On 19 February 1980 Professor Roy Mackal of Chicago University, a biologist with an enduring passion for cryptozoology, was wading through the virtually unexplored Likouala swamps in the northern jungles of the African Republic of Congo. As he pushed through the stinking mud, biting insects and a humidity which touched 100 per cent, he must have wondered why he had left the comfortable life of a university for such hazardous terrain. Accompanying him was a zoologist, James Powell, whose previous experience of the African jungles still had not fully prepared him for the hardships they were facing. Both were driven by a certainty that somewhere in this dangerous region lived large unknown beasts which, just possibly, might be remnant dinosaurs.1
The Likouala swamps, however awe-inspiring their beauty often is, are one of the most forbidding and inhospitable places on earth. They are a constantly sodden marshy jungle area which extends over some 55,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than England, about the size of the US state of Illinois or Iowa, stretching across the Republic of Congo to Zaïre, Chad and the Central African Republic. They represent terrestrial life in overload, the thick jungle hiding leopards, panthers, gorillas, hippopotami, antelope and the dangerous wild buffalo, together with a number of unknown species which dwell in the shallow waters.
The region is very hot and very humid. It is infested with
The Likouala swamps: possible home to relict dinosaurs.
poisonous snakes – vipers, mambas, cobras – voracious ants, belligerent crocodiles, scorpions, tarantulas and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The region has endless tracts of stinking mud which must be laboriously waded through, each step bringing up discharges of stinking gas. It is filled with diseases of every type. Even the local inhabitants, as acclimatized to the region as any humans could be, are rife with intestinal parasites, skin diseases and malaria.
Few hunters venture into the heart of the swamps. Even fewer live there in villages. The largest are only a handful of isolated huts, many miles’ and many hours’ travel from any neighbours. Those who do live in the area do so on the main rivers, the Likouala-aux-Herbes, the Bai and the Sangha. In this vast swamp a large beast, adapted to the conditions, could survive, rarely seen, indefinitely.
A notable curiosity of this region is that despite its fearsome appearance it is, in ecological terms, an ‘island’ of stability.2 It has remained much the same for 60 million years – almost since the time the dinosaurs are thought to have died out. During this long period it has not experienced any of the changes which have distorted the rest of the world. It has never seen earthquakes, Ice Age glaciation, flooding or the mountain-building effects of continental drift. Over these millions of years it has remained environmentally constant. A creature adapted to the conditions, and living here successfully in the past, would have every expectation of continuing to live there today. Indeed, some known creatures have done just that: crocodiles, for example, have thrived there virtually without change for some 65 million years.
It cannot, therefore, be regarded as a complete surprise that here, in this vast jungle swampland, local hunters have occasionally reported seeing a huge hostile monster described as a large reptile. Science may not have recognized it, but the local people certainly do. They know it as the mokele-mbembe and take care to stay well clear of its path.
It was the reports of this monster which drew Professor Mackal and James Powell into the swamps. Their decision to mount an expedition, in the face of considerable scholastic disdain, took considerable academic courage. The expedition itself necessitated physical courage.
It is undoubtedly true that the native peoples who have lived in the Likouala swamps over the centuries have always known of this monster and have seen no reason to feel anything about it but great fear. It is a common belief amongst certain groups in the area that to even talk about witnessing such a creature would, in some occult manner, bring about one’s death.
The first Europeans to realize that something strange and monstrous was alive in Central Africa were the French missionaries who, during the eighteenth century, were tramping through the jungles seeking to make converts to Christianity. While engaged in this task they also reported on the daily life of the people and on the animals and plants which they saw, most unknown to Western science at the time. In 1776 the French Abbé Proyart drew from these reports for his Histoire de Loango: missionaries had come across the tracks of some huge and unknown animal which left claw-marks about three feet in circumference, with seven to eight feet between each print.3
Nothing further was recorded until the early twentieth century. Then rumours of the existence of some very strange beasts began reaching the scientific community in Europe.
