...An early sceptic was Ed Hillary, one of the two New Zealanders who took part in the 1951 reconnaissance. Hillary noticed that there were striking differences between the nature of the tracks in the two sets of photographs. The single footprint is clearly new and fresh, whereas those in the line of tracks are blurred and indistinct, almost certainly the result of thawing and refreezing over a period of several days. Hillary questioned Shipton on the issue several times but always found him evasive. 'Eric,' Hillary told me, 'tended to rather dodge giving too much of a reply.
A second sceptic was the anthropologist John Napier,a professor of primate biology at London University,who went on to write Bigfoot,an enquiry into the existence of a range of creatures of dubious provenance, published in 1972. As well as being baffled by the unique characteristics of the single footprint, he too noticed marked differences between the two sets of prints. The footprint in the close-up shot is almost rectangular, with the addition of the toes. The footprints in the long-shot are oval and there are no signs of toes.
During his research, Napier was so puzzled that he questioned first Ward and then Shipton about the discrepancies. It was Ward who proposed a novel explanation: there had in fact been two entirely different sets of tracks. Shipton supported Ward's account, agreeing with Napier that those in the long-shot were probably made by a goat; it was only those in the close-up which emanated from the unknown creature, yeti or otherwise. Shipton blamed the original confusion on a sub-editor at The Times; Ward suggested that the negatives had been mixed up in the archives of the Mount Everest Foundation. What was particularly striking about this explanation was that it contradicted all previous accounts. Shipton, in The Times, had described seeing just one set of tracks, and repeated this in his book The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition (1952) and his autobiography, Upon That Mountain (1956). Ward too had related the one-track version in his own autobiography In This Short Span, published shortly before Napier's Bigfoot.
Further confirmation of the one-track account is to be found in the diary of Bill Murray.
On November 11, two days after the sighting by Shipton and Ward, Murray and Tom Bourdillon came upon the footprints, which Murray described as 'a long line of spoor along the line of Eric and Michael's track'. I discussed the whole episode with Murray, who died in 1996, and he was certain that there was just one set of tracks...
