“It must not be killed or shot at except in an emergency arising out of self-defense.” That was one of the U.S. State Department’s cardinal rules for American fortune seekers, proto-cryptozoologists and adventurers who were making the trek into the Himalayas and hoped to encounter the Abominable Snowman – also known as the Yeti.
The Yeti, like its legendary North American relative Bigfoot, is a mythical ape-like creature that many have claimed is real. Some said they saw the creature, while others say they’ve found evidence (in the form of footprints and folk tales) of what they believe to be the beast. Also like Bigfoot, there is no conclusive evidence that the Yeti exists or has ever existed. In spite of this fact, the Department of State, specifically the U.S. Embassy in Nepal, determined the key rules for any Americans who should encounter one of them.
Before the 20th century, the mythical Yeti was just that: a creature of myth. It was part of the cultural belief systems of many Buddhists in the region, but no one in the West knew (or even cared) about whether or not such an ape was real. As Western explorers began to trek in the area in the 1800s, reports of the creature found their ways into journals and travelogues from visitors who returned from Himalayan expeditions. But as Westerners became more and more determined to summit the world’s tallest mountain, interest in the area’s resident apeman only grew.
More and more explorers began to make claims of seeing the Yeti, while others photographed strange prints in the snow. Not only were the footprints those belonging to something that was certainly a biped walking upright, the creature had a unique footprint, with anywhere from three to five toes of various sizes. Even Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, summiting Mount Everest for the first time, claimed to have seen the tracks of a Yeti. The Yeti Craze reached a fever pitch in the late 1950s, when wealthy Americans began leading expeditions to Nepal specifically to search for Yeti-related evidence.
Then in 1958, mountaineer Peter Byrne traveled to Nepal for that same purpose. It was there he found a purported Yeti hand in a monastery. He returned the next year with the mission of getting either the hand or a finger from it to return to London for testing. He managed to smuggle a finger to India and, with the help of actor Jimmy Stewart, smuggle the finger to London.
That finger turned out to be a regular human finger. But the incident was enough for the United States mission in Nepal to release a memo that governed visiting Americans who were looking for evidence of the Abominable Snowman.
The memo, written by U.S. Ambassador Ernest Fisk, published three rules that specifically applied to those Yeti hunters:
- They would pay a royalty of 5,000 rupees to the Nepalese government in exchange for a permit to carry out a search expedition for the Yeti.
- If a Yeti is traced, it can be photographed or captured alive, but it must not be killed or shot at unless it becomes a case of self-defense. Any photographs of the creature, dead or alive, must be surrendered to the government of Nepal.
- Any news that substantiates the actual existence of the Yeti must be submitted to the Nepalese government and cannot be released to the press for public consumption without Nepal’s express permission.
The U.S. National Archives, upon releasing this document, was careful to stress that the existence of the memo did not mean the United States government recognized the existence of the Yeti. It was just a means for the U.S. to demonstrate its support for Nepal’s national sovereignty. It was a Cold War-era policy designed to keep Nepal, strategically situated between China and India, in the American sphere of influence and out of the Soviet Union’s.