Born in France, Marie-Jeanne Koffmann spent most of her life in the U.S.S.R., as a surgeon at Moscow hospitals and as a mountaineer. She became interested in the “Snowman” in the 1950s, particularly in Kabarda (Caucasus), where she recorded hundreds of sightings of the almasty, the local variety of the Almas. From 1948 to 1954, Koffmann was held in a gulag (Soviet labor camp) after being accused of spying for the French. Four years after her release, she was picked to be on the Soviet Union’s first official expedition to the Pamirs. She published a synthesis of her remarkable fieldwork research in the magazine Archéologia. Koffmann was also the president of the Russian Society of Cryptozoology for a time.

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