Going on a Monster Hunt, gonna catch a big one…

Allghoi Khorkhoi or The Mongolian Death Worm

Monster Hunting in Mongolia

Under the remote sandy emptiness of the Gobi Desert lurks one of the most fearsome creatures ever conceived by man, god or evolution. Four feet of smooth bloated salami body, like a cows intestine, with a tiny tulip of a mouth which spits acid venom and blind eyes capable of delivering high voltage charges to their prey, The Mongolian Death Worm is said to have the disposition of the most psychopathic of feral animals.

Allghoi Khorkhoi is so feared in Mongolia that the mention of its name is thought to attract bad luck and it is supposed to have murdered hundreds of people since the early 19th Century when a team of Russian scientists confirmed its existence. Recent sightings have been rare, or else as cryptozoologists believe people have been afraid to speak about their encounters for fear of attracting the creature's rude bad luck. Four scientific teams have combed the desert of Mongolia for Allghoi Khorkhoi since 1990, but none have come back with anything more than hearsay and frightening stories.

If this nightmare were to exist it wouldn’t be a member of the soft moisture loving worm family but would have to be made of something much tougher to survive in the dry sand of the desert, so it is much more likely that it’s a kind of snake or its terrified audience has failed to notice tiny limbs that it would place it within the skink species of lizards. Snake experts suggest that from descriptions it sounds most similar to the Death Adder or Cobra, both which spit venom (though neither has the corrosive powers of acid.). It’s electrical properties are the most difficult for believers to reconcile, the only creatures known to use electricity as a weapon are eels, who can’t live in the desert. So while scientists accept the possibility of Allghoi Khorkhoi’s existence, they query its murderous intentions and purported ability to kill humans so easily.

Curiously the Mongolian Death Worm is said to be attracted to the colour yellow and that the corrosion caused by its acid venom is also bright yellow.

Review by World Reviewer Staff

Photo by flickr user dospaz

Mok’ele mbembe, the last dinosaurs

Monster Hunting in Congo - Brazzaville

The stories of Mok’ele mbembre are straight from the pages of 19th Century adventure books like ‘The Lost World‘: in dense swamp lands at the remote heart of the Congo endure the few survivors of the dinosaur extinction who, though huge, steal out from their sanctuary to devour people almost whole. Local people tell of a vast long necked reptile similar to what we understand Apatosaurus or Brontosaurus to have looked like with three toed footprints the size of a frying pan.

Most Mok’ele mbembe sightings and reports came from local tribes people but when European explorers heard about the creature the hunt for it was on. There were several hoax finds of bones and tracks, most which were thought to be the doctored hippo remains, though at the beginning of the 20th Century more reliable reports of a long necked animal about thirty feet long and the colour of an elephant came out of the Congo.

In the 1980’s a study of this story was undertaken and several locals who were interviewed talked about a creature the same as the earlier description being killed in Lake Tel in 1959. The story continued that anyone who ate the meat of the creature became ill and died. Local people were shown photographs of animals living in the region all of which they could correctly identify followed by a picture of an Apatosaurus which most identified as Mok’ele mbembe. No sightings were made of any unknown creatures but several strange tracks were found.

More recent expeditions have failed to produce any definite proof, however a Japanese team shot twenty seconds of aerial video showing what appears to be a huge long necked animal swimming in Lake Tel.

Review by World Reviewer Staff

Photo by

The Loch Ness Monster

Monster Hunting in Scotland, United Kingdom

Is it male or female? Does it eat fish, plankton or people? Does it wear a tartan sweater? Unanswered questions abound on the subject of the Loch Ness Monster, in part due to the lack of funding for investigative expeditions but largely due to the creature's unwillingness to present itself regularly for observation.

Nessie, as the monster is fondly known worldwide, was first made known to the general public in 1933, courtesy of the Spicer family, who claimed to have almost driven into it as it slithered across the lochside road. They described it as a huge, black, prehistoric-looking creature about 35 feet in length, and are said to have been thoroughly horrified by the experience, in contrast to many more recent, well-known witnesses. The following year, a now iconic and apparently very convincing photograph of something akin to a thin, dinosaur-like head and neck (or perhaps a sock puppet in profile) was taken by Dr. Robert Kenneth Wilson and so began Nessie's meteoric rise to fame. However, the first recorded sighting was by St. Columba, who brought Christianity to Scotland in the year 563, and apparently converted Nessie to boot, pacifying the monster's man-eating rage with the sign of the cross, and preventing it ever from eating human flesh again.

This suggests that if a monster is present in Loch Ness, it must have its very own ancestral line dating back well over a thousand years to have been sighted so regularly since then. The most popular theory indicates that Nessie may in fact be a remnant of the dinosaur age, with a family tree that grew through a loophole in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, and lasted until the present day. Whether Loch Ness contains enough food to sustain a warm-blooded animal of such a size is doubtful, and the low water temperature would render a reptile almost immobile, but the possibility of access to other food sources has not been eliminated.

