Saturday, February 4, 2012

Lesson twenty-two: Mistaken identity?



While in search of the Abominable Snowman in the Baba Ghanoush region of the Himalayas, my Sherpa shouted, "Yeti! Yeti!" and directed my attention to a nearby bluff. There, to my delight, I saw a large, hairy bipedal beast. 


For a better look I scanned the area with my field glasses and that's when I realized the creature was a Tibetan blue bear, standing upright in search of food in a hollowed out tree.


I rapped my Sherpa on the head with my walking stick and said in broken Nepalese(नेपाली), "That's a bear, you swarthy oaf!"  After looking through my field glasses he confirmed his assessment and asserted, "Yeti! Yeti." He then gently removed my pith helmet and conked me on the head with my own walking stick.


As it turns out "Yeti" is actually a corruption of the word "myeti", a regional dialect term for "bear".


Ethnic Tibetans fear and worship the bear as a supernatural being. Could it be that all this time the Yeti has been nothing more than a case of mistaken identity?

4 comments:

  1. Ha ha ha! You're probably right.

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  2. No chance. There's too much evidence to support the Yeti theory. Perhaps more than any other cryptid.

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  3. Since Bigfoot is real I suppose it stands to reason that the Yeti is too.

    Maybe there's room for Yetis and Myetis in the Himalayas?

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    1. I honestly don't know about the Yeti. Its existence seems unlikely to me. All the accounts can be debunked quite easily, and the best evidence, i.e. the footprints, can be explained by paradoxical undressing.

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