The Big Book of Mysteries. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

of phenomena which were not vulnerable to explanation in mechanistic terms. Vitalists were interested in studying the psychic powers of human beings and uncanny powers in animals — such as the apparent sixth sense of the Sasquatch.

      A report from Union Town in Pennsylvania, published in a paper by Stan Gordon for the 1974 UFO Symposium, tells the story of a woman who was sitting at home watching television, when she heard a strange noise coming from her front porch and got up to investigate. Thinking that something dangerous might be out there, she picked up a loaded shotgun first. As she turned on the porch light and stepped out to look, she saw a creature she described as seven feet tall and covered in hair, less than two metres away. She said that it raised its arms above its head, and, thinking it was about to attack, she fired one shot into its body at point blank range. There was a flash of light and the thing simply vanished: no blood, no carcass, no sign of anything.

      PARANORMAL ABILITIES

      J.W. Burns worked for many years as a teacher among the indigenous Chehalis people of Harrison River, close to Harrison Hot Springs. From his Chehalis friends he heard many accounts of the Sasquatch, not as huge, ape-like semi-humans, but as a magically gifted giant race that had clothes, fire, weapons, and basic technology, and lived in villages. They also had paranormal abilities.

      It may be unkind to suggest that perhaps mechanists are mechanists because they are afraid of vitalism and its implications, but it often seems as though they are. As Dr. Sheldrake argues again, for them to admit the reality of anything mysterious or mystical in life would mean abandoning their faith in the hard won certainties of science.

      Some embarrassing phenomena are then either attacked or ignored, not because they are unorthodox, illogical, fallacious or ridiculous, but simply because they don’t conform to the comforting mechanistic theory which sets out to explain the universe and all it contains.

      Sheldrake maintains that a broader alternative to the mechanistic theory of life has grown up in the form of a holistic or organismic philosophy of nature. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Nature is made up of organisms not machines.

      Against this more liberal philosophical-biological background, the Sasquatch and his Himalayan cousin the Yeti, have much more opportunity of emerging into the light.

      An amazing encounter was reported by nineteen-year-old Lakpa Sherpani in 1974. She said that her yak herd was attacked by a short but immensely powerful yeti, which killed five of them by twisting their horns and then knocked her unconscious. The incident occurred at an altitude of approximately 4.3 kilometres in the vicinity of Mount Everest.

      In 1957, Professor V.K. Leontiev was in the Caucasus Mountains near the source of the River Jurmut, when he saw strange tracks in the snow. That night he heard inexplicable sounds, and saw a weird, unknown creature the following day. He described it as over seven feet tall and very broad. The body was covered in hair and it walked upright, not touching the ground with its hands. The professor referred to it as a Kaptar, the name by which it was known locally. He examined its footprints carefully after it had gone, and described them as unlike the prints of any animal he had ever come across previously.

      In July of 1924 a party of miners was attacked by a group of Sasquatch in the Mount St. Helen’s/Lewis River district in Washington State. The miners had heard strange, frightening sounds for over a week before the Sasquatch actually attacked them. They saw a weird, seven-foot-tall creature and fired at it, then ran to their cabin and barricaded themselves in. All through the night the Sasquatch hurled rocks at the cabin and attempted to break in the door — despite their massive strength, it held. Press men from the Portland Oregonian came to investigate and found giant footprints all around the miners’ cabin. After the attack, the place was renamed Ape Canyon — a name by which it is still known today.

      Artist’s impression of Sasquatch or Yeti, based on witnesses’ reports.

      Ivan Wally of Vancouver was driving his pickup along the Trans-Canada Highway above the River Thompson, five or six kilometres east of Lytton. It was the evening of November 20, 1969. As his vehicle climbed the hill he saw a creature ahead of him on the road. It was approximately seven feet tall; the legs looked long in proportion to the body, and Ivan guessed that it probably weighed more than 136 kilograms. The creature had short greyish-brown hair all over it. As the truck approached, the creature turned to look at it, and raised both arms.

      Ivan said later that its face reminded him of a wizened old man. Something about the thing sent Ivan’s dog — which was on the seat beside him — half crazy with either fear or anger, maybe a combination of both. At that point the creature loped away on its long legs. Ivan turned around and drove back to Lytton where he reported the incident to the RCMP, who took him seriously and searched for footprints. Unfortunately, the roadside gravel was not conducive to taking impressions, and they found none.

      Volumes could easily be filled with similar incidents: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sensible, truthful and reliable witnesses from Canada, the United States, Tibet, Nepal, China, and Russia have reported sighting after sighting of strange creatures resembling very large men, covered with hair. So what might they be? A significant number of the reports suggest that there is something paranormal about them. Are they simply some unknown but perfectly normal and natural anthropoid? If so, why do we never find their bodies? Perhaps they bury their dead. Perhaps they go off to find a lonely and desolate place — maybe a hidden mountain cave — where they can die with dignity, privacy and secrecy when they feel that their end is near. The strangest theory of all is that they enjoy enormous longevity.

      In the Hunza valley, high in the Himalayas, the normal human inhabitants enjoy exceptionally good health and extremely long lifespans — possibly attributable to their pollution free air and a diet rich in apricots and apricot oil. If the Sasquatch and Yeti and their cousins around the world’s other mountain ranges also benefit from the pollution free air available at those altitudes, perhaps their life-spans are many times ours.

      Some researchers suggest that they may have had an extraterrestrial origin: the jury’s still out on that one.

      It seems highly unlikely that the Sasquatch and his close relatives are merely myth, legend, hoax or imagination. There have been so many reports of these enigmatical hairy giants that there simply has to be someone or something up there in the mountains — the great unsolved mystery is what.

      PROF OF THE YETI?

      Joshua Gates, a television presenter, came across what seemed to be Yeti footprints in Nepal, not far from Mount Everest, in 2007. Each print was well over thirty centimetres long. The prints had five toes and measured about twenty-five centimetres in width. Casts were taken, and when these were examined by university experts in the United States they were thought to be too anatomically accurate to be fakes. Gates’s team also found mysterious hairs on a high-altitude tree. When these were examined, it was concluded that they belonged to a hitherto unknown primate of some kind. In 2008, Japanese researchers led by Yoshiteru Takahashi photographed what looked very much like Yeti prints.

3 BIBLICAL MYSTERIES

      The books of the Bible introduce a host of mysteries to humankind, and man has for centuries attempted to translate and understand the stories told within its spiritual prose. What better place to start than in the beginning.…

      The book of Genesis gives an account of the Garden of Eden that suggests a realistic description of an actual historical and geographical location — a real, solid, physical place, rather than the colourful dream landscape of myth or legend. George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien all had the gift of creating imaginary landscapes that possess uncanny realism — as if they had visited the actual locations.

      By contrast, the biblical description of Eden seems to possess a sturdy, time-defying realism, a sense of historical and geographical actuality, which makes the quest for it well worth pursuing.

      The