Slick Expedition "Yeti Feces", Nepal (1959)

Tom Slick wanted to find the abominable snowman. He described the Yeti as "a fierce and hairy ape-man, at least eight feet tall." With F. Kirk Johnson and the San Antonio Zoological Society, he sponsored a run of expeditions into eastern Nepal at the end of the 1950s.

The U.S. government was watching. A U.S. Embassy New Delhi dispatch dated 16 April 1959 noted that "American resources in the last two years have been concentrated on efforts to capture the abominable snowman." American teams had rules to follow. They needed a Nepalese permit, could harm the Yeti only in self-defence, and had to let the Nepalese government approve news of any find.

1959. The Tom Slick-F. Kirk Johnson Snowman Expedition was in the field. Slick himself was not. After a knee injury in a bus accident, he no longer took part in the field work. Peter Byrne was there.

From that expedition came a sample of droppings. The International Cryptozoology Museum labels it "Fecal matter from a small Yeti." No source names who collected it. No record describes anyone seeing the animal that left it.

The word "small" may echo the expedition's own thinking. Reporting on the 1958 effort, Norman G. Dyhrenfurth suggested there were probably two kinds of Yeti. One was a small forest type living at about 8,000 to 12,000 ft. The other was larger, 6 to 8 ft tall, in higher terrain. In 1958, near the Cepua checkpost, Sherpa Da Temba and a local man reported a small creature, possibly a young Yeti about 4 ft 6 in tall, catching frogs in a stream at night.

Then came the claim that made the sample famous. According to Loren Coleman, Slick's biographer, "fecal analysis found a parasite which could not be classified." Coleman later spoke of "unknown parasite eggs that would match an unknown primate." One newspaper recalled that "Slick emphasized to reporters that it was unknown because the creature the parasite came from was unknown."

A line attributed to Bernard Heuvelmans takes the logic one step further. "Since each animal has its own parasites, this indicated that the host animal is equally an unknown animal."

The trouble is the paper trail. No lab report has been published, no analyst is named and no parasite species is given. Sources disagree on the year, 1957 or 1959, and one places Slick's return in Tibet. Wikipedia flags the parasite line "citation needed." Every version leads back to Coleman, or to writers repeating him.

Related relics from the same era have not fared well. Hillary and Marlin Perkins judged the Pangboche hand a hoax in 1960, and a 2011 Edinburgh test of a Pangboche finger found human DNA. Later studies matched other Himalayan "Yeti" samples to bears and a serow. Even Coleman, speaking of three hairs from the 1959 expedition sent to Oxford for DNA testing in 2013, said: "I'm thinking it will come back some common animal."

The sample survives. It is displayed at the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, which Coleman founded. The museum says it has appeared on In Search Of, MonsterQuest and Mysteries at the Museum. The parasite remains unnamed. So does the animal.