Rumors about the appearance of Bigfoot appear from time to time in the press. We saw Bigfoot in completely different places in the world - these are India, China, Siberia, the Caucasus, etc. In different places it is called differently - the most common name is "Yeti". But in the mountains of the North Caucasus they call him "Almasty". Below we will give several examples of eyewitnesses and scientists who prove that the Caucasian Bigfoot "Almasty" really exists. But whether it is so or not, you judge.
The magnificent exploration in the mountains of the North Caucasus in the region of Kabardino-Balkaria was carried out in the summer of 1960 by Professor A. A. Mashkovtsev. His report, saturated with polling data and introducing the initial biological order into all this raw material, laid a new home. For Kabarda was destined to personify a different stage, a different level of the entire study. This speck on the map of our planet today is a place where field research into the problem of relict Neanderthals, relatives of the “Podkumskiy man” dug out in the same places, is advanced further than anywhere else. And Soviet and world science owes this to Zhanna Iosifovna Kofman.
She relocated her work to Kabarda in 1962, Zh. I. Kofman laid heroism. And she found herself. Nowadays, he is a first-class specialist, attracting and bringing in many young people. Every year for several months in Kabardian villages - on his "Zaporozhets" and a motorcycle, without any material and organizational support, just as a full member of the Geographical Society. A steadier step from an orientation filled with doubt to the acquired confident skill and geometric progression of knowledge. For the world's mystery of relict paleoanthropes, Kabarda is not the rule, but the exception. Here this species of animals is unusually pressed to people, to their homes and plantings. Thus, the type of relationships and connections with people is extremely peculiar, perhaps similar to the ancient stage, reflected in folklore and myths.
These protected and fed "shaitans" from outsiders are tightly covered by beliefs and religious instructions: whoever betrays at least one will doom himself and generations of descendants to cruel punishment. But at the same time, the old psychology is already so shaken today that a lot of information is pumped out by patience and tact. Kabarda, which became an anthropological laboratory, forced the final decision on the issue of trust in local people. There just wasn't a single marking observation of a visiting scientist or geologist, which we have to cling to in other places before listening to the local voices. Those working in Kabarda threw away the premise of our critics, as if the indigenous population were sure to lie for some reason.
To begin with, here is a tribute to tradition: the story of a senior livestock technician, Russian, member of the CPSU N. Ya. Serikova. It was in 1956, when N. Ya. Serikova had just moved to Kabarda, to the Zolsky district, and she had never heard of any local stories about Almasty. Rented an apartment from a collective farmer.
It was the evening when the wedding was being played at the neighbors'. N. Ya. Serikova dozed, then went out into the garden, went back to bed, still without turning off the electricity and leaving the door to the courtyard open. It was eleven o'clock. “I’m lying down and suddenly I hear some screeching. I immediately looked at the floor. Horror! On the floor was a creature squatting, all hairy, slanting eyes. The creature was squatting with its left arms on its right shoulder, right on its left. It looked at me with such a look that it was about to jump to me. I was really petrified. I look at it, and it is at me … Then a few words burst out from me: "Lord, where did you come from?" (I never believed in God). The creature screamed again and jumped into the first room with such speed, as if it flew out, the door banged with such force that it seemed to me that the house shook. After him there was such a smell in the apartment,that I can't compare it with any smell, some stifling, sour. Until the morning I could neither get up nor move. I thought there must be devils."
Only in the morning did the neighbor explain that this was not a devil, but simply Almasty, that Almasty lived in the house of a neighboring old woman, and when she died, he moved into the house of Lukman Amshukov and lives with him. Perhaps this same one, frightened by the accordion and the noise, jumped into the room where he had already been before, but retreated from the sound of unfamiliar speech.
“What was the Almasty I saw? The height of an average person, the whole body is covered with hair, not long - 3-4 centimeters, eyebrows are thick, black, hair on the face is shorter and less frequent than on the body … The creature was about one meter from my eyes … About what it was Almas, and not a man, say the cut of his eyes, his wild, bestial look, incomparable with any look, his fetid smell. His very figure was not quite human - his legs and arms were longer than those of a human … The shape of his head was a little oblong."
