Dr. Vazgen Karapetyan and the Captured Wild Man of Dagestan

Winter 1941. The Soviet Union is at war. In Dagestan, lieutenant colonel Vazgen Karapetyan is stationed with an infantry battalion about 30 km into the mountains from Buynaksk. Nick Redfern says the posting lasted about twelve weeks. Accounts differ on who captured the man: Koffmann wrote of a military patrol, Russian summaries mentioned local militia, and Redfern named a police officer.

The prisoner was male, naked and barefoot. About 180 cm tall. A powerful chest. Well developed muscles. A very heavy lower jaw. "The chest, back, and shoulders, however, were covered with shaggy hair of a dark brown colour," Karapetyan recalled, "much like that of a bear, 2 to 3 centimeters long." Below the chest the hair grew thinner and softer. "The palms of his hands and soles of his feet were free of hair."

Coarse hair fell to his shoulders and partly covered his forehead. His face carried sparse hair, but no beard or moustache. "His fingers were thick, strong and exceptionally large." Karapetyan extended his hand and said "Hello," but there was no response. He wrote that the eyes told him nothing and described them as "dull and empty," "the eyes of an animal."

Then a stranger detail. "The prisoner could not be kept in a warm room. He had sweated in the house so profusely that they had to keep him in the shed." The account preserved by Ivan T. Sanderson adds that he carried lice of a type different from those infecting humans.

Karapetyan made no diagnosis. A few days later, by the Russian summaries, he learned the man had been shot "as a deserter or spy." One account says local authorities thought he might be a German spy in disguise. Sanderson's version differs. The man was shot by his Soviet captors as they retreated before the advancing German army. That version sits awkwardly with the calendar. In December 1941 the German army was far from Dagestan.

Koffmann says Karapetyan went in person to the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences to report what he had seen. His account was among those that led to the Academy's "Commission to Study the Question of the Snowman," set up in January 1958. Boris Porshnev started it. The geologist Sergei Obruchev chaired it. Porshnev treated the Dagestan captive as key evidence, a sign of surviving degenerated Neanderthals. But the 1958 Pamir expedition failed, and Porshnev's opponents disbanded the commission.

The case rests on one named witness. He wrote it down about 17 years after the event. There are no photographs, no remains, no military records. No one has alleged a hoax. Yet Karapetyan's own observations, the silence, the total indifference, the heavy body hair, also fit a human being with hypertrichosis, an intellectual disability or deafness. Or a feral or homeless person.

Often cited as a precedent is Zana, the Abkhazian "wild woman" of the 19th century, also studied by Porshnev. A 2021 analysis of her remains found she was a human of East African descent with a genetic condition causing heavy hair growth.

Sanderson brought the story to Western readers in Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life in 1961. Bernard Heuvelmans and Porshnev returned to it in L'Homme de Néanderthal est toujours vivant. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson carried it into Forbidden Archeology. It stands beside the Red Army shooting said to have taken place in the Pamir in 1925 as one of the classic Soviet wild man accounts. The man in the shed has never been identified.