What do a Texas oil tycoon, a beloved comedic actor, and a mytho-historical cryptid all have in common?
A connection to a mysterious artifact – a mummified hand once kept in the reliquary of a remote Buddhist monastery.
The cryptid used to be connected to it, at least.
Read on to see what I mean.
For years the Pangboche monks displayed the supposed yeti relics to visitors of the monastery, conveniently located along a trekking trail toward Mount Everest in the Himalayas, in relative peace.
That all changed in 1957. Slick, a Texas oilman, arrived in Nepal, ready to spare no expense to fund a reconnaissance expedition to hunt for the mythical abominable snowman in Nepal. The quest failed, but Slick, injured while on the hunt, commissioned two guides, brothers Peter and Bryan Byrne, to continue his search.
When your name is Tom Slick, you have no choice but to become an oilman. Just sayin’.
Later that year, Peter Byrne discovered that the monks of the Pangboche monastery in a Nepalese valley claimed to hold a yeti skull top and hand. On Slick’s orders, and after much debate by the monks, Byrne negotiated to obtain a single finger from the hand, in exchange for a relatively significant fee toward the temple’s upkeep and a replacement human finger.
“We made a donation of ten thousand rupees to the temple — only about $160.00 in today’s rate of exchange, but a large amount for a community where the average income might be as little as $15 in a year — and the lamas then gave me a go ahead to take one finger and replace it with another […] from the human hand I had brought back from London,” wrote Byrne, in a letter to Allsop.
Wait. Where did he get a human hand. In London. On such short notice?
The 50s were a simpler, freer age, indeed.
By the way, keep that finger in mind. It’ll be important later.
Byrne was not the first Westerner to see the supposed yeti remains. As early as 1953, a group of Indian mountaineers and an Austrian and British scientist viewed and measured the yeti scalp, although none of them mentioned the hand. The relics, it seemed, provided a source of income for the centuries-old temple since they were viewed as sacred relics by local worshippers and because the monks would allow visitors to photograph the bones for a fee.
But Byrne had left, as Sir Edmund Hillary might say, left the job rather half done. Getting the relic fragment was one thing. Taking a holy object of incredible cultural significance across international borders would prove more difficult.
What did Byrne do?
He improvised.
And this case of high strangeness got even stranger.
Byrne smuggled the finger and some skin from the hand across the Nepalese border into India, where he made a rendez-vous in Calcutta with American movie star Jimmy Stewart and his wife Gloria.
That’s right.
Byrne gave Jimmy Stewart the finger.
The famous couple agreed to smuggle the finger into the United Kingdom for research by Slick’s friend and primatologist Osman Hill of the Zoological Society of London, which they did by hiding it within Gloria Stewart’s undergarments in her luggage.
Wrote Byrne in his letter: “Then, three days later, the hotel’s concierge called from reception to say that there was a British customs officer in the hotel lobby asking to see them […] and could he send him up. They said yes, of course and a few minutes later a young British customs official appeared at the door [o]f their suite, Gloria’s lingerie case in hand. They gave the man a cup of tea, had a pleasant chat and signed a receipt for the case which, Gloria noticed, was locked and had not been opened. Ushering the young man out the door, she pointed this out to him and asked why it not been opened and examined by Customs. ‘Oh madame,’ said the young man, ‘certainly not. A British customs official would never open a ladies lingerie case’.”
To recap, as recently as the 1950s, you could fast-talk some monks out of a Yeti finger, replace it with a human one express shipped from London, and smuggle said relic out of the continent in your wife’s drawers. Because no government official would countenance rifling through a lady’s unmentionables.
Never forget what they took from us.
Speaking of which, the Yeti hand later went missing.
But not before Sir Edmund inspected it and declared it a fake.
One slight problem with that analysis …
Several years later, the publisher of World Book Encyclopedia commissioned an expedition into the Himalayas, led by the famed Everest co-conqueror Edmund Hillary. Hillary proposed a hunt to discover if the yeti was myth or monster. The expedition set out in late 1960, and while it failed to find evidence of the yeti, Hillary methodically debunked the supposed yeti bones he found in Nepal, including the bones of Pangboche – which now included a human finger crudely wired into place, courtesy of Byrne in 1958.
Emphasis mine. Because it’s hilarious.
The world is convinced the Pangboche hand is a fake based on Hillary’s word. But there’s a good chance we have a Shroud of Turin situation here, wherein Hillary examined a patch that wasn’t part of the original relic.
Slick’s lab guys tested a skin sample retrieved by Byrne. They couldn’t match it to any known animal.
An American TV show repeated that analysis in 1991 and came up with the same result.
One zoologist who did test the original finger smuggled by Byrne originally declared it human before walking it back later.
The finger bone he analyzed also went missing. According to the official lore, it turned up decades later in the Royal College of Surgeons’ museum. In 2011, the BBC subjected the bone to DNA testing, which came back human.
Here’s the thing, though.
Skeptics are always going on about quality and purity of evidence.
If a lab sample is out of sight for five minutes, they’ll scream lab tampering.
By the same measure, the chain of custody for Byrne’s finger is sketchy at best.
Assuming the monks themselves didn’t pull a well-intentioned fast one, and then that Byrne kept his eye on the finger the whole time he was in Nepal, we still have the wrinkle of Gloria Stewart’s underpants.
British Customs had her lingerie case for three days. We only have the fact that it was still locked, and the customs agent’s word, that it wasn’t searched.
A luggage lock is not going to pose an obstacle for government spooks. Under most circumstances, neither is privacy.
Finger bones seemed to have grown on trees back then. So who’s to say the Nepalese government didn’t contact the Brits asking for their relic back, and wanting to maintain goodwill – remember, this was back in the golden age of Himalayan alpinism – while not wanting to ruffle an A list movie star’s feathers, Customs arranged to quietly retrieve the finger and send it back home?
The finger bone tested in 2011 presents even bigger problems. If anybody could find a convincing human substitute for a Yeti bone, it would be the Royal College of Surgeons – no aspersions cast on them; it’s a compliment, really.
Sure, the Royal College’s sample had human DNA. But it’s not like we can positively match it to the bone Slick’s boys examined. The tech didn’t exist back before the finger went missing.
So the best ancillary evidence we have to go on are the skin samples. Which, as far as I can tell, were never messed with. And to this day, nobody’s been able to identify them.
Slicks’ team gathered more physical evidence, too. including the intestinal parasites of an unknown primate taken from a fecal sample found at lower elevations.
Many cryptozoologists think that’s where Yeti actually live – not in the airless, frigid Death Zone, but in the rhododendron forests of the mountain valleys below.
That may also be why we haven’t found conclusive proof yet. The sensationalistic press – including the “Abominable Snowman” name – has everyone looking in the wrong place.
The Himalayas are a weird place.
They’re nature’s equivalent of a KEEP OUT sign, but people keep venturing there anyway.
Perhaps some of our close primate relatives do, as well.
For an even weirder tale of adventure, read my award-worthy horror action novel:
