Introduces the yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, recounts sightings throughout history, and considers the reliability of the evidence advanced as proof of its existence.

What leads us to believe in monsters? What happens when we meet the brutal creatures of our nightmares?

Looks at the legendary creature said to inhabit the Himalaya Mountains, including the history of its sightings, and the inconclusive evidence that has been offered to prove its existence.

Climbing solo in Eastern Tibet in 1986, Reinhold Messner confronted . . . something. Since that moment, he has been obsessed with what the Western media has called the "abominable snowman". Widely considered the greatest living mountain climber, Messner had found his greatest challenge--to solve the age old mystery of the yeti. Photos.

As it turned out, young Daniel never outgrew the enchantment of the mysterious Yeti, the Abominable Snowman. His search for the enigmatic creature of Himalayan legends spread over many decades: from 1956 until 2015, Daniel C. Taylor visited almost all valley systems in his quest to explain the ‘Yeti’s footprints’. But to his surprise, solving the footprint mystery did not answer the Yeti question. As his quest evolved, Taylor went on to create two massive national parks around Mount Everest. Equipped with abundant knowledge of the Himalaya, Taylor tells a story that is captivating and full of surprises. He looks back at his exploration of the 2,000-mile-wide Himalaya and talks about bioresilience as a parallel dynamic to biodiversity, thus widening the scope of our understanding of ecology. Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery is the extraordinary story of one man’s conservation impact and what it means for people to be part of the wild in today’s increasingly tamed world.

Presents arguments for and against the existence of five notable cryptids and challenges the pseudoscience that furthers their legendary statuses, while providing an exploration of the nature and subculture of cryptozoology.

This book attempts to come to grips with a set of widely ranging but connected problems concerning myths: their relation to folktales on the one hand, to rituals on the other; the validity and scope of the structuralist theory of myth; the range of possible mythical functions; the effects of developed social institutions and literacy; the character and meaning of ancient Near-Eastern myths and their influence on Greece; the special forms taken by Greek myths and their involvement with rational modes of thought; the status of myths as expressions of the unconscious, as allied with dreams, as universal symbols, or as accidents of primarily narrative aims. Almost none of these problems has been convincingly handled, even in a provisional way, up to the present, and this failure has vitiated not only such few general discussions as exist of the nature, meanings and functions of myths but also, in many cases, the detailed assessment of individual myths of different cultures. The need for a coherent treatment of these and related problems, and one that is not concerned simply to propagate a particular universalistic theory, seems undeniable. How far the present book will satisfactorily fill such a need remains to be seen. At least it makes a beginning, even if in doing so it risks the criticism of being neither fish nor fowl. Sociologists and folklorists may find it, from their specialized viewpoints, a little simplistic in places; and a few classical colleagues will not forgive me for straying far beyond Greek myths, even though these can hardly be understood in isolation or solely in the light of studies in cult and ritual. Others may find it less easy than anthropologists, sociologists, historians of thought or students of French and English literature to accept the relevance of Levi-Strauss to some of these matters; but his theory contains the one important new idea in this field since Freud, it is complicated and largely untested, and it demands careful attention from anyone attempting a broad understanding of the subject. The beliefs of Freud and Jung, on the other hand, are a more familiar element in the situation and have given rise to an enormous secondary literature, much of it arbitrary and some of it absurd. The author has tried to isolate the crucial ideas and subject them to a pointed, if too brief, critique; so too with those of Ernst Cassirer.