Although Mokele Mbembe seeker William Gibbons has insisted that “these people have nothing whatsoever to gain from telling stories because we don’t pay them, they get no reward from us for doing this,”60 he also has described both financial transactions and monetary disputes between foreign monster hunters and, for example, the residents of the village of Boha near Lake Tele. Gibbons reported that the villagers were angry that the expedition led by Herman and Kia Regusters in 1981 had failed to fulfill “promises of gifts and money” and that one expedition had been left stranded at the lake in 1987 by the local guides after refusing to pay more than the agreed price. Gibbons’s own 1985 expedition paid the Boha elders for access to Lake Tele.61 Similarly, a member of the 1988 Japanese expedition to Lake Tele described meeting with “Boha village elders, who demanded a substantial fee for our expedition to gain access to Lake Tele.”62 Gibbons even asserts that during negotiations with a Japanese expedition in 1992, the Boha village elders “promptly held the expedition hostage while the sum of $12,000 (USD) was sent … to secure their release” (though we have been unable to confirm this anecdote).63 Clearly, there are plausible financial incentives for local informants to wish to entice further investigators and television crews to visit the region. Moreover, virtually all the eyewitness testimony in the Mokele Mbembe literature has been solicited and translated by a small number of guides—often paid guides who lead multiple cryptozoological tours to the same villages and draw on existing relationships year after year.64 Notably, in countries with a guided tour industry, such as Cameroon (and, indeed, in any service industry anywhere in the world), it is not uncommon for operators to quietly distribute funds to others in the service chain (and to receive commissions when bringing their tour groups to preferred vendors). Finally, Mokele Mbembe proponents themselves benefit when wealthy patrons and television companies provide tens of thousands of dollars in funding for their expeditions.
Figure 6.7 According to one poorly corroborated but frequently repeated anecdote, hunters killed and ate a Mokele Mbembe in the 1950s. As the story goes, those who ate the animal mysteriously sickened or died. (Illustration by Daniel Loxton and Jim W. W. Smith)
For a study of the problems with soliciting local testimony, consider the famous tale that a Mokele Mbembe was killed and eaten at Lake Tele, which is difficult to access, in 1959 (figure 6.7). According to this dramatic and mysterious story, all who ate the meat of the animal sickened or died. This has become such a canonical part of this cryptid’s lore that it was featured as part of the action in Hollywood’s Mokele Mbembe movie, Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985). But where did the tale come from? During a one-month fact finding mission to the Congo in 1980, Mackal and Powell heard the story of a Mokele Mbembe killed (but not eaten) at Lake Tele—first as “vague rumors,” then as an anecdote that an unnamed soldier heard from his wife,65 and finally as an unsourced account related by a local official who was variously identified as Antoine Meombe or Miobe Antoine.66 Mackal and Powell followed these rumors to the district of Epena, where they put the question to President Kolonga (or Kolango) of the Epena District of the Likouala Region. To their surprise, Kolonga “smiled at the words Mokele-mbembe, declaring that the word only meant ‘rainbow.’”67 Mackal argued with him—and fed the story to the informant: “We have heard several times over that a Mokele-mbembe was killed some time in the past in Lake Tele. We have heard, too, that this Mokele-mbembe is very dangerous, although its food is strictly vegetable material; the malombo is its favorite food. If your people, or rather the pygmies at Lake Tele, are able to kill a rainbow with spears, and the rainbow eats malombo fruit, we are very interested.”68 It was a ready-made template—essentially, “This is the story we want to hear.” (Note as well that this is merely the extent of the leading that Mackal tells us they did.) Sure enough, Kolonga announced the next day that he was willing to “provide us with the truth about the Mokele-mbembe.” Powell, seemingly unaware of how suspicious this sounds, explained how this went down:
Gradually, as we gained his confidence, and he came to realize we were serious, and not laughing at the traditions of his people, he became cooperative, and promised to collect for us informants who had lived near Lake Tele, as well as others who could give information on “deep places where the animals are seen.”
