I put up a post last month when I began reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (and, wow, what a reading experience it was). At midway point or so, there’s a reference to a 1961 Life magazine article about Sir Edmund Hillary preparing for a Himalayas expedition to search for the Abominable Snowman. It’s difficult to fathom that anyone still believed that such a thing possibly existed in the same decade we were to reach the moon, but it’s true. The New Zealand mountaineer actually penned the piece himself. The opening:

“Does the yeti or ‘abominable snowman’ really exist? Or is it a myth without practical foundation? For the last four months our Himalayan scientific and mountaineering expedition has been trying, to find out–and now we think we know the answer.

There has been a growing pile of evidence in favor of the creature’s existence: the tracks seem by many explorers or Himalayan glaciers, the complete conviction for the local people that yetis roam the mountains, the yeti scalps and hands kept as relics in the high monasteries, the many stories by people who claimed to have seen them.

But despite the firm belief of many Himalayan explorers and of some anthropologists, I began the search for the yeti with some skepticism.”