1b. The Pangboche Hand In 1957, Texas oil millionaire Tom Slick launched a series of expeditions in search of the Yeti. Slick had an unabiding love for cryptozoology, and his money could buy him no greater thrill than the promise of bringing the abominable snowman into captivity. Slick's efforts were largely fruitless, except for a 1958 expedition that revealed the alleged bones of a Yeti's hand, an artifact enshrined at a monastery in Pangboche, Nepal. The monks refused to let expedition member Peter Byrne remove the hand from the premises, but he hatched a plan to steal parts of it. In 1959, Byrne secretly switched human hand bones for the some of the bones of the Yeti hand, and he smuggled the Pangboche originals out of the country with the valuable assistance of -- get ready for this -- Jimmy Stewart, the famed actor. Stewart just happened to be passing through India, and he and his wife Gloria agreed to wrap up the stolen bones in their underwear inside their luggage. Truth is stranger than Bigfoot. Scientific analysis of the Pangboche bones was mixed. British primatologist Osman Hill initially announced that the bones were of human origin, but then he changed his mind and declared them unidentifiable as any known primate. Later he revised his opinion yet again, saying that the Pangboche hand must have belonged to a Neanderthal. Unfortunately, the smuggled bones were lost and cannot be reexamined today. Sir Edmund Hillary, the explorer who climbed Mt. Everest in 1953, decided to get to the bottom of this "abominable snowman" business and embarked on a highly publicized debunking expedition in 1960-61. Hillary's intentions were noble, but he committed some of the closed-minded crimes that give good skepticism a bad name. Sir Edmund accused the Sherpas of being a superstitious, overly-mystical people who did not distinguish between fantasy and reality, and further insinuated that their Yeti sightings went hand in hand with heavy drinking. He obtained a "Yeti scalp" which he decried as being a fake made out of the skin of a goatlike animal, the serow, without understanding that the artifact was a common skullcap fashioned in imitation of the Yeti -- these Yeti scalps were no more deceptive than the sugary pastry we figuratively call a bearclaw. In an irony of hilarious proportions, Hillary also ridiculed the Pangboche Hand, which he characterized as "essentially a human hand, strung together with wire, with the possible inclusion of several animal bones" -- and little did he know how perfectly accurate that description was, considering the secret surgery Peter Byrne had performed on the bones just a year earlier! Next: Abominable Encounters Missing Links Primate Center Index Back to Cryptozoo Entrance