The USSR was the only country in the world where the problem of finding the Bigfoot was considered at a high state level. And under the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, on the initiative of Professor Porshnev, there was a Commission to study this issue.
How it happened is described by a student and follower of Boris Porshnev - scientific director of the International Center for Hominology, a member of the Russian Humanist Society Dmitry Bayanov.
Homo or monkey?
Dmitry Vladimirov: - Dmitry Yuryevich, why did Soviet science become interested in finding Bigfoot? After all, he is traditionally considered an inhabitant of the Himalayas
Dmitry Bayanov: - It was the time of the Khrushchev thaw. The information link with the West has increased. Belgian zoologist Eyvelmans has captivated millions of readers with the book "In the footsteps of unknown animals" and the term "cryptozoology". From the Himalayas, the words "yeti" and "Bigfoot" came to us, and newspapers and magazines wrote about expeditions in search of him.
Then a stream of letters from readers came from different regions of the Soviet Union. They reported that creatures similar to the Himalayan Yeti also live in their land. From the editorial offices of newspapers and magazines, these letters were sent to the Academy of Sciences. Major General (retired) Mikhail Topilsky wrote that he saw a killed hairy wild man during the war with the Basmachi in the Pamirs in 1925. And lieutenant colonel of the medical service Vazgen Karapetyan reported that in December 1941 he was instructed to give an opinion regarding a captured wild man on The Caucasus.
It became clear that the problem required scientific research, and in January 1958, on the initiative of the historian and philosopher Boris Porshnev, a Commission for the Study of the Bigfoot was created in the USSR Academy of Sciences.
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Porshnev himself believed that not all hominids (the ancestors of modern humans) died out, some of them could survive in the form of relict forms different from Homo sapiens. And he put the Neanderthals in the first place among such forms, not excluding, in principle, other representatives of the genus Homo, known from fossil data. Other opinions were also sounded: that it is Australopithecus or Pithecanthropus.
But the chairman of the commission, geologist Sergei Obruchev, assumed that this was an unknown two-legged monkey. For Obruchev, this question was purely zoological, and for Porshnev and his followers - anthropological, that is, shedding light on the origin of man.
What did the commission do?
- It had two tasks: first, the collection of all the information existing in the world on this issue; secondly, conducting a search expedition in the Pamirs. Why there? Because just at that time a message was received that the hydrologist Pronin observed a creature in the Pamirs through binoculars, which he took for a Bigfoot. In addition, it was believed that since the Pamir is located closer to other regions of the USSR to the Himalayas, then snow people can also live there. Or go there.
The work of the commission for collecting the material was quite successful: the results were published in collections under the stamp of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. But the results of the Pamir expedition turned out to be negative: it was poorly organized and carried out. Porshnev's opponents took advantage of this and liquidated the commission. Soon the subject of Bigfoot was taboo in academia.
But at the Darwin Museum, a permanent seminar on relict hominoids was organized. This term was proposed to replace Bigfoot. And after the death of Boris Porshnev, I gave this science the name "hominology". The term stuck, including its English spelling - hominology.
There the goblin wanders
Those who closed the commission can be understood: there were no results. How to study creatures about which science knows nothing?
- They were not known to science, because there was no science that they could be known. That is, natural, biological science! But as for the humanities, such as folklore and demonology, they have always known these creatures. The problem is that for academic specialists they designate exclusively characters of popular superstitions and fictions: devil, goblin, brownie … That is, the names of these creatures did not bring them closer, but, on the contrary, prevented the creation of biological science about them.
Do you want to say that these characters of folklore are the snowmen?
- During the war, our family lived in Tajikistan. It was there that I first heard about the "hairy wild people" living in the mountains. I remembered this much later, when I came there on an expedition. On all expeditions, I interviewed local residents about their observations in nature. And as a result of polls and reading books, including old ones, I came to the conclusion that words such as devil, goblin, shaitan and many others are used to denote creatures that people consider real because they have seen them.
Can you give examples?
- I met Porshnev in 1964 and in the summer of the same year I went on an expedition to Kabardino-Balkaria. I wanted to be convinced of the existence of eyewitnesses who saw the "wild man" to whom Porshnev and Zhanna Kofman, his colleague, referred to. The eyewitnesses turned out to be real. They called the snowmen both well-known words devil and shaitan, and new ones for me - almasty, mozylkh, kaptar, gul. And they called it naturally and naturally.
A young woman, zootechnician Nadezhda Serikova, was scared to death by Almasta's night visit to her room. The Kabardian landlady, from whom she rented this room in the annex, said: "I saw the devil at night." The hostess says: "Do not be afraid, this is not a devil, these are Almas." He was fed by such and such villagers, during the day he even sat in their closet. She compared him to a brownie.
In a word, already on the first expedition I had the feeling that Gogol's characters from “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” had come to life and become reality. And folk explanations of the nature of "wild man" were very bizarre. A local resident shared his opinion: “There is a wild goat, a wild sheep, a wild boar. Why not be a wild man?"
With great surprise, I discovered the gap between the knowledge possessed by the people and the ignorance (or rather delusion) possessed by science. After the Caucasian expeditions, I wrote my first book - “Leshy, nicknamed“Monkey”. Experience of demonological comparisons”. It saw the light only thanks to the restructuring, in 1991. The nature of such "goblin" and "devils" is now being carefully studied by hominologists, and the results are published on the American website Relict Hominoid Inquiry of the University of Idaho. In the US, in general, they are much more interested in the subject of Bigfoot than in our country. Now my book "Hominology: a science whose time has come" is being published there.
Has it really come?
- Officially, hominology continues to be considered a pseudoscience. But in fact, this is a completely scientific discipline: the object of its study is real!
In 1966, Boris Porshnev published an article in the journal Voprosy filosofii "Is a scientific revolution in primatology possible now?" He argued that it was not only possible, but inevitable. We, his followers, have made and are doing this revolution. Among the most important scientific events of the XX century. there are three: Homo sapiens went to space, Homo sapiens went to the moon, and Homo sapiens became convinced that he is not the only owner of intelligence on Earth.
The USSR was the only country where this topic was considered at the highest level. But as at one time genetics and cybernetics were banned in our country, so now hominology. Only she is banned all over the world. The facts are stubbornly hushed up and ignored by official science.
By the way, did Porshnev think that the KGB knew about the existence of Bigfoot?
- Both the KGB and the Soviet government. In the information collections of the Commission on the issue of the snowman, there were reports of border guards about the observation of snowmen. According to the former border guard, there was also an instruction on how to deal with such creatures if they violate the state border. This kind of information was classified. And the border troops then, as you know, were subordinate to the KGB.
Now it's time to dot the i's to finally see the forest for the trees.
Author: Dmitry Vladimirov