In 1925, for example, a Greek photographer gave a first-hand account of his encounter with a yeti — luckily from a distance away. He was 4,600 metres up in the mountains on an expedition with Britain's Royal Geographical Society when he watched a strange creature for about a minute, as he described it: ‘…exactly like a human being, walking upright… It showed up dark against the snow, and as far as I could make out, wore no clothes.’
What’s more, as they descended the mountain, they discovered the creature's footprints, which were ‘similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long by four inches wide’.
So far, so mysterious!
In the 1950s, as the world’s attention turned to the region and brave mountaineers trying to be the first to scale Mount Everest, a number of photographs were taken of footprints in the snow. Indeed, the two men who eventually conquered Everest — Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay — even reported seeing large footprints when scaling the mountain in 1953.
There are plenty of theories and suggestions to explain all the bizarre yeti sightings, footprints and legend. One simple explanation was that they had misidentified real local wildlife such as the Himalayan brown bear, Tibetan blue bear or even a langur monkey. And more recently, research teams from Oxford University have run DNA analysis on unidentified animals which have again suggested Himalayan brown bears as the explanation for the sightings. But even that hasn’t stopped our fascination with the hairy beast.