Shennongjia Jeep Encounter with a Red-Haired Yeren

Shennongjia is a forested mountain district in Hubei province. In May 1976, senior cadres of the Shennongjia Forestry District had been at meetings in Shiyan. They drove home through the night toward Songbai, the seat of the district.

There were six people in the jeep. Five officials and a driver. Among them was Chen Liansheng, deputy director of the district party office, aged 29. With him were Ren Xinyou, vice-director of the Forest District Revolutionary Committee, She Quanqin, Zhou Zhongyi, Su Jiaguo and the driver, Cai Xinzhi.

Most accounts give the date as 14 May 1976. The hour is disputed. About 1 a.m. in some versions. 4 or 5 a.m. in others. The place was Chunshuya, a pass on the border of Fang County and Shennongjia, about 1,700 m up.

Chen was asleep. The driver's shout woke him. "Look, there's a wild goat ahead!" It was no goat. In Chen's words, it was "a big fellow about 1.9 m tall, red hair all over, walking upright."

Its arms were short and thin, its lower body very long and thick, "like the hind legs of the yellow cattle back home." There was no tail. The ears stood upright, rising above the top of the head, and the face was like a donkey's. The eyes were like human eyes, and they did not reflect the headlights the way an animal's would.

She Quanqin and Zhou Zhongyi moved in. Chen picked up a stone. The men surrounded it. The stand-off lasted more than 20 seconds. Then a stone struck it on the buttocks. The creature grasped at the branches hanging over the track to pull itself onto the slope. It failed. It fell into the shrubbery, crossed a ditch and fled. "This animal walked upright," the driver said. "It ran standing, not crawling."

Chen went back to the spot with a vice-minister of the Yunyang publicity department. They found unusual-looking red hair, which they presumed belonged to the creature. There had been no camera in the jeep. Chen wrote a report, signed by Ren Xinyou and sent by telegram to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. One account says it went to the People's Daily. "It was important that the eyewitnesses were all high-ranking officials," Chen later said. "As party members we wouldn't have lied."

In September 1976 a first team of 27 members was set up in Fang County. It caught nothing, but collected hundreds of hairs. Huang Wanbo reported that hairs taken from an oak tree looked like human hair. In 1977 came the great expedition, more than 100 people from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University and army scouts from the Wuhan Military Region, led by Zhou Guoxing. They found a nest, hair, many footprints, droppings and sleeping sites. Nothing conclusive. Along the way they confirmed that golden snub-nosed monkeys live in the area, and helped bring about the Shennongjia reserve.

The debate that followed was not kind to the wildman. Red hairs sent for testing proved to be dyed human hair, and most of the sleeping sites turned out to be bear dens. In December 1998 and January 1999, Chinese officials and the China Wildlife Conservation Association declared there is no wild man in Shennongjia. Zhou Guoxing blamed bears and macaques, while others pointed to the dim early-morning light. Paleoanthropologist Zhao Lingxia put it simply: "we need bones to verify the existence of a species."

The believers never left. "Whatever name you give it, I believe this strange being exists," said Wang Shancai of the Hubei Wild-men Investigation Institute. The yeren became China's own Bigfoot, drawing documentaries and an episode of Finding Bigfoot. And it all traces back to one jeep, one pass and a red-haired figure in the headlights.