One of the earliest official records of these stories was made by the German captain Baron von Stein zu Lausnitz, just prior to the First World War. At that time these swamps fell within the German colonial empire, the Cameroons, which extended through the north of modern-day Congo, in which territory the region lies today. The captain had been ordered to make a general survey of the area which he completed in 1913–14. In his report back to Berlin – which unfortunately was never published because of the outbreak of war – he mentioned an unknown beast, the mokele-mbembe, which lived in certain rivers in the swamplands.
This beast, he wrote, was ‘feared very much’ and lived in an area bounded by two rivers, the Likouala-aux-Herbes and a tributary, the Sangha. Both feed water into the Congo river which flows down the border between Congo and Zaïre before emptying into the Atlantic.
The captain described an animal about the size of an elephant but with a long and flexible neck. Some reports describe a single horn on its head. Its skin was reportedly smooth and grey-brown in colour. It was said to live in caves washed out by the current beneath the river bank and to eat certain plants along the banks. The local natives were terrified of its long powerful tail which was rather like that of an alligator. It was reputed to attack any canoes which came near it, killing the occupants but not eating their bodies for, although vicious, this animal was not carnivorous.4
During the succeeding decades, anecdotes and rumours about this beast, and perhaps others equally unknown, kept surfacing, not only in the Likouala area, but in other parts of Central Africa. In the Cameroons, a monster, the n’yamala was spoken of in almost identical terms. A water-dwelling monster, the mbilintu was noted in the jungle area where the borders of Zaïre, Zambia and Tanzania all come close to one another. This was described as resembling a huge lizard with a long neck, a small head and heavy legs similar to an elephant’s.5
Another German official, the magistrate Dr Leo von Boxberger, who served in the Cameroons for many years while it remained a colony, reported that in the Congo basin there were many reports of a ‘mysterious water beast’ described as a huge reptile with a long thin neck.6
The earliest European hunters and animal collectors who heard these stories concluded that some relict dinosaur was the likely explanation. Such suggestions briefly made lurid headlines which did the thesis no favours in the scientific community and, even worse, led to a number of sensationalized frauds.7 These drove the subject well beyond the boundaries of orthodox science.
Nevertheless, apparently genuine sightings continued: in the 11920s a local ruler in what is now Zambia was informed, with great excitement, that a monster ‘taller than a man, with a huge body, a long neck with a snake-like head, and sturdy legs’8 had been resting on the edge of a nearby swamp; upon the approach of the men it had quickly vanished beneath the waters. The ruler immediately visited the site where he could easily make out traces of a large animal. In an area about four and a half feet wide, the reeds were pressed into the mud as though from the weight of a bulky creature and, from this point, a wide muddy track led to the river. This was consistent with what the excited natives had seen. The ruler deemed the incident of sufficient importance to send a report on it to the local British administrator.
In May 1954 an Englishman, working in what is now Zambia, was taking a short fishing holiday at Lake Bangweulu. While fishing, he was astonished by the sudden appearance, about twenty-five yards away, of a small head atop a long thick neck, rising up out of the water. His first impression was that it was some sort of snake but he quickly realized that he was witnessing a much more mysterious creature. He remained tight-lipped about this sighting until the 1990s, when he told his story to cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker, who concluded that it represented a mokele-mbembe type of creature.9
Dr Shuker’s informant described the animal’s neck as about twelve inches thick and of a grey colour. Its head had a blunt nose with an obvious jaw-line and brow. After a few seconds the creature sank back below the water of the lake.
Other observers have recorded such creatures and have noted that they regularly leave the water because footprints and other marks have been found on the shore; these revealed that it had a foot with three toes or claws and a thick tail.10
In the late 1970s James Powell approached Professor Roy Mackal, who had been delivering a lecture on cryptozoology at a Texan university, with an interesting story.
In 1976 Powell had been based in Gabon conducting a study of crocodiles. During this time he had befriended local people who, knowing of his interest in such animals, told him of a mysterious creature which they called the n’yamala.11 It was said to be a very dangerous long-necked monster, to be avoided at all costs.
Mackal and Powell pooled their information and began to plan an expedition to Central Africa in order to seek out this unknown monster. Both thought plausible the suggestion that it might be a relict dinosaur. Firstly, though, Powell decided to return to Gabon for a fortnight’s preliminary investigation. He arrived there at the end of January 1979. His findings were to prove important.
