Description
Russia – or to be exact, the Soviet Union – was the first country to probe the snowman riddle on a scientific basis. In 1958, in the post-Stalinist political thaw, the Soviet Academy of Sciences diverted itself for a time with the exotic and sensational subject of the Himalayan yeti. As the Academy had received reports of similar creatures in the mountains of Soviet Central Asia, it set up a special commission to collect evidence on the subject and launched a major expedition to the Pamirs to establish the existence of snowmen there. The expedition was a failure (this book explains why), and this put an end to official interest in the matter. Snowman studies (or ‘hominology,’ to give its modern term) was declared by the academic establishment to be a pseudo-science, along with astrology and parapsychology Dmitri Bayanov is the science director at the International Center of Hominology. His cryptozoological career has focused primarily on the study of relic populations of hominids, including the Almas and the American sasquatch. He is the author of In the Footsteps of the Russian Snowman (1996), Americs Bigfoot: Fact Not Fiction (1998), and Bigfoot: To Kill or to Film? The Problem of Proof (2001). Each deals with some aspect of hominid research. His current book, Bigfoot Research: The Russian Vision, originally published by Crypto-Logos, Moscow, is a compilation of his writings on hominology. Bayanov originally graduated from a teachers school in 1955 with a major in humanities. After studying under such individuals as Professor B.F. Porshnev and P.P. Smolin, Chief Curator of the Darwin Museum in Moscow, Bayanov took part in Marie-Jeanne Koffmanns expedition in search of the Almas in the Caucasus Mountains. He later made reconnaissance trips into the same region on his own. Dmitri Bayanov is currently an active member of the Relict Hominoid Research Seminar at the Darwin Museum. His involvement with the group began in 1964 and he became its chairman in 1975. He was also a founding board member of the International Society of Cryptozoology and served on its Board of Directors until 1992. Bayanov is credited with coining the terms “hominology” and “hominologist” in the early 1970s to describe the specific study of unknown hominoids and those who study them.
