I am genuinely enjoying this conversation.
Star Man was reminding me of some kind of Poirot/Miss Marple who refuses to spill the beans until the last chapter because he might be wrong and doesn't want to hurt the innocent. But now I'm cracking up over the metaphor which keeps getting more and more complicated and actually confusing, rather than elucidating, the issue.
Maybe it's neither a horse nor a dolphin. Maybe it's a hippokampos. 
If I had a book coming out I'd combine all the most 'imaginative' theories I've read in this forum, it's sure to get into the best seller lists, or at the very least become a better script than that awful movie.
So, I'd have the yeti/menk/sasquatch as an alien from a frozen world, and it evolved to be covered in fur to stay warm. It is said to walk with a lolloping gait, and that is due to differences in gravity, and is generally only seen in colder climates, at altitude, well away from the equator, where the hirsute beast cannot cope with the heat.
The reason no dead yeti or baby yetis have ever been seen, or a lair or dung found, is they do not live and breed here, only visit, and arrive via a wormhole, which only appears on mountains rich in iron, a lodestone where the wormhole flux creates plasmatic effects such as orange orbs, 'fireorbs', glowing entities and ball lightning.
When the wormhole is closed there is a ripple in the space time continuum, explaining the military getting dates wrong, and anything metal, such as aircraft or a passing missile, is sucked towards it like iron filings to a magnet, explaining all the aircraft which crashed in that area across the years.
The number 9, the highest single number, is believed to be one of the combination numbers which unlocks the wormhole, and gadget man Igor Dyatlov had developed a special radio frequency receiver to detect the wormhole's formation, comprising of a small radio, excess salt and a piece of copper wire as an aerial. If the reception of Bill Haley's
Rock Around The Clock was interrupted on Berlin radio when at 3000ft they knew what was about to happen.
They headed up that mountain after detecting something and attempted to trap a tourist menk in a pit, digging a deep snow trench. The creature was lured inside with loin steaks and porridge, and the tent arranged to collapse on top of it. The hikers had taken off clothing to evade the menk's thermal vision, which allows it to hunt prey on its frozen world (like when Arnie covered himself with river mud to elude
The Predator).
They hypnotised and subdued the trapped menk by cossack dancing around the tent while singing banned communist songs. 'We will not stop until you drink the medicinal vodka!' they shouted, as Semyon whooped that they were going to make history. Soon it was bleary-eyed, toasting Nikita Khrushchev, collapsing into a heap, snoring its head off, and then they lowered themselves in to tie it to logs, intending to haul it out and lay it on a ski sled and drag it back to Vizhay, where bearded man's hospitality would welcome it as a long-lost cousin and make it feel at home as a fellow State outcast.
But the menk came round when they were in the trench and attacked them with its compelling force and tore its way out of the tent using its claws. The drunken menk staggered outside, tripped over a rock and fell. When they do so they instinctively go into a hedgehog ball, so it rolled down the pass towards the forest, its fur not leaving any trace. The hikers assembled to discuss what to do, and decided they had to leave immediately and go after it, determined not to lose their prize and the chance to be in the National Geographic.
The menk, now nursing a hangover, hid in the forest. Slowly its anger grew as it watched the hikers' approach and begin digging another capture pit in the snow, and it decided to exact its revenge. It pounced on Lyuda and Semyon, and delivered not a bear hug, but something far worse, a yeti hug, which cracked ribs, and when Lyuda screamed it ripped out her tongue like the alienised Ripley did the alien's in
Alien Resurrection, loosening her hyoid bone. It threw their bodies into the ravine, and captured Igor to hang him upside down by his ankles from a tree, but he escaped. To keep evading the hikers and spring surprise attacks it shapeshifted into many different things, including a dolphin, a horse, a lynx, an eagle, and even a mushroom head.
The rest of the hikers hid in the tallest tree they could find, a cedar, nervously looking back up at the tent. The menk lit itself a fire underneath, using branches which snapped off under its weight when it tried to climb up after them. It tried to smoke them out, but eventually, after warming itself, it shook the tree so violently the hikers fell down like conkers, and then it bonked some of them on their heads with a log as if playing a xylophone.
The military arrived, their radar detecting an anomaly, helicopters, ground vehicles, MiG jets, the lot, but by then the menk had vanished, the wormhole closed, so they staged a Roswell style cover-up, arranging bodies so they looked like they'd been chased or bitten by a combination of overwintering snakes, marauding elks and hungry wolverines, while others died of the cold dressed only in their birthday suits. 'People will never believe this', they thought to themselves, but for 62 years and more, they did.
Rumour has it the Soviets caught a menk in 1952 and were hoping for a breeding pair for military applications, and that the menk helped them develop their space program. They only abandoned Moon landings for the greater goal of the planet Chewbaccaan.
A Stitch In Time Kills Nine is available soon.
Topic: Evidence (Read 130917 times)
