In 1977 China Sent 100 Soldiers Into the Mountains to Hunt Bigfoot. What They Found Terrified Them

Chapter 1: The Government Hunt for China’s Wild Man

In the spring of 1977, the Chinese government launched one of the most extraordinary scientific expeditions in modern history.

More than one hundred people—including anthropologists, zoologists, biologists, photographers, journalists, and soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army—were sent deep into the remote mountains of central China. Their mission was simple in theory, yet astonishing in practice:

Find the creature known as the Yeren.

Often translated as “Wild Man,” the Yeren was China’s equivalent of Bigfoot. For centuries, stories had circulated throughout the mist-covered mountains of Hubei Province about a giant, hairy humanoid that walked upright through the forests. Villagers claimed to have seen it. Hunters reported hearing its cries in the night. Some even swore they had come face-to-face with the creature itself.

Unlike similar legends in many other countries, however, the Chinese government decided to investigate these reports seriously.

When the expedition finally returned from the wilderness, they did not bring back a captured creature. They found no skeleton, no body, and no clear photograph.

What they did bring back was something far more unsettling.They returned with enormous footprints measuring up to 38 centimeters long. They recovered strange hair samples that laboratory analysis could not conclusively identify. They documented hundreds of eyewitness accounts from people living in some of the most isolated regions of China.

Most remarkably, they recorded the testimony of a farmer who claimed to have stood face-to-face with one of these creatures for nearly an entire hour.

To this day, the Yeren investigation remains one of the largest state-funded cryptid hunts ever conducted anywhere in the world.

Yet outside China, very few people have ever heard the story.

When most people think about mysterious creatures, they immediately picture North America’s Bigfoot, the Himalayan Yeti, or perhaps the Loch Ness Monster. These legends dominate documentaries, books, and television programs. The Yeren, despite attracting the attention of China’s most prestigious scientific institutions, is rarely mentioned.

That omission is strange.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences devoted years of research to the mystery. Multiple government-sponsored expeditions were organized. Soldiers were deployed to assist scientists in the field. Rewards were offered for anyone capable of producing a living or dead specimen.

Few governments in modern history have ever treated a legendary creature with such seriousness.

But the story of the Yeren did not begin in 1977.

In fact, it stretches back thousands of years.

Ancient references to mysterious hairy beings living in China’s mountains appear throughout Chinese history. Some researchers trace the earliest descriptions to the Warring States Period more than two thousand years ago. Over the centuries, scholars, poets, physicians, and local historians all recorded stories of strange human-like creatures inhabiting remote forests and mountain caves.

During the Ming Dynasty, local records from what is now Hubei Province described groups of wild, hairy beings living among the mountains and occasionally raiding villages for livestock. In 1578, the famous physician Li Shizhen included references to Yeren-like creatures in his monumental medical encyclopedia, placing them alongside descriptions of known animals and natural phenomena.

These accounts were not isolated folklore.

They appeared repeatedly across different regions and different periods of Chinese history.

One local legend claimed the creatures were descendants of laborers who had fled into the wilderness during the construction of the Great Wall centuries earlier. Over generations, they supposedly became wild and adapted to life in the mountains.

Whether true or not, the legend reveals something important.

People in these regions had been discussing the existence of the Wild Man for centuries.

For most of modern Chinese history, however, such stories remained little more than folklore.

Then something happened in 1976 that changed everything.

Late one night, six officials were driving home from a Communist Party meeting in the Shennongjia region of Hubei Province. The road wound through dense mountain forests, far from major towns and cities.

Suddenly, their headlights illuminated a figure standing directly in the road ahead.

The creature did not move.

The vehicle came to a stop.

Curious and confused, three of the men stepped out of the car and approached the figure. According to later reports, they came within a single meter of it—close enough to touch.

One of the witnesses was Chen Liansheng, a senior forestry official whose testimony would later become central to the Yeren investigation.

His description was detailed and specific.

The creature was covered in reddish fur. It stood upright like a human. Its face appeared strangely human-like, yet its mouth protruded forward in a way that seemed almost animal. It possessed no visible tail. Its upper body appeared relatively slender, while its lower body was unusually thick and muscular.

Most disturbing of all were its eyes.

According to Chen, they reflected light differently from any human eyes he had ever seen.

For several moments, both sides simply stared at one another.

Then one of the men threw a rock.

Instantly, the creature turned and vanished into the darkness of the surrounding forest.

The next day, the officials returned to the location and reportedly discovered several strands of reddish hair where the encounter had occurred. These samples were collected and eventually sent to Beijing for examination.

Soon afterward, Chen filed an official report.

That detail is often overlooked, but it matters.

These were not hunters, thrill-seekers, or believers in the supernatural. They were Communist Party officials operating during the final months of China’s Cultural Revolution—a period when superstition and folklore were strongly discouraged.

Submitting a report about a mysterious hairy humanoid was not something a government official would do casually.

Yet the report was filed.

And when it reached Beijing, it attracted attention.

Scientists who had quietly collected similar stories for years suddenly had a credible modern case to examine. Newspapers began reporting on the phenomenon. Villagers from across several provinces came forward with their own experiences.

Within months, what became known as “Yeren Fever” had swept across China.

For the first time, the country’s scientific establishment openly confronted a question that had lingered in the shadows of Chinese history for centuries:

What if the Wild Man was real?

And in 1977, determined to find the answer, China sent more than one hundred people into the mountains to search for it.