Adventures in Cryptozoology Volume 1: Hunting for Yetis, Mongolian Deathworms, and Other Not-So-Mythical Monsters

Praise for Adventures in Cryptozoology

‘Richard Freeman must surely be the world’s most widely-travelled field cryptozoologist, scouring the globe for well over twenty years in search of such elusive mystery beasts as British lake monsters, Mongolian death worms, Tasmanian wolves, Russian and Sumatran man-beasts, South American water tigers, and African dragons, to name but a few. Now he has drawn upon the extensive knowledge and experience gained during his many expeditions and voracious reading to write this fascinating book, packed with new, original insights and forthright opinions, making it essential reading for everyone who dreams of following in his footsteps seeking unknown animals.’

—Dr Karl Shuker, zoologist and author

‘Freeman’s book on monsters is a page-turning treat. Not only does he pack it with excellent overviews, facts and details on cryptozoology, he also grips the reader with accounts of his own expeditions. These globe-trotting journals bring the hidden and mysterious creatures of nature into the mud and dirt of serious, real-world research, leaving us with a thrilling and inspiring book. Yes, Freeman takes monsters seriously, but he never loses his sense of fun, wonder and adventure. Recommended.’

—Peter Laws, author of The Frighteners: Why We Love Monsters, Ghosts, Death, and Gore

Copyright © 2019 Richard Freeman

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

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Adventures in Cryptozoology: Hunting for Yetis, Mongolian Deathworms, and Other Not-So-Mythical Monsters: Volume I

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 20199356743

ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-015-8, (ebook) 978-1-64250-016-5

BISAC SCI070000—SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Zoology / General

Printed in the United States of America

Adventures

in

Cryptozoology

Hunting for Yetis,

Mongolian Deathworms,

and Other

Not-So-Mythical Monsters

Volume I

Richard Freeman

Coral Gables

Dedicated to Sir David Attenborough, who brought wonder and mystery into my childhood.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

The History of Cryptozoology

Chapter Two

Here Be Dragons

Chapter Three

Monsters of Lochs and Lakes

Chapter Four

Sea Monsters

Chapter Five

Giant Apes and Hominins

Chapter Six

The Magic Zoo

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

Foreword

Here be dragons…

Had Richard Freeman been living in medieval times, I am quite certain he would have been burnt at the stake for being a wizard with a mind crammed full of arcane knowledge about the strangest, weirdest, scariest, and in some cases possibly even the most dangerous creatures this world has ever seen. But, as he is in fact living in present day Exeter, he has to make do with being a well-known, and to some extent even notorious (something I suspect he would actually be a little bit proud of), figure in the weird and wonderful world of cryptozoology.

To say Richard is passionate about cryptozoology, would be to engage in an understatement of almost criminal dimension. And if you combine this with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of everything from thylacines to the many varied forms of big, hairy ape-like creatures roaming the world, and the many creatures in between (dragons being especially close to his heart), you are in for several entertaining hours, should you find yourself seated across from him over a couple of pints, or amongst the audience of one of his lectures.

I first met Richard in the mid-1990s at the first UnConvention held by the Fortean Times magazine in London, and got to know him later at a number of the Weird Weekends held by the Centre for Fortean Zoology in Northwest Devon. Despite our differences—me being a traditional university-educated zoologist/scientist, a class of beings for which Richard can only muster a fairly limited amount of respect—we became good friends. A situation which, over the years, has resulted in me receiving mysterious and often evil-smelling letters and parcels whenever Richard has been on one of his travels to far-flung corners of the earth, on the hunt for creatures that live at the outer limits of scientific knowledge. Most of these times, he has brought back old bones, scat samples, tufts of hair, or mouldy pieces of skins for me to analyse. We haven’t made a major breakthrough yet, but it is not for lack of effort. Say what you will, but Richard does get out in the field considerably more than most.

I hesitate to call this book Richard’s definitive work on cryptozoology, as I am quite certain he’s got a good number of books in him yet, but it is quite a read—part autobiography, part cryptozoological encyclopaedia. You may agree or disagree with his conclusions and observations, but I guarantee that once you have read this book, you will have been mightily entertained, and it will have made you think. What more can one ask for in a book these days?

Oh—and should you see, find, or photograph something strange out there, remember to contact Richard (or me)! You never know…

Lars Thomas

Copenhagen, March 2019

Chapter One

The History of Cryptozoology

‘What is the most cunning of all animals? That which man is yet to see.’

—Indian proverb

•

This is a book about monsters, real ones. From an early age we are taught that monsters do not exist. This is a lie, pure and simple. Most of us have relegated monsters to the realms of horror movies and nightmares but, by doing this, we do them a disservice. The reality is that monsters walk the earth today. The Oxford English Dictionary has several definitions of a monster. They include ‘a large, ugly, and frightening imaginary creature’, and ‘a thing of extraordinary or daunting size’. Both would sound familiar to most people today. But what makes a monster can depend on how you look at things. Flamingos are beautiful birds. Most of us have seen them at zoos or on wildlife documentaries. They are a favourite amongst birdwatchers, admired for their lovely pink plumage. Most species derive their colouration from the carotenoid proteins in tiny shrimps that they filter from the water with the lamellae in their beaks. Though they look beautiful to us, flamingos must seem horrific to their diminutive prey: as a vast gaping maw fringed with hair-like structures, lunging down to scoop them up.

For the sake of this book, however, I will use the term ‘monster’ for a cryptid. Cryptids or real monsters fall into several categories. Some, like the Mongolian deathworm, are utterly unknown to modern science; the second category is that of creatures thought to be extinct but that may still thrive in remote parts of the world. The Tasmanian wolf belongs to the latter group. Lastly, we have known creatures who have grown to dimensions far beyond those officially sanctioned by so-called experts. These creatures would include animals like the giant anaconda.

Some cryptozoologists, those who study and search for cryptids, dislike the term ‘monster’. I disagree. We would do well to remember the original meaning of the word. It comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning revelation. As a cryptozoologist I find this very fitting.

In the days before international travel, before television and before Sir David Attenborough, the average European knew little about the wild animals of the world. Most of their scant knowledge would have been gained, by the few who could read, from bestiaries. These illustrated compendiums of animal lore were popular in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. These books were more concerned with what moral lessons Christians could learn from beasts than the natural histories of the beasts themselves. The dragon, for example, was symbolic of both Satan and pride. Conversely, the unicorn symbolized Christ and his humility. The depictions animals with which we are familiar today such as crocodiles, elephants, and hyenas were so distorted as to look like something else entirely. The artists involved had never seen living specimens of the beasts in question and had only travellers’ descriptions to go on. Some of the strange beasts recorded in these works have been shown to be garbled versions of real animals. The manticore, according to the bestiaries, was a beast with red fur, a body like a lion, a man’s face, rows of shark’s teeth, and a scorpion tail. It was said to dwell in India and be fond of the flesh of men. We know today that the manticore had its origin in the tiger.

As people began to travel more and the globe became more populous, inch by inch superstition was replaced with science. Exotic creatures were captured for menageries springing up across Europe and a new interest in natural history, free from religious allegory, began. With the Renaissance and the dawn of the age of science, many of the ancient monsters were slain by reason. In his 1748 book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) noted that no amount of evidence could prove the reality of an event that violated the laws of nature. It was more likely that the evidence was wrong. Here came a great stumbling block as even today we do not fully understand the laws of nature. At this time, belief in monsters was waning in Europe, but a few naturalists were still investigating strange creatures.

Baron Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) was a French zoologist, anatomist, and palaeontologist. He established many key concepts such as different rock strata holding different fossils and that animal species could become extinct. In 1812, Cuvier made his greatest mistake. Indeed, it was to become known as his ‘Rash Dictum’. He stated that he thought all the world’s large animals had already been discovered and there were no more to be found. Just seven years later, one of his former pupils discovered the Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus).

The Prophet of the Kraken

In 1820, a man died of starvation in a cold Parisian gutter. He was given a pauper’s burial and the few who attended did so only to snicker at the feeble-minded fool that believed in sea monsters. The man was the French zoologist Pierre Denys de Montfort. Had he lived until 1857, he would have seen his wild stories vindicated. Pierre Denys de Montfort was a malacologist, an expert in molluscs. He was also a scientific heretic, for he dared to research something that the high priests of science deemed to be an old wives’ tale: giant cephalopods.