The mystery also deepens with the loch, it seems, as the 1989 discovery of 'Edwards Deep' (also known as 'Nessie's Cave') revealed that Loch Ness stretches down at least as far as 812 feet, if not more, making it the UK's deepest. Operation Deepscan, the 1986 sonar exploration of the loch, revealed three sonar contacts much larger than anything known to live there, and at far greated depths. In 1993, Project Uruqhart (spearheaded by the BBC's Nicholas Witchell and several well-known scientific and media bodies) uncovered a very strange distribution of fish and plankton in the loch, possibly caused by deep water currents, and several unexplained large sonar contacts. There is clearly something lurking down there, and the findings are backed up by numerous, similar claims across the world, such as those of Bessie of Lake Erie in the USA, Champ of Lake Champlain in Vermont, Isshii of Lake Ikeda in Japan, and the Tarasque of Halong Bay in Vietnam.

Review by larapiegeler

Photo by flickr user doegox

The Giant Anaconda

Monster Hunting in Manaus, Brazil

The Anaconda, as accepted by science, is a group of aquatic snakes, very similar to boas. They lie in wait for their prey underwater, their well-camouflaged green-grey skin concealing the tops of their heads, which are all that remain above the water. They will strike when animals come near to drink, and will either drown or suffocate them by crushing their bodies with muscular coils, before eating them head first. The largest recorded specimens were between fifteen and twenty feet long, though precise size is difficult to determine as the anaconda skins stretch a great deal once they have been removed, and photographs of live specimens often lack examples of scale.

However, deep in the tropical forests and swamps of South America, a different story can be heard. The etymology of the name is doubtful, but the Spanish-speakers in the region call it the ‘matatoro’, or ‘bull killer’, and anacondas of a far greater size than a mere twenty feet are said to take livestock and sometimes people on a regular basis.

In 1907, an explorer named Major Percy Fawcett travelled widely in the area and heard many accounts from local and native people of anacondas of over fifty feet in length. His own scepticism evaporated, however, when he shot a massive anaconda swimming in the Rio Negro close to his boat. He measured it as 62 feet. In 1933, a ninety-foot one was said to have been killed by the Rio Oiapoc, a claim backed up by the Brazil-Columbia Boundary Commission, and a photograph discovered in 1948 is believed to show a hundred-foot monster snake, also found in the Rio Oiapoc area. A three-foot snake’s rib was also said to have been found on the banks of the Rio Purus, which would suggest that snakes as long as 150 feet could exist, though the rib was never analysed.

More recent sightings have been made by scientists working in the area as well as local people, but until one of these monster snakes is captured, they will always be regarded as cryptids.

Review by larapiegeler

Photo by flickr user Cristóbal Alvarado Minic

The Tarasque Dragon

Monster Hunting in Ha Long, Vietnam

Many years ago, the Leviathan sea monster of the Old Testament is said to have spent a few tender moments with the Onachus, a legendary, giant bison with the power to burn anything it touched, and the result was the Tarasque, a dragon-like monster.

The legend goes on to describe how the beast was attacked by the king of Nerluc’s knights, but only Saint Martha was able to calm it, and she led it back to the city, where the people killed it out of fear despite its passivity. However, reported sightings by local sailors of a massive marine creature moving about in Halong Bay have persisted for many years, and still occur frequently today. The bay itself is believed by some to have been created by the sweep of a dragon’s tail as it entered the sea here. Perhaps it stayed?

Precious little scientific investigation has been carried out in the search for the Tarasque, rendering it something less of a global phenomenon than the Loch Ness Monster, but the dubious description of a lion-headed dragon with a turtle’s shell, a giant scorpion’s tail and six muscular legs ending in paws like a bear’s, as given in the legend, has gradually altered. Most of today’s sightings are uncannily similar to those at Loch Ness, raising the question of whether the world’s legendary lake and sea cryptids are not alone, but part of a happy, prehistorically-descended, monstrous family…

Review by larapiegeler

Photo by flickr user anyjazz65

The Kraken

Monster Hunting in Faroe Islands

When the Vikings of the Old Norse sagas sailed the seas and fought as heroes, they are said to have tackled sea monsters so intimidating and terrible that even they sometime lost their courage when faced with them.

These giant, octopus-like creatures are said to have lived in the waters off the Icelandic and Norwegian coasts, and were so huge that they were sometimes mistaken for outlying islands. Their sheer mass meant that upon diving back down to the depths, they would suck whole ships under with them.

This may sound a far cry from the Kraken we know of in popular culture, tangled in legends and curses in the depths of the Caribbean Sea, but this may not be so far from the truth either. Huge, octopus-like creatures have been sighted there too, some over 75 feet long, and sections of bodies which remain impossible to identify as any smaller, known species have washed up on the shores there. Stories passed on by word of mouth of ships having been attacked by these creatures are common in the region.

Plausible explanations do exist. The Giant Octopus, of the Enteroctopus family, is said to live in the world’s colder oceans and its arm span has been known to reach thirty metres. The Seven-arm Octopus, the largest cephalopod species ever officially recorded, is found most often off the coast of New Zealand, and the Colossal Squid of the Southern ocean has been caught and documented many times, its largest example measuring ten metres. Experts seem convinced that many of these species have the potential to become much, much larger and some, particularly the giant squid, are known to have attacked small ships in the past, so there is plenty to suggest that we should keep looking for a real version of the mythical Kraken.

Review by larapiegeler

Photo by flickr user MikeBlogs