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Calming the soul of N. Ya. Serikova came only when five years later she learned that Moscow researchers were studying the problem of Almasta here.
“I have talked many times with livestock breeders on this topic, and many, having talked, told how they saw the Almasts or heard about him from their fathers, grandfathers and comrades.
Ordinary people (shepherds, shepherds), when they are confident in you and your sincerity, never lie. People are afraid to give up the Almasts, they are intimidated by the mullahs and say with conviction that if they give up one Almasts, his relatives will still avenge their brother.” And so, from month to month, from season to season, no matter how difficult it is for a woman in those parts, Zhanna Iosifovna Kofman's slow conquest of the trust and respect of these ordinary people of Kabarda. Protocol to protocol. There are dozens of them at first, then hundreds.
Let's grab some examples. Isn't it folklore, isn't it an eternal fairy-tale standard? XX Zhigunov, 46 years old, Kabardian, dispenser of the Baksan brick factory: “… I decided to take a shortcut and went straight through the corn field. As soon as I turned off the road, about 40 meters from it, I came across the remains of an almasta, torn apart by wolves or dogs. In an area about 15 meters in diameter, all the corn was broken, felled, everything was trampled. In the middle of the platform lay the head of an almasta with the remains of a neck. The left half of the neck was gouged out. Before that, I did not believe in the existence of Almasta, so I began to examine the head with particular interest. Taking a stick, I turned it over on all sides and, squatting down, carefully examined it.
The head was enveloped in a shock of very thick and long hair, very tangled and glued together with burdock. Because of this, I did not see the shape of the skull, but in size it is like a human. The forehead is slightly sloping. The nose is small, snub. There is no bridge, the nose is as if depressed, like that of a monkey. The cheekbones protrude to the sides, like a Chinese. The lips are not the same as those of humans, but thin, straight, like those of a monkey. I did not see my teeth: my lips were baked, I did not open them. The chin is not the same as that of a person, but round, heavy. Human ears. One ear was torn off, the other whole. The eyes are strongly slanted, with a slit downward. I don't know the colors - the eyelids were closed, I didn't open them. The skin is black, covered with dark brown hair. Hair is missing around the eyes and on the top of the cheeks. On the cheeks, on the ears - short hair, on the neck - longer. There was a sharp disgusting smell coming from the head.
It was not a smell of decomposition, because the remains were fresh, there were no flies, no worms - it was evident that it had been torn apart for several hours, the blood had just baked. It was the smell of Almasta himself, so repulsive that I almost vomited. Therefore, I examined the head, holding my nose with my left hand, and holding a stick with my right. The smell resembles the smell of old dirt, unwashed body, mold. Not far away were other parts of the body, I saw the whitening bones, covered with the remains of dark meat, but did not come close and did not look at them."
Here is what Magil Elmesov told. In 1938-1939. he grazed collective farm horses in the Malka Valley, which lies beyond the saddle of Elbrus. In the same valley one beekeeper, a Russian from near Nalchik, annually brought his apiary and pitched a tent. Once Magil Elmesov went to visit a beekeeper, and he told him how Satan got into the habit of stealing honey and food and how he was killed. The beekeeper slept not in a hut, but on a special tower, and someone began to climb into the hut and literally lick all the food. He went home to fetch his younger brother, who had just returned from the army, but left the apiary for three days under the supervision of a Kabardian from a nearby village.
When they returned, he was frightened: indeed, someone visited the hut at night. At night, my brother with a gun was not on the tower, but in a hut. After midnight, a double shot thundered: Satan thrust himself into the hut, and a seasoned soldier shot him. As soon as dawn broke, they saw blood at the hut. The bloody trail led into the bushes. In some 150 meters they stumbled upon a dead, crumpled Almasty. Both bullets hit the stomach. And here the beekeeper, who was telling all this, took Magil Elmesov to show the corpse.
For seven days, says Magil Elmesov, he strongly decomposed. In the bushes lay a creature very much like a man. The hairy body, the face, like that of an animal, is somewhat extended forward. Long limbs inadequate to the body.
Magil Elmesov also remembered that there was no hair on his palms. That my toes are very long. Such was the Almasty, whom these Russians ignorantly mistook for Satan!
