Could the improper discovery or killing of a Yeti in Nepal have provoked an international incident? Slate writes:
Titled “Regulations Governing Mountain Climbing Expeditions in Nepal—Relating to Yeti,” this Foreign Service memo was issued from the American Embassy in Kathmandu on November 30, 1959. Did the U.S. government believe in the Yeti, as some cryptozoologists took the memo to mean?
The memo came at the end of a decade of strenuous Yeti-hunting. In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest, and reported seeing large tracks. In 1954, the Daily Mail funded a sixteen-week “Snowman Expedition” to Everest to look for clues. And in the late 1950s, American oil millionaire Tom Slick bankrolled a number of Himalayan expeditions in search of the creature.