09:50 -0500 (CDT)
From: Don Juneau

Bearded, rugged-faced Messner, himself a mountaineering legend since he
climbed Mount Everest without using artificial oxygen in 1978, has devoted
his life to tracking the creature after a close and terrifying encounter in 1986.

Hmmm. Oxygen deprivation, or Fun Guy programming? <G>


Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 19:36:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Andrew D. Gable"

The debunking of the yeti myth is probably a disinformation campaign launched by the mi-go. It is my personal opinion that Reinhold Messner is a remnant of the network of mi-go cultists most prevalent in the 1920s and that the bear theory backed by him is merely an effort to divert the public's attention from the Himalaya Mountains and thus mi-go activity.

BTW, on a roleplaying note concerning the mi-go/yeti connection: what nature does everyone think the connection takes? I'm guessing that the yeti is another genetically-engineered proxy race (like XXXXXXXXX [redacted in interests of DG]), sort of a proto-XXXX (redacted in DG's interests once again), utilizing the DNA of an ape (probably orangutan) as contrasted with human.

And that's my two cents.


From: "Aaron"
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 17:03:03 -0700

Personally, I liked Davide Mana's reference to the Plateau of Leng. While the Mi-Go are kewl I cant imagine that everything on the spectrum of the supernatural is due to them. There is a whole pantheon of beasties and monstrosities and tossing in the odd-ball non-mi-go thingy into an otherwise mi-go centered campaign could be an interesting way to through the players for a loop.

If not a touch of Leng which could have Dreamlands repercussions that a GM may not want to include in their campaign, it could be a tribe from antiquated Hyperborea. One of the savage beast men. Though Tibet is a tad bit of a hike from their traditional stomping grounds.

I would personally discount it being ghouls though. Ghouls could be a pretty kewl race for a small side trek during the campaign but for some reason I cant picture them in a place quite that isolated. Though I suppose a small population would be able to survive.

Offhand I cant think of any other bi-pedal or humanoid beasties, though I know their must be others I am not remembering. Anyhow, a random non mi-go adventure would do well to shaking up a campaign and causing players to rack their brains and double-guess what was going on.


From: Michael Layne
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 20:20:15 EDT

Bearded, rugged-faced Messner, himself a mountaineering legend since he
climbed Mount Everest without using artificial oxygen in 1978, has devoted
his life to tracking the creature after a close and terrifying encounter in 1986.

Anoxia's my guess…. This guy doesn't sound like he would be worth the Fun Guys' time!


Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 21:11:34 -0400

From: Daniel Harms

In one of Lin Carter's stories, the yeti turned out to be the fungi dressed up in fur outfits.

Yeah, me neither.


Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 17:48:22 -0800

From: Scott Cleverdon

Bearded, rugged-faced Messner, himself a mountaineering legend since he
climbed Mount Everest without using artificial oxygen in 1978, has devoted
his life to tracking the creature after a close and terrifying encounter in 1986.

Anoxia's my guess…. This guy doesn't sound like he would be worth the Fun Guys' time!

For all those Brits out there, remember when David Icke stopped doing the commentry on Athletics and decided he was the new messiah??? (he inspired one of my players at the time to create a demented artist character called Ike Davide)

Anyway, Icke said we'd all be laughing on the other side of our faces in a few years time.

Unfortunately, for him, the chuckles still happen on the same side as they always have… casting our minds back we have then as we are seeing now with the Yeti man, the difficulty of standing up, in a cynical world, with an outrageous point of view - especially if your point of view happens to sound like a lot of New Age (tm) claptrap or psuedo-scientific nonsense.


Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 18:22:29 -0400
From: Graeme Price

Interestingly enough, I've seen this done before. I wonder if anyone else on the list has read Phillip Kerr's so-so thriller "Esau"?

This rather average thriller deals with an expedition to the Himalayas to find the Yeti (which turns out to be a race of bipedal primates somewhat related to the Orangutan… missing link between man and the great apes and all that nonsense, ala the Bigfoot tribe in Trails of Tshagogghua or however the hell you spell it!) which they find, capture, do DNA tests on etc. Apart from having a few unnecessary plot twists and the obligatory superfluous Hollywood romance, it also includes a covert US government agent who tags along with the expedition to find a missing satellite which dropped in the area. Said agent turns out to be a grade A nutball, with a mean streak who sets about eliminating everything that gets in his way. I considered ripping this off wholesale for a DG-ish scenario (with the agent being an MJ-12 plant), but gave up due to lack of motivation. Despite the various flaws, it's worth a look. For those who didn't catch it up front, the book was Esau, by Phillip Kerr.


Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 06:58:57 -0700 (PDT)

From: Jeff Campbell

I found this on the Oregon Live Web site. Thought it might be Delta Green Material.

--------

Ever since Todd Neiss saw Bigfoot, he has stayed on the lookout.
There was the expedition Neiss led last spring, for example: a trip into the deep forest near Saddle Mountain in Clatsop County, Oregon. Neiss's five-member team had the run of a two-hundred-plus-acre, privately owned section of land for eight days. During that time, encouraging signs included some 15-inch footprints, but "they were washed out and not of cast quality," explains Neiss, sounding slightly jaded but not discouraged. "We were hoping to find something better later on." Something better? Neiss means something really better, although he won't admit to hoping for another sighting. "I really question the odds that people have seen a Bigfoot more than once," he says.

Neiss, 37, is the vice-president of a Portland transportation company, and the leader for Operation Entice Contact 2, or "EC2." That expedition last March was the group's second such trip seeking conclusive biologic evidence to prove the existence of the tall, hairy, elusive hominids said to roam densely wooded sectors of North America.

Neiss has been obsessed with the search since back in 1993, when he caught sight of three huge, hair-covered figures while participating in Army demolition maneuver in Clatsop County. Since then, the former skeptic has become one of the most devout and sought-after acolytes in the ubiquitous cult of Bigfoot. It's a cult that stretches throughout the Northwest, from Northern California to coastal Canada and as far inland as Idaho.

EC2 came up only a few ice cubes from empty, just like EC1 and the fistful of other organized expeditions launched in the Pacific Northwest during the past three decades. That is, empty as far as the scientific community is concerned. Neiss had hoped that the more than $100,000 in video and audio equipment lugged along by his team would turn up some substantial evidence. Equipment ranged from a rifle loaded with a biopsy dart to a bait stand/infra-red alert system slathered with goodies like bacon grease and Spam. The bait stand was designed to lure "BF" - which is how the creature is known to intimates - out of the woods; the biopsy dart might have provided conclusive evidence of his existence, if he'd taken the bait.

Then again, if Neiss and other Bigfoot field-researchers have learned one thing from years of searching, it is that expensive toys don't add up to much more than big budgets - that is, unless BF decides to play. Bigfoot aficionado Peter Byrne says he has spent several million dollars over the past three decades establishing clearinghouses and conducting large-scale, long-term research projects. The most recent project included a toll-free hotline for reporting sightings. Byrne, who lives in Portland's West Hills, has published numerous books on Sasquatch. His experience working as a big-game hunter and guide in the 1940s and '50s makes him uniquely qualified for the quest.

For his part, Byrne thinks his work has helped place Oregon on the Bigfoot-sightings map. "Part of the reason there are so many sightings reported in Oregon is because of the projects I've run," says Byrne, who joined Neiss for the latter part of the expedition last March. "I established a place for this information to come." Researchers like Byrne have helped categorize the phenomenon and pin down what some people believe to be the creature's territorial habitat. But it's vision-quest expeditions like Neiss's that are the heart and soul of the BF cult. And coming home without an autographed photo of Sasquatch is no reason to consider a venture a failure. "That doesn't mean nothing was found," Neiss says. "There's usually some evidence if you know what to look for - broken tree branches,a strange foghorn-like whoop-whoop in the night, a foul funk, you name it." Little shreds of evidence are what keep researchers tracking and chasing Bigfoot throughout the region. "What makes it exciting is the prospect of the eventual discovery," Byrne says. "If the things exist, it truly will be the find of the century."


From: "David Farnell"
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 08:52:21 +0900

Hey, we all know it's just Jenny and her jennikins, still out there. (Then again, the idea of Jenny mating with Bigfoot is too sweet not to consider.)

(to forestall possible questions, Jenny Armbruster is one of the stars of _At Your Door_-check it out, makes a pretty good DG op with some mods)

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