When he had done this, and we were all gathered together at his house, Mr. Kolango made a little speech to the assembled informants, explaining that we had come from far away to get information on the mokele-mbembe, that we took the existence of the animal seriously and were not laughing at their traditions, and exhorting them to tell only the truth, neither inventing nor holding back.69
Sure enough, two of the informants thus provided and primed by Kolango obligingly recited the tale that the Americans had already announced that they wanted to hear. Both the first storyteller (identified as Mateka Pascal) and the second (“a fisherman”) acknowledged that they were repeating hearsay:
He (Mateka) did not personally see the animal, as he was only a small child at the time. According to his account, the mokele-mbembe had been entering Lake Tele from the moliba in which it lived via one of the waterways which enter the lake on its western side. After the animal had entered the lake, the pygmies blocked off its waterway by constructing a barricade of large stakes across it. When the mokele-mbembe tried to return to its moliba, it was trapped by the barricade and killed with spears. Some of the stakes used to construct the trap were large tree trunks, and are still there. The pygmies cut up the animal and ate it. All who ate of it died. The animal killed was said to be one of two. The other one—possibly a mate—is said to still be there, but has become wary and difficult to approach.70
The second, unnamed man merely confirmed the hearsay yarn that he had just heard, adding only the flourish of a sole survivor: “Those who ate of the meat died. The one survivor, who did not eat of the meat, had died about ten years ago.” Even Mackal seems to have been uneasy about the possibility of informants influencing or inspiring each other’s stories. “If there was anything negative about this informative meeting,” he reflected, “it is that all or most of the eyewitnesses were in the same room, hearing everything that was being reported.”
What are we to make of the “all who ate of it died” story? It is hearsay at best, and the possibility that the story was concocted to order looms large. Only one independent telling of the “all who ate of it died” yarn was recorded—and that by someone admittedly not yet born when the event allegedly took place. Nor is there any corroborating evidence, despite the tantalizing claim that “because Pascal still goes to fish in the very molibo where the killing occurred, he could affirm that the stakes are there to this day, and, therefore, the story is true.” Because Mackal’s and Powell’s visas were about the expire, they left without visiting Lake Tele. “Roy and I now wanted to go on to Lake Tele and the site of the alleged killing of the mokele-mbembe in 1959,” Powell explained. “There we hoped to find bones or other physical remains, perhaps even to sight and photograph the surviving animal. But this was not to be.”71 (Mackal returned to the region the following year, but seems not to have verified this one straightforwardly testable part of the hearsay “all who ate of it died” tale.)
That’s pretty thin stuff, but it gets worse. Mackal reported that on several occasions local Africans either denied any knowledge of Mokele Mbembe or asserted that the creature did not exist—and that he refused to accept such negative testimony! At the village of Moungouma Bai, for example, the locals explained that they had “heard of the Mokele-mbembe from [their] fathers” but “never saw it” themselves. “I was astonished,” Mackal wrote. “Here we were, only a few kilometers from Lake Tele, where a Mokele-mbembe had been killed, yet these villagers claimed to know nothing about it.” Mackal’s confrontational response to this testimony is jaw-dropping (especially when one considers that Mackal’s party was dispersing beer with their pressure to provide congenial testimony and included Congolese security
guards armed with AK-47s):
Through Gene and Marcellin as interpreters I responded, demonstrating our rather extensive knowledge of the episode at Lake Tele, including descriptions of the appearance and habits of the animal, what it ate, where it had been seen and by whom. When confronted with such a barrage of information, they were visibly disturbed, and some, in their confusion, admitted to a great deal more knowledge…. It became clear that the people of Moungouma Bai were hiding information and knew a great deal about the Mokele-mbembe but were not going to share it with us…. Georges made an impassioned plea for cooperation, first conciliatory and then threatening.72
Given this pressure, it is not surprising that some of the villagers began to offer testimony that complied with the story the Americans had provided. Still, Mackal remained displeased with their lack of enthusiasm for his Mokele Mbembe narrative. The party left some desperately needed medical supplies with a Red Cross medic who was visiting the village, but Mackal stated his opinion “that these people did not deserve our medical largess.”
Local testimony about Mokele Mbembe is badly burdened by hearsay and by obvious leading (and pressuring) of alleged witnesses. Moreover, regional informants have also supplied descriptions of a whole menagerie of additional, distinct monsters, including “a giant turtle, a giant crocodile, a giant-snake-like creature, a water elephant with a great horn but no trunk, an animal with plank-like structures growing out of its back, and of course, the Mokele-mbembe proper.”73
A few Westerners (mostly missionaries) claim to have caught brief glimpses of Mokele Mbembe, but their accounts are also highly inconsistent and difficult to interpret. Every attempt to obtain reliable photographs, films, or footprint casts of this alleged creature has failed. The film shot by zoologist Marcellin Agnagna in 1983 is also useless. Agnagna claimed first that he had failed to remove the lens cap and then that the camera had been set at macro-focus rather than telephoto. (The circumstances are also suspicious. Visiting the same Boha village three years later, Gibbons reported that “we could not find any of the witnesses from 1983 who could confirm Marcellin’s story.”74 Even more damaging to Agnagna’s claim is this exchange between British travel writer Redmond O’Hanlon and the son of a Boha village elder, which took place in 1989: “‘So, Doubla,’ I said softly, ‘why did Marcellin swear he saw the dinosaur?’ ‘Don’t you know?’ said Doubla, giving me his first real smile. ‘It’s to bring idiots like you here. And make a lot of money.’”)75 The photos taken in 1985 by Rory Nugent cannot be usefully interpreted. As one critic described them, “One is a very distant snapshot of what appears to be a log floating in a lake; the other might as well be a flying, out-of-focus wedding bouquet in transit past a bed sheet.”76 (Even cryptozoologists are unimpressed with these images. “Rory Nugent’s alleged Mokele-mbembe photos could be anything,” according to Gibbons.)77
More revealing is how many expeditions have traveled through the Congo Basin in search of Mokele Mbembe without obtaining any convincing evidence of the creature (or in some cases, even managing to find locals willing to affirm that it exists). Between 1980 and 2000, “almost twenty expeditions … searched unsuccessfully to find mokele-mbembe,” Gibbons reflected.78 Let’s briefly consider a sample. In 1981, the husband-and-wife Regusters expedition traveled to Lake Tele in competition with an investigation led by Mackal. (These expeditions were initially one, but split as a result of a dispute between Mackal and Regusters.)79 After their return, the couple held a press conference in which they swore to have seen Mokele Mbembe multiple times—and to have taken photographs, not yet developed. “Even if we had the best photographs in the world,” said Regusters, “there would still be people who do not believe it.”80 This turned out not to be a problem, since none of their thousands of photos showed evidence of a dinosaur.81 In 1985/1986, creationist and cryptozoologist Gibbons spent time around Lake Tele under the guidance of Agnagna, but “did not find any tangible evidence for the existence or otherwise of mokele-mbembe.”82 With the end of that expedition, Gibbons and his team fell out with Agnagna, who was alleged to have deliberately concealed the location of Mokele Mbembe (among other matters of dispute).83 In 1988, a Japanese expedition and film crew searched the Lake Tele region for thirty-five days, but “found no evidence of the existence of Mokele-Mbembe in the area.”84 O’Hanlon toured the area in 1989 and interviewed many local people, who told him that the creature was a spirit and not a physical being.85 In 1992, a Japanese expedition captured aerial footage of something large and blurry in Lake Tele.86 Although ultimately useless—the object was too distant to allow any positive identification—it has been suggested that this Japanese team may have filmed a canoe. As cryptozoologist John Kirk explained, “What some have taken to be the head and neck of the creature could also just as easily be a man standing at the front of the boat while oaring his way across the lake, while behind him sits another man who might be mistaken for a hump.”87 Gibbons’s second trip, in 1992 (apparently financed, oddly enough, by Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, and other rock musicians),88 was actually a missionary and sightseeing trip, with the team’s short stay in the region occupied with dispensing medical treatments and spreading the Gospel.89 As a highlight, Gibbons describes testifying in a thatch-roofed village church: “I began to speak, telling them my story of salvation and finding Christ in the jungle…. After I had finished speaking, Sarah gave an altar call, and three people … came forward and accepted Christ…. The power of Satan had been broken. It was a glorious day indeed!”90 Notwithstanding this spiritual victory, no tangible sign of Mokele Mbembe was located. In 1999, J. Michael Fay led a 2,000-mile, 456-day biological transect through the region on foot and reported nothing relevant to Mokele Mbembe.91 Gibbons spent most of November 2000 scouting for Mokele Mbembe in Cameroon92 and led a well-funded, all-Christian search into Cameroon in 2001, accompanied by a film crew for the BBC and Discovery Channel.93 They heard stories of several monsters, including the claim to have seen a gray-haired Bigfoot-like creature carried out of the jungle, bound to a pole, by a group of European hunters. Although the members of the expedition allegedly spotted a series of UFOs (one of which “took off into space at a 45-degree angle at a speed that no known earthly craft could possibly match”), they found no tangible evidence for Mokele Mbembe.94 (Disappointed by the entire affair, the Discovery Channel dumped the documentary “due to insufficient film material”; the Christian businessman who had helped them secure the contracts and funding for their creationist expedition declared them “amateurs” and parted ways.)95
Despite this embarrassment, an American insurance broker and creationist named Milt Marcy offered to foot the bill for Gibbons’s next expedition, which visited Langoue, Cameroon, in 2003.96 This trip was notable for introducing yet another type of monster: giant spiders. Having heard from an English woman who claimed that her parents once had spotted a spider “at least four or five feet in length,” Gibbons asked the villagers “if they knew of any such giant arachnid, and indeed they did!” In a remarkable coincidence, these monsters—“strong enough to overpower and kill a human being”—lived right around the village! No one had mentioned the giant spiders to Gibbons on his previous two visits because he had not asked, which was a shame because a giant spider had been living right behind the camp of one of his informants at the time. “At that moment,” wrote Gibbons, “I felt like drowning myself in the river. A golden opportunity to capture a rare and completely unclassified species of giant arachnid had eluded us.”97 (Such a B movie–style giant spider probably is not possible, physically: limited by an exoskeleton, it could neither support its own weight nor extract enough oxygen from the air to survive.) The group poked around for a few days and delivered some sermons, with the group’s Cameroonian Pastor Nini “even casting out demonic spirits.”98 Then, on their last day on the river, “Pastor Nini boldly proclaimed that this would be the day when we would encounter the la’kila-bembe [allegedly a synonym for Mokele Mbembe]. The Lord had assured him that this w
as truly the day”—and right on schedule, it was! As they floated over the water, their guide stood up in the canoe, declaring that he could see “a very big animal crossing the river just ahead of us.” The cryptozoologists saw nothing and captured nothing on film, but they were impressed with the guide’s detailed description of a reddish-brown creature with “typically reptilian” eyes.99 And then they went home.
In 2004, Marcy funded a return expedition to Langoue, headed this time by creationists Peter Beach and Brian Sass.100 They used plaster to take casts of some marks that they intuited, based on nothing in particular, to be claw prints from a dinosaur. I examined these casts during the MonsterQuest production and determined that they were not sauropod tracks. But Beach and Sass also conceived a notion that now constitutes the cutting edge in Mokele Mbembe belief: the legendary dinosaurs seal themselves up in riverbanks for long periods. Supposedly, the animals first climb into caves or burrows and then wall up the caves from the inside, with small air vents near the top. As no part of this behavior has ever been observed—even allegedly—this wild speculation can only be described as baseless and bizarre. While examining the small riverbank holes that they supposed to be air vents, they heard “a distinctive scraping sound, as though something was attempting to claw its way out of the sealed chamber.” Could it be that Mokele Mbembe was only feet away from them—and about to emerge? We will never know because Beach and Sass got spooked, and left immediately.101 In 2006, Marcy himself ventured to the same region with Robert Mullin and Beach. They located what they imagined to be several sealed caves containing Mokele Mbembes—which is to say, some small burrows or holes in the riverbank—and that’s it. Mullin described it “a dry run as far as Mokele-mbembe was concerned.”102
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