The Pangboche Hand: a Yeti Finger in James Stewart's Luggage

In the Nepalese village of Pangboche, the monastery kept a strange treasure. Legend said Lama Sangwa Dorje meditated in a cave, and a yeti became his disciple. When the yeti died, the lama kept its hand and scalp as relics. They were paraded through the village as a fertility ritual. The lamas believed that removing the hand would bring disaster.

In 1957 the Texas oil heir Tom Slick heard of the "Yeti hand". He was funding the Slick-Johnson expeditions with F. Kirk Johnson. Loren Coleman calls the actor James Stewart a "hidden partner" in them.

1958. Peter Byrne, an Irish-born explorer and big-game guide on Slick's expedition, was shown the hand and skullcap. He photographed it. The lamas would not part with it. Byrne says he negotiated permission to take one finger, if he left a replacement and made a donation to the temple.

Slick sent him to London. Over lunch at Regent's Park Zoo, the primatologist W. C. Osman Hill produced a dried human hand. Byrne carried it back to Pangboche with about 10,000 rupees and swapped the index finger. Other versions say the finger was simply taken, or that the monks were made drunk.

Byrne smuggled the bones from Nepal into India. He had planned to take the finger out himself, but Slick told him to go to Calcutta instead. The Stewarts were in India on a tiger hunt. December 1958. At the Grand Hotel, the finger was hidden in Gloria Stewart's lingerie case.

In London the airline lost one bag, and it was that case. A few days later a customs officer brought it back to their hotel. Gloria asked whether it had been opened. The officer assured her they would never search a lady's undergarments. The finger went on to Osman Hill.

Osman Hill at first judged the fragments "hominid", and in 1960 he placed them closer to Neanderthal. That year Sir Edmund Hillary and Marlin Perkins examined the hand and judged it a hoax. They did not know it now mixed original material with the human bones Byrne had put in. In 1991 Unsolved Mysteries tested samples kept by the anthropologist George Agogino, which were called "near human" but not human. After the broadcast, the whole hand was stolen from the monastery.

Osman Hill had left his collection to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1975. In 2008 curators at the Hunterian Museum found a box. His notes identified the finger as a yeti finger from Pangboche. On 27 December 2011 came the DNA result from the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, and the finger was human. "Human was what we were expecting and human is what we got," said Dr Rob Ogden.

Benjamin Radford suggested it came "perhaps from the corpse of a monk. But definitely human." The smuggling itself rests largely on Byrne's word. Loren Coleman says he confirmed it from the Slick archives, interviews with Byrne and correspondence with Stewart. He advised on the 1991 segment and argued, without success, that Stewart's role should be included.

The case is now studied as trafficked cultural material, removed against its owners' wishes. In 2010 Wētā Workshop made a replica hand and skull for the monastery. It was delivered in May 2011. Mike Allsop, an Air New Zealand pilot and Everest climber, runs the Return the Hand campaign. It asks for the originals to be returned, no questions asked.