I’m going to tell you this man’s credentials before I tell you the incredible thing he told me one day in Bangkok back in 1965.

   He knew people as a scholarly subject and in the real world. The Siam Society published his monograph in 1962: “The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand.” A Caucasian American, spoke Thai and Chinese perfectly (he was born in Yunnan, China, in 1927), and he was fluent in 5 hill tribe languages—Akha, Shan, Wa, Karen, and Lahu. In fact, he spoke Lahu before he learned English. And he went to school in America. So he knew people.

   He also knew animals, both as scholarly subjects and in the wild. From California State Polytechnic College, he got a degree in Animal Husbandry. He published scientific articles about various animals, especially snakes (which is why I met him), and Edward H. Taylor (whom my chapter in The Science Club calls “the God of Herpetology”) named various new species of reptiles and amphibians after him. Plus (check this out): this guy was the only Caucasian ever to achieve the rank of “Supreme Hunter.”

   That’s a Lahu title that’s given to anyone maybe only once in a generation. To earn it, you have to kill one each of “the seven killer animals,” and each one has to meet these three criteria: it must have killed a human being; it must be a male; and it must be charging you—no ambushes, no back-shots, to take down the seven: king cobra, tiger, leopard, elephant, boar, bear, and gaur. An enormous forest buffalo (2.2 m. at the shoulder), the gaur instinctively hates man so intensely that after goring a person to death, the gaur will crack off its own horns against a tree to get rid of the human smell, this man said.

   So he knew both people and animals.

   And this is what he told me: he had seen four yetis.

   Yes, yetis.

   He said the four were a male and a female of two different species. The smaller couple, covered with reddish hair, stood about 1.67 m. (In comparison, the biggest gorillas can reach 1.8 m.) The far larger male and female yetis—2.4 m. tall—had grayish hair. In both sightings, he was high in a tree looking down at the creatures from about 15 m. away.

   Oops, forgot to tell you who he was: Oliver Gordon Young (the jungle expert I mentioned in my “The Mother From Hell” blog, who told me, “Here’s the treatment if a king cobra bites you: lay down, so you’ll be comfortable when you die”). He worked for the US Foreign Aid program. He didn’t like his first name, so everyone called him Gordon Young. He grew up in the jungle because his grandfather, William M. Young, had been sent to Northeast Burma as a Baptist missionary in 1898. Gordon’s father, Harold, was born in Kengtung, Burma. I met Harold in Chiangmai, and laughed myself silly when he told me that he had tried diligently to convert the hill tribes to Christianity, but they ended up converting him to Animism.

   Anyway, Gordon as a teen would trek off into the jungle with nothing but his 30.06 rifle and 6 cartridges. (He told me, “If you need more than six bullets, you don’t belong in the jungle.”) Sometimes he’d be gone for two or three months before anyone saw him again. It was on one of these treks that he saw the yetis, first the red ones in one valley, and the gray ones a week later in the adjacent valley.

   He assured me that the widespread notion of yetis living high in the Himalayas—the “abominable snowman”—was silly. I remember him smiling as he said, “What would they eat up there—snow cones?” He said, sure, the big gray ones have been sighted high in the Himalayas; but their habitat is deep jungle in the mountains of Thailand and Burma (which in fact are foothills of the Himalayas), and in those jungles, he said, there’s plenty of food and, much more importantly, perfect isolation from the modern world.

   So were the creatures men or beasts? Both species had “gorilla-like faces” and sagittal crests (a bone crest that runs lengthwise along the top of the skull), Gordon said. But their bodies were humanoid rather than pongoid (ape-like), with proportionately longer legs and shorter arms. While a gorilla’s arms are as long as its legs, its hands reaching halfway down the tibia (shin bone), the yetis’ arms were much shorter, reaching halfway down the femur (thigh bone), like ours do. Gordon said that none of them knuckle-walked, they all strode, bipedally.

   He remained sniper-still in his tree perch for 3 days and 2 nights to observe the red two before they moved off, and 2 days and 1 night to observe the gray two, who walked off and didn’t return at dusk on the second day.

   Man or beast? He said that they all seemed to be folivores (leaf-eaters), like apes. But he watched them build homes. They tied head-high grasses together at the top to form an onion-shaped structure, then hollowed out the inside. He also listened to them communicating with each other in grunts and coos and cough-like sounds, but he told me that he couldn’t say with certainty that for either species it was a true language.

   Man or beast? That question remains unanswered. But for me, considering the source, this is a fact: they are not myth.

   Why didn’t Gordon Young document his find, spread the world-rocking news? Because he really did understand animals and people, and he knew that contact with the modern world would destroy the creatures.

   His memoirs about his amazing experiences with amazing animals in the jungles of Thailand and Burma was published in England by Souvenir Press in 1967: Tracks of an Intruder.