September 6, 2024 • 30 mins
The sandworm from Frank Herbert's Dune, is a monstrous gigantic creature with a thirst for blood. But did you know it was possibly based on another terrifying creature that is said to stalk the darkest corners of Mongolia's Gobi desert...
Written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard MacLean Smith
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews and his expedition team were
getting restless. It was May nineteen twenty two, and the
men were in Erga, the capital city of Mongolia that
would later be renamed Ulamberta. Their goal was a meeting
with Mongolia's newly established prime Minister, the Aal kans Kuttak
(00:33):
dam dim Bazaar, in the hope of being granted a
permit to conduct an archaeological expedition in the heart of
the Gobi Desert. It was a fragile time in the
newly independent state. Only the year before, Mongolia had undergone
a revolution that left it in a precarious position, teetering
(00:54):
between the influence of the Soviet Union and Chinese governments,
with much in sand security among the new ruling powers
over whom they could trust. There had even been reports
that white men found in the region were being captured
and horribly tortured. One rumor told of a man being
(01:15):
skinned alive. So Andrews could have been forgiven for feeling
a little nervous when he finally received an invitation to
speak with Prime Minister dam dim Bazar. After making his
way to the Mongolian Parliament. It was ushered into a
back room, where he found Premier dam Dimbazar and a
(01:35):
group of his officials sitting together in somber silence. Some
pleasantries were exchanged before Andrews tentatively began his pitch for
the permits when dam Dimbazar held up his hand for
Andrews to stop. As the Prime Minister explained to Andrew's interpreter,
he was more than happy to grant Andrews's permission to
(01:58):
conduct his expedition, but only if he did something for
him in return, of course, said Andrews in reply, what
do you need? And so damn Dimbazar made his request
that while Andrews and his team were out searching for
ancient artifacts in the desert, they also spend some time
(02:21):
trying to capture something for him. For centuries, people of
the Gobi Desert had told extraordinary tales of a strange
creature that was said to be headless, legless, about two
to five feet long, and resemble approximately the intestines of
a cow. It was also rumored to spit a corrosive
(02:44):
yellow saliva and generate blasts of electricity so strong they
could kill a full grown camel. Some said it was
so poisonous that merely to touch it meant instant death.
The creature reputed to live in the most desolate parts
of the Gobi Desert, and they called it Allegrei or Hi, or,
(03:09):
as it came to be known in English, the Mongolian
death worm. You're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard McLain Smith.
Welcome back. If ever there was a man on which
(03:33):
to model the movie character Indiana Jones, it was Roy
Chapman Andrews born in eighteen eighty. The American explorer, adventurer,
and naturalist would eventually become the director of the American
Museum of Natural History, But in the nineteen twenties, Andrews
was on a quest to find the earliest evidence of
(03:55):
human life. Andrews was a proponent of the out of as,
the theory of humanity's origins, in which it's believed the
earliest humans emerged from the present day region of Asia
as opposed to Africa. Neither the Mongolian Prime Minister nor
any of his officials had ever seen the so called
(04:17):
Intestine worm for themselves, but as Andrews listened to them,
conferring with his interpreter, he could tell from the look
on their faces that they all very much believed it existed.
Damn Dim Bazaar, for one, said he knew a man
who had seen it, while a cabinet minister reported that
(04:39):
a cousin of his late wife had also witnessed the
strange creature. The assembled dignitaries had practical instructions for Andrews.
