A. G. Pronin's Snowman on the Fedchenko Glacier, Pamirs (1957)

Summer 1957. Alexander Georgievich Pronin was a hydrologist with the Geographical Research Institute of Leningrad University. He was in the Pamirs on a glacier-mapping expedition. His ground was the Balyandkiik River valley, beside the Fedchenko Glacier in Gorno-Badakhshan. The Balyandkiik carries meltwater from the glacier. Between 1910 and 1913 the advancing ice blocked it. These mountains already had their wildman lore, the golub-yavan of Central Asia and the almas.

The date depends on who tells it. Ivan T. Sanderson's retelling and the summaries drawn from it give 2 August 1957, at noon. Other accounts say 12 August, or 12 and 14 August.

Pronin saw a figure standing on a rocky cliff about 500 yards away. Some versions place it as far above him as it was distant. By one account he watched it through binoculars. In the version that reached English readers, "the creature was not human. It resembled a man but was very stooped." Its build was stocky. Its feet were wide apart. Its forearms were longer than a human's. It was covered with reddish-grey hair. One summary says it was visible for several minutes. Then it was gone. Three days later he saw it again. This time it was walking upright.

The account appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda, most sources say on 15 January 1958. The story travelled abroad. Pronin was subjected to some ridicule. One later summary says he was first discredited by the Russian press and later rehabilitated.

January 1958. At the initiative of Boris Porshnev, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences created a "snowman commission". According to one Russian retrospective it was chaired by the geologist S. V. Obruchev. Its members included Kirill Stanyukovich, P. P. Smolin of the Darwin Museum, the surgeon Marie-Jeanne Koffmann and Porshnev himself.

That year an expedition went into the Pamirs. Who led it is disputed. Some sources name Pronin. Others name Stanyukovich, a botanist said to be more interested in plants than in yetis. The team worked around Sarez Lake and the upper Balyandkiik valley.

It found nothing. In one rendering of Stanyukovich's later summary: "Neither tracks, nor fur, nor remains, nor a single verifiable witness account." Dmitri Bayanov later called the expedition poorly organized and conducted. Its negative results gave Porshnev's opponents their argument. The Academy stopped funding in early 1959.

No source accuses Pronin of a hoax. No one on record has named an animal or a person he might have mistaken. The one sceptical argument came from Stanyukovich. The sparse food of the Pamir highlands, he concluded, could not support a large primate. His book on the expedition, In Pursuit of an Amazing Mystery, appeared in 1965.

Pronin's two brief sightings launched an official Soviet hunt for the snowman. The story runs through Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, Porshnev's manuscript published in English as The Soviet Sasquatch, and Bayanov's In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman. Historians have studied the commission as an episode of Cold War science. And the Pamirs kept producing reports. Soviet border guards in the late 1960s, a Tajik Academy expedition in 1982, and later witnesses into the 2000s.