By: Melissa Harsh - Team Tracker Member
I recently came across a photo that has apparently been around for years, yet I have never seen it until now. I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about it. What was I looking at? Where did it come from? Who took it? I wanted to find out, not just for me, but for others who had never seen the photo, or who had but didn't know the back story either.
This is the photo I saw
and here are the other shots
I started digging, searching around the internet, and finally found some information. The picture is of a supposed Sasquatch/Yeti that was killed in an avalanche somewhere in Tibet, (or Europe, depending on who's doing the telling) and then found it's way to a fair in France, where it was displayed on ice in 1997. It was known as "The Yeti of Bourganeuf", named after the town in France where the fair took
place.
An investigator named Christian Le Noel saw the display and wanted to find out more about it. He was told, by the man displaying the Yeti, that Tibetan Monks found it in an avalanche, and that they then had to hide the body in a well from the Chinese Army. Apparently the army found it anyway, and quickly took possesion of it. The Army later decided to display the body, for a time, in Shanghai.
Noel was then told that after Shanghai, the body somehow made its way to East Germany, where it was part of a state run fair. The fair eventually went bankrupt after the collapse of the communist bloc. After that the body traveled from Germany to France, where Noel would see it and begin his investigation.
When Noel pressed for more information, asking to possibly talk to others who had possession of the creature, he was told that because the body was so similar to a human's that whoever owned it, or even came in contact with it, would refuse to talk to him, afraid of the legal consequences. Or at the very least, bad luck.
After pressing even further, Noel was dismayed to find that both the body and its owner had disappeared. And that was the end of the story until over a year later, when a man came forward to the journal "Cryptozoologia" saying he was the sculpter of the corpse in question.
The “Yeti de Bourganeuf”, trickery was admitted by the creator, done to honor Bernard Heuvelmans and his dealing with the Minnesota Iceman. It is a sculpture by artist Emannuel Casteels Janssen, and was manufactured to showcase Janssen’s skill.
My friend and associate from France, Michel Raynal wrote of this:
In 1997, what looked like a new version of the affair of the frozen man (this cadaver of a frozen hairy man shown in the US fairs, which Bernard Heuvelmans was able
to study in 1968) occurred… in France ! It was indeed a hoax, and amusingly, our Belgish friends of the ABEPAR (which publishes the journal Cryptozoologia) are (involuntarily) responsible.
Emmanuel Casteels Janssen, animal sculptor and a collaborator of the magazine, relates in the June to August 1998 issue of Cryptozoologia that two friends of his, have helped people who wanted to make a giant copy of Bernard Heuvelmans’s frozen man: "In fact, it was a sculpture made with sponge rubber on which hairs of horse tail have been pasted. The eyes have been simply bought from a provider specialized in taxidermy."
So, the intriguing photo also has an exciting history, one of course steeped in trickery. That is
exactly what I'd expected to find. After all, anyone can hoax a Bigfoot photo, but it takes an artist to make a
good fake. And an artist to come up with a detailed back story. And because of the quality there are
still people who believe this story is real and these photographs genuine.
Editor's Note:
This story whether true or false, based on this account, now resides in the fictional section of History, myth and folklore along with the likes of "the Minnesota Iceman", (which surprisingly, this year, has re-surfaced again, although a fake) and "Patty" from the famous "Patterson/Gimlin Film" (still not officially decided one way or the other but with more evidence leading to it all being a hoax) just to mention a few.
Some of these and other similar accounts may have started out as being true but over the years have now become listed as a hoax, myth or urban legend. There is one story that started out as a hoax but over the years, it has ended with a true encounter. On September 06, 2012, in San Antonio, TX, a man by the name of Rick Dyer did track, shoot and kill a Bigfoot which frequented the encampment of some homeless people in that area and was successful in retaining the body for scientific study.
Please go to the following websites to get the full story of what happened and details about the Bigfoot that was shot"
bigfoottracker.com
bigfoottoday.com
Also you can pre-order the DVD's "After The Shot" which shows the recovery and transport of the creature to the facility where it was studied for the past year and "BIGFOOT - The Autopsy", the complete autopsy performed by the scientists. See and learn about their anatomy. See the website for more details.
