Pang Gensheng meets a "hairy man" in the Taibai mountains, Zhouzhi County, Shaanxi

In 1976 and 1977, the mountains of central China were full of talk about the yeren. The wildman. In Shaanxi, the Shaanxi Biological Resources Investigation team interviewed hundreds of people, according to the archaeologist Myra Shackley. Searches with local militia and commune members found nothing definite. What the team did collect was testimony. The descriptions were strikingly standardised.

One statement came from Pang Gensheng. He was 33, a team leader from Cuifeng commune in Zhouzhi County. Two members of the team, Wu Jiayan and Niu Yong, wrote down what he told them.

Early June 1977. Pang went to Dadi Gully, in the Taibai mountains, to cut logs. Here Mount Taibai rises as the highest point in the Qinling and in Shaanxi. Pang came face to face with something shaped like a man. "He was about seven feet tall," he said, with shoulders wider than a man's. The forehead sloped. The eyes were deep set. Dark brown hair, more than a foot long, hung loosely over the shoulders.

Then it came closer. It "came up to seven or eight feet, and then to about five feet from me." Pang kept backing away "until my back was against a stone cliff." There was nowhere left to go. "Then I groped for a stone and threw it at him. It hit him in the chest."

Janet and Colin Bord, writing in The Unexplained, added that short hair covered the body and face, and that the eyes were deep-set and black. "His long arms reached below his knees, and he walked upright with his legs wide apart."

Other retellings strayed further. On 15 June 1981 the British magazine Weekend ran the story as "Hairy Encounter". The witness became "Pong Ke-Shem". The creature grew to "a good 10' tall". The stone struck its leg. And now, "instead of rushing at me it up rooted a small tree and, using it as a walking stick, limped away!" Shackley called it a "bastardised" version, and "a splendid example of the way a story can be distorted in the reporting".

Even the height needs care. The seven feet were Chinese feet. Shackley noted a Chinese foot as 73 cm, which would make the figure impossibly tall. The standard Chinese foot is about a third of a metre. Seven of them come to roughly 2.3 metres. Very tall. But believable.

No one has accused Pang of inventing his story. The doubts belong to the wider yeren mystery. Mainstream science does not treat the wildman as real. Sceptics point to misidentified bears, macaques, gibbons and monkeys, and to embellished tales. Samples from other cases traced back to bears, macaques, goral, serow and humans. That same year a separate Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition, led by Zhou Guoxing, searched Shennongjia in Hubei with soldiers, zoologists and photographers. It found no convincing evidence. The two stories are often confused.

Shackley printed Pang's statement in Wildmen: Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma in 1983. She offered it not as the strangest account, but as a typical one. Reviewing the book in Nature, Erik Trinkaus described its author as already convinced that wildmen exist, though his criticism was aimed at her Mongolian chapter.

No photograph exists. No footprint was cast. What remains is one man's memory. A cliff at his back. A stone in his hand. And a hairy figure five feet away.