Siberian officials this month sponsored nature lovers, scientists and foreigners who claim they have socialized with Bigfoots to attend an International Scientific-Practical Conference on Hominology...The rest of the story is at the Wall Street Journal, where there is also a photo gallery.
Siberian officials issued a press release saying the three-day event this month turned up "irrefutable evidence" that such a creature—known to locals as a Snow Person—has been squatting in a Kemerovo cave 2,000 miles east of Moscow. Field trips into the surrounding mountains also turned up what they said were telltale signs of Yeti wanderings, such as bent and twisted branches, and underbrush that served as a bed...
Kemerovo Gov. Aman Tuleyev is offering a one million ruble, or about $31,500, reward to anyone who finds a Yeti, telling Russian television, "We need to sit down with him, drink some tea and talk about life."..
Mr. Burtsev has visited conferences and gone on hunts in the U.S., staying for a week in rural Michigan, where Robin Lynne, 48, says she has been feeding a family of Bigfoots outside her home for two years. Hosted by the regional government, Ms. Lynne flew to Siberia for the conference this month, where a tour bus with police escort drove participants to a hunting lodge in the piney outback. There, Ms. Lynne described how the Bigfoots bang on her door, bring her sticks as presents and drink water from a bucket in the yard when the weather is warm. "They love the bucket," she told the group.
Oh, and by the way...
Officials say they would also like to drum up some tourism for Kemerovo, a poverty-stricken region known more for its coal mine accidents than alpine beauty.
They knock on the door and ask for water, and in 2 years she can't get a single picture?
ReplyDeleteI used to know a man who swore he'd encountered one, but I can't remember his story. My thought on this is that it's people assuming they know what they see. Seeing is believing, but beliefs aren't truths. On three separate occasions I've seen Australian animals in the wild near my home. I live in Pennsylvania. Because I'm a born skeptic, I don't jump to the conclusion that I really saw a kangaroo, an emu, and a wallaby and that these animals must be living in the Philadelphia suburbs. Disbelief is my native state (so is Pennsylvania), so doubt is instantaneous when something is outside the norm. My mother and I saw the 'kangaroo', dead on the shoulder of the road, while driving home from a day of shopping. We laughed and knew it was almost certainly a road-kill deer in an unnatural position. Our passing it at 45mph added to its odd appearance. The 'wallaby' was a small fallen branch seen, also from a moving vehicle, in half-light before dawn near the end of a night shift at work. It was 'hunched' in just the right way to match my concept of the shape and posture of these little kangaroos. The emu...was an emu. In my driveway. It led to one of the oddest phone calls I've ever made. Calling work to tell them you'll be late because there's a five-foot-tall bird in your driveway gets exactly the range of responses you'd expect.
ReplyDeleteThe major difference is that these animals do exist. The point in common is that it is easy to think you know what you're seeing. If was as credulous as the people behind these sitings and, beyond that, wanted to believe that antipodean fauna are taking over the US Mid-Atlantic I know these sitings would be facts in my mind.
why am I not suprised that they also admit to wanting to increase toursm?
ReplyDeleteHey, it worked for Loch ness.
I did not know that "alpine" could be used in that way. i.e. referring to any mountainous area rather than just the large mountain range that dominates the area known as Central Europe.
ReplyDeleteYou learn something new every day.
@blitherpoop Have you ever heard of the phenomenon known as the Phantom Kangaroo?
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_kangaroo
You're experience sounds oddly enough like that (save for the emu part).