Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Friday, December 30, 2011

Female yeti captured?

Attention Yeti aficionados; some folks in Russia have captured a female Yeti, and are holding it in a cage.

At least that's what the video clip (here) seems to imply.  It shows a video taken, apparently with a hand-held recorder, of a television showing a news broadcast.  First, we see the broadcaster, and then it cuts to some scenes outdoors, and finally to a guy speaking Russian -- and in the background is a cage containing what appears to be a Yeti.

The problem for me is that I don't speak Russian, so I have no idea what any of them are saying.  For all I know, they could be saying, "Hey, y'all, take a look at this wingnut we caught walking around in the woods with a gorilla suit!  We threw him into a cage at the zoo to teach him a lesson."  I'm reminded of the story from 2009 that left a lot of news agencies (including some big ones like Fox) red-faced -- the "ghost city" story from Huanshan City, China, that claimed that there was the mirage of a phantom city that appeared in the fog, and was photographed and videotaped from a bridge over the Xa'nan River.  In the video, several Chinese folks were questioned by reporters, and their comments were translated as being amazed, perplexed, mystified -- where did this city come from?  What is it?

Then the woo-woos got involved, as they are wont to do, and it was linked to everything from HAARP to Project Blue Beam, the alleged conspiracy by which NASA is going to create a New World Order with the Antichrist at its head.  (I'm not making any of this up.)  How creating a phantom city in the middle of a Chinese river would further that aim, I have no idea, but rationality is not these people's forte.

In any case, the explanation is far simpler, as you might have guessed.  The buildings and spires and trees in the "ghost city" are actually part of the real city of Huanshan; there is an island in the middle of the Xa'nan River that has an amusement park, and there'd recently been a flood, and there was a lot of mist and fog, and the people on the bridge were saying how surreal it looked.  "Hey, look at the island and amusement park," they were basically saying.  "With all this fog, it looks like a ghost city, or something."  But it was mistranslated, and the whole woo-woo contingent took off at a run.

Here, with the Yeti video -- I don't know.  My general thought is, if they'd really captured a Yeti, it would have been all over the news, not just on an obscure video clip that popped up on Cryptomundo.  Especially considering how hard the Russians have been working lately to prove to everyone that the Yeti exists -- if they had a live one, you can bet that they wouldn't just hush it up.

But I could be wrong, of course.  If any of my readers speak Russian, I'd be curious to find out what they're really saying, rather than just speculating.  Given how far off the beam the Chinese ghost city story went, I'd rather base what I think on firmer knowledge than what we've got.  In any case, keep your eye in this direction, cryptozoology buffs -- it could be that the Russians are about to produce the evidence we've all been waiting for.

1 comment:

  1. The capture of an actual creature would be a problem for yeti proponents, since it would then be a serious challenge to explain the lack of other physical evidence, e.g. remains. They've had to resort to speculating that they're some kind of immaterial thing.

    However, as it sems this has been admitted to be a publicity stunt for a park, the point is moot.

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