Tom Slick And The Stolen Yeti Hand
Peter Byrne/Wikimedia CommonsThe Pangboche hand, once believed to be that of a Yeti, as photographed by Peter Byrne in 1958.
Even for a Yeti sighting, the tale of the Pangboche hand is almost too fantastical to believe.
Having heard rumors of a Yeti hand housed in the same town that held the Pangboche scalp, American oilman and Yeti hunter Tom Slick asked explorer Peter Byrne to go to Nepal and retrieve it.
When the temple custodians told Byrne he couldn’t have the hand, he returned and gave his employers the bad news. Instead of calling it quits, Slick and Professor Osman Hill, a primatologist, hatched a new plan: Send Byrne back to Nepal to obtain a finger from the Pangboche hand and replace it with a human finger.
Over lunch with Byrne at a London restaurant, Hill took out a brown paper bag and tilted it over the table. A human hand spilled out. “It was several months old and dried,” Byrne told the BBC in 2011. “I never asked him where he got it from.”
Back in Nepal with the human hand in tow, Byrne offered to make a donation to the temple (only about $160 in today’s currency) in exchange for one finger from the Pangboche hand. He also offered a replacement human finger. The custodians accepted.
And even after all that, this is where the story fit for the big screen actually brings in a movie star.
Slick asked his friend, actor James Stewart (star of It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, and at least a dozen other classics), to help Byrne smuggle the finger back to London, believing a celebrity could slip through customs more easily.
Nature Picture Library / Alamy Stock PhotoThe supposed Yeti scalp and hand on display at a monastery in Pangboche, Nepal.
Stewart and his wife, Gloria, were in India at the time, and once Byrne made it over the border from Nepal, he met Stewart in Calcutta. There, they stowed the finger in Gloria’s lingerie case, and the Stewarts made it out of India with no problems.
Except that when the couple arrived in London, the lingerie case was missing. A few days went by before a customs officer returned the luggage with the finger still inside.
And in an ending that’s either a total letdown or pure poetry (probably depending on whether or not you’re a Yeti believer), the “Yeti” finger for which they traded a human finger was found to be human itself in 2011.
