Good evening. I appreciate you taking my call. I am calling from Brighton Beach, where many of us old Soviets ended up after the collapse. My name is not important, but what I have to tell you is. I worked as a translator and administrative assistant for the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1956 until 1971. And that's the thing, I was there when the Academy did something it had never done before and has never done since. They created an official government commission to investigate whether wild men existed in the mountains of our country. This was 1958. The Commission for the Study of the Snowman Problem, we called it. In the West you might say 'Snowman Commission.' Officially sanctioned. Academy funding. Real scientists. I was twenty-three years old, fresh from university, and I thought I had walked into a madhouse.
You have to understand the context. 1953, the British finally summit Everest. Suddenly the whole world is talking about the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman from Sherpa folklore. The Daily Mail in Britain, they sponsor an expedition. It becomes an international sensation. But here is what the West did not know: for centuries, people across Soviet Central Asia had been reporting similar creatures. In Mongolia they called them Almas. In the Caucasus, Almasty. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, every mountain region had stories going back hundreds of years. These were not fairy tales to the local people. They had specific descriptions: creatures five to six feet tall, covered in reddish-brown hair, walking upright like men but with sloped foreheads, heavy brow ridges, no chins. The Mongolians had place names for where they lived, Almasyn Dobo, meaning Hills of the Almases. The explorer Nikolai Volkonsky documented accounts in 1876. This was not new. What was new was that the Soviet Academy of Sciences decided to take it seriously.
The man behind this was Professor Viktor Volkov, a historian, not a zoologist. That detail matters. He specialized in popular revolts in pre-revolutionary France, but he had unconventional theories about human evolution and language. He believed that if these 'wild men' existed, they might be surviving specimens of early hominids, what he called 'relict hominids.' Perhaps Neanderthals who never went extinct, hiding in the remote mountain ranges of Central Asia. Volkov was respected. He had published serious academic work. So when he approached the Academy in 1957 and requested permission to formally investigate, they actually listened. And that's the thing, in the post-Stalin thaw, there was briefly an openness to unusual ideas. He was given approval to establish an official Commission. He published an article in Pravda requesting eyewitness accounts. Pravda article was facinating - Mike' Within months, over one thousand reports flooded in from across the Soviet Union.
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