Through his contacts Powell was introduced to a local shaman, a man of high intelligence and great knowledge of the area. Powell reported:
First I showed him pictures of African animals found in the Gabonese jungles – leopard, gorilla, elephant, hippo, crocodile, etc. – and asked him to identify each one, which he did unerringly. I then showed him a picture of a bear, which does not occur in Gabon. This he could not identify.
‘This animal not live around here,’ he said. I then showed him a picture of a Diplodocus (a brontosaurus-like dinosaur)… and asked him if he could recognize it.
‘N’yamala,’ he answered, quite matter-of-factly.12 Powell then showed him a picture of a plesiosaur. The shaman also identified this as a n’yamala. When shown illustrations of other dinosaurs the shaman replied honestly and bluntly that these did not live in the region.13
Powell was cautious but concluded that the shaman was a plausible witness and so accepted that there was, or had been in the recent past, a dinosaur-like creature concealed deep in the swamps of Gabon.
The next day Powell travelled eighty miles downriver to another small settlement where he put the same questions and illustrations to the local people. He reported identical results: ‘Pictures of a leopard, gorilla, hippo, elephant and crocodile were all correctly identified. The bear was unknown. Pictures of a Diplodocus and a plesiosaur were both identified as n’yamala.’ The latter was said to be, ‘a rare animal that was found only in remote lakes deep in the jungle. Only the very greatest hunters have seen the n’yamala.’14
The natives told Powell that these animals lived on ‘jungle chocolate’, the name given to a plant with large fruit – like nuts – which grows near the banks of rivers and lakes. They added that these animals did not coexist with hippos; consequently, in any areas where the n’ yamala lived, hippos were conspicuously absent. Mackal and Powell were later to find certain areas abounding with hippos and other parts of the same river complex curiously devoid of them. Could they assume that this indicated the presence of the unknown beast?
The shaman eventually confessed to Powell that he had personally seen one of these beasts about 1946, when he was camping near a small lake. Early one morning, he recalled, a n’yamala left the water and climbed on to the land to eat ‘jungle chocolate’, allowing him a good view of it. The beast was about thirty-three feet long with a long neck and tail and appeared to be as heavy as an elephant.15 The shaman added that its usual feeding times were between midnight and dawn; the remainder of the day it would spend under water.
It seemed evident that this n’yamala of Gabon was the same creature as the mokele-mbembe of the Congo. Enthused by this information, Mackal and Powell decided upon an expedition to the latter region to try and find one of these beasts. They organized rapidly; on 30 January 1980 they flew out of O’Hare Airport, Chicago, en route for the northern Congo.
From the very beginning Mackal and Powell had three aims: firstly, and most ambitiously, to photograph or capture a living mokele-mbembe; secondly, to gather all the information they could about the creature, its habits, its environment and particularly when and where it had been most recently spotted; thirdly, to meet and interview as many eyewitnesses of the beast as possible.
They had chosen their area of search well for they soon found cooperative witnesses who testified to the continued presence of the creatures. Mackal and Powell were in the upper basin of the Likouala-aux-Herbes river, based for a time at the riverside settlement of Epéna, near which a number of sightings had occurred in recent times. They interviewed about a dozen men and women, most of whom had personally witnessed the creature.
One, a high-ranking army officer who had been born in the area and maintained a home there, had seen the creature twice. Once, in 1948, when he had been paddling in a canoe with his mother, upriver from Epéna, they saw a mokele-mbembe crossing the river about thirty feet ahead of them. The same year, also in a canoe, he had actually run into one lying just under the surface in the middle of the river. He vividly described his amazement when the obstruction suddenly moved away and proved to be a monstrous animal.16
Another witness described when, aged seventeen, he had been out in his canoe about 7 a.m. and decided to hunt some monkeys he had spotted. He landed and had just pulled his canoe out of the river when, with a sudden rush of water, a huge animal rose out of the river shallows. It was almost completely visible for several minutes. It had a long reddish-brown neck which, at its base, was as thick as a man’s thigh. It was about thirty feet long and around six feet or so high with a tail longer than its neck.17
Yet another local resident described that as recently as July 1979, just seven months earlier, at a settlement fifty miles downriver from Epéna, a mokele-mbembe had been progressively stranded in a swampy jungle pool by the lowering of the water level with the onset of the dry season. The local people observed it over the course of several months until one day when it emerged from the jungle, walked over a small sandy island and disappeared into the river. It left footprints similar in size to those of elephants, together with claw-marks and a trail of flattened grass six feet wide.18
During these interviews a very intriguing story emerged from several informants. At some time in the past, a mokele-mbembe had actually been captured, killed and subsequently eaten. This was said to have occurred at Lake Tele, about forty-four miles inland from Epéna, deep in the jungle almost midway between the Likouala-aux-Herbes river and a tributary, the Bai.
About forty years earlier, two or three mokele-mbembes had been disrupting the fishing of the local inhabitants who decided to prevent them entering the lake. Around Lake Tele were a number of large lagoon-like pools, each connected by a channel to the main lake. The creatures were living in one of these pools and entering the lake via the channel. The natives chopped down a number of trees, each around six inches across, and sharpened one end. When they knew that the beasts were in the lagoon they drove these heavy stakes across the connecting channel with the points angled uppermost, like a row of medieval pikes. This barrier, they hoped, would keep the monsters out of the main lake. One of the creatures attempted to break through this barrier of stakes and while it was doing so the natives fell upon it with spears, killing it. To celebrate their success, they cut the beast up and ate it. But shortly thereafter, according to the story, all who had eaten the flesh died.19
Mackal and Powell ran out of time and did not make it to Lake Tele. But the next year Mackal returned with a slightly larger team, including, this time, a native Congolese zoologist. While they gathered many more reports of sightings they again failed to see or record any of the beasts at first hand. They did, however, find some evidence which might just derive from the mokele-mbembe.
While they were at Dzeke on the Likouala-aux-Herbes river, they were told of a site a short ride upriver where, about a year before, one of the beasts had been surprised; it had rushed to the river leaving a clear trail behind.
Mackal and his team, together with a local hunter as guide, visited the site. There, they found that the river bank was fairly firm and covered with grass about three feet high. The thick jungle started some fifty yards in from the bank. ‘Jungle chocolate’ plants grew in profusion with their fruit the size of a small orange. The guide took them to an area where there were a number of small pools and there showed them the trail which had been left. Near the edge of one pool they could see the traces very clearly: ‘Branches, broken and weathered, attested to the passage of some creature 1.5 to 2 metres in height and half as wide. This was certainly the right size for a mokele-mbembe, but, of course, also for a smallish forest elephant.’20 The trail led through the jungle and contained large footprints, a foot or so in diameter, pressed into the soft earth. This trail was readily visible until it entered the grass growing at the river bank where the recent year’s growth had since obscured it.
Their guide pointed this out and explained that originally the grass too had been flattened in a six-foot-wide track leading into the river. He added that no elephant makes such a trail and, in any case, elephants always come out of the river again. The other possibility, that the trail was made by a large crocodile, would seem impossible since crocodiles do not leave foot-wide footprints or break the jungle to a height of six feet.
Mackal realized wryly that this creature they were hunting had been living here when, the year before, he and Powell had been upstream at Epéna.
In all, over the two expeditions Mackal took over thirty detailed descriptions of the beast, of which a little more than half came from eyewitnesses, some of them having seen it several times.
Fascinated by the media reports, other investigators began to also arrange expeditions to this part of Central Africa. Since Mackal’s and Powell’s first there have been over eleven expeditions, occurring almost annually. They include two from Japan and one official Congolese scientific group. None have returned with either photographs or film of the beast. It remains elusive to this day.
The regular arrival of researchers and curious amateurs to the area has had its effect on the local economy. The writer Redmond O’Hanlon, who mounted his own mini-expedition to look for a mokele-mbembe, reported that at Boha, the nearest village to Lake Tele – a mere two days’ walk away – a prominent shack bore a large sign reading: BOHA PILOTE DINOSAURE.21
But the mokele-mbembe may not be the only strange creature in the Likouala swamps. Mackal and Powell collected stories of others, two of which might also represent relict dinosaurs.
