Pangboche is a tiny, isolated village, high up within the mountains of Nepal.
Resting at an altitude of 13,000 feet, It is located deep within in the Himalayas.
This tiny place is renowned for producing world class Sherpas, and is mostly inhabited by the Sungdare Sherpa.
Many putting this phenomena down to the extremely inhospitable climates that people from the village are exposed to from a very young age.
It is also the home of an ancient monastery who’s resident monks seem at home, completely isolated from the rest of mankind, above the clouds, on top the mountains.
Countless lost and extremely lucky souls have been lured to this place during the vicious blizzards which consume the mountains, saved only, by the sound of the monks ceremonial horns,
If the Yeti does indeed exist, then these surrounding mountain ranges, all but forgotten by the outside world, would undoubtedly be a suitable home for extremely illusive beasts.
And if a population of human beings were ever to encounter such an animal, it would have to be the monks of such monasteries dotted within these inhospitable, and completely isolated mountain ranges.
Once one discovers that the majority of such populations, not only believe in such creatures, but often claim to have witnessed them, the events that follow become all the more of an intriguing reality.
Not only do some of these groups of devout, and very long running lines of monks claim to have seen them. but many stories are attached to such events.
Some, the pangboche monastery in particular, actually claim to be in possession of the physical remains of this creature.
Peter Byrne, funded by an extremely wealthy oil tycoon by the name of tom slick, would find these remains high within the mountains, that the monks had kept with them for many years as a ritual artefact, a part of their ceremonies day by day.
Known as the pangboche hand byrne had no idea what to expect…
Imagine his surprise when the monks produced what appeared to be an authentic yeti’s hand and a complete scalp.
According to the monks, many years prior, one of their brothers had walked into a cave to meditate. There, he saw a Yeti. He returned Many years later, to find that the yeti was dead. He collected a hand and the scalp and took it back to the monastery where it remained.
Astounded by the artefacts byrne requested they let him take them away for further study, unfortunately the monks refused, claiming the remains were too highly valued by the monastery.
Unperturbed and determined to come away from there with some form of hard evidence, in a shocking move, peter byrnes stole sections of the hand bone from the monks, replacing them with human bone.
Byrne then smuggled the bones out of Nepal and into India, where actor James Stewart allegedly smuggled the hand bones out of the country in his luggage to England.
Once at the London University primatologist William Charles Osman Hill conducted a physical examination of the pieces that Byrne supplied. His first findings were that it was hominid, and later in 1960 he decided that the Pangboche fragments were a closer match to a Neanderthal but not an exact match.
In 1991, in conjunction with loren Coleman's research, it was discovered that the Slick expedition consultant, an American anthropologist by the name of George Agogino, had retained other samples of the pangboche hand kept from the original theft. The NBC program Unsolved Mysteries obtained samples and determined they were similar to human tissue, but were not human, and could only verify they were "near human."
Shortly thereafter, most likely due to confirmation via forensic testing of the artefacts authenticity, the entire hand and scalp was stolen from the Pangboche monastery, in a military precision style operation. Rumours regarding the items reportedly disappearing into a private collection, via the illegal underground in the sale of antiquities would circulate. yet they have never been seen again.
George Agogino, before his death on September 11, 2000, transferred his secret research upon the Pangboche Yeti hand to Loren Coleman.
In 2010 Weta Workshops, who did the models for the lord of the rings movies, kindly produced a replica skull and hand based on photos of the missing hand and skull. Mike Allsop handed over the replica skull and hand to monks at Pangboche in May 2011, they seem to be very pleased to have their artefacts back, let’s just hope no one tells them…