He was born in 1764 and was fascinated by nature from an early age. Sadly, he was of a generation that lost many scientists to history due to the French Revolution and a republic that stupidly—in the words of public prosecutor Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville—did not need scientists. He fared better than most. After serving in the army and after a stint as assistant to the geologist Barthelemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, he became attached to the Jardin des Plantes, the main botanical garden in Paris. For a time, he was a much sought-after scientist, being offered places on a number of expeditions. He travelled to Egypt and Germany to study geology. His gift for languages did not go unnoticed, and he became attached to the Museum of Natural History as a translator.

He investigated the origins of ambergris (the indigestible beaks and claws of cephalopods vomited up by sperm whales like gigantic owl pellets) and became interested in the idea of huge cephalopods. He interviewed American whalers who had settled in France about the evidence for such creatures. One such man, Ben Johnson, told of a monstrous tentacle found in the mouth of a sperm whale they had killed. The tentacle was thirty-five feet long and had been severed at both ends, de Montfort reckoned another ten to twenty feet of it had been lost. It was as thick as a mast with suckers the size of hats. Another man, Reynolds, told of seeing what he thought was a red sea serpent lying next to a whale they had killed. It was discovered to be a massive tentacle forty-five feet long with suckers as large as plates.

Writing in his Histoire Naturelle Genale et Particulière des Mollusques, de Montfort classifies two giant cephalopods: the colossal octopus and the kraken octopus, the latter referring to the gigantic squid. He also writes of a votive painting (now long lost) in the Chapel of St Thomas in Brittany. The painting showed a titanic octopus attacking a ship. It was supposedly based on real events involving a ship from a nearby port whilst anchored off Angola. A giant octopus was said to have attacked the ship, wrapping its arms about the rigging and causing the vessel to list dangerously. The crew retaliated with cutlasses and managed to get the monster to relinquish its hold by hacking off some of the arms. The painting was made to commemorate the events, the scared sailors having prayed to St Thomas.

Such huge creatures had been mentioned by Louis Marie Joseph O’Hier, Comte de Grandpre, in his book Voyage a la Cōte Occidentale d’Afrique written between 1786 and 1787. The natives of that region told him that a giant octopus known as Ambazombi would often attack their boats and canoes, dragging them to the bottom of the sea. They believed the monster to be an evil spirit. The name Ambazombi may be linked to Nizambi, the supreme god of the Bakongo people of Angola. The term ‘zombie’ is a corruption of Nizambi, whose priests entered a trance-like state before their god entered their bodies.

Captain Jean-Magnus Dens, a Danish man and former employee of the Gothenburg Company, now retired to Dunkirk, told a similar story to the Comte. He had once been becalmed off the coast of West Africa and took advantage of the situation to scrape barnacles off the side of the ship. Men were lowered by ropes whilst sitting on planks. As they worked, a huge cephalopod rose from the water and wrapped tentacles around two of the men, dragging them under. Another arm coiled about a third man who clung to the rigging. His shipmates managed to save him by hacking off the monster’s writhing member. The unfortunate man later died of shock. The captain informed de Montfort that the portion severed was twenty-five feet long, and the whole arm had been thirty-five to forty feet long. It tapered to a point and was covered with suckers. The captain felt that if the monster had attached all its tentacles onto the ship, it would have capsized.

Another captain by the name of Anderson told de Montfort of finding two huge tentacles, still connected by part of the mantle, on some rocks near Bergen, Norway. They were so thick he could barely put his arms around them and were roughly twenty-five feet long.

Upon publishing his theories, de Montfort was met with instant hostility in France. Despite being closer to the truth than anyone had imagined, he became a pariah in scientific circles because of his theory. Out of work in scientific agencies, he retreated to the country and wrote books on beekeeping and linguistics. Returning penniless to Paris, he scratched the most meagre of livings identifying shells for naturalists and collectors. He became a wretched, ragged figure and finally a destitute alcoholic. He was found dead of starvation in 1820, a pitiful end for a man once associated with the most august scientific institutes in Paris. Pierre Denys de Montfort has been largely forgotten. Despite having created twenty-five genera still in use today, de Montfort’s career has barely merited a footnote whilst his better-off contemporaries, such as Georges Cuvier, are still celebrated today.