When he found one of the deadly worms, he must
be sure to handle it with long steel forceps they
set so as not to come into direct contact with
(05:00):
the creature. They also advised that he should wear dark
glasses to neutralize the disastrous effects of even looking at
such a poisonous creature. For six years, from nineteen twenty
two to nineteen twenty eight, Andrews led several ventures known
as the Central Asiatic Expeditions to search for the earliest
(05:23):
human remains in Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. During these expeditions,
Andrews and his team found many previously unknown fossil specimens,
including the first scientifically recognized dinosaur eggs, But what they
didn't find was a Mongolian death worm or any evidence
(05:46):
that they even existed. However, writing in his nineteen thirty
two book The New Conquest of Central Asia, Andrews conceded
that if the faith in its existence was not so
strong and widespread among the Mongolians, and if everyone did
not describe the animal exactly the same way, I would
(06:09):
believe it to be an idle myth. It would be
another ten years or so before stories of the death
worm emerged once more from out of the Gobi Desert,
when sometime in the nineteen forties, Russian paleontologist Ivan Yefromov
heard some locals talking about it while he was there
(06:31):
looking for fossils of his own. Yefromov dabbled in writing
science fiction, and the Mongol tales he heard inspired him to
write a story called Olgoi Korkoy, a Russian version of
the worm's Mongolian name. In this fictional tale, his worms
could grow around five feet long and had the power
(06:54):
to kill people from a distance. It was just a
short story, but it was a harbinger of more to come,
because giant, lethal desert worms were destined to loom large
in science fiction over the coming decades. In the late
(07:18):
nineteen fifties, an emerging author by the name of Frank
Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, in the United States and
visited the Oregon Dunes, where the largest expanse of coastal
sand dunes in North America rise to heights of up
to five hundred feet. There, Herbert's interest in deserts was sparked,
(07:42):
and in a letter to his literary agent, he wrote
that he was impressed by the idea of how moving
junes might be able to swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers,
and highways. He went on to write what became the
award winning epic series June, one of the world's best
(08:03):
selling science fiction novels. The saga revolves largely around the
uncompromisingly arid planet Oracus, which is inhabited by enormous deadly worms.
Another version of deadly fast tunneling desert worms appeared in
the nineteen ninety comedy horror film Tremours. Unlike the deathly
(08:29):
serious June series set on alien worlds, Tremours, with its
tongue in cheek black humor, was set in the Nevada Desert.
The idea for the story came to the writers S. S.
Wilson and Brent Maddock while they were producing a series
of educational safety videos for the US Navy. Climbing a
(08:51):
large desert boulder to get some footage from a high
vantage point near one of the desert naval bases, they
asked each other, what if there was something that wouldn't
let them leave the rock? They were on something like
a shark, they thought, but on land. Like Frank Herbert,
(09:11):
the writers of Tremors envisaged monstrous tunneling worms, highly sensitive
to the slightest vibration and hungry for human flesh. Explanations
of what inspired the creation of the monster worms have
included whales, dragons, and even giant nematodes. What's not recorded
(09:34):
is whether Herbert or the Tremor's team had ever come
across stories of the Mongolian death worm, but one young
Czechoslovakian man called Ivan mccurla most certainly had born in
Bohemia in nineteen forty three in what is now part
of present day Czech Republic. Mccurlo had read all about
(09:57):
the accounts of Broyd Chapman Andrews, and even Yefhramov's fictional
tale about the supposedly deadly Mongolian worms. It sparked a
childhood fascination with legendary creatures that never left him. At
the age of sixteen, mcurla moved to Prague, where he
(10:17):
studied mechanical engineering and zoology and electronics before deciding to
pursue his longtime hobby of cryptozoology more seriously. Ivan mccurla
(10:39):
organized expeditions to unsuccessfully search for the Lockness Monster, the
Tasmanian tiger, and the so called elephant bird of Madagascar,
and authored numerous books on cryptozoology, but what he became
best known for was his passionate quest to find the
Mongolian death worm. In one nineteen eighty seven book about
(11:03):
the land and legends of the Gobi Desert, macurla described
how the creature was said to live near water sources
in the western or southern part of the country, only
coming to the surface after rainfall, and that when it
travels under ground, it creates waves of sand on the
surface by which it can be detected. At the time,
(11:27):
macurla was unable to see this for himself due to
the Communist era travel restrictions in both Czechoslovakia and Mongolia.
That all changed one November in nineteen eighty nine, when
the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which had ruled unopposed for forty years,
were suddenly swept aside. Now free to travel, Macurla, along
(11:53):
with photographer friend Eerie Scubian, and a doctor called YadA Procopec,
made their fur expedition to the Gobi Desert the following year.
It was a difficult trip. There were still official restrictions
on travel within the country and practical difficulties getting to
the remote parts of the Gobi Desert that the worm
(12:16):
was said to inhabit. Despite the severe lack of transport infrastructure,
with no buses and barely any roads, macurl eventually managed
to convince someone to drive them into the southern Gobi.
