In 1954, a young English journalist named Ronald Downing traveled to the Midlands to call on a man about whom he had heard only fleeting reports. This man, Downing had been told, was a reclusive Eastern European traveler who had had the strange good fortune to see a yeti—an “abominable snowman,” the legendary, supposedly humanoid but simian inhabitant of the high Himalayas. The London Daily Mail, for which Downing wrote, was financing a Himalayas expedition of its own to find and photograph the yeti, and Downing was charged with obtaining a suitably colorful background story.
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