Bigfoot: It’s Yogi not Yeti

Russian monster is bear

A “YETI” which has terrorised Russians for three years and sparked a global bigfoot frenzy is really a bear from the US, a Sun probe reveals.

Our decisive DNA tests — by a leading genetics expert from Oxford University — show the creature is an American bear that could have fled a circus.

It is more closely related to famous cartoon bear Yogi than a mythical man-like snow monster.

For three years, there have been scores of sightings of a towering, long-haired beast roaming the Mount Shoria region of southern Russia.

The “bigfoot” has shed its unusual black and grey coarse coat in clumps in various caves which have been collected and claimed to be yeti hair.

The samples have never been analysed by top geneticists — until now.

Cartoon character ... Yogi

We gave three hairs from different areas of Shoria to yeti-hunter Prof Bryan Sykes of Oxford’s Wolfson Institute.

His tests reveal one, a long, thick, distinctive hair, comes from a rare type of black bear from North America — Ursus americanus. They can reach 7ft — just like the yeti sighted at Shoria.

The other two hairs turned out to be from a racoon and a horse.

Experts are baffled as the bear is never found native outside the US. The hair is not from an Asiatic black bear, which can be found in Russia.

Prof Sykes — leading a global genetics project to test hair samples from possible bigfoots — revealed: “The hairs did not come from a yeti. The American black bear result was highly unusual. An explanation could be an animal escaped from a circus, zoo or private collection, but it is extraordinary.”