NEW DELHI: Indian Army on Tuesday claimed that one of its teams spotted mysterious footprints of mythical creature "

" close to Nepal's Makalu Base Camp.

During an expedition, the Mountaineering Expedition team came across mysterious marks measuring 32X15 inches, which the Army believed are of the mythical beast Yeti.

"For the first time, an Indian Army Mountaineering Expedition Team has sited Mysterious Footprints of mythical beast 'Yeti' measuring 32x15 inches close to Makalu Base Camp on 09 April 2019. This elusive snowman has only been sighted at Makalu-Barun National Park in the past," Indian Army tweeted.

Rejecting derision over its mountaineering team's claim of having found footprints of the mythical Yeti, the Army said that "evidence" about the Abominable Snowman has been "photographed and will be handed over to subject matter experts" for scientific evaluation.

The Army further added it held on to the "photographic evidence" about the Abominable Snowman for about 10 days but then decided that they matched earlier theories.

“So, we thought it prudent (to go public) to excite scientific temper and rekindle the interest," Army said.

The findings were reported from a region located on the border between Nepal and China. Makalu is among the highest mountains in the world and stands near the Makalu-Barun valley, a remote wilderness that has also been surveyed by researchers hunting for the Yeti.

Though the hunt for the mythical beast has stretched back to centuries, tales of a wild hairy beast roaming the Himalayas captured the imagination of climbers in Nepal in the 1920s, prompting many, including Sir Edmund Hillary, to go looking for the creature.

It was in the 1950s when a British explorer Eric Shipton sighted a series of abnormal footprints while he was looking for an alternate route to climb Mount Everest. Shipton's finding intensified the interest of the world in this mysterious, elusive creature.

So much so that the Nepalese government, in a hope to capture the "beast", issued a hunting license for Yeti in the 1950s.

In 2008, Japanese climbers returning from a mountain in western Nepal told Reuters they had seen footprints, which they thought belonged to the Yeti.

And although they carried long-lens cameras, video cameras and telescopes, they hadn't seen or taken any photographs of the creature.

But scientists have found little evidence of the Yeti's existence so far. In 2017, a group of international researchers studied multiple purported Yeti samples collected from across the Himalayan region and concluded they belonged to bears.

In 2008, two men in the United States said they had found the remains of a half-man, half-ape, which was eventually revealed to be a rubber gorilla suit.

Till now there have been numerous instances of people, explorers, scientists claiming to have either sighted Yeti or spotted its footprints. However, none of the claims could be verified, as of now.