January 27, 1960: Abominable Snowman

Hillary shows an illustration of a yeti to reporters before launching an expedition to search for the creature in 1960.

The much-publicized trek took Hillary and a team through the Himalaya in search of physical evidence of the Abominable Snowman. After ten months the team returned with three skin samples it had collected. Two were found to have come from bears, the other from a goat.

Hillary, who pulled out of the expedition midway due to illness, later declared the yeti a "mythological creature, probably based on rare sightings of the Tibetan blue bear."

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