LONDON (AP) - Explorers back from a seven-week hunt for the Abominable Snowman said Wednesday that they had found manlike tracks in the snow and the remains of two sheep in one of the most remote regions of Tibet's Himalaya Mountains.
But the ''Yeti'' - as the creature is called - failed to materialize. Chris Bonington, 53, leader of the six-man British expedition, said at a news conference that ''there's certainly not any conclusive evidence one way or another'' that the creature exists.
Bonington and his team, including two American climbers, spent seven weeks exploring the 23,237-foot Menglungtse summit, where British explorer Eric Shipton took his famous photograph of a four-toed Yeti footprint in 1951.
Since Shipton's photograph, scores sightings of a fearsome hairy beast, known both as Yeti and the Abominable Snowman, have been reported.
Bonington said in an interview with a radio station in London that the team's main evidence consisted of the skins of two mountain sheep known as bharals found at 17,000 feet. He said the skins appeared to have been ripped cleanly off the sheep in a manner inconsistent with any of its known predators.
''You'd expect a snow leopard, if it had killed an animal, to have to gnawed it, to
have savaged it,'' Bonington said.
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH - Friday, June 10, 1988
(c) The Associated Press
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