Does the yeti exist? A new podcast joins the hunt — review

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The mystery of the yeti, a bipedal beast said to roam the Himalayas, has been a source of fascination for explorers, naturalists and folklorists for decades. Tall, hairy, ape-like, with giant feet, it has several names: the yeti (a Sherpa word for “wild man”), the abominable snowman or, in Bhutan, migo. That this creature has loomed large in horror movies and episodes of Scooby-Doo means it surely can’t be real — can it?

In the 10-part BBC podcast Yeti, Andrew Benfield and Richard Horsey gather stories of yeti sightings in a journey that takes them to the mountains of India, Myanmar, Nepal and Bhutan. They play their trump card early: a recording of an interview with David Attenborough suggesting there might be some truth to the legend. The veteran naturalist can be heard discussing the photographs submitted by the mountaineer Eric Shipton after he climbed Everest in the early 1950s showing large footprints in the snow. He also mentions the fossilised molar teeth and jaw of a large ape-like creature unearthed at a Chinese apothecary by the Dutch-German paleontologist Gustav von Koenigswald. “So . . . there certainly was a giant ape there, and I think it’s not impossible that one could survive,” Attenborough says.

The series does its best to balance scientific enquiry with often flimsy anecdotal evidence — there is not a yak herder or farmer in the Himalayas who doesn’t know someone who knows someone who has seen the yeti. Benfield and Horsey take the roles of believer and sceptic respectively, with tension fitfully rising from their differing viewpoints — though they both lose heart after meeting a man in Myanmar who claims he was kidnapped and had his hands bound by two yeti. They also investigate the death of a construction worker 15 years ago whose body was found in north-east India, his neck clearly broken. Some locals say the culprit must have been the yeti: not only was there a large footprint, but traces of non-human hair were found at the scene. Yet further investigation reveals that the hair was in fact a small piece of leaf.

Tall tales and investigative cul-de-sacs abound in this series which, at times, veers into the hammy. Benfield and Horsey make a show of having their hopes raised at finding evidence of the yeti’s existence, only to have them dashed roughly 15 minutes later. Most compelling are the later episodes which delve into yeti mythology and its importance to Himalayan communities. “The world is huge and it has so many things we still don’t know about,” a Bhutan historian says. “[The] yeti falls, in my mind, into the same category as the spirits. They live here, they appear when they feel like it and they have the ability to disappear. And that’s why the yeti chasers will never find them.”

bbc.co.uk/programmes