Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious

by Chronicles of the Strange

  Ian Officer of Benger, Western Australia, reports that there have been numerous sightings in recent times, including twenty-two reported in one year. One witness, Mr Buckingham, said that he had a very clear view of a dog-like animal, grey-brown, with very marked either dark brown or black transverse stripes running across the rump, and a thin tail.

  But it is the 1985 photographs, taken in February by Kevin Cameron of Girrawheen in Western Australia, that provide the most challenging evidence - something far more concrete than anything that has turned up in fifty years of searching in Tasmania itself. Sceptics have asked why Cameron did not get a picture of the animal bounding away; why he did not shoot it, as he clearly had a rifle; why the animal seems to be in exactly the same position in the two photographs; and there have been critical analyses from a technical photographic point of view.

  Cameron offers no comment. He is of aboriginal descent and an experienced bushman who works with a pair of highly trained dogs. Until recently he was illiterate. He seems hardly equipped to perpetrate a major deceit. And the photographs themselves are beguiling. They have a lack of artifice, and the position of the animal seems full of naturalness and energy.

  Athol Douglas, until recently Senior Experimental Officer at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, is convinced that the animal is a thylacine. Dr Ronald Strahan of the Australian Museum, and formerly Director of Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo, regards the pictures as authentic and says that the animal could not be anything but a thylacine. Kevin Cameron also possesses casts which show the distinctive pattern of the Tasmanian tiger: five toes on the forefeet and only four on the hind.

  Meanwhile, in the rough terrain of the centre and north of Tasmania itself, expeditions continue to try to prove that the animal survives. It is hard to credit that a wolf-like creature the size of an alsatian, so distinctively coloured, which carries its young about in a pouch and is not notably afraid of humans, could have evaded its pursuers for fifty years. Most of the tigers were wiped out in the last years of the nineteenth century by bounty hunters protecting sheep. The last known killing of a wild thylacine was in 1930. London Zoo's last specimen died in 1931, and the last of all at Hobart in 1936. Since then, and particularly in recent years, there have been numerous recorded sightings - at least 100 of them of sufficient clarity and detail to be accounted as reliable.

  The distinguished zoologist Eric Guiler has been involved in many forays to try to locate the thylacine. He has placed electronic surveillance equipment and night cameras at likely spots, but without success. His interest has been sustained by the apparent authenticity of so many reported sightings. In the early 1950s he managed to interview a number of old men who had been tiger bounty hunters. One of them, H. Pearce, described seeing a female and three pups in the late 1940s - with the clear implication that he had wiped them out, as he had so many in the past. The old shepherds were unrepentant.

  Another incident near the area known as the Walls of Jerusalem was described by a cattle drover. His three dogs were involved in a scuffle in the bush near his cabin. Only two came back. Next day he found the third dog dead, with its heart eaten out. He took his horse and two dogs to a nearby gully. The dogs ran under the horse and then a tiger appeared on a nearby rock.

  Guiler lists dozens of modern sightings, often backed up by more than one witness or by other evidence. In 1960, by the Manuka River (near the spot where a sighting had been reported), he himself heard the strange yapping hunting noise that the thylacines made. In June 1976 there was a sighting on the Pieman River, and nearby a fresh wallaby kill. In 1981 at Mount Eliza there were quite clear tracks of the distinctive five toes followed by four toes. Since the 1960s there have been a whole clutch of sightings at Woolnorth, which was one of the most profitable areas for the bounty hunters of the last century.

  Almost annually now, well-equipped expeditions set off to try to obtain final proof that the Tasmanian tiger managed to survive the depredations of less ecologically minded generations of Tasmanians. Yet so far the nearest thing to evidence comes from Kevin Cameron's photographs, by all accounts taken far away on the Australian mainland, 2,000 or 3,000 years out of time.

  The Communist Wildmen

  If there are unknown 'wildmen' still to be found on this earth, the odds are that they lurk protected not only by some of the remotest landscapes on our planet, but also by the severe and daunting frontiers of the two great Communist superpowers. Details are slowly emerging of the extraordinary proliferation of sightings and evidence now being collated by researchers in both the Soviet Union and China.