Among the interviews which Mackal and Powell conducted, one was decidedly odd. One woman, who had hitherto only repeated local stories about the mokele-mbembe, was leafing through a book of dinosaur illustrations carried by the two scientists when she opened a page which had an illustration of a stegosaurus. She suddenly smiled. ‘Yes, that animal was spoken of by my ancestors. My parents told me about this animal with the planks growing out of its back. I was told to hide behind a tree if I saw it coming through the forest.’22 She explained that this animal, the mbielu-mbielu-mbielu, also spent much of its time in the water and that the ‘planks’ along its back dripped with growths of green algae. She added that she had seen the creature herself on only one occasion – or, at least, had seen its back sticking out of the water.
Mackal, on his second expedition in 1981, was to obtain further information on this animal. He met with an elderly local man, a former civil servant who had previously worked for the French administration. He had maintained very detailed records of all sightings of mokele-mbembes known to him, noting some fifteen sightings and the places where they had occurred. Near the end of the interview he also mentioned the creature with ‘planks on its back’.
He described one which had been a little upriver from Epéna, and which, although he had not personally observed it, had often been seen around dusk in the dry season, when the water was at its lowest. It had ‘much green vegetable growth on its back’ which was very obvious whenever the creature emerged from the water.23
Mackal also found many of his informants talking of another monster which they called the emela-ntouka, or ‘killer of elephants’. It was said to resemble the mokele-mbembe in being semi-aquatic, having the bulk of an elephant and similar thick strong legs, but it lacked the mokele-mbembe’s long neck and its head had a sharp horn growing out of it.24 It had been known to attack and kill water buffalo or elephants but never to eat them. It too was herbivorous.
Other creatures were also mentioned: there were sightings of a giant snake-like or lizard-like creature with a forked tongue which walked on four short thick legs, the nguma-monene. It was distinguished by a serrated bony ridge running along its back.
This creature was clearly seen by an American missionary interviewed by Professor Mackal. In late 1971 this pastor was travelling upriver in the Likouala region. The river at that point was about 200 feet wide. Suddenly, ahead of him he saw a creature unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was about thirty feet long and had ‘a back like a saw’. He stopped his outboard and drifted in the current watching as this creature swam across the river, climbed out at the other side and disappeared into the jungle.25
Finally, there were reported in the same area three giant examples of known creatures: a huge crocodile up to fifty feet long which was said to dig out long underground tunnels, which it then inhabited – this was first mentioned in the nineteenth century by a Belgian explorer; a giant turtle with a shell twelve to fifteen feet in diameter; and a large bird, perhaps some kind of eagle, which had a wingspan of almost thirteen feet and which attacked and ate monkeys.
There is clearly much scope for cryptozoologists in Central Africa.
Many thousands of years ago ancient peoples created visual records of their world. They recorded, in pictures and carvings, their society, the animals they hunted or tamed and, later, events of importance. Amongst these records are some which are very curious indeed: they defy any easy explanation.
At the very beginning of the Egyptian royal dynasty, around 3100 BC, when writing was in its infancy, there was production of highly decorated slate palettes, a ceremonial development of those used for mixing pigments for make-up. A number of these have been found, particularly in Hierakonpolis, the ancient capital of southern Egypt. All are covered with exceptionally skilful carvings of hunting or political scenes. Many animals and humans are shown with great attention to detail. The animals, in particular, are instantly recognizable; there is nothing about them which seems to derive from the realm of fantasy.
It is all the more surprising, then, that two of the palettes found – one now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and another in Cairo’s Archaeological Museum – show long-necked creatures identical to the reported characteristics of the mokele-mbembe. The palette of King Narmer in Cairo is particularly forthright. At its centre – framing the circular depression in which pigments could be mixed – are the long curving necks of two strange beasts with strong limbs and long tails. Both these creatures are shown as captive: each has a rope around its neck held tight by Egyptian keepers. This, perhaps, is the nearest the illustrations come to fantasy: no one man could alone restrain such a beast.26
Naturally, as no creatures as these are today accepted by science they have quickly been labelled ‘mythological’. Yet a moment’s study reveals that this conclusion cannot be justified.
