London, Oct.1 : A BBC producer has expressed his determination to prove that George Mallory, and not New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Nepali Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was the first to reach the summit of the over 29,000 feet high Mt. Everest.

Graham Hoyland will tell the Royal Geographical Society this week how George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were the first men on Everest in 1924.

Hillary and Tenzing reached the summit in 1953.

Mallory's frozen body was recovered in 1999, 75 years after he started out on his expedition.

After eight trips to Everest and decades of research, Hoyland thinks he knows what happened to his hero.

He argues that most of the historians and climbers, who are, like him, fixated by Mallory's last climb, have been looking for answers in the wrong place.

That place is a vertical cliff at 8,620 metres (28,280ft) on the mountain's north ridge known as the Second Step. Most mountaineers believe it was here in 1924 that climber Noel Odell saw Mallory and Irvine for the last time, climbing towards the summit.

Hoyland is quoted by The Scotsman as, however, saying that while Mallory had favoured this route, it had not been the way chosen for earlier attempts.

"I read all the pre-war expedition books and I realised no one had even attempted to go anywhere near the Second Step. They'd all traversed underneath it."

Climbing up Everest's lower slopes, Hoyland says, Mallory and Irvine met Howard Somervell and his climbing partner Edward Norton as they descended from an earlier attempt on this same, slightly lower route to the summit.

"Mallory had Irvine with him, who isn't really a climber, and he looks up and sees this enormous prow of a Second Step. I don't think he would have contemplated it when he got up close."

As the years passed, Hoyland says, Odell became convinced he had seen his companions on the imposing Second Step. But Hoyland argues that the two Britons could not have climbed the steep cliff as quickly as Odell described. "No one can surmount the Second Step in five minutes."

Then, he says, there is the question of timing. "Odell saw them at 1.30 p.m., which is late, so it certainly wasn't on the Second Step. The only place it can have been was the Third Step. They were seen by Odell at just the time you would have expected to see them at the Third Step."

If Mallory and Irvine were on the Third Step, Hoyland argues, "there is no question in my mind that one or both of them would have reached the summit."

The location of Mallory's body, far below and near their top camp, shows how close they came in making it back. But Mallory had put his snow goggles in his pocket, suggesting it was dark when he fell. Hoyland believes Irvine then struggled on before lying down and succumbing to the cold. (With inputs from ANI)