Reinhold Messner's Night Encounter with a Yeti in Eastern Tibet

Summer, 1986. Reinhold Messner was 41. That year the South Tyrolean mountaineer became the first person to climb all fourteen 8,000 metre peaks. In July he was somewhere quieter. Alone in Tibet's eastern wilderness, retracing the Sherpas' migration from Kham to Khumbu, near the Tibetan headwaters of the Mekong River. No roads. No people.

19 July 1986. Twilight. Messner was making his way through ash-colored junipers. He heard an eerie whistle, like the warning call of mountain goats. Out of the corner of his eye, an upright figure darted between the trees to the edge of a clearing. It hurried on, silent and hunched forward, vanishing behind a tree and reappearing against the moonlight. Then it stopped. It turned to look at him.

The whistle came again, "more of an angry hiss." For a heartbeat he saw eyes and teeth. "The creature towered menacingly, its face a gray shadow, its body a black outline." Covered with hair, it stood on two short legs, powerful arms hanging almost to its knees. Over seven feet tall, he guessed, and much heavier than a man. About 30 feet away. It smelled awful. Then it moved off toward the escarpment with such agility and power that he was "both startled and relieved."

He feared it would come back. It did. Messner ran for a mountain village and was almost torn apart by a pack of large dogs. He sheltered in an old hut. He said he photographed a huge, human-like footprint in the mud. His attempts to photograph the creature itself failed. One film was damaged in processing. A flash malfunctioned.

November 1986. Messner went public. "I have seen a Yeti." After an interview with an Indian newspaper, the ridicule was harsh. His credibility as a writer and mountaineer suffered. "People accused him of being bonkers," the blogger Mark Horrell later wrote.

For about 12 years he covered roughly 20,000 km of Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan, interviewing Sherpas and Tibetans. They spoke of the chemo, or dremo. An everyday animal that stands about seven feet on its hind legs and can break a goat's spine. "He always appears at night and only when you least expect it," one told him. Messner said he saw the animal several more times. He compared what he had seen with a bear Tibetans called chemo at Lhasa Zoo.

His verdict. The chemo is a brown bear, Ursus arctos, "a rare form of a brown bear that usually walks upright and is extra intelligent." The Yeti, he concluded, is a sum of fantasy, wishful thinking, legend and a real animal. He set it all out in Yeti: Legende und Wirklichkeit in 1998, published in English in 2000 as My Quest for the Yeti.

Messner admitted the light was poor. "It was dark, so I wasn't exactly sure what is the color." One reviewer read his book as more open, weighing an unknown ape against a diverged bear lineage. Science later leaned toward the bear. A 2014 study by Sykes and colleagues matched 36 "anomalous primate" hair samples to known animals. In 2017, Lan, Lindqvist and colleagues traced nine "Yeti" samples to Himalayan and Tibetan brown bears and an Asian black bear. A tooth from a stuffed "yeti" at the Messner Mountain Museum came from a domestic dog.

In 2016 he spoke about it again for Channel 4's Yeti: Myth, Man or Beast. One man alone. A moment of moonlight. It remains the best-known eyewitness account behind the bear explanation of the Yeti.