This is death. And here is the birth. Hooker Akhaminov, 55 years old, Kabardian, collective farmer:
“On August 10, 1964, in the afternoon, I mowed hay in a sunflower field. In some places there were areas not sown with sunflowers, grass grew on them, so I mowed. Suddenly I heard a sound nearby, not that sniffing, not that snorting, like a dog when something crawls into its nose. I stopped and listened. Again he began to mow. The second time the same sound. I stopped mowing. When he rang out the third time, I put my scythe and went to watch. Suddenly, out of the grass, two hands rose towards me, like human hands, but black, hairy, long. Especially long fingers. I rushed from there and climbed onto the cart, about 8-10 meters from this place. Standing on the cart, I saw a human figure, which bent over and went into the sunflowers.
I only got a good look at the back. On the back, red hair, like a buffalo, on the head long hair. When Almasty left, I got off the cart and returned to the spit. Then I heard a squeak from the same place. He approached carefully, parted the grass. On the crumpled hay, as in a nest, lay two newborns. Apparently she had just calved. Newborns are exactly like human babies, just small - they will pull two kilograms, no more, and you cannot distinguish them from human ones.
Their skin is pink, like a human child, exactly the same head, arms, legs. Not hairy. Legs and arms were moved. I ran from there, harnessed the cart and returned to the village. I told my relatives and neighbors about my meeting. After two or three days, I returned to this place again. There was no one there already."
Question: "Why didn't you tell anyone about this?" Answer: "And who should I tell you why?" Question: "Didn't you know that it is very interesting that scientists are doing this?" Answer: "And who knows that it is necessary … I have never heard that anyone was interested in this."
But, probably, the disease. Mukhamed Pshukhov, Kabardian, builder:
“It was before the war, in the summer. We then lived in the village of Batekh, in the Zolsky district. Somewhere Almasty came to our garden and settled in it, in corn. She spread various rags and grass there. She stayed with us for a week. I was in our garden all the time, eating green corn. All hairy, long hair on the head. The breasts are lowered, hanging, like a woman's, but lower. The nails are long. The eyes are slanted, red, the teeth are larger than those of humans. During the day she always lay. It usually lies on its side, but everything turns over, does not lie in one position for a long time. Many people came to see her. If several people come close at once, she worries, sits down, screams, gets up, tears her hair on her head. Shouts very loudly. When she calms down, if the person is standing close, she quietly approaches and begins to lick him like a dog.
Here is a face to face meeting. Aberi Tatimovich Kotsev, a Kabardian, a shepherd, more than once heard from a friend that he met Almasty in Akbecheyuko's gully, near Sarmakov, that Almasty was approaching the kosh, eating bread. In August 1959, when he was grazing horses there, he tried to check - he laid out bread for bait, sat in a kosh until two o'clock on a moonlit night, waited in vain.
“The next morning, at about seven o'clock, I rode up the gully to drive the horses that had gone overnight. Suddenly, when leaving the weeds, around the bend, I suddenly met him, almost nose to nose. He ran towards him at a shallow trot. He stopped, and my horse also stopped rooted to the spot. We stood 3-4 meters apart. Small in stature, about one and a half meters, slightly stooped. Hands, longer than a human, reached up to knee level. They were protruding from the body, and the elbows were slightly bent. All covered with hair - the length of a buffalo, thick, dark gray. The forehead is not as high as that of a person, but low and sloping back. The eyes are slanted. The cheekbones protrude, just like a Mongol. The mouth is wide. The chin is not the same as that of a person: a person has a thin, sharp chin, while his chin is round, large, not sharp, but massive.
Himself - clubfoot, the knees are slightly bent forward, and the legs are crooked, like a good rider. The feet are slightly turned inward. The toes are spread out. I think it was a man, because I did not see breasts. The hair on the head was not very long, but very disheveled, sticking out in flakes in different directions. Interestingly, a person's face is narrower and smaller compared to the skull. And his skull is suitable around the circumference, but since it is not as tall and flatter than that of a person, the face is larger.
