On the Trail of the Ukrainian Yeti
17 February 1998
Interplanetary Bigfoot Leaves Tracks in Rivne Oblast?
The size of footprints is amazing: 82 by 26 centimeters. All told, there are 18 footprints, 1.5 meters apart. An interesting detail: the footprints resemble the tracks of boots but without soles, and they start abruptly as if the unknown creature came straight down from the sky. Their depth is amazing, reaching 3-4 centimeters in the dirt road.
First to discover this mysterious phenomenon, much talked about in Sarny district and others nearby, was an old man from the hamlet of Klesiv, Mykola Mikosianchyk. Driving to go fishing, in a forest six kilometers from the village of Rudnia-Karpylivska, he stopped and right in front of him espied gigantic human footprints.
Deciding this was a bad omen, Mykola turned his car around and went home. Many of his neighbors refused to believe his tale about the strange footprints. Only later, when the place became sort of a Lilliputian Mecca, being visited not only by the curious but also by representatives of the local authorities, teachers, and foresters, the doubts gradually began to dissipate. At this very moment, many inhabitants of nearby villages also began to recall that they had also seen similar footprints earlier. And only recently there was a mysterious luminescence and shimmer above the locality, something like a UFO…
After a twenty-minute ride on a bad forest road soaked from rain and snow, we stopped our car at the distance of five or six kilometers from the village Rudnia-Karpylivska. The lumberjacks from the Klesiv Forest were our the guides, and whenever the car got stuck we all had to get out and push.
“We’ve arrived,” says the oldest woodcutter, Oleksandr Vyshevsky. “You see, these sections on the road are fenced around with poles and covered with pine branches. These are the footprints of a giant. A few days ago the rain washed them away a little, but the main contours still remain.
The size of footprints is amazing: 82 by 26 cm. All told, there are 18 footprints, 1.5 meters apart. An interesting detail: the footprints resemble the tracks of boots but without soles, and they start abruptly as if the unknown creature came straight down from the sky. They cross the road at an angle, then disappear. Their depth is amazing, reaching 3-4 centimeters in the dirt road. Lumberjacks weighing eighty kilograms jumped up and down with all their weight, and they didn’t seem to leave any imprint at all. On the sides of the road, where the “alien” left his footprints, they were much deeper.
“Whether you want to agree with me or not, I think there were some kind of supernatural forces here,” Oleksandr says after a brief pause. “How on earth could these tracks get here? They couldn’t by themselves. It can’t be just human fantasy. And no human being could do anything like this. It would have had to weigh several tons to press the ground like this.”
One of the authors of these lines had remembered that during his first visit to Rudnia he had been told about a peasant who had also seen similar footprints near Lake Somyne. But the reaction of his neighbors was virtually unanimous: invention and nonsense. Now those who have visited the place don’t call it nonsense anymore, at least not within earshot. They also say that one inhabitant of Karpylivka could not sleep at night after he had seen it.
It is unlikely that science will be able to explain all this. Evidence of the snowman and traces of his activities have been discovered in many parts of the world. In various countries this mythical human-like creature has various names: the abominable snowman, yeti, and in North America and China a shaggy inhabitant of almost inaccessible regions is called a bigfoot. Scientists think this creature a type of hominid relic, a primitive humanoid ancestor of homo sapiens that has not changed for millions of years. According to the foreign press, there is a society of believers in the bigfoot in Portland, Oregon, which has over 250 members across the USA. The society has three versions about his origin: a pre-human man “conserved” from an earlier stage of human evolution, an extraterrestrial being, and an animal unknown to science. Just in case, there is a law in the Scamania (Washington) which prohibits killing a bigfoot and provides for a fine of $10,000 for so doing.
Last October at an international conference in Moscow zoologists discussed hypotheses about the snowman. The chair of the seminar on problems of hominidology Yuri Bayanov noted that mentions in folklore and mythology are themselves evidence of its existence. And some explain the elusiveness of the snowman by its having telepathic and even teleportation capabilities (Argumenty i fakty Ukrainy, No. 49). There are also other hypotheses which consider this creature as anomaly like a UFO or poltergeist: it can be observed only in the places of intensified penetrability of dimensional gateways. Even if there is no present explanation for the enigma, we need not make fun of it and refuse even to discuss it. Rivne
Photo: The snowman’s 82 centimeter footprint
Drawing by Anatoly Kazansky:
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