Leaving aside modern scientific prejudices, the logic of the palette itself – which is the only logic relevant in this situation – demands that we consider these two long-necked creatures as real, as known, as any of the other animals and humans also depicted. Therefore we cannot avoid concluding that the ancient Egyptians had captured examples of some great beast which either no longer exists or does so only in some distant habitat unknown to science. A beast extraordinarily similar to that reportedly seen in the Congolese swamps.
But the ancient Egyptians were not the earliest humans to record strange creatures which must have inhabited their world and which may still inhabit ours. Millennia earlier, during the last Ice Age, similar monsters were depicted.
It is well known that many caves have been found in Spain and France which hold illustrations made by early man. Some of these are incised by sharp stones; some are drawn in charcoal; others are painted in colour. The most dramatic fact of these illustrations is the very high degree of artistic skill demonstrated by people we otherwise tend to disdain as ‘cavemen’. And further, the very lifelike aspect of the animals represented allows the vast majority of them to be easily identified. Which fact makes it all the more astounding when, on only two known occasions amongst these thousands of illustrations drawn, carved or painted, there are depictions of long-necked animals unlike anything known today.
The first comes from the cave of Pergouset in southern France and is dated to 12,000 or more years ago. It is a well-executed engraving of an animal with a very long neck bearing a head rather similar to a horse. Is it a giraffe? Unlikely because of the almost arctic Ice Age conditions which existed outside. Is it, then, something like a mokele-mbembe? Or perhaps a marine creature rather like Vancouver’s Caddy? No one knows. The archaeologists who drew attention to it in 1997 noted, ‘The very long neck is no accident; the lines have been reinforced or re-cut several times…’27 They speculated that this and other engravings may be fantasies created under the influence of psychedelic drugs. This is possible; but it is much more likely that, as with other drawings, this creature was something seen by the artist living in the world beyond the cave.
The second example is even more enigmatic. In the Spanish cave of Casares, also dating from the Ice Age, is an incised illustration of a group of three monstrous, dinosaur-like, creatures. Two are large, perhaps adults, and the third is small, seemingly a young animal. They all have long necks, substantial but ill-defined bodies and strange reptilian heads. They look dangerous.28
As in the other cases, the logic of the caves themselves suggests that these are creatures which have been actually witnessed by the artists while outside the enclosed safety of the deep caverns.
Were our ancestors, until comparatively recently, confronted by true monsters as they hunted in the forests or fished in the rivers? These drawings would seem to prove that this was so. In any case, whatever the truth, to dismiss these creatures as ‘mythological’ or ‘fantasy’ is to cast premature judgement upon them and risk ignoring potentially important historical data.
Perhaps somewhere we will dig up their bones. Unless, of course, they were maritime or partly aquatic river-dwellers – in which case their bones have probably long been washed far out to sea.
Between 1911 and 1922 Englishman Frank Melland served the British colonial authorities as a district magistrate in what is now Zambia. He had a keen interest in natural history and had been made a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Geographical Society and the Zoological Society. In 1923, when he returned to England, he published In Witch-bound Africa, a study of the tribal shamanism which he had observed during his colonial service. In it he described how his zoological interests were piqued one day when he was told of a special magic charm used on certain river crossings to avoid the attack of some greatly feared creature the natives called the kongamato.
When he asked, ‘What is the kongamato?’ he received a surprising answer. It was a type of bird, his informants said, or rather, a flying creature like a lizard with bat-like wings, wings which were four to seven feet across. Not only this, its beak contained many sharp teeth. Melland wrote: ‘I sent for two books which I had at my house, containing pictures of pterodactyls, and every native present immediately and unhesitatingly picked it out and identified it as a kongamato.’29 It was said to live in the jungle swamplands, in particular those up the Mwombezhi river which arises near the border with Zaïre.
Further south, in Zimbabwe, tales of a similar creature have emerged. The English journalist G. Ward Price related a story told to him by a colonial officer whose administrative region contained a huge swamp which was so feared by the local people that they generally refused to enter it.
One man, however, proved sufficiently foolhardy as to venture in. He emerged some time later with a deep wound in his chest reporting that he had been attacked by a large bird with a long beak. The colonial officer obtained a book containing illustrations of prehistoric creatures and showed these to the wounded man. He looked through it without comment until he came upon an illustration of a pterodactyl. He cried out and immediately fled.
