Last week’s news from northern Pakistan and southern Europe may not have crossed the pond to mid-coast Maine. Hence this column regarding science and searchers.

French and Spanish papers have featured the early August murder of Jordi Magraner, guiding spirit of – take a deep breath – The Virtual Institute of Cryptozoology. A Spaniard, Magraner was based in France … hich, Spanish say, explains much of his bizarre and lamentable story. Spain prides itself on a severe academic rigor. But once across the border, ooh-la-la. (Violent death is bad and sad … but for more on this “Institut Virtuel,” go to Google and giggle.)

Magraner’s throat was cut in the remote valley of Bumboret, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where he’d been searching for the Abominable Snowman. Despite being known as “big, hairy one” (bar-manu in the local lingo), this creature is not to be confused with Osama bin Laden (see below) but seems equally elusive.

Science nowadays comes in three forms: serious, pseudo, and silly. Most scientists are serious, proceed methodically, insist on real evidence, and rejoice in doubt and challenge. Serious paleolanthropology, the science of human origins, embraces lively argument but agrees on at least one issue – that all humans have belonged to the same sub-species since Neanderthal disappeared 30,000 years ago. In other words, no yetis.

Pseudo science is different and, in the United States, dangerously ideological. It begins with a belief, usually religious, and then searches for “evidence” to support it. Marginal elsewhere in the West, this deeply dishonest effort still thrives among Americans, nearly half of whom polled believe in Genesis-like notions of recent, rapid, divinely ordained creation. Advocates of so-called “creation science” try to have their gibberish included in biology books and public schools … and have voted overwhelmingly Republican since Ronald Reagan declared his own doubts about Darwin.

Challenge to Reagan’s current successor: Do you really want to be an “education president,” in fact as well as empty rhetoric? Denounce “creation science” for what it is: intellectual fraud. Bush won’t, because he wants and needs the Christian fundamentalist vote. Without it, he’d never have won – “won” – elective office.

Then there’s silly science and the unfortunate “cryptozoologist” in Pakistan, Magraner counted himself a disciple of the late and little known Bernard Heuvelmans, whose doctorate goes to show that a Ph.D. is no guarantee of good scholarship. Among Huevelmans’ imaginative publications: On the Track of Unknown Animals, Neanderthal is Still Alive, and Beast-Humans of Africa. All risible rubbish.

Bumboret Valley, where Magraner searched for his yeti, has long attracted eccentric outsiders, including (four times) myself. Its otherworldly appeal stems mostly from the native people who – alone in that part of Central Asia – have resisted conversion to Islam and retain a faith based on animism and ancestor worship. Thus anthropologists (my own tribal group) go crazy/enthusiastic in Bumboret; one of my European colleagues stayed too long and went crazy/insane. None of us, however, ever glimpsed an Abominable Snowman. Nor was Bumboret considered dangerous. What’s changed?

We don’t yet know who killed Magranet or why. But across the breadth of Pakistan, once relatively safe for Westerners, events speak to the deadly danger of religious fundamentalism. A year ago, between trips into then-riskier Afghanistan, I traipsed Pakistani streets without a care. Not now.

Last winter (in Karachi) an American reporter was murdered in cold blood. March 17’s grenade attack on a diplomatic community church (Islamabad) killed four people, including two Americans attached to our embassy. In May (Karachi again) a suicide bomber struck in front of the Sheraton Hotel: 13 dead, 11 of them Westerners. Last week (near Islamabad) a school and a hospital, both run by Christian missionaries, were hit in separate attacks. Car-bombed in June, the American consulate in Karachi has now closed its doors. Likewise locked tight is an American-sponsored international club in Peshawar where, during the anti-Soviet 1980s, we’d congregate and self-congratulate after forays into jihad Afghanistan. (Back then, the Islamist mujahedeen were CIA-backed good guys, and Pakistan represented safe haven for us all.)

The current spate of xenophobic violence comes in response to our War on Terror – and in opposition to Pakistani President Musharraf’s related, belated efforts to contain Muslim religious fundamentalism. We’ve been partly successful, and so has he. But the monster that our two governments helped create two decades ago is truly abominable. And, unlike a snowman, it has thus far survived the heat.

This series’ second column (Oct. 9, 2001) listed some of Pakistan’s long-standing national interests. Under Musharraf’s predecessors – and Musharraf himself until U.S. pressure after 9-11 – those goals were pursued by a strategy that promoted radical, militant Islamism in Afghanistan. Much of this promotion occurred on Pakistan territory, especially in the Tribal Areas that border Afghanistan. Here Pakistani government authority is next to nil.

Result: Not a yeti but a Frankenstein which has now turned on Musharraf himself and on the West. Special rage is reserved for the US, whose puppet Musharraf now appears. See recent columns (Aug. 5 and 7) for U.S. stooging of Afghan President Hamid Karzai; critics in Pakistan likewise call Musharraf “Busharraf.”

This series’ first column (Oct. 4, 2001) urged closing the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It’s never been done; perhaps it can’t be done. But because our forces waited well into 2002 before trying, al-Qaida and Taliban personnel escaped into Pakistan. Based in the Tribal Areas, they sally forth to strike in all directions. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, regular government troops have entered this “Land of Insolence” … but with scant effect.

Indeed the reverse is now true. Islamist counter-attacks from the Tribal Areas are getting more frequent and reaching further afield. The resulting urban insecurity now extends to Kabul: Afghanistan’s capital, biggest city, and site of June’s peaceful Loya Jirga. But in July came the assassination of a vice-president and the discovery of a car bomb plot. Last Wednesday morning a police post was attacked. Afghan government sources claim that the gunmen were merely prison escapees – less threatening than, as first reported, invaders from the tribal boondocks – but anxiety grows. Were all killed, as the government asserts? Or did some fade away like yetis: ready to appear and disappear another day?

Meanwhile, speaking of mythic elusiveness, there’s no news of Osama bin Laden and little more of Mullah Omar. These two most abominable enemies once figured in every Bush statement. Our commander in chief sounded like the Coasters, a favorite doo-wop group of my youth. In their 1957 mega-hit “Searchin’,” the background voices endlessly repeated “Gonna find her.” Change the gender to fit Osama, and you have W’s mantra last September and October and November and December … until bin Laden disappeared from Tora Bora.

And Mullah Omar? Reported sightings of the one-eyed Taliban leader led to last month’s bombing of a wedding in Uruzgan province.

Time for all American citizens to keep both eyes open. There’s no yeti yet, and guess what? Bush has thus dropped all mention of Osama and Omar. Once they were key stated targets in the War on Terror. Given their disappearance, now they’re conveniently ignored. What other abominable snowmen will Bush put forth to take their place? Be vigilant…lest our White House come to resemble the Virtual Institute of Cryptozoology.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.