A Famed Explorer Finds Bigfoot-Like Prints On Mt. Everest
Christie’s Auction HouseExplorer Eric Shipton placed his pick axe against the beast’s purported print for scale.
Some believe that a mammoth and ape-like Himalayan creature — referred to as Yeti or Abominable Snowman — is different than Bigfoot. But others suspect that Bigfoot and the Yeti belong to the same species and are simply regional takes on the same mythology.
To those who believe, this peculiar find on Mount Everest in 1951 might sound like a Bigfoot encounter.
While traversing the mountain’s Menlung Basin in 1951, famed British explorer Eric Earle Shipton happened upon a trail of 12 to 13-inch footprints in the snow at 19,000 feet.
Shipton was accompanied by famed mountaineer Tom Bourdillon, who photographed the tracks and sent them to a contemporary named “Mick.”
“Here are the footprint photos: sorry for the delay,” Bourdillon wrote. “We came across them on a high pass on the Nepal-Tibet watershed during the 1951 Everest expedition. They seemed to have come over a secondary pass at about 19,500 ft, down to 19,000 ft where we first saw them, and then went on down the glacier.”
Christie’s Auction HouseClimber Tom Bourdillon said they followed the tracks for nearly a mile.
“We followed them for the better part of a mile,” Bourdillon went on. “What it is, I don’t know, but I am quite clear that it is no animal known to live in the Himalaya, & that it is big.”
Further intriguing was that this incident came a little over 25 years after Royal Geographic Society photographer N.A. Tombazi became the first European to report a similar type of Bigfoot encounter while scaling Mount Everest himself.
Skeptics have proffered that the prints were made by an animal and merely grew in size when the snow below melted. But just two years after Shipton’s footprint discovery, Sir Edmund Hillary — the first person to reach the peak on Mount Everest — launched an expedition to find this creature.
While Hillary failed to do so, Shipton’s photos have been marveled over for decades. Many have deemed them as promising evidence of a Yeti or other Bigfoot-like creature. His images fetched around $10,000 at Christie’s Auction House in 2014 — one year after famed climber Mike Rees photographed yet another set of enormous prints there.
