During the early 1990s several French expeditions to the Shishi Kuh Valley, in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan, learned of sightings of the barmanu (“Big Hairy One”). They also found Barmanu footprints. Zoologist Jordi Magraner, medical doctor Anne Mallasse, and another team member, all Europeans, also heard unusual guttural sounds that they thought could have been uttered by a primitive voice box. Local witnesses claimed they had seen and smelled the animal that made the noises. The expedition leaders later told reporters, “Eyewitnesses shown pictures of a selection of human and human-like creatures consistently selected the image of a primitive man found preserved in ice some twenty years ago by a Belgian team.” This is a confused reference to the allegedly unknown hominoid (or, in skeptics’ view, model) that Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson described frozen in a block of ice, known universally as the Minnesota Iceman. Further expeditions are planned.
In 1995, after an Unsolved Mysteries segment on the Minnesota Iceman, Loren Coleman, who consulted for that show, was contacted by Pakistanis who claimed to know where a body just like the one in the program was buried. The informants did not respond to follow-up queries. The link to Pakistan and the Barmanu, not mentioned in the television program, is nonetheless intriguing.
SEE ALSO:
SOURCE:
The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters,Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature
Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999 Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark
The barmanu, which means “big hairy one” in one dialect spoken in Pakistan, is a humanlike, fur-covered creature that supposedly lives in Pakistan’s Shishi Kuh valley. In the 1990s French researchers seeking the creature spotted footprints said to have been made by a barmanu; they also heard sounds so strange and smelled an odor so foul that they believed it could only have come from a barmanu. No other evidence of the animal has been found. Nonetheless, believers in other man-beasts like bigfoot and the yeti say that the existence of the barmanu is highly likely given that the region it supposedly inhabits is remote and similar in topography to some other supposed man-beast habitats.
SEE ALSO:
- Bigfoot
- Man-Beasts
- Yeti
SOURCE:
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena – written by Patricia D. Netzley © 2006 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning