Badzar Baradiin's Almas Sighting in the Alashan Desert

In 1905 the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and East Asia sent a 27-year-old Buryat scholar on a long journey. Badzar Baradiin, a Buddhologist and later a political figure, was bound for Urga and then for Labrang monastery in Amdo. He kept detailed travel diaries. On 29 March 1906 his caravan left Urga. On 18 April it reached the edge of Alashan.

As Boris Porshnev later told it, the moment came in April 1906, in the Alashan desert, at a spot known as Badyn Jaran. Evening. "Not long before sunset, when the caravan had to stop for the night." Then the caravan leader gave a startled cry.

On a sandy mound stood "the figure of a hairy man, like an ape." It was stooping, "with long arms dangling," and "lit by the rays of the setting sun." For a minute it looked at the people. Then it turned and disappeared among the mounds.

Baradiin asked the drivers to pursue it. A lama from Urga, Shirab the Hoarse, set off after the almas, intending to tackle him and overcome him. But in his heavy Mongolian boots, Shirab could not catch up.

Baradiin is said to have told the folklorist Tsyben Zhamtsarano. Porshnev wrote that Zhamtsarano mapped almas sightings up to 1928, and that the artist Soyoltai drew a composite portrait. Neither sketches nor map have come down to us. Zhamtsarano's student Byambyn Rinchen recalled that in 1936, in Leningrad, Baradiin asked him whether "his companion Sharab the Hoarse, who tried to chase and catch the Almas, was still alive." Rinchen spread the story in 1958, 1959 and 1964. Porshnev published the standard version in 1963 and 1968, and later co-wrote L'homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant with Bernard Heuvelmans.

In 1982 Michael Heaney went into the Leningrad archives. Zhamtsarano's papers held no maps, no sketches, no sign he ever collected almas stories. Baradiin's diaries recorded daily distances, camps, animals and people met. The entries for 19 to 27 April cover the very days of the sighting. "Up to now we had not seen a single living soul for a whole week," reads one. Of the almas, nothing. His letter to Zhamtsarano of 17 July 1907 was silent too.

Shirab the Hoarse was not on the caravan list. The real party included Baradiin's brother Zhap and Demzhin Namzhilai. And the route, Heaney found, passed about 150 miles east of Badain Jaran. "It is inconceivable that in a diary of such comprehensiveness, conceived as a complete record of events, describing a monotonous journey across the desert, an incident of such a startling nature should go unrecorded," he wrote in Cryptozoology in 1983.

Heaney traced Shirab to Mikhail Rozenfel'd. His 1931 travelogue and 1936 novel Ushchel'e Almasov borrowed a real former lama from his own travels. Baradiin's 1936 question to Rinchen was probably a joking reference to that fictionalized account. Heaney did not accuse Baradiin of a hoax. He saw a story with "rather shaky foundations," probably "an elaboration of the vaguer tales of 'wild people' in the desert." One diary note may be its seed: "The people of these places are very wild and avoid the outside world, they say." He allowed that this alone does not rule out other almas evidence.

Rozenfel'd's novel became a 1937 film, Ushchelye Alamasov, directed by Vladimir Schneiderov. The Baradiin sighting is still told as the start of almas research. A hairy figure on a dune, back-lit by the setting sun. And a diary that never mentions it.