We stood for several minutes, looked at each other, he was breathing evenly, not out of breath after running. Then he turned to the right and walked off into the weeds. And I drove on. And in this talented observation, everything should again amaze an anthropologist who knows the appearance of a Neanderthal fossil. And this is just one of many cursory sketches.
At the next report in the Geographical Society in the spring of 1966, Zh. Kofman, with the skill of an anatomical surgeon, drew an irrefutable truth in chalk. Here is a schematic skull of a modern man. Here is a Neanderthal fossil. And here - and chalk turns words into lines before our eyes - a combination of dozens of testimonies about the skull of Almasty. The third picture turns out to be identical to the second! At the same time, it is not easy to extract the general from the survey protocols. This is not only not like folklore, but the opposite: the skeleton of folklore is repetition. There are no two records in the dossier of the Kabardian laboratory, even if they are similar to each other. There is no plot or style. The details are endless. Not so much superimposing messages on each other, as applying to each other, the researcher reconstructs the image of the paleoanthropus.
However, it is not standard either. Almasts are extremely individual both in appearance and behavior. There is a lot of peculiarity in each. The last season of the work of the group Zh. I. Koffman advanced to a new goal: to the ability to collect beams of information about the same individual Almasta, recognizable by undoubted signs. She was seen by various people in close places for a short time. This is a new, very close peephole into the world of these ghostly animals still so little known to us. The Kabardian laboratory must decode them. Little hope of swoop or fluke. You need to know a lot in advance. There were almasts right at hand. But blindly, and went out of hand.
Here is the raid. Erzhiba Koshokoev, 70 years old, Kabardian:
“The first time I saw Almasty was in September 1944. At that time in our republic there were detachments of volunteers (vigilantes) to maintain order, combat banditry, etc. I was a member of such a detachment. The detachment was a combined one - there were Karachais and Ossetians in it, and our Kabardians were gathered from different places.
Once we rode, on horseback, through a hemp field near the Black River. I went second, and the first was a man from Argudan, he is now dead. Suddenly his horse stopped so abruptly that I almost ran over him. He says to me: "Look, Almasty!" Ahead, a few meters away, stood a gubganana (female almasty - BP) and threw the tops of hemp rods with seeds into her mouth.
The whole detachment crowded behind us, made a noise, and she, seeing us, very quickly ran on two legs to the kosh, which was not far away. Several people tore their guns off their shoulders and wanted to shoot. But our commander, a Russian officer from Nalchik, shouted: “Don't shoot, don't shoot! Let's better take her alive and deliver her to Nalchik”.
We dismounted and surrounded the kosh. There were many of us, and we were able to completely close the circle around the kosh. I found myself just opposite the kosh door and saw everything very well. As we approached, Gubganana jumped out of the kosh two or three times. She seemed very agitated: she jumps out, fusses, rushes in one direction, and there people run back into the kosh, immediately jumps out again, rushes in the other direction, but there are people too. At the same time, she grimaced, her lips moved quickly and quickly and muttered something. Meanwhile, our chain was getting closer and closer to the kosh. We closed and walked already elbow to elbow. At this time, the gubganana ("steppe grandmother" - Adyg.) Jumped out again, darted about, but suddenly screamed with a very terrible cry and rushed straight at the people. She runs faster than a horse.
To tell the truth, people were confused. She easily broke through our chain, jumped at a run into the ravine and disappeared into the thickets surrounding the river. She was about 1 m 80 cm tall and healthy. The face is hard to see because of the hair. Chest to lower abdomen. All covered with long red hair resembling buffalo hair. The footprints - I went to look at them in the ravine - are small. I was very surprised then at the discrepancy between her height and footprints (she ran on her toes. - BP)”.
No, you cannot predict searches on such accidents. You can only hack into your nose that Almasty cannot be taken with your bare hands. A completely different way is to seek help from those local people who have tamed, fed, secretly kept in a barn or in the passage of some single Almast. This connection, according to the information collected, is very close. But how to remove the vow of secrecy? Only once was an accidental luck very close, but then we still did not understand anything and did not know, but it is difficult to say what we would have done if we had not missed the chance.
