Yeti. Russia

2002, Shuryshkarsky district of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, a small Khanty village of Azov, clinging to the shore of one of the tributaries of the Ob. It was here that schoolchildren Volodya Kachin and Sasha Zakharov saw a strange creature.

They came to the river, when suddenly a hairy monster rose from the tall bushes. Raking the water with his hands in a place where the depth reaches more than two meters, he headed for the shore.

Leonid Ivanov, a special correspondent of the Trud newspaper, told about further events.

"The boys screamed in horror at the same time, but the next reaction to meeting with an unknown creature was already more individual. Sashka turned around and fled to the village, and Vovka remained sitting, unable to get up on his suddenly wobbly legs.

 

But he was able to see the unprecedented creature in more detail. And I drew from memory a humanoid animal covered with thick long hair. In that drawing, a triangle of denser hair on the chest clearly stands out: either the beard is full-bodied, or the wool is thicker in front.

The meeting of the guys with the outlandish inhabitant of the forest alarmed the whole village. And the next day, having ridiculed the frightened men, the women went to the bank of the river in a gang, where everything happened. From the place indicated by the teenagers, strange footprints really went into the forest. Bare feet were clearly imprinted on the hard ground. The length of one was 62 centimeters, and the step exceeded two meters, although, according to the guys, the stranger's legs were short.

When the women confirmed the boys' story, local hunters also decided to explore the place. The prints they saw made them remember that they had seen something similar before, but no one attached any importance to it. Some thought that the prints were left by a huge bear, others just left without filling their heads with all sorts of horror stories."

Then the rumor reached the scientists of the international expedition, which deals with the cranes living nearby. At that time, the ORT film crew was with the scientists - Natalia Astafyeva and Sergey Isakov. Curiosity led both scientists and journalists to Azov. Although two weeks have passed, the rains have not washed away the traces, they were captured on film. In fact, this was the only objective confirmation of the authenticity of what happened.

 

The children told different interlocutors the same thing, without getting confused in details, when they described the monster that appeared out of the water. A little embarrassed, Vovka even reported such a piquant feature - the reproductive organ of the creature hung almost to the knee.

Scientists followed the giant's trail to check if it was a prank by local wits. But it turned out that even if someone made two huge feet and walked by tying them to his feet, the joker had to weigh two hundred kilograms - so deeply are the feet pressed into the hard ground.

In some places, the prints of giant feet were preserved by trampled grass in the forest. In several places, apparently annoyed by the meeting with people, a strange visitor uprooted several trees, which is beyond the power of the company of young jokers. By the nature of the prints, the location of the feet, scientists at the Institute of Nature came to the conclusion that the traces were really left by a creature of large size and could not be the result of a practical joke.

And the old-timers remembered that soon after the war, the villagers found a baby on the mowing, completely covered with hair. They brought him home, reported him to the police, fed him like their children, and then some scientists came and took the find.