Case file · Cryptid
The Long Walk's two yetis
In his bestseller 'The Long Walk' (1956), Sławomir Rawicz claimed that during an escape on foot from a Siberian gulag, while crossing the Himalayas in the winter of 1942, his group was blocked for hours by two large bipedal creatures.
1956 CE · 28.30, 88.60 · status: hoax
The account
The book described an escape on foot from Siberia through the Gobi and Tibet to India and sold millions of copies. The yeti episode was widely quoted in cryptozoology books.
The sceptical view
In 2006 the BBC found Soviet records including statements by Rawicz himself, showing he was released in the 1942 amnesty of Poles and shipped across the Caspian Sea to Iran. His walk to India, yetis included, never happened, though others have since claimed the story as their own.