The point is, perhaps, that Khabas Kardanov, a young Kabardian, got to know the female Almasta obviously after she had already been tamed by some faithful and for some reason lost her patron. She gave in very easily. However, Khabas, following the rules, renounced for a long time, although he did not know how to properly hide the affection of this almasta to his house, and many residents of the village of Sarmakovo, including his relatives, talked about this. His uncle, Zamirat Legitov, directly met her in the lonely house of Khabas. Friends made him talk.
A few months earlier, he had met a terrible hairy woman in a weed. He was petrified and covered in sweat with fear. She was less frightened and continued to sit when he backed away. And a few days later he met her again, then a few more times, and one day he threw her some food, either cheese or bread. Then he always gave her food, she began to come to him in the kosh for food. Then he drove the herd to Sarmakovo, and Almasty followed him - she began to live at his house.
Khabas said that he taught her to do some work: "She is very strong and understanding … She works quickly, strongly." For example, loaded hay on a cart. I went to steal tomatoes for him somewhere far from Sarmakov. "She did not know the human language, but she muttered something inarticulate." The time her uncle met her, she came in with an armful of stolen tomatoes and sat down, muttering and grunting. It is interesting that the mother and father of Khabas did not keep a secret, but expressed fears to their acquaintances that Almasty might bring misfortune to their son. And he really laughed at first, and after two or three years he did not know how to get rid of her: it was impossible to drive her away.
In 1959, in those places, information about Almasty was collected by the engineer of the cheese factory M. Tembotov on behalf of his brother, the zoologist A. Tembotov, who worked at Nalchik University. He found out about Khabas Kardanov and entered into negotiations. And he made it clear that he was not averse to getting rid of his trained intrusive Almasta, having, however, overcame a fair price. The last hour of the epic has come. M. Tembotov contacted one of the members of our commission by phone to receive instructions. It must be remembered that this was in the spring of 1959: the existence of Bigfoot in the Caucasus still almost did not fit into our thoughts, and the commission had just been shipwrecked at the Academy of Sciences. There was nowhere to get the required amount. Tembotov gave up negotiations with Khabas Kardanov. And soon he left to work in Siberia: relatives say that this decision was facilitated by the desire to get rid of Almasty.
It is hardly worth hoping for a repetition of this situation. The Kabardian experimental field led by Zh. I. Kofman is not a jump, not a calculation of chance, but a steady advance. What is the main result? That each year brings our gaze a little closer to the beast. His nature is seen more and more clearly. Each season reveals something about him that we did not know. This gait gives a sense of the inevitability of success. We are not just in the cave, we are walking along it, the light arrives, which means we will leave. But in me these steps of progress reinforce the sense of the vastness of what is still unknown. Paleoanthropus, hovering in areas from the Elbrus alpine meadows and forests to the villages of Kabardians in the plains, apparently has properties that we still do not even suspect.
Indeed, a lot of records have been made, but informants make up an insignificant percentage of the population of Kabarda, and most of the informants have personally seen Almasts once or twice in their lives. Consequently, meetings are the rarest exception to the rule. What is the rule? Why do exceptions happen? Here is the bulk of what is still in the darkness. It is not easy to say if we are halfway through. With a clarity that has never been before, we understand how difficult it will be to reach the goal - judging by this, the most difficult thing is still behind us. Upstairs, on the Dzhinal, and in the "beam", and on the bench in Sarmakov, one thought was repeated in my brain. Everything that we have learned so far around the world, including here in Kabarda, is unintentional meetings (perhaps only Yu. I. Merezhinsky had intentional observation).
We've grown to a problem: how to move from collecting unintentional meetings to intentional meetings? No, not to “convince” someone and thus squeeze out of someone “perhaps yes”. But this is the further stage of the study. Only a significant amount of unintentional meetings could serve as its foundation. Have we learned enough for some advice from the wisest to draw from this information how to make meetings deliberate?
We must try hard. But if we do not know enough yet, we need to expand the series of records of unintended meetings at least tenfold. After all, sooner or later we will find ourselves so much aware of the biology of relict paleoanthropes, including their relationships with people in various fields, when a technique leading to deliberate meetings is found. Then the second half of the history of troglodyte studies will begin.
