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Himalayan Kingdom Sets Aside Forest for Creature That Walks Backward, Poster Reports
A Reddit post says Bhutan's Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary is the only reserve established expressly to protect the habitat of the Migoi, the country's Yeti.
SAKTENG, BHUTAN — A Reddit user posting to r/HighStrangeness claims that the kingdom of Bhutan has created a nature reserve with a distinction found nowhere else on Earth: a mandate to preserve the home of an unproven creature. According to the post, the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary spans 740 square kilometers of high-altitude forest in the eastern Himalayas.
The sanctuary, the author writes, shelters genuine endangered species, among them snow leopards and red pandas. But its stated special purpose is the Migoi, the Bhutanese cousin of the Yeti.
The semi-nomadic Brokpa people of the region describe the Migoi, per the post, as nearly eight feet tall and covered in reddish-brown fur. They are said to credit it with supernatural gifts, including invisibility and the habit of walking backward to confuse trackers. The author adds that the creature is no mere campfire tale in Bhutan, appearing on national postage stamps and in ancient texts.
Expeditions have gone looking. The post says royal search parties and international teams, a Discovery Channel expedition among them, have ventured into the mountains. They reportedly returned with ambiguous hair samples whose DNA could not be sequenced. Local tradition, the author notes, holds that the creature stays out of sight because of its supernatural nature.
Bhutan has not lost heart, the post says. It describes a recently launched "Great Yeti Quest" festival in Sakteng and an officially surveyed Yeti Tracking Trail linking remote highland villages. The author calls it a rare instance of government conservation policy overlapping with high strangeness. The Migoi, for its part, has offered no comment.