Fringe zoology has long been a popular fixation among paranormal enthusiasts. Throughout history and across the globe, stories and sightings of odd creatures have managed to capture the public interest. The phenomenon is so prevalent that these anomalies were only recently granted their own scientific classification, “cryptid,” in 1983. The idea that monsters exist is definitely fascinating, but when evidence of their presence does turn up, there’s usually little reason to get excited. In these cases, more often than not, looks can be deceiving.
10 De Loys’ Ape
As the story has it, in 1917 Swiss geologist Francois de Loys led an expedition to Venezuela in search of oil. By 1920, he and the surviving members of his party had reached the Rio Tarra, near the Colombian border, where they encountered a pair of strange primates. The monkey-like creatures walked upright, stood at around 140 centimeters (4’ 6”) tall, and lacked tails. They approached aggressively, waving their arms, shouting, and flinging their own excrement, so de Loys shot one of them dead. The other ran off into the jungle. De Loys then posed the dead body for photographs and preserved the creature’s head and hide. Unfortunately, the remains and most of the photographs were reported lost or ruined in a boating mishap later in the expedition. Only one photograph remained.
For nine years, this picture gathered dust in de Loys’ private collection, and likely would have remained there had he not shared it with anthropologist Georges Montandon. Montandon studies surrounded human evolution and race—he believed that the various world populations had descended from the large primates specific to their regions. For example, he theorized that Asians had descended from orangutans. De Loys’ discovery gave Montandon a missing link between the spider monkey and native people of South America. Montandon named it Ameranthropoides loysi, and he and de Loys set about promoting the breakthrough. Problematically, it was an obvious hoax.
While de Loys took his story to the press and was met with great interest, Montandon championed the photo to the scientific community and was quickly called out by scholars who saw the image as nothing more than a common spider monkey without a visible tail. In the picture, there’s nothing definitive to compare the size of the creature to, but the presence of banana plants not native to the area indicated that the entire story was fabricated. Years later, in a letter to a Venezuelan news magazine, physician and politician Dr. Enrique Tejera would assert that he had worked with de Loys during the expedition, knew of the monkey in question, and was sure it was nothing more than de Loys’ pet. It had no tail because it had been amputated for health reasons, and de Loys had simply taken a photo after it died.
9 The Yeti Hand
The tale of the Yeti hand of Pangboche Monastery is long, involved, and star-studded. It begins in the early 1950s when a glut of expeditions to conquer Mount Everest quickly gave way to a glut of expeditions to find evidence of the Abominable Snowman.
While the legend of the Yeti is entrenched in Himalayan folklore and the first recorded sighting happened more than 100 years prior, photographs of its tracks captured in 1951 by Everest mountaineer Eric Shipton touched off worldwide fascination. By 1953, Edmund Hillary had reached the mountain’s summit, and with the West now enthralled by both Everest and the Abominable Snowman, the London-based Daily Mail commissioned a large expedition strictly in search of the Yeti. It was this group that first discovered the remains at Pangboche.
The Himalayan village of Pangboche is home to an ancient Buddhist temple, and it was there that the expedition came upon an alleged Yeti’s scalp preserved as a religious relic. They were allowed a cursory inspection, but could extract only scant hairs for further analysis. Team zoologist Charles Stonor was initially convinced of the scalp’s authenticity, but it would be years before the scalp was thoroughly analyzed.
In the meantime, Texas oil tycoon and renowned adventurer Tom Slick organized three high-profile excursions in search of the beast over the latter half of the decade, enlisting the aid of mountaineer and explorer Peter Byrne. Byrne visited the temple in 1958 and found what was said to be a mummified Yeti’s hand as well, but the monks were again reluctant let even a small piece of it leave. Intrigued, Slick sent Byrne back the following year with a dried human hand, hoping he could trade it for that of the Yeti. Byrne reported that he was able to convince the Lamas to allow him to swap one finger of each hand. Slick’s friend and famed actor Jimmy Stewart then smuggled the finger from India to Britain in his wife’s lingerie case. It was received for study by primatologist William Osman Hill, and a sample was sent to anthropologist George Agogino in America. Dr. Hill’s findings were inconclusive—the hand was hominid, but seemed more Neanderthal than human. Decades passed and yet another expedition would reach Pangboche before the next analysis.
In 1960, Edmund Hillary mounted another outing to Nepal, this time on his own fact-finding mission. At Pangboche, he compared the scalp to the hides of three serows and declared it a match. Hillary and his team dismissed the hand on sight as inauthentic, noting it had been wired together—which it had, a year prior, by Byrne. A more thorough study wasn’t done until 1991, when Agogino contributed his sample for a piece by the investigative TV show Unsolved Mysteries. Again the tests proved inconclusive—though the finger appeared human, it was still possible it had belonged to an undiscovered species. Meanwhile, the television exposure resulted in the theft of the scalp and hand from the monastery, leaving only Agogino’s tissue sample as evidence.
But in 2008, Byrne’s Yeti finger was rediscovered among Hill’s collection, which he’d left to the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum in London after his death. In 2011, the BBC learned of its existence, and a sample was taken for a news piece. DNA testing finally and anticlimactically proved it to be human, putting the half-century-old issue to bed.
8 The Cuero Chupacabra
While the United States and Canada can call Bigfoot their primary cryptid, their neighbors in Latin America are more familiar with the infamous, bloodsucking Chupacabra. First reported in Puerto Rico during the mid-1990s, the beast was blamed by locals for a rash of exsanguinated livestock. The first eyewitness account was by Madelyn Tolentino, who described a bipedal creature with giant, alien-like eyes and a spiky back similar to that of a stegosaurus. Her account was sketched by UFOlogist Jorge Martin, and the widely circulated picture provided the first popular documentation of the Chupacabra’s appearance. So, how is it that today many think of the Chupacabra as more zombified dog than reptilian dwarf?
Enter rancher Phylis Canion of Cuero, Texas. Canion claimed that in 2007 her chickens were being mysteriously drained of blood, much like the victims of the legendary beast, and she’d been witnessing strange hairless blue-gray animals lurking about the property. When one of them turned up dead on the road nearby, its appearance was so out of the ordinary that she saved its head for DNA testing and proclaimed to the media it must be the Chupacabra in the flesh. Of course, two separate DNA tests eventually proved that the Cuero Chupacabra was no mythical monster. In reality, the beast was the hybrid offspring of a wolf and a coyote with a severe case of mange. The apparent lack of blood among livestock has been rationalized by researchers as simple coagulation. Nonetheless, the impression on the public remains, and several discoveries of mangy canids have graced news headlines as the elusive Chupacabra in the years since.