Gallingly, after his death, de Montfort was proved correct when parts of a gigantic squid began to fall into the hands of scientists. Danish zoologist Professor Johannes Japetus Smith Steenstrup published the first scientific description of the giant squid. We now know the giant squid (Architeuthis dux) can reach sixty feet long.

The Lost Menagerie

As the years went on, more monsters were shown to have a basis in fact. For years, stories had circulated of a savage, hairy giant inhabiting the jungles of Central Africa. Natives called the creature the ‘pongo’, which was said to kidnap and rape women and tear branches from trees to beat elephants to death. Then, in 1860, French zoologist Paul Belloni Du Chaillu discovered the lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla). Of course, the stories attached to it were local mythology, but the animal itself did exist. It was not until 1902 that it’s relative, the mountain gorilla (Gorilla gorilla beringe), was proven to exist when German army officer Friedrich Robert von Beringe shot two specimens in what was then German East Africa. Keep these stories in mind when we examine accounts of other hairy giants in other mountain ranges later in the book. They are now dismissed as the gorilla once was.

The French missionary Father Armand David revived the skin of a black and white bear from a hunter in China in 1869. The creature itself was not seen alive by a westerner, the German zoologist Max Hugo Weigold, until 1916. The beast in question was, of course the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) a creature now instantly recognisable.

In the same forests that the lowland gorilla called home, there were strange stories of a striped, donkey-like beast called the atti. Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley heard of this beast whilst in the Congo. Sometime later, the British Governor of Uganda, Sir Harry Johnson, rescued some pygmies in the Congo who had been abducted by a showman. When he returned them home, the grateful pygmies showed Johnson the tracks of the atti. Johnson was expecting the animal to be a forest zebra but instead found a cloven-hoofed spoor. He later obtained a skull and skin of one of the beasts. In 1901, English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater identified it as a species of short-neck giraffe, naming it the Okapi (Okapia johnstoni).

Just three years later, British intelligence officer Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen shot a gigantic wild pig in Kenya. It turned out to be the first specimen of the world’s largest wild pig, the giant forest hog (Hylochoerus meinertzhageni), formally known only in native rumour.

Another traveller’s tale was that of a dangerous dragon-like beast said to haunt several remote islands in an Indonesian archipelago. It was said that The Sultan of Sumbawa, a neighbouring island in the chain, would banish wrongdoers, rivals, and other undesirables on these islands to be devoured by the beasts. Pearl fishermen brought back hair-raising stories of encounters with the monsters. The beasts were said to have razor-sharp teeth, claws, and a taste for human flesh.

In a story worthy of Edgar Rice-Burroughs, a western aviator crashed on one of the islands and found himself surrounded by ‘dragons’. With the curiosity of western science piqued, an expedition was led by the wonderfully named Governor of Flores, J.K.H. van Setyn van Hensbroek, in 1912. He secured a specimen of what is now known as the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis). Growing to over ten feet long and tipping the scales at one hundred and fifty pounds, the Komodo dragon is the largest known lizard and the largest venomous creature, producing a hemotoxin that acts as an anticoagulant in the blood of victims. It kills with razor teeth and a venomous saliva, taking down deer, water buffalo, wild boar, and even humans. The venom hinders the clotting of blood, causing the victim to weaken through blood loss. Large as they are, there are reports of death-dealing lizards much bigger and we will be meeting these in the next chapter.

As the twentieth century continued, more large animals were discovered. On December 22, 1938, Marjorie Courtney-Latimer, the curator of a small museum on the South African coast, was examining the catch from a local trawler. She would often pick up specimens for the museum from the catch of fishermen. Amongst the catch that day was a five-foot-long blue fish with a formidable set of teeth. It had a strange, fan-like tail and fins that resembled stubby legs. Realising that this was unlike any fish she had seen before, Marjorie arranged for it to be transported back to the museum and put on ice. She then wrote to her friend Professor J.L.B. Smith, an ichthyologist of great standing at Rhodes University College in Georgetown, including a drawing and description of the fish. The professor did not receive the letter till the 3rd of January, but when he read it, he recorded his thoughts.

