Peter Byrne's First Yeti Footprint

Peter Cyril Byrne was born in Dublin on 22 August 1925. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1943 and served on the Cocos Islands in the East Indian Ocean. After the war, by most accounts, he became a tea planter in northeast India.

The mountains already had a reputation. In 1925 the Tombazi sighting was reported at about 15,000 feet. In 1937 footprints were found at the Zemu Gap. Byrne was drawn in. As Greg Long wrote in 1996, "Curiosity got the better of him, and soon Byrne was hiking into the mountains, looking for tracks."

1948. The year is all anyone recorded. No month, no day. Wikipedia's Yeti article, citing McLeod's Anatomy of a Beast, says Byrne "reported finding a yeti footprint in 1948, in northern Sikkim, near the Zemu Glacier," while "on holiday from a Royal Air Force assignment in India." The Zemu is a glacier about 26 kilometres long at the base of Kangchenjunga.

Other accounts tell it differently. His IMDb biography says he "discovered his first yeti footprint in Nepal in 1948." Himalayan Nature describes "a 1948 exploration in Nepal" and his "first set of Yeti footprints." Long wrote only that he "found unexplained footprints in British Sikkim (between Bhutan and Nepal)."

One print, or a set. Sikkim, or Nepal. On leave from the RAF, or already working in tea. The record does not settle it.

Byrne never claimed to have seen the animal. Over some 50 years, he said in 2019, he found "two or three sets of possible Yeti footprints," with "five toes on each foot," at "altitudes of 15,000 feet." Asked whether he had ever seen a Yeti, he answered: "No, no … I'd love to see one."

The footprint opened a career. Byrne went on to lead Tom Slick's Himalayan Yeti work, from the 1957 Arun River reconnaissance to the expeditions of 1958 and 1959. That era brought the Pangboche Hand episode, in which he took a finger and left a replacement. From 1960 he ran Slick funded Bigfoot work, then the Bigfoot Information Center in The Dalles, Oregon, and in the 1990s the Bigfoot Research Project. In 1976 he sent hair to the FBI, and the answer came back: "the hairs are of a deer family origin."

The most striking doubt came from Byrne himself. In 2019 he said the prints "could have been left by Hindu holy men, or sadhus." He had seen them "walking barefoot in the snows at such heights." Critics of Himalayan tracks in general point to snowmelt enlarging ordinary animal prints, and to bears or people.

His reputation drew fire as well. Fellow researchers René Dahinden and John Green later called him a fraud, and in 2013 he pleaded guilty to benefits fraud. No one, though, has alleged that the 1948 print itself was faked.

Byrne died in Tillamook, Oregon, on 28 July 2023. A fellowship fund at Himalayan Nature carries his name. His first footprint survives only as a line in biographies that cannot agree where it was. Yet that is where his search began.