Abominable Snowman
In 1832, James Prinsep, one of colonial India's most venerable scholars, kept a British trekker's account of his trip through Nepal, where he reportedly saw a tall, hairy, bipedal creature that fled upon being detected. This first recorded modern sighting of a yeti (ancient-Roman historians also told of cave-dwelling "satyrs" in India's mountains) made Bigfoot's Himalayan cousin a household name around the world. The Abominable Snowman moniker came in 1921, when a British army colonel translated the phrase his Sherpa used for a creature that left behind huge footprints in the mountains. Indeed, many mountaineers, including Everest conquerors Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, reported unshod footprints far larger than human feet dotting snowy trails. Another traveler's tale described a massively muscled, hairy beast clutching a primitive bow. A 1954 expedition commissioned by the British Daily Mail retrieved dark brown hairs from a supposed yeti scalp kept in a secluded Buddhist monastery. The yeti was the subject of a rich vein of mid–20th century adventure fiction and still spurs contemporary explorers: a 2008 Japanese expedition turned up more alleged yeti footprints.