…a bomb seemed to burst in my brain and beyond that sketch and the paper of the letter I was looking at a series of fishy creatures…fishes no longer here, fishes that had lived in the dim past, ages gone, and of which only often fragmentary remains in rock are known.

On February 16, Professor Smith arrived at the museum to examine the remains and had his suspicions confirmed. What Marjorie had saved from the fishermen’s nets was a fish from an order thought to be extinct for sixty-five million years, the Crossopterygii or coelacanths. The fish was given the scientific name of Latimeria chalumnea but was known simply as the coelacanth in popular parlance.

The discovery sent shock waves through the scientific world and it wasn’t until December of 1952 that a second specimen was captured off the Comoros archipelago off the northeast coast of Madagascar. Since then, a number have been caught in the area and even filmed alive in the deep sea of the islands. But the story had a sequel.

In September of 1997, Mark and Arnaz Erdmann were on their honeymoon on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. At a market they came across what they thought looked like a coelacanth that was brown rather than blue. They took some photographs and asked fishermen to try to catch another one. In 1998, a fisherman called Om Lameh Sonatham caught a second Indonesian specimen. DNA testing proved that it was genetically distinct from Latimeria chalumnea and was dubbed Latimeria menadoensis. This second species of coelacanth has led to speculation that other species may lurk undiscovered in the deep seas of the world.

Back on dry land in 1971, Dr Ralph Wetzel of Connecticut discovered a large pig-like beast in the Gran Chaco region—an area of semi-arid scrub and sparse trees that covers north Argentina, west Paraguay and southeastern Bolivia. It turned out that this remarkable beast had hitherto been only known from fossil remains from ten thousand years ago. The Chacoan peccary (Catagonus wagneri), the largest of all peccaries, had been living happily unknown to modern science since the last ice age.

Into the sea once more and in November of 1976, a team of researchers from the Hawaii Laboratory of the Naval Undersea Centre were aboard a research vessel twenty-six miles northeast of Oahu. Two large parachutes were dropped overboard as sea anchors. They were lowered to a depth of 500 feet. Upon being hauled in, a huge fish over fourteen feet long and more than one thousand six hundred pounds was found tangled in one of them. The beast appeared to be some form of shark but was unlike anything seen before. The weird beast was frozen and transported to the National Maritime Fisheries Service. There followed a seven-year examination of the extraordinary find.

The fish was found to be a huge plankton-feeding shark with a wide mouth and many rows of tiny teeth. Given the scientific name of Megachasma pelagios, this huge fish is more commonly known as the megamouth shark. Dwelling in deep water, it rises closer to the surface to feed on plankton and jellyfish at night. Fewer than one hundred specimens have been recorded since the species was first discovered.

During the 1990s, several new large animals were discovered in the jungles of Indo-China. In 1992, the Vietnamese Ministry of Forestry sent a team to examine the biodiversity of Vu Quang National Park in north central Vietnam. The team came across three sets of horns and a skull from an unknown species. They resembled the horns of the oryx species found only in Arabia and Africa. On three return visits, twenty more specimens were secured including two skins. DNA analysis proved that the new species was a strange member of Bovidae, the family of animals that contains wild oxen such as water buffalo, bison, and yak, and also a number of large antelopes. The creature was named the Vu Quang ox or Saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis). Since then, live specimens have been captured but have never lived long in captivity.

The same forests also yielded three new species of muntjac deer.

Coming full circle, December of 2013 saw the discovery of a new species of tapir. Tapirus kabomani—the little black tapir was found in the Amazon.

This list is not exhaustive, it is simply a sample to show that large and sometimes spectacular creatures can exist unknown to mankind. Why is it then, that cryptozoology is met with such scorn by mainstream science? After so many new and strange creatures have been discovered, you would think that the lesson would have sunk in, but no, cryptozoology is still rejected as a pseudo-science in many quarters. If