Aside from the apatosaurus-like creatures of Africa’s jungle swamps, sightings of other long-extinct monsters have been claimed – in the skies above the Dark Continent, and even in the United States!
- A. H. Melland, a Native Commissioner in Northern Rhodesia, was told by local natives of a flying lizard with membranous wings that stretched up to seven feet across. They called the creature kongamato, and unhesitatingly identified it when shown a picture of a pterodactyl.
- Natives of the Gold Coast knew of an animal they called susabonsam that was about the size of a man with large, bat-like wings. At first it was thought that they were merely exaggerating the size of a large bat, but the natives have names for each kind of bat they know.
- While driving to work one morning in 1976, several school teachers reported a large flying creature with a 12-foot wingspan that swooped down on their cars. Some research at the school library turned up an impossible identification: a pterosaur.
- In the early-morning hours of one day in 1976, police officer Arturo Padilla of San Benito, Texas was surprised by a the sight of a huge “bird” caught in his headlights. Minutes later, fellow officer Homer Galvan saw its huge, black silhouette crossing the sky without flapping its wings. A few hours later, Alverico Guajardo, a resident of Brownsville, Texas, claimed to see the monstrous animal outside his mobile home, describing it as bird-like, but “not of this world.”
- In 1982, James Thompson was driving near Fresno, Texas when he saw a dark gray, featherless, hide-covered creature with a 5- to 6-foot wingspan gliding close to the ground. (Also read: “Did Pterosaurs Survive Extinction?”)
What are to make of these sightings? Humans are notoriously bad witnesses, and many could have misidentified known animals with which they were not familiar. And what of the native tribespeople who surely knew well the many animals of their region? It’s been suggested that they simply could have been pulling the legs of the eager and gullible white explorers.
The anecdotal evidence leaves the question open, however. And the search for living dinosaurs is continuing.
New Expeditions
On January 3, 2000, the British-led Congo Millennium Expedition – or DINO2000 – set off for the Likoula region of the Congo for four weeks to search for mok’ele-mbembe. The adventure into Likoula took the expedition into the heart of the area where natives claim to have seen mok’ele-mbembe. “The existence of dinosaurs in central Africa is unlikely, but not a total scientific impossibility,” said Dr. Karl Shuker, an internationally recognized cyrptozoologist and author of Mysteries of Planet Earth. “If dinosaurs could exist unknown to science anywhere in the world, the Likouala is where they would be.” No dinosaurs were discovered.
Most recently, on January 10, 2005, The Milt Marcy Expedition is heading into a river system in Cameroon on the border of the Congo Republic to search for the living dinosaur. According to Loren Coleman’s Cryptomundo, explorers Milt Marcy, Peter Beach, Rob Mullin and Pierre Sima have some advantages over previous expeditions in that they are using high-resolution satellite photographs to find where the living animals might be.
Imagine if they are successful!
