"Scientists" uncover global league of mythical creatures

The yeti/unicorn team is unstoppable.

Artist Mike Mitchell (click to buy his stuff)

How do you know a news story is going to be good? One sure sign is that it opens with the line, "There's a high likelihood that hairs recovered during a state-sponsored expedition in a southern Siberian cave came from a yeti, a prominent Russian cryptozoologist said Tuesday."

Yes, that's right—a real honest-to-goodness Abominable Snowman. The Moscow Times has the story of Valentin Sapunov, a professor at the State Hydrometeorological University in St. Petersburg, who says he collected the suspect fur "during a trip to the Azasskaya cave in the Kemerovo region."

Sounds legit. But all geniuses have their haters, and Sapunov has one Jeff Meldrum, an Idaho State biologist who was at the "yeti conference" in Russia from which the expedition set off.

"There was no expedition. The conference participants were accompanied by the press on a field trip to a cave site. It is my opinion that the 'evidence' found in the cave was unreliable," said Jeff Meldrum, a biologist at Idaho State University and cryptozoologist.

Meldrum, who took part in the expedition, added that the footprints in the cave, a "short line of right feet only," were not convincing, and the "nest" of ferns had never been slept in.

"There was no other sign of occupation in the cave, except a few empty soda cans and snack food wrappers," he wrote in e-mailed comments to The Moscow Times on Tuesday.