Wild man elusive, Beijing man found

It was not a mythological creature found by rescuers in the Shennongjia National Nature Reserve last Saturday, but one Beijing tourist who lost his way in a cave last week while searching for Bigfoot.


Instead of showing relief, 28-year-old Tsinghua University graduate Jiang Suyou said he hoped to stay in the Hubei Province nature reserve for one more day to wait for the legendary half-human, half-ape, asking the rescue team to come back the next day.

"We carried the physically weak man out of the cave and had him sent to the hospital," said Tang Guangzhi, the head of the forest public security bureau for Shennongjia Nature Reserve.

Over 300 personnel spent three days tracking the lost tourist in the reserve before they found him Saturday morning.

"It was very difficult to locate him in the virgin forest," Tang said.

A recent campaign to find Bigfoot, initiated by the Hubei Wild Man Research Association, has increased the number of daily visitors to the reserve to 250. In previous years, few tourists would visit during the cold season.

"This puts a lot of pressure on our daily work," Tang said.

Yin Benshun, vice president of the Hubei Wild Man Research Association, told the Global Times that he and other researchers have already gathered enough evidence to prove the existence of several legendary creatures, including the wild man, the snake with a rooster's comb, the donkey-headed wolf, the double-sized, all-yellow tiger and the griffin. He said they will reveal more details at a press conference on December 11.

"The yearlong exploration needs 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) and some 50 people to work in five teams," Yin said. "But since the funds are not in place, we haven't begun our search."

The existence of the wild man remains hotly debated.

"There's no wild man in China!" said Zhou Guoxing, a paleoanthropologist at the Beijing Museum of Natural History.

Zhou said he went to the Shennongjia area for eight months to look for the wild man in 1977. He is convinced, he said, that the legendary creature only exists in people's minds.

"The association is searching for money," Zhou said, "under the banner of searching for the wild man."

Witnesses claiming to have seen the wild man in Shennongjia described it as over two meters tall and covered in gray, red or black hair.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences carried out three massive expeditions in search of Bigfoot between 1976 and 1981, according to Xinhua News Agency. The searches took place in the Shennongjia National Nature Reserve, a 70,187 hectare virgin forest in Hubei Province.

By Fang Yunyu Source: Global Times