The officer said to Price, ‘It seems to me quite possible that in that vast, unpenetrated area pterodactyls still survive.’30
But it is not only the peoples native to the area who have seen these strange creatures. In 1941 a British army officer and his men witnessed one flying above them.
That year, Lieutenant Colonel A. C. Simonds was in the Sudan under the command of Orde Wingate who was preparing his invasion of Ethiopia to restore the exiled emperor Haile Selassie. As part of the preliminary strategy, Simonds, commanding a very small group of officers and men, was ordered south. He and his men left the southern Sudan town of Roseires and crossed into Ethiopia, heading east through the jungle towards the Belaya highlands which they reached fifteen days later. It was during this march that they all saw a strange flying creature fitting the description of a pterodactyl.
In a private memoir written for his daughter, Lieutenant Colonel Simonds described what happened:
On our march we were continually seeing and hearing wild animals, and although I told this story when I came back to civilization I do not think anyone believes me, even now. All of us saw an enormous bird gliding above us which seemed to have a second sort of wing on the end of its wing tip – almost like a hand. There was a great wing-span, and then another little wing-span. When I arrived in Cairo, I reported this to naturalists, who, having checked the information, said that what I had seen was a Pterodactylos which had been extinct for over a million years!31
Pterodactyl reports are not restricted to the isolated jungle swamp ‘islands’ of Africa. They occur elsewhere, in an area which would seem one of the most explored areas of the world, North America.
On 26 April 1890 the Tombstone Epitaph (one of the most delightfully named newspapers in the world) ran a story, replete with the usual exaggerations, that, several days earlier, two riders travelling through the Huachuca desert south of Tombstone, about fifteen miles north of the Mexican border, came across a huge flying monster. It was reported to have been over ninety feet long with wings 160 feet across: wings which were bat-like, leathery and devoid of feathers. Its head was eight feet long with a jaw bearing a row of sharp strong teeth. The two riders were said to have shot and killed it.32
In 1969 a magazine repeated this story with all the exaggeration of the original and it was seen by a then elderly man who had, as a child, personally known the two original witnesses and the original story. He decided to set the record straight and related a sober and credible account of the incident. He explained that the two riders were well known and respected local ranchers. They had indeed come across a very strange creature that day, something totally unknown to them with large leathery wings. These were not the vast size reported by the newspaper; rather, the wingspan was estimated as between twenty and thirty feet; still huge, of course. They had shot at it with their rifles but failed to kill it; twice it managed to take to the air before plunging down again. They left it, wounded, still struggling in its attempts to fly off.33
Much more recently in Texas, on 24 February 1976, three schoolteachers were motoring down a country road near the Mexican border when a great shadow fell across them. They saw, flying close above them, a huge creature with very large wings of tight-stretched skin over long fine bones; wings rather like those of a bat. Except that these wings were fifteen to twenty feet across. They had never seen or heard of anything remotely like this creature before. Subsequently they spent some time rummaging through reference books looking for anything, alive or dead, which might explain this bird – if that was what it was.
They finally found a creature which appeared identical: a pteranodon – a very large-beaked pterosaur with wings reaching thirty feet across. Unfortunately, this had been extinct since the time of the dinosaurs, almost 65 million years ago.34
Strangely, several days earlier, a similar flying creature – perhaps the same one – had been seen by two other witnesses also near to the Mexican border.
Such creatures may even have flown further north. On the morning of 8 August 1981, a couple were driving across Tuscarora Mountain in Pennsylvania. Ahead two large bat-like creatures, evidently surprised by the sudden appearance of the car, were running towards them, skin-covered wings outstretched, in an attempt to take off. Their wings spanned the width of the road: at least fifteen feet. They took to the air and for the next fifteen minutes the couple watched them gradually soar into the distance. They later identified them as ‘prehistoric birds’ like pterosaurs.35
The world of orthodox science cannot explain these sightings. It is forced to either ignore them or dismiss them as mistaken, fantasy or fraud. But science can provide proof that identical creatures once existed and in the same area. Between 1971 and 1975 the fossil remnants of three pterosaurs were excavated at a site in western Texas. These were dated from the last years of the dinosaur period. While the skeletons were not entirely complete, sufficient bones were found to be able to estimate their wingspan at around fifty feet.36
Not only are these the biggest such flying creatures ever found, but they are also the most recent pterosaurs ever found dating from the very end of the dinosaur period. According to the fossil record, this species was the very last in existence. Some day, perhaps, we may unearth some more recent fossils of this type – or perhaps some remains.
