Russia - or to be exact, the Soviet Union - was the first country to probe the snowman riddle on a scientific basis. In 1958, in the post-Stalinist political thaw, the Soviet Academy of Sciences diverted itself for a time with the exotic and sensational subject of the Himalayan yeti. As the Academy had received reports of similar creatures in the mountains of Soviet Central Asia, it set up a special commission to collect evidence on the subject and launched a major expedition to the Pamirs to establish the existence of snowmen there. The expedition was a failure (this book explains why), and this put an end to official interest in the matter. Snowman studies (or 'hominology, ' to give its modern term) was declared by the academic establishment to be a pseudo-science, along with astrology and parapsychology.