Add a new stop on your conspiracy web everyone: national archivists have discovered that the US State Department, the Foreign Service, and the US Embassy in Nepal all took the existence, somewhere, of the creature known as a Yeti very, very seriously. In the 1950’s, anyway.
Archivist Mark Murphy said he couldn’t believe his eyes when he discovered the long-ignored papers written at the end of the Eisenhower administration. “I thought I was seeing things,” he said. “These documents show that finding the Yeti was a big deal in the 1950s. It goes to show the government was taking this seriously.”
How seriously? They endorsed and enforced Nepal’s own rules on expeditions seeking out the elusive beast:
Regulations required expeditions to pay for a special Yeti finding permit, agree not to attempt to harm any Yeti they found unless it was in self defense, and to turn over all news of the beast to Nepalese authorities instead of any news organizations.
Funny, they don’t mention Tintin going through all that…
(Okay, it’s obviously because his expedition started as the search for survivors of a downed plane, and then turned into a search for the Yeti halfway through.)
(US News via Skepchick, top pic via Flickr.)
Published: Sep 5, 2011 12:55 pm