Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Almasty, The Russians, The Trousers, The Latest!

Here's Jon Downes with the latest on all-things Russian and Almasty-ish, courtesy of team-member Adam Davies who, via a crackly phone connection, has updated Jon on what's afoot.

Says Jon:

"The first thing that [Adam] assured me is that all members of the team are safe, healthy and well. The only injury so far has been Adam himself who, whilst climbing some treacherous rocks, slipped and fell 10 feet, tearing his trousers.

"Even Richard is unusually chipper as despite a day of gruelling climbing thousands of feet up mountainous rock faces to a cave where Almasty have reportedly been seen, and – as far as I can gather – from whence Grigory Panchenko obtained both skull fragments and samples of scat, and in Adam’s words 'Richard for once does not have the wooden spoon for being the least healthy member of the expedition – apparently on this occasion the booby prize goes to Keith who had most difficulty negotiating the unforgiving terrain.'

"They explored the caves yesterday, which are at a place called White Rock, near Tyrnyauz and have set up camera traps in the caves. At the moment we have no information as to how recent the scat samples are, but presumably local people believe that the caves are inhabited by the Almasty.

"Grigory has given the bone and scat samples to the boys and he believes that they are genuine, although he has asked Adam to stress to me that he is not prepared to accept them as firm evidence until they have been analysed.

"Today, as far as I can gather, (and you have to remember that this report is gleaned from two very brief crackly telephone conversations, each lasting well under 3 minutes, so I don’t have all the answers), half the team have climbed back up to the caves to check the camera traps, whilst Adam, presumably having repaired his trousers, and Dave have been filming an interview with an eyewitness who claimed to have found an Almasty body in 1996.

"There wasn’t time for me to get a full description, but Adam told me of his surprise at hearing that the female corpse reportedly had a ‘conical’ head like that of a yeti. The team will be staying in and about Tyrnyauz for a few more days before embarking into the mountainous regions near Mount Elbrus hopefully to exhume the cadaver."

Here's the rest of Jon's post.

More when we get it!

Rather curiously, Adam's caper with his trousers is eerily reminiscent of something of a similar nature that happened to Richard on a previous expedition, when he ended up well and truly trouser-less!

What's the deal with the CFZ and trousers? I have no idea, but it can't be a pretty sight, to say the least! It won't mean a thing to American readers, but I'm rather minded to ask Adam and Richard (in the words of the old Scottish song): Donald, where's your trousers?

Is there some weird Fortean beast or entity that has a particular liking for trousers of the CFZ kind? Mercifully, I don't know - and nor do I particularly want to know either!

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