Once there, his team began collating eyewitness accounts. One after another.
(12:37):
Locals gave eerily similar accounts of a creature they described
as looking like a cow's intestine filled with blood, usually
about half a meter in length and as thick as
an average male's thigh. Another strange but consistently described trait
(12:59):
was how the creature had no eyes, nostrils, or mouth,
making it difficult to tell its head from its tail.
It was also reported to move strangely unlike ordinary worms
by rolling or squirming sideways. One night, after befriending a
(13:20):
couple of Mongolian nomads after a few bottles of vodka,
the Czech team were treated to more unsettling details about
the alleged worm. The nomad said that it not only
spits an acid, corroding anything it touches, but that this
substance turns everything yellow. The color yellow they set attracted
(13:45):
more worms. Once, they claimed, a young boy was playing
outside with a yellow boar when there was a sudden
disturbance in the sand around him. Moments later, a giant
word broke through the surface and stopped to regard the boy.
(14:05):
Untroubled by its appearance, the boy was said to have
been killed instantly when he tried to touch it. When
the parents allegedly came across the tragic scene, they found
a disturbingly large trail in the sand that led away
from their sun. In anger, they followed the trail until
(14:28):
they too came across the worm, only to both then
also be killed by it. One elderly woman local to
the same area explained that when the worm wanted to
kill someone, it would move half its length out of
the sand and inflate a bubble over its exposed body,
(14:50):
from which it squirted its deadly poison. Sadly for Ivan mccurla,
he and his team failed to find a death worm
on their expedition. Three years later, however, maccurla returned to
(15:12):
Mongolia for a follow up trip. Over the course of
eight weeks, he and his team used explosives to blast
holes in the desert to try and scare the worms
out of hiding, but still they found nothing. Then, on
a visit to a Buddhist monastery, things got a little scary.
(15:36):
That afternoon, maccurla was approached by a monk who knew
all about his expedition. As they sat in the quiet temple,
the hot air thick with the smell of incense, the
monk told mccurla that the Algoy Korkoy was a creature
of supernatural evil and that he was endangering his life
(15:59):
searching for it. That night, as mccurla slept night mayish
images of the giant worm flashed through his unconscious mind.
He woke up with a start to find his back
covered in blood filled boils procopec. The expedition's doctor became
(16:20):
alarmed when Over the next few days, even more hemotoments
appeared on mccurler's body, and he began to show signs
of heart failure. This incident was captured in a TV
documentary the teammate called The Sand Monster Mystery, which aired
on Czech television in nineteen ninety three. Thankfully, mccurla went
(16:45):
on to make a full recovery and undaunted, in the
summer of two thousand and four, he launched what would
be his third and final expedition to find the Mongolian
death worm. This time he enlisted the help of Pilot. Together,
they filmed great swathes of the goby's vast expanses via
(17:06):
a video camera attached to an aircraft, as well as
using night vision goggles to search in the dark, but
yet again, the team failed to find any evidence of
the worm. In an interview on Prague TV after this final,
unsuccessful expedition, mccurla seemed resigned to never finding the creature.
(17:29):
He said that for many years he believed the creature
could be a zoological reality, but after his most recent experiences,
he began to suspect that it might in fact be
some kind of psychological phenomenon. Instead a hallucination, perhaps brought
on by the extreme heat of the Gobi Desert. The
(17:53):
following year of two thousand and five, it was time
for a British team to have a crack at finding
the worm. As the director of the Center for Forty
in Zoology or c f SAID, a cryptozoological club based
(18:16):
in Exeter in the southwest of England, Richard Freeman was
no stranger to quests for mysterious creatures. A lifelong fan
of doctor who he'd been a zookeeper and head of
reptiles at a major UK zoo for a while before
also being drawn into the world of crypto zoology, Freeman
(18:40):
relished the search of animals that mainstream biologists believed were
legendary more extinct. His past expeditions included hunts for the
Cupa cabra, a blood drinking nocturnal creature from Puerto Rico,
and the Orang pendeck, a supposed ape man said to
(19:00):
live in unexplored valleys in Sa Martra. Now he had
assembled a small team of fellow c f SAID members
to go to Mongolia with him. Arriving in Mongolia's capital, Ulambatar,
the team headed south towards a remote area of the
Gobi Desert region covering over eight thousand square miles called Noyan,
(19:26):
where many reported sightings of the death worms had come from.
