Monsters You Never Heard Of (6 page)

When he tried to get close to it, the figure took off and ran into a wooded area. John tried to follow it. It stopped about thirty feet away from him. In the darkness he could only make out a shadowy form.

He said the figure had a body like a monkey, but a big "figure eight"-shaped head. He could see its eyes, but no other features. It was staring at him. This made John feel very uneasy. He backed away carefully and then he ran.

Bill Bartlett drew this picture of the Dover Demon.

Both Bill Bartlett and John Baxter made drawings of what they saw—or what they said they saw. The drawings looked like they were of the same creature. Both boys also said that they had not heard the other's story before they made the drawings.

The next evening two other teenagers, Will Taintor and Abby Brabham, said they got a glimpse of the creature. They were driving along and picked up something in the headlights on the side of the road. The thing was crouched on all fours. Abby described it as having a very large head and a thin, monkey-like body. She could not see any mouth or nose, but its large eyes seemed to glow with a greenish light. Will only got a fleeting glimpse of the figure. He had the impression of something with a large head, and tan body.

The story got into the newspapers, and the thing was dubbed the Dover Demon.

No one else ever reported seeing the Dover Demon. No physical evidence of its existence was ever produced. A lot of people talked to the four young witnesses about their strange encounters. A few thought it was all a hoax. Most people got the feeling that the witnesses were telling the truth. But even if they were telling the truth, as far as they knew it, that does not mean that they actually saw a strange little creature with a large head and skinny body. They may have seen something quite ordinary—a cat or dog perhaps, It was night. No one really got a good close-up look at the creature. They may have just gotten excited and made a mistake about what they saw. At least one of the witnesses knew about the other sightings before he made his report. People often see strange things—or think that they do—especially at night.

This is John Baxter's drawing of the figure he said he saw.

But what if it wasn't a hoax or a mistake? What could the Dover Demon be?

A lot of people who are interested in the subject are also interested in UFOs. They think that the Dover Demon might be something that came out of a UFO, though there had been no important UFO sightings around Dover at that time.

Then someone suggested that the Dover Demon might be a Mannegishi. The Mannegishi are creatures of the mythology of the Cree Indians of Canada. They are supposed to be little people with round heads and no noses. They have long thin arms and legs. Their main purpose in life, according to Cree legends, is to play jokes on the big people.

How long can a snake grow? According to the
Guinness Book of World Records
, the longest and heaviest of all snakes is the anaconda of South America. The book says that a 37 1/2-foot anaconda was "reliably reported" to have been killed on the upper Orinoco River in eastern Columbia. That snake should have weighed about 1,000 pounds.

A 33 1/2-foot anaconda was killed in southeastern Columbia in November, 1956.

A 1,000-pound, 37 1/2-foot snake is
enormous
. Even a 20-foot snake is a giant, and among anacondas the 20-foot length is fairly common. But there are rumors of anacondas and other snakes which are far, far larger.

Major Percy Fawcett's meeting with a 62-foot anaconda, from a drawing by his son.

Take the story of Major Percy Fawcett, a British Army officer and frequent traveler in the Amazon jungles of South America. He had heard stories of 50- and 60-foot anacondas. But he didn't believe them. Then one day early in 1907, Major Fawcett and several local Indians were in a canoe drifting along the Rio Abuna river. Suddenly, a giant triangular head appeared practically underneath the boat. It was a monstrous anaconda. The creature slithered out of the water and onto the bank. Fawcett didn't stand around watching it. He grabbed his rifle and shot it. He made a rough measurement of the creature. It turned out to be 62 feet long. It also had a terrible odor. "Everything about this snake was repulsive," Fawcett commented.

Fawcett said that later he heard of even larger anacondas.

When Fawcett got back to London a lot of people called him a liar because of his 62-foot snake story: But if he was a liar, he wasn't the only one.

The Belgian naturalist, Bernard Heuvelmans, has a long-time interest in strange, unusual, and unknown animals. He met a Frenchman named Serge Bonacase, who had been in Brazil in 1947. Bonacase told the naturalist an astonishing story.

He said he was with a group of Frenchmen and Brazilians that spotted an anaconda asleep in the grass. They got about twenty yards away from it and fired their rifles at it several times. Only after they killed it did they realize how enormous it was. "When we walked along the whole length of its body it seemed as if it would never end."

What Bonacase found most impressive was the thing's head. To demonstrate, the size of the head, Bonacase stretched out his arms in front of himself, with his hands together. This formed a triangle with two-foot sides and an 18-inch base.

Bonacase's group didn't have anything to measure the snake with except a piece of string about three feet long. Using it, they estimated that the creature was between 72 and 75 feet in length.

None of the group had a camera. There was no possibility of carrying back a snake of that size and weight. But why didn't they bring back its skin, or head? Bonacase said no one thought it would be worth the trouble. They didn't think there was anything that unusual about the creature.

"The Brazilian officials who had spent much of their lives in this country did not seem to be particularly surprised. As for me, I had heard so many tales of giant snakes that I supposed the whole of the Amazon was crawling with monsters of this size."

Try to imagine a snake 75 or 80 feet long. That is almost four times as long as the longest snake you have ever seen, or have ever seen a picture of. The longest snake kept in a zoo was a mere 22 feet. A 75- or 80-foot anaconda is a real monster.

And there is more. There are rumors of another, even larger snake in South America. It is supposed to be some sort of water snake that lives in the Amazon River and its tributaries. Stories make the thing sound so big that it has been called an inland sea serpent.

The giant andaconda of South America

A priest, Father Victor Heinz, reported seeing this monster twice. The first time was on May 22, 1922. He was riding in a canoe

down the Amazon when he saw a giant water snake drifting quietly and gently downstream. "I reckoned that its body was as thick as an oil-drum and its visible length was some 80 feet."

Father Heinz' next meeting with the monster came in 1929. He was on the river at night. Suddenly, his crew became very frightened. They began to row madly toward shore.

"What is it?" Father Heinz cried.

"There is a big animal," they muttered, very excited.

At the same moment he heard the water move. It sounded as if a steamboat was passing. Then he saw two bluish-green lights several feet above the water. He thought they were lights on a riverboat. The two lights, however, came from the monster's eyes which glowed in the dark. The monster simply avoided Father Heinz' canoe and swam over to the other side of the river.

There have been many stories about giant snakes attacking people and other animals.

Glowing eyes figure in many accounts of this giant water snake. On July 6, 1930, a Portuguese merchant named Reymondo Zima was going down the river at night in his motorboat. He was looking for a house on the right bank. He saw a light near the shore. Thinking it was the house, he steered toward it. Then he switched on his own searchlight. Suddenly, the light began charging his boat at a high speed. It turned out to be a giant water snake, which had only one glowing eye. Zima assumed that the animal had somehow lost the other eye. He thought the creature had mistaken his searchlight for the eye of a fellow snake. The creature nearly overturned Zima's little boat, but he managed to make it safely to shore.