So, now when I go trekking in Nepal, I have to worry about Yetis, five foot tall killer monkeys and Maoist guerillas. I think I’ll just go on a BFRO expedition, where all I have to worry about is some pancake eating big-headed junior bigfoot and whether I’ll get sued for listening to pirated Sasquatch howls I down loaded from Napster.

On the other hand, evidence for both tailless and tailed large monkeys in the Himalayas-to-Eastern Tibet (and South China) is supported by both reports and (rare) physical evidence. The problem is basically that all of them are confused with Yetis in the popular imagination–and none too clearly distinguished from each other.

The Vietnamese reports of Yeti-like lowland apes (Da Nhan) generally referred to them also indiscriminately as “monkeys” and those reports merged into traditions of the Kra-Dhan and Bekk-Bokk. The American veterans’ reports similarly called them both “monkeys” and “apes” but described them basically as between chimpanzees and gorillas. Incidentally, the Vietnamese dictionaries shown to me by informants define orangutans as “small Da Nhan” and gorillas as “large Da Nhan”.

“Its “beady, yellow eyes” stared at them “with obvious demoniacal cunning and anger.”

This is interesting because it seems pretty sensational to me for a field observation by two professionals. Granted most people would be soiling themselves at around that time, but I find the colorful language to be a little odd coming from these particular witnesses.