Possible Desert Yeti Sighting in the Middle East

This Report published to this site November 18, 1999

ID#00011

My name is Tim Cash, and I recently ran across your web site, which I found very
interesting. I have a story for you. I think I once saw a Yeti. It was in the desert, as strange as that
may sound.

It was quite a long time ago, when I was growing up. My father worked in the oil industry, and so I spent a lot of time in the Middle East as a child, in the Persian Gulf and in Algeria. Once, on an excursion in southern Algeria, near Tamanrasset (in southeastern Algeria), I saw something which I think may have been a desert Yeti. Of course I don't know, and I feel a little awkward bringing it up, but here's the story. I was camping with my father, several other American oil company workers, one of their kids, and a few of our Algerian friends who worked with the Algerian state oil company. My father and his colleagues had taken some time off from their regular duties to go out and spend a day or two of recreation in the Algerian desert, which is quite magnificent.

This was all back in 1972.

Anyway, we were all awakened during our second night out. We'd been sleeping under the stars, and were awakened by the sound of something moving around near our truck. It wasn't a sudden or scary noise, and in fact it took a while for us to wake up enough to realize that there was something there. But my father and a colleague of his, Roger, woke up the whole party, and told us there was something over near the truck. We didn't quite know what to make of it (since, after all, this was the desert, and it's not like you get roaming bears or any of the kinds of animals which startle campers in the U.S. in the desert).

The truck was about 20 yards from where we had all laid out our sleeping bags, and we shined a flashlight in the direction of the truck. Something was clearly on the opposite side, and we could see its body mass behind the vehicle. Of course with only a flashlight we didn't have much of a good view, but whatever it was very large, and definitely not human. As soon as the flashlight beam hit it, it ducked down. But we watched it there for about ten or fifteen seconds, while it crouched behind the chassis of the truck. It watched us the whole time, and didn't move. We were all whispering to each other, and of course we were all quite scared, since clearly it wasn't human. I guess we just stayed there like that since we were too shocked to know what to do, and since it didn't seem to be threatening (it was, after all, hiding from us) and wasn't coming toward us, we just sat there watching it for what seemed like the longest time. Finally, one the Algerians with us, Belkacem, suggested that we had to do something, since we obviously couldn't just stay in that situation, with a thing behind the truck watching us. So he picked a canned good from a bag we had with us near the sleeping
bags, got up and, taking the flashlight, slowly advanced toward the truck. The rest of us stayed back, but we watched as Belkacem got closer. He kept the light shining on the thing's eyes the whole time. When he got maybe ten yards from the truck, the thing let out a kind of a howl, and sprinted off away from us. I think it scared the hell out of Belkacem, and at first he sprinted back toward us. But Roger grabbed the flashlight from him and chased after the thing until it was out of sight.

That was it. I can't really describe the thing in too much detail. Since I was a kid (I should add that I was nine years old at the time), it seemed to me to be larger than life. If I were to guess as to its size, I'd say that it was maybe six or seven feet tall, and it kind of looked to me like a big ape.

Anyway, we saw nothing more of it, but promptly packed our things up and got in the truck to drive away from the spot. We just drove back to Tamanrasset that night, since we were all a bit too freaked out to stay in the desert.

We told some people about it in town the next morning, and I guess my dad had a conversation with one guy who owned a little cafe - he told my dad that the locals see creatures like what we had seen from time to time. They'd never hurt anyone, and mostly just seemed to spook the herds of the nomads of the area. Nobody had ever had any problems, so it was just an aspect of local lore which people talked about. They even had a name for the things. Everyone in Tamanrasset called them "al-kubara," which basically means the "giants."

So that's my story. Was it a Yeti? I really have no idea, but if it wasn't, I'm at a loss to say what it was. Anyway, I'll be curious to hear what you think of my story. I can be e-mailed casht@gunet.georgetown.edu.

Happy hunting,

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