Recorded tales of a giant, hairy humanoid creature — whether you call it Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, Sasquatch, or the Yeti — date back to the 1920s in North America, and as far back as 1832 in Nepal. But like the Loch Ness Monster and flying saucers over Area 51, hard evidence of the Chewbacca-like hominid legend has always been elusive.
Someone should have told the editors of Pravda, the Moscow-based tabloid that shares its name with the now-defunct Communist Party press organ that went belly-up, along with the USSR, in 1991.
On December 29, Pravda ran a story under the breathless headline “Yeti caught in Russia’s Ingushetia Republic.” Citing a story from the news agency Interfax, Pravda reported the capture of a two-meter-tall creature and said it was taken to a “zoo situated on the territory of the holiday hotel near the settlement of Surhahi in the Nazranovsky region of Ingushetia,” near the Georgian border.
Pravda even quoted Bagaudin Marshani, Ingushetia’s minister for labor and social development, saying that border guards found the Yeti — originally thought to be a bear — after a hunter said the animal had attacked a sheep.
And there was video, a remarkably complete chronicle including a close-up of the dead sheep and a shot of the hunter firing on a slowly retreating Bigfoot.
Alas, it was not to be.
Marshani later explained to the red-faced Russian media that the Yeti was “a life-size puppet” that his government agency planned to use for New Year’s celebrations.
“Ded Moroz [Grandfather Frost] and Snegurochka [the Snow Maiden] are arriving today on a special flight from Greenland. They will get to meet the Yeti that we ‘captured,'” he said. “There will also be ten talking animals at the holiday — a wolf, a squirrel and others. Ded Moroz will introduce the Yeti to children.”
The program of fairy-tale characters, it turns out, was designed to collect donations for an orphanage.
Pravda issued a correction, saying that Marshani scolded Interfax for misinterpreting his words. “News agencies distributed the information without checking the facts,” his spokesperson told Pravda. “It’s a hoax.”
YouTube viewers, however, were not fooled so easily. The bear “turned out to be Putin,” one commenter cracked. Another wondered aloud if the labor ministry would “capture” SpongeBob SquarePants next year.
Watch the Yeti hoax video that Pravda fel for — hook, line, and sinker: