Josh Gates’ Recent Investigations Into Yetis
Discovery ChannelHost Josh Gates examining a purported Yeti scalp.
Although the golden age of Yeti hunting came to an end several decades ago, that didn’t put an end to the search. In fact, in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in solving this mystery once and for all — some of which has been fueled by Discovery’s Josh Gates, host of Destination Truth and Expedition Unknown.
In 2007, during the filming of Destination Truth, Gates led an expedition to the Himalayas to investigate reports of the Yeti. While exploring the region, he and his team, like many others before them, came across odd, roughly 13-inch footprints in the snow.
They didn’t settle for only photographs, though. Instead, they created casts of the prints, once again thrusting the Yeti into the international spotlight. Remarkably, the prints were incredibly similar to those found by Shipton half a century earlier.
“[The cast] is very, very similar,” Gates told news outlets in 2007. “I don’t believe it to be a bear. It is something of a mystery for us.”
Nine years later, in 2016, Gates would revisit the Yeti, this time for Expedition Unknown: Hunt for the Yeti. This second investigation took him across Nepal and Bhutan, where he explored remote villages, interviewed locals about their encounters, and examined sacred artifacts believed to be connected to the creature.
An alleged Yeti hand that turned out to have belonged to a young bear.
Upon returning to the United States, Gates submitted the various samples he collected for scientific analysis, the findings of which were intriguing, to say the least. A purported Yeti hair sample, for instance, was revealed to be human, a sample of alleged Yeti scat actually originated from a goat, and a hand that supposedly came from a Yeti was actually a young bear’s.
Ultimately, Gates and his team didn’t turn up any new evidence that supported the existence of the Yeti. What they did find, however, was a fascinating blend of how folklore and modern science could come together to shed new light on such mysteries.
It also showed that previously unrecorded or thought-to-be-extinct species might still inhabit some of these remote areas. That’s not to say, of course, that there is without-a-doubt no such thing as the Yeti — and perhaps one day, someone will find it.
Next, check out five of the craziest bigfoot traps made by the men hunting the creature in North America. Then, check out seven cryptids even cooler than bigfoot.
