Dr. Ivan Ivlov and his driver see a family of almas

The almas is said to be a human-like creature of the Mongolian mountains. Mainstream science treats it as legend. In the early 1960s, though, people were still looking. Between 1962 and 1965 the Mongolian researcher Zhugdariyn Damdin carried out almas fieldwork in the west of the country. In the Soviet Union, Boris Porshnev was pursuing his own "snowman" research.

1963. The Altai mountains of Mongolia. Ivan Ivlov, described as a Russian paediatrician, was travelling through the range with a Mongolian driver. He was said to have been sceptical of the local stories.

Then he saw them. Several human-like creatures, standing on a mountain slope. They appeared to be a family group. A male, a female and a child. Ivlov observed them through his binoculars from a distance of half a mile. He kept watching until they moved out of his field of vision. His driver saw them too. They were common in that area, he said.

Ivlov went further. He interviewed many Mongolian children who were his patients, believing they would be more candid than adults. The children provided many additional reports about the almas. One stood out. A boy said that while he and some other children were swimming in a stream, he saw a male almas carry a child almas across it. Later retellings credit Shackley with writing that neither the Mongol children nor the young almas were afraid of each other.

Everything known about this encounter comes from one source. The British archaeologist Myra Shackley told the story on page 91 of Still Living?, published in the United Kingdom as Wildmen: Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma (Thames & Hudson, 1983). Every later version traces back to her. No publication by Ivlov has been found. Nor has any Russian or Mongolian record of the case.

The retellings drift. Most give the distance as half a mile. One unverified version says about a mile. Some place the sighting in the southern part of Mongolia, others in the west. The Mongolian Altai runs through both. No exact spot is given. No length of time. No footprints, hair, photographs or film. Beyond "human-like", the creatures themselves were never described.

In a 2010 retelling, the blogger Dale Drinnon quotes Shackley calling it "an event that was recorded by a trained scientist and transmitted to the proper authorities." That report has never surfaced. Drinnon's text also argues there is no reason to doubt Ivlov's word, pointing to his scientific reputation and his earlier scepticism.

Shackley's wider argument met resistance. A 1983 review in Nature said her Mongolian evidence for surviving Neanderthals "consists entirely of Middle Palaeolithic-like tools", which modern humans also made. The same year, Michael Heaney cast "grave doubt" on the classic 1906 Baradiin almas sighting, a reminder that the founding stories of almas research could be retold inaccurately. Other writers have raised feral humans or hypertrichosis to explain almas reports in general. No explanation has been offered for this case specifically. No hoax has been alleged either.

Ivlov's account lives on in blogs, wikis and encyclopedia entries on the almas. A paediatrician. A driver. A family on a slope, half a mile away. The original wording still waits on page 91 of a 1983 book.