Azasskaya Cave Yeti Evidence, Kemerovo (2011)

The yeti story in the Shoria Mountains of Kemerovo Oblast began before 2011. In 2009 the regional administration circulated a photograph of a footprint from a local cave. In March 2011 hunters reported tracks near the village of Elbeza. That September the former heavyweight boxer Nikolai Valuyev came looking, and left without finding Bigfoot.

Then came October. At the initiative of Governor Aman Tuleyev, a conference opened in Tashtagol on 6 October 2011. Igor Burtsev, director of the International Center of Hominology in Moscow, led the Russian delegation. Guests came from the United States, Canada, Spain, Sweden, Mongolia, Estonia and China. Burtsev believed around 30 yetis lived in the Kuzbass, and said villagers reported them taking sheep and hens.

Azasskaya Cave is a karst cave and a protected geological monument inside Shorsky National Park. It runs about 7 km, but only the entrance grotto and roughly 120 m of gallery can be reached. Around 8 and 9 October the delegation made a two-day trip to the cave and to Karatag peak. The press came along. Russian television showed a researcher, surrounded by onlookers, pointing out hairs and footprints on the floor.

Anatoly Fokin collected the hairs. They were grey, lying in a clump of moss. Nearby lay a supposed bed of dried ferns. Valuyev, that year a State Duma candidate for United Russia, set his own shoe size, 52, against the print. "The Yeti has maybe 60," he said, adding: "I have no doubts, the Yeti has settled [here]."

10 October 2011. The Kemerovo regional administration issued a press release. "They found his footprints, his supposed bed, and various markers with which the yeti marks his territory." Conference participants, it said, had gathered indisputable proof that the Shoria mountains are inhabited by the "Snow Man." The artifacts offered "95% evidence," and a special laboratory would analyse them.

Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University had walked the same floor. He saw a "short line of right feet only." The fern nest had "never been slept in." And: "There was no other sign of occupation in the cave, except a few empty soda cans and snack food wrappers." He called it a field trip with the press, a "staged event." He refused to sign the statement and went home.

In late October 2012 Valentin Sapunov of the Russian State Hydrometeorological University said DNA and electron microscope work left him 60 to 70 percent sure the hair came from a yeti. Tuleyev offered 1 million rubles, about $32,000, for a real one.

In February 2013 Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that geneticists at Oxford had examined three samples. Black bear. Horse. Raccoon. Oleg Pugachev, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Zoological Institute, said the hairs had no follicles, so no DNA could be extracted. "What snowmen?"

Communist Duma deputy Nina Ostanina called it a publicity stunt. The opposition called it pre-election advertising for United Russia. Arkady Tishkov said it would mainly attract tourists. Valery Kimeyev of Kemerovo State University was blunt: "Until we have found some bones, it doesn't make sense to talk about the yeti." Benjamin Radford recalled yeti hair that proved to be goral, and a Sichuan yeti that was a mangy civet.

Nobody saw a creature. The researchers set up no cameras. Still, for a few days in October 2011, a Siberian region declared the abominable snowman real.