US Scientists Invited To Russian Yeti Hunt

First time accepted submitter Lindan9 writes "After an apparent increase of yeti sightings in the Kemerovo and Altai region of Siberia, a group of scientists from around the world are meeting to examine evidence possibly proving yeti existence. The scientists suspect there is a population of several dozen living in the area. The team hopes to spot a yeti or still living neanderthal man during their search of the area's mountains." I hope they find two pristine horns faster than I did.

Pristine Horns are from WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

>two pristine horns

For anyone who missed the joke, this is a reference to a particularly obnoxious quest from World of Warcraft where the required items have a very low drop rate - meaning the player has to slaughter a preposterous number of yetis in order to complete it.

many people think this is madness

[wierd_w]

Many people think the search for cryptids is a waste of time, and not an area where any serious discoveries could be made, due to the large number of very unscientific crackpots.

The alarming number of such crackpots claiming to be cryptozoologists casts a very thick layer of tarnish on the more sincere and truly scientific in that speciality, but the assertion that nothing good can come from those few, due to the noise in the channel from the many, is not a sound assertion, and is a guilt by association rhetorical fallcy.

Other people will assert that any large macrofauna like "sasquatch", or "yeti" would surely have been discovered by now, but that is also an erroneous assertion. (Not that far removed from the false assertions made by several prominent politicians concerning the closure of patent offices during the 1900s, basing such rhetoric on the assertion that "everything worthy of a patent has already been invented." History clearly shows this is not the case.)

If these are *real* scientists looking for evidence of a cryptid, then I wish them well, and hope they find something. The methods they report in their field journals will surely be useful, even with a null result.

If however, this is just a bunch of poorly trained "enthusiasts" claiming to be crytpozoologists, but lacking any measure of proper scientific method, then this expidition is a colossal waste, and I hope they get frostbite of the penis for wasting resources and time.

Sorry.. I felt I needed to clarify that issue.

Re:Waste of time

[WastedMeat]

Not that such a thing exists, but if it did, infrared may not be the way to go. If something has adapted to live in Siberia, it will be well insulated which means that the temperature of the outermost layers of skin and/or fur will remain close to ambient temperatures. Polar bears, for example, are not effectively detected on infrared cameras.