Yeti. Mongolia

A very interesting letter from M. V. Mitrofanov:

"At the school where I studied, there was a museum of military glory. Our frequent guests were veterans. And it so happened that I soon found myself a neighbor with one of them. He was a retired colonel who graduated from a tank school back in 1936, then participated in the armed conflict on Khalkhin Gol, and since 1942 - on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, graduated from the war in 1945 as deputy commander of a tank regiment.

He liked to talk, to remember his fighting youth, and I really liked to listen to his unhurried, even lulling, but at the same time incredibly interesting stories. And our conversations continued for many years, until his death. I want to retell one of his stories. I do not know in what form it is better to put it, but I will try from the third person.

In the spring of 1940, when the fighting on Khalkhin Gol had already died down, our units were on the territory of the Mongolian People's Republic, and my neighbor was, if I'm not mistaken, the head of a mobile tank repair workshop.

One day the sentries noticed an outsider not far from the location of the unit (this is in the steppe, where there were no settlements for 100 miles around) and began to pursue him. He tried to escape. The soldiers opened fire and wounded the "unknown". What was their surprise when they found a huge monkey in the bushes between the hills! The animal was wounded, bleeding, and dragged to the unit. (The bulk of the soldiers were peasants, so they had never seen a monkey.)

The commander of the unit, too, obviously did not shine with a general education and reasoned like this: "We are in Asia, abroad! And in Asia, abroad, monkeys definitely live. I've read it in books myself." Therefore, the appearance of a giant monkey in the Mongolian steppe did not cause anyone confusion.

My neighbor, after all, a Muscovite, with a technical education, in a word, a fairly intelligent person, understood that there are no monkeys in Mongolia and there cannot be any monkeys, much less anthropoids. In addition, he grew up on Krasnaya Presnya and spent his childhood (according to him) in a zoo, where the boys climbed over the fence. And of course, I've seen a lot of monkeys.

In a word, he understood that this was not a monkey, and she, this creature, did not look like an ordinary monkey. But... it is often very difficult for a literate person to prove anything to an illiterate.

The neighbor tried to say something, but realized that it was "the voice of one crying in the desert." And so this creature remained a monkey for everyone. After some short time, it died, probably from blood loss.

The most interesting thing happened next. The supply of troops was difficult. That is, the products were not bad, but it was very difficult to deliver them in off—road conditions, as a neighbor said: an arid steppe for hundreds of kilometers is worse than a swamp. There was no question of fresh meat at all. And the commander of the unit ordered the killed "monkey" to be sent... to the boiler.

Officially, it seems to have been buried, but in fact it was skinned and cooked soup. In the dining room, this dish was listed as "soup with horse meat"... And it passed! They ate it and were alive! Such an incredible story!

Of course, I asked my neighbor, the colonel, to describe this creature in more detail. Here's what he could remember: huge, taller than the tallest man, it looks very strong, shaggy, matted wool, brown. And most importantly, the features that the narrator could not formulate accurately. This creature was very similar to a human. A monkey is a monkey, an animal that can never be confused with a person. It moaned somehow humanly. It moved its paws — very similar to human gestures. And the eyes! If you look at them, you shudder, they seem to be meaningful, and it's scary to look at them, but the narrator could not explain why it was scary. As I understood from the story, the creature did not make any attempts to "talk" with people.

The colonel-neighbor finished his story like this: "After all, in any case, it was not a man, not even a wild one, it was an animal."

Yes, I missed that the creature was male, but with genitals much smaller than one would expect, judging by the overall dimensions of the body."