We have seen how isolated yet stable areas can harbour large unknown animals, animals long thought extinct. The sea, already demonstrating some of its mysteries with the coelacanth and Megamouth shark, may yet reveal the existence of more unknown creatures, a megalodon perhaps or a ‘Caddy’. The jungles of central Africa apparently hold one or more semi-aquatic monsters which may represent relict dinosaurs. Could Texas be such an area?
It has long been a deeply held claim that everything is biggest in Texas. Could these stories represent a Texan exaggeration of some close encounter of the large bat kind? Could it really be possible that such unknown creatures could find a refuge in North America where the skies seem forever filled with aeroplanes and helicopters? Are there any isolated and remote areas like those of Central Africa near Texas, where some large, as yet unrecognized creature might live? In fact there is one.
Northern Mexico is dominated by the largely unexplored Sierra Madre mountain range which runs like a bony spine up the country from Oaxaca to the United States border. This region is a perfect place for unknown creatures still to survive, hidden away from human contact. Cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker suggests that it is here that they might be sought.
Dr Shuker notes a further intriguing possibility: in 1968, an archaeologist found a curious carved relief at the ruined Mayan city of El Tajin which sits in the south-eastern foothills of the Sierras. This carving depicted a ‘serpent-bird’ which the archaeologist argued was not some fabulous legendary beast but an accurate depiction of some flying creature well known to the ancient Mayans. This ‘serpent-bird’ is a very good likeness of a pterosaur.37 Could this archaeologist be correct? If so, it indicates that such a creature was alive in historical times, perhaps as late as the final collapse of the Mayan civilization 1,000 years ago.
Dr Shuker comments:
Cryptozoology is full of curious coincidences, but few are more curious… than the undeniable fact that modern-day reports of giant pterosaurian look-alikes just so happen to emanate from the very same region that was once home to a bona fide creature of this type.38
What are the chances of a creature found in fossil strata 64 million years old being alive today? Rather slim, one would think. What of a creature twice that age? Would the chances be twice as slim? The survival of the coelacanth shows how foolish such appeals to reason are in this subject. It would seem possible that any earlier animal, under the right conditions, might have a chance of surviving. It could be objected that the sea is a far more stable environment than anything to be found on land. And this seems a reasonable argument. But the truth is far stranger than this.
As an example, there is one animal whose survival gives all zoologists, however sceptical they might be, pause for thought: the tuatara.
The tuatara is a very primitive reptile, superficially resembling a lizard, with three eyes – the third only partly functional. It grows about two feet in length and lives a mostly isolated nocturnal life. Fossil remains of its type have been dated to as far back as over 200 million years ago and since that time the animals have changed very little. In every part of the world except the South Pacific, the fossil record ceases with that of the dinosaurs. If it were not for the South Pacific remnants, it would have been believed that all the tuataras vanished in the same cataclysm which took away the dinosaurs. But the tuatara saw the dinosaurs come and go; it may well do the same with humans.
It still lives today on a few, very small, very remote islands near to the coast of New Zealand. A second species lives on a ten-acre islet in the Cook Islands about 2,000 miles away. Of all the world, how did these small islands, far apart from each other and thousands of miles away from the major continents, end up with the only living tuataras?
What would be the chances of science predicting this situation? It is fair to say that, however much reason was stretched to its limits, such a survival in these so isolated environments could never have been considered even remotely possible.
We can only conclude that, with nature, anything is possible. And to forget that simple truth is to live in a fantasy world. The approach of the cryptozoologists must be correct: it is more, rather than less, likely that large unknown species still exist, still continue to elude our gaze, in the sea, on the land or in the air.
This scientific adventure is set to continue.