Cryptomundo » Yeti Hunter Sir Edmund Hillary Dies

Yeti Hunter Sir Edmund Hillary Dies

Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 10th, 2008

hillary Yeti

Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two men to climb the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, has died at the age of 88, on January 11, 2008, local New Zealand time. He climbed the 29,035 ft (8,850m) peak with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, reaching the top on May 29, 1953.

Hillary’s health had reportedly been in decline since April 2007, after a fall while visiting Nepal. He suffered a heart attack in hospital on Friday morning.

hillary tenzig

Sir Edmund’s fellow climber, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (right), died in May 1986.

Born July 20, 1919, in Auckland, New Zealand, Sir Edmund Hillary began climbing mountains in his native country as a teenager and earned renown as an ice climber.

He served as a pilot during World War II and as New Zealand’s ambassador to India in the 1980s.

Within cryptozoology, Sir Edmund Hillary will be remembered, first as a man who hunted Abominable Snowmen, and then one who later would debunk the Yeti.

In the 1950s, curiosity about the identity of the “Abominable Snowman” drew Edmund Hillary into the search. Stories of hairy man-like creatures were known. Footprints in the snow and in mud were found to indicate some such cryptids were active in out of the way places in Nepal, Tibet, and the surrounding region.

In 1952, Hillary along with George Lowe found hair on a high pass while in the mountains, relating it to Yeti.

In 1953, Yeti tracks were found by Hillary in the Barun Khola range. The next year, two British members of Hillary’s team discovered Yeti tracks in the Choyang Valley. His trusted Sherpa friends would tell Hillary of their firsthand sightings of the man-sized Yeti.

The Sherpas in Nepal know of several types of “Abominable Snowmen” in the mountains of Asia.

When Hillary went to the Himalayas to look for the Yeti, he and his collaborator, journalist Desmond Doig, noted that there were several unknown primates said to be there still undiscovered in any formal way.

Among the varieties was one called the “Nyalmo.” Hillary and Doig learned of the Nyalmo in north-central Nepal. It was said to be “giant-sized (up to twenty feet tall), manlike, hairy, and given to shaking giant pine trees in trials of strength while other Nyalmos sit around and clap their hands.”

During most of the 1950s, Hillary was a supporter for the possibility of the existence of the Yeti.

Late in 1960, Sir Edmund Hillary, sponsored by the World Book encyclopedia company of Chicago, left on his (in)famous expedition to Nepal in pursuit of the “Abominable Snowman.”

Search For Yeti

The scalp at the Khumjung monastery, Nepal, examined by his expedition was reported to be over 350 years old. This scalp was borrowed by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1960 and examined by specialists at the Field Museum in Chicago. It was made from the skin of a Himalayan goat-antelope, the serow (Naemorhedus sumatraensis). Of course, Hillary already knew this because he had a copy made for him before he left Nepal.

Edmund Hillary’s 1960 Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition (also called the World Book expedition) concluded that Yeti tracks were distortions of human footprints melted by the snow, that Yeti sightings by Sherpas were unreliable because the mountain porters did not make a distinction between the supernatural and the real worlds, and that all the scalps were probably fakes. At least that is the overt story told to the media. But there may have been a covert mission, as well.

Hillary’s “Yeti expedition” has been critiqued in such books as Ivan T. Sanderson’s Appendix E, “Sir Edmund Hillary’s Scalp - A News Story from Nepal” in Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life and in the section “Hillary’s Assassination of the Yeti” in Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology . (While I was writing my Slick book in the 1980s, Hillary kindly wrote me a letter answering some questions I had asked him about his knowledge of Slick. His reply demonstrated he was a gentleman and an adventurer, always.)

In the end, Hillary would sum up his sense of the Abominable Snowman with these words: “I am inclined to think that the realm of mythology is where the Yeti rightly belongs.”

The Hillary-Marlin Perkins effort to discover the reality behind the Snowman appears to be have been a smokescreen.

While Tom Slick’s 1957-1959 expeditions may have been rumored to be espionage missions, what part did spying play in Hillary’s trek? Driven by the media, most accounts of the Yeti debunking affair mention only the high altitude medical testing as another subobjective of Hillary’s efforts. A few English and Italian press accounts, however, exist confirming that one other goal of the group was to spy on the Chinese in Tibet.

Two rocket experts, Tom Nevison of the United States Air Force and Peter Mulgrew, a radio expert with the Royal New Zealand Navy, were closely watching and gathering data on the Chinese firing missiles from Tibet. Journalist Desmond Doig, Nevison and Mulgrew were camped together at Tolum Bau glacier when they all witnessed just such a launching. Meanwhile, the Chinese were jamming the Hillary camp’s radio.

In a sad twist of fate, Sir Edmund Hillary’s first wife, Louise, and daughter, Belinda, 16, died in a 1975 plane crash near Kathmandu, Nepal. Then Hillary’s friend, Peter Mulgrew died when Air New Zealand Flight 901, a DC-10 crashed on Mt Erebus, Antarctic, November 28, 1979. Hillary and Mulgrew’s widow, June, grew close and married.

One of the great ones from that famed 1950s-1960s generation of Yeti hunters is now gone. How sad.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

For more, please see:

My Favorite Hillary & Yeti Photo.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Abominable Snowman, Breaking News, Conspiracies, CryptoZoo News, Cryptomundo Exclusive, Cryptotourism, Cryptozoologists, Cryptozoology, Expedition Reports, Eyewitness Accounts, Footprint Evidence, Media Appearances, Men in Cryptozoology, Obituaries, Photos, Pop Culture, Yeti. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.

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11 Responses to “Yeti Hunter Sir Edmund Hillary Dies”

Mike Smith responds: January 10th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Wow, to tell you the truth I didn’t know he was still living. My thoughts go out to his family
bill green responds: January 10th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
hey loren & everyone im deeply sadden to hear of the passing of a wonderful yeti hunter sir edmund hillary. good evening . bill green
Cryptid Hunt responds: January 10th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
He was inspirational to many adventurers and explorers like me! He will always be remembered in cryptozoology!
Benjamin Radford responds: January 11th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Hillary was a hero of mine, and one of the explorers I dedicated my book Lake Monster Mysteries to. It is a sad day, he will be missed.
red_pill_junkie responds: January 11th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
He was truly a great man. Rest in peace
DARHOP responds: January 11th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Major Bummer! Rest Peacefully.
johnstownmonster responds: January 11th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
That IS sad. Fewer and fewer people like this exist in today’s world and it’s always tough to lose another one. My thoughts are with his family.
midwestskeptic2 responds: January 11th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Mr. Coleman

I’m just a “lurker” on your very informative site. Thus my first posting here.

I’m close to sixty. A USA Midwesterner. A very opened minded “skeptic” when it involves cryptozoology. One-such as me, while respecting the beliefs of others does like to see some proof.

Sir Hillary has always been one of my heroes. A very ordinary man with extraordinarily qualities. For someone that had accomplishments such as he remained a very approachable man. I had the opportunity to meet him once after attending one of his lectures.

With so many fakes and “wannabees” we come across in person and in print in- both our personal and professional lives it is so refreshing to reflect back on a man that did so much, yet never seeked notoriety.
jerrywayne responds: January 12th, 2008 at 11:26 am
There have always been explorers and adventurers among us; there always will be. Sir Hillary stood out from the rest because of his modesty and humbleness, qualities that are unfortunately out of fashion in today’s world.
Loren Coleman responds: January 12th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
For more see,

My Favorite Hillary & Yeti Photo

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/hillary-yeti-pic/
scosmo451 responds: January 12th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
I’ve been working and off the net, so this is the first I’ve seen of this. I, too, did not know he was still alive (shame on me) but have always thought well of him as an adventurer and a throwback to the time of a “man’s man”. I’ll have to reread a few things now.

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Yeti Hunter Sir Edmund Hillary Dies

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