As they drove, Freeman looked out at the jeep's window,
transfixed vast fields of sand dunes merged with gravel plains
that seemed to stretch into infinity, appearing like giant mirrors.
(19:46):
Due to being coated with the mineral mica. The surrounding
cliffs were so red they seemed to be on fire.
As the party traveled deep into the south, they met
and interviewed around twenty four apparent eyewitnesses, who all had
stories of seeing the giant death worm. As both explorers
(20:11):
Chapman and mccurlor had noted before them, descriptions of the
worm were remarkably consistent. Almost all the witnesses claimed to
have seen it, lying on the ground, motionless, being about
two feet long and as thick as an arm, with
scaly skin. All believed it to be extremely poisonous. One
(20:36):
elderly man named Luvsandorsch claimed to have seen it back
in nineteen seventy two. It was traveling across the desert
one day when he saw what he first thought was
a human arm lying on top of the sand. It
was only when he got closer that he noticed it
was moving. It was a large wormlike creature, he said,
(20:59):
that kept changing colour to match its surroundings. He said
they were thought to live underground in soft sand, and
that they were able to generate an electrical charge, but
they weren't around as much as they used to be.
A woman named Sukh took Freeman's team to a location
(21:21):
near the border with China and a forest of sacks,
all a strange shrubby drought tolerant plant which grows in thickets.
It was there she said that she supposedly saw a
brownish gray worm about half a meter in length writhing
within the plants, before disappearing among the roots of a tree.
(21:45):
The team found numerous burrows in the area, assumed to
be made by rodents, which they surmised might be an
excellent food source for the death worms. But no sooner
had they begun to set traps to catch the rodents
and worms, an enormous sandstorm rose up in the distance
(22:05):
that quickly descended, shredding their tents to confetti and forcing
them to leave the area. After moving on from the
forest of Saxel, Freeman's expedition met with an old ex
(22:28):
army colonel named Hervu, who still lived near an abandoned
military base called ovoutin Autreat years ago when he was
a soldier. Hervu set out on a motorbike patrol just
as the desert sun was beginning to set. At some point,
he apparently came upon what he thought was a busted
(22:51):
old tire on the ground, all coiled up, but as
he got closer, he realized it wasn't a tire at all,
but some kind of weird worm like creature. For half
an hour, Urzu watched it as it lay there, unmoving,
the light glinting off its scaly skin, still wet from
(23:14):
recent rain. Eventually, he rushed off to get his camera,
only to find on his return that the creature had gone.
That night, the ex colonel took Freeman and his team
to the site of the encounter, where they camped, laying
out rodent traps and laboriously digging holes in the dirt.
(23:36):
They sank bucket traps, hoping to lure in a death worm,
but the traps caught nothing. Again, the team moved on,
this time to a nearby oasis rich in wildlife, where
they met with a woman named could Youuenger. Back in
the nineteen eighties, could Youuenger was out walking with her
(23:58):
grandfather when he called her over to look at something again.
It was a brownish forty centimeter long wormlike creature with
no discernible head or tail. She didn't remember much else
about it, other than that she was very frightened of it.
Once again, Freeman's team set out bucket traps to try
(24:21):
and catch the creature, but as they started digging holes
around the oasis, Freeman gazed up to see a small
dust devil beginning to grow about a mile away. His
interest turned to consternation as the small dusty vortex rapidly
grew larger, then began barreling directly toward them. When it hit,
(24:46):
the fierce winds and blowing dust engulfed the entire camp,
smashing and scattering everything in their path. The wind was
so strong that at one point Freeman saw one of
their Mongolian drivers flying past him, horizontally hanging on to
a billowing tent as it was swept out into the desert.
(25:08):
Thinking back to Ivan mccurlur's hunch, that perhaps the worms
were in fact some kind of psychological phenomenon. It was
as if something didn't want them to discover the truth.
After a month in Mongolia, the Center for Fortian Zoology
expedition was over, and there was no specimen or even
(25:32):
sighting