  In 1985 newspapers in the West carried a colourful Reuters report from Peking, quoting the China Daily. It said that a 3ft 7in (1.1 m) tall male wildman had been caught in the mountains of Hunan and was living in a flat in the city of Wuhan. The story was soon to be retracted.

  But, in its resolution, it was to provide a fascinating insight into the state of 'wildman' research in China. For the creature turned out to be a previously unknown type of monkey - the very animal that had been predicted by Chinese researcher Zhou Guoxing in his analysis of wildman evidence.

  Zhou, a staff member at the Peking Natural History Museum, and his colleague, Professor Wu Dingliang, Director of Anthropological Research at Shanghai's Fudan University, had both taken part in the vast Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition in 1977 to the Shennongjia Mountains. More than 100 people had been involved for nearly a year. They collected casts of footprints, pieces of hair, faeces and, most importantly, they collated the many accounts of 'wildmen' from the local people. From this evidence Zhou and Professor Wu concluded that there were two creatures involved. The first - apparently about 4 ft (1.2 m) high -was an unknown type of ape or monkey. The second - 7 ft (2.1 m) tall or more - was a large unknown species of primate, they thought.

  Within five years the first part of their theory was to be proved right; evidence for the second part accumulates rapidly.

  The vast arc of virtually uninhabited territory which runs from Afghanistan along the Soviet-Chinese border, through Tien Shan and then down southern Mongolia for more than 2,000 miles, is remote to an almost unimaginable degree. Even the nomadic herdsmen make only occasional excursions into the high mountains. It can be 400 miles from one road to the next. Tibet, to the south, is, by comparison, heavily populated. Much of the area is still thick primeval forest rising up the Shaal Tau and the Altai Mountains.

  It was in 1981 that Zhou first heard that there were relics of a wildman preserved in Zheijiang Province. The next year he was able to make a trip to investigate. In the village of Zhuanxian he met a woman, Wang Congmei, a cowherd, who as a girl (back in May 1957) had encountered the creature. She said it had a head like a man and almost hairless skin. When it stood erect it was at least 1 m (3 ft 3 in) tall. Walking, it went on all fours, rather like a panda. The creature had been killed by Wang's mother, Xu Fudi, and a party of villagers. The local schoolmaster, Zhou Shousong, had preserved the hands and feet.

  Even in their shrivelled state, the hands and feet (see illustrations), presented a haunting sight. Zhou had heard similar stories before. Road builders in Xishuang Eanna had killed what they called a 'wildwoman' in 1961. It had walked upright, being 4 ft (1.2 m) tall or more. They said its hands, ears, breasts and genitalia were similar to those of a female human.

  Many witnesses in Yunnan said that such wildmen still walked about. Zhou took careful measurements of the severed hands and feet of the Zhuanxian wildman - it had been very certainly male, Wang Congmei said. He also took plaster casts and samples of hair back to Peking. After careful analysis and consultation he concluded that the creature was neither a man nor an ape, but an unknown type of large monkey. Within a year his theory was to be justified.

  In 1983 a large monkey was captured in the Huang Mountains and taken to the Hefei Zoo. It is nearly 1 m (3 ft 3 in) high, has hands and feet like Wang Congmei's creature, and certainly has the strange flat finger and toe-nails which give such an uncanny man-lik
e appearance to the severed hands and feet from Zhuanxian.

  Then in 1985 came the second capture, at first excitedly announced as a wildman. This time the animal had been discovered in Chengbu, Hunan. It had started throwing rocks and sand at two young girls who were out in the foothills. They had run home to tell their parents, who had organized a party which succeeded in capturing the animal. Chinese researchers are now involved in attempting to classify both creatures, which certainly seem to be a new species.

  The fact that local people's accounts of the small 'wild-man' had been so swiftly and precisely justified, despite much academic scepticism, encouraged Zhou to pursue his analysis of the large 'wildman' sightings. These presented an altogether more fearsome picture. There have been hundreds of reports, but two in particular seemed worthy of note because they came from scientists.

  Back in 1940 a biologist, Wang Tselin, had been travelling in the Gansu area. He had seen a 'wildman' killed by local hunters. He had no camera and no means of preserving or transporting the body, but his description is precise and extraordinary. The body was a female with very large breasts. It was 7 ft (2.1 m) tall and covered with grey-brown hair. Above all, Wang was struck by the primitive but human configuration of the face, which reminded him forcibly of the famous (and then newly discovered) Peking man.

  Ten years later a geologist, Fan Jingquan, was out with a group of local guides in the forest near Baoji in Shangsi Province. They came across two wildmen - apparently mother and son. The description was similar. Fan was struck by how tall they were. Even the child seemed nearly 5 ft (1.5 m) tall.

  In 1977 there was another spate of reports of wildmen in the mountains of Tabai in Qinling. Villagers who had encountered the creatures reported that they were 6 1/2 ft (2 m) tall, walked upright, and were covered with hair. They left huge footprints.

  Zhou and Professor Wu Dingliang are now convinced that there is an unknown large species living in the Chinese-Mongolian border area. Zhou concludes: 'I am of the opinion that it is quite possibly a descendant of Gigantopithecus which was thriving in the mainland of China in the middle and later Pleistocene period.' He points out that the panda and the orang-utan are survivors of the fauna of the Pleistocene which managed to remain in middle and western China - the panda right up to the present day. 'It is not impossible that Gigantopithecus, as the dominant member of this Pleistocene fauna, could also have changed its original habits and characteristics and survived to the present.'

  Some anthropologists have even made a connection between Gigantopithecus and the famous Ice Man exhibited by showman Frank Hansen in the Minnesota area in 1968. This ape-like corpse, frozen in a block of ice, was denounced by some as a rubber fake concocted in the environs of Hollywood. But Dr Bernard Heuvelmans, the 'father' of cryptozoology, who examined it over three days, was convinced it was genuine - certainly a hominoid, perhaps Gigantopithecus. He believed from his inquiries that it had been shot in Vietnam during the war and smuggled back in the 'corpse bags' used by the United States Army to return the remains of their casualties. Vietnam was certainly an area where Gigantopithecus flourished.

  Fittingly, twenty years on, one of the first scientific ventures between the old enemies was an investigation of Gigantopithecus at Lang Son in the north of Vietnam. Early in 1988, Russell Ciochon and John Olsen of the University of Arizona were due to start an excavation at a cave where bones have been found with a view to determining how near to modern times the great 600-lb creatures might have survived.

  Russian and English anthropologists, notably Boris Porchnev and Myra Shackley, have proposed the most daring hypothesis for the 'wildmen' of Mongolia and the Altai Mountains. They suggest that there may be surviving groups of Neanderthal man, who supposedly died out 30,000 years ago.

  Myra Shackley, a Leicester University lecturer, made a 2,000-mile expedition to Outer Mongolia in 1979. In 1983 she published her review of the expedition. She had found a number of Neanderthal tool kits in open-air sites on the river terraces in the Altai Mountains. They included scrapers, rough chopping tools, and small flakes which had been used, then re-sharpened. They were made from jasper, agate and chalcedony, rocks much favoured by Neanderthals.

  Myra Shackley estimated the Mongolian sites to be less than 20,000 years old. 'They may indeed be even more recent,' she says, 'since many of the tools are fresh and surprisingly unworn if they have been resting on the surface for that length of time.' She reports:

  My first line of approach was to show examples of Neanderthal tools to the people and ask whether they had seen anything like them. I obtained the same answer from a number of widely separated groups. All agreed that the tools had been used by people 'who used to live in this area before us' and who now 'live in the mountains'. The name given to these people never varied; the locals called them either the people of Tuud or, when asked to elaborate, gave them the name Almas or one of its local variations.

  Shackley was convinced by the stories of the people she met. 'For me there is no question of whether the wildmen exist -I find the evidence compelling - but only of how they should be classified.'

  Across the border in the Soviet Union, almost annual expeditions are taking place, concentrating particularly on the Pamir Mountains, in pursuit of the continuing reports of Almas. A member of the 1981 group, Vadim Makarov, found one of the biggest footprints ever discovered. The plaster cast shows a four-toed foot measuring over 19 in (50 cm). There were several distant sightings on this expedition, but none so vivid as the one made the previous year by an eighteen-year-old student, Nina Grineva.

  She had set up camp near a sandy riverbank where she had earlier noticed footprints. She was awoken one night by the sound of stones being knocked together. 'Sixty feet away stood a very hairy person about 7 feet high. His figure was massive, almost square. He stooped and had a very short neck. His arms hung loosely. I was not scared and began slowly to advance towards him.' Nina had a toy rubber bird in her hand which she squeaked to attract the creature's attention.

  It was this that spoiled our contact [she said]. He made a sharp turn and quickly went down the slope to the river and disappeared beyond the steep bank. I noted the softness and grace of his walk, though he moved very fast. It was not a human walk, but as of an animal, as of a panther. Despite boulders and other obstacles, he moved quickly, softly and even gracefully. He must have a perfect sense of balance, and, to him, a steep and uneven slope is like a paved road to us.

  The reports of these expeditions, collated by the Darwin Museum in Moscow, continue to generate controversy inside the Soviet Union. These are scattered sightings in the Caucasus, and even in the Yakut area of eastern Siberia.

  The case for continuing research and exploration is championed by Dimitri Bayanov at the Darwin Museum, who points out that wildmen are prevalent in Russian and Mongol folklore and mythology. 'We say that if relic hominoids were not reflected in folklore and mythology, then their reality could truly be called into question. Of course the reality of relic hominoids cannot be supported by recourse to folklore alone. But the folklore is a valuable reinforcement of the other evidence we have.'

  In 1983 Bayanov led an expedition to Tajikistan. He visited the site near Lake Pairon where two women, Geliona Siforova and Dima Sizov, had reported seeing a wildwoman sitting on a boulder 10 yards (9 m) from their tent. It surveyed them for a long time, making munching sounds. They did not dare to approach it, and in the morning there were no traces of footprints or hairs.

  Bayanov also visited the area of Sary Khosor and talked with Forest Service workers, who said they often had reports of wildmen. Two years previously, a shepherd had driven his sheep back down from the mountains two months early because he had seen a big black 'gul' or wildman near his pasture. It had frightened his dogs and he had not dared to stay. Another Tajik had told the officers of an encounter five years earlier with 'a giant hairy man, very broad in the shoulders, with the face like that of an ape'.

  The Forest Service takes these r
eports seriously enough to prohibit its employees from spending the night alone in the mountains, for fear of these wildmen.

  Bayanov had no personal encounter with wildmen, but he concluded his 1982 expedition report by saying:

  The abundant signs I witnessed of local fauna, particularly omnivores such as bears and wild pigs, indicate enough food resources for the presumably omnivorous hominoids the year round. The 93 percent of the Tajik Republic's territory taken up by mountains is virtually devoid of permanent human population, so the latter poses no special danger to wild hominoids. The long and continuing record of purported hominoid sightings, supported by these new accounts, leads me to the conclusion that such creatures do exist there.

  However, the whole idea of wildmen regressing from Neanderthal or any other prehistoric men is anathema to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Bayanov's interest and the work of the Alma expeditions were heartily denounced in 1985 by Soviet explorer Vadim Ranov. This hypothesis is wrong and easily refuted,' he told a meeting in Dushanbe, reminding his audience of the Marxist ideal of progress. 'We must remember that Homo sapiens evolved in a constant process of social as well as biological evolution.'

  Clearly there are political as well as scientific hazards in the path of the enthusiastic researchers of Moscow and Peking.