Case file · Cryptid
Reinhold Messner's yeti
The great mountaineer Reinhold Messner said he met a tall, upright, hairy creature in eastern Tibet in 1986, then spent years investigating and concluded the yeti is the Tibetan brown bear.
1986 CE · 29.65, 96.00 · status: explained
The account
In 'My Quest for the Yeti' (1998) Messner argued that the 'chemo' or 'dremo' of Tibetan lore is a bear that sometimes walks upright, and that Western stories turned it into an ape-man. He kept bear skulls and skins in his museum as evidence.
The sceptical view
Messner's own conclusion is a known animal; critics noted that his linguistic arguments were loose, but the bear identification fits later DNA studies.