The Indian Army has said that its mountaineers have sighted giant footprints of the “mythical beast Yeti.”
Late yesterday (April 29), the army’s additional directorate general of public information (ADGPI) said its mountain expedition team had made the sighting near the Makalu base camp in eastern Nepal. The official Twitter handle of the ADGPI also posted photographs of the footprints. The sightings were made on April 09, the army said.
The “Yeti’s” footsteps measured 2.6 feet, the ADGPI tweet said. A footstep is the distance between one foot print and the next during a normal walk. The average length of the foot step of an adult male human being is said to be around 2.5 feet.
The tweet claimed that “Yeti” had been sighted at the Makalu-Barun National Park in the past, too.
For decades, the mysterious giant snowman has fired the imagination of adventurers and mountaineers venturing into the Himalayan slopes.
In Nepali folklore, particularly, this mythical creature has loomed large. Many have in the past claimed to have seen one, often depicting it as half human-half ape.
In 2014, a controversial study created quite a flutter by claiming to have collected two Yeti fur samples from Bhutan and northern India. It said that a creature—a hybrid between a polar and a brown bear—could be very much alive still.
The scientific community has, however, not bought into these claims.
An associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore gathered a total of 24 samples from Asian bears and purported Yetis to only discover that the samples largely belong to Himalayan and Tibetan bears. Another DNA sample study conducted by Proceeding of the Royal Society B in 2017, too, showed that stories on Yeti so far have been based on the Himalayan black and brown bears.
The Indian Army’s claims could potentially fire another round of debate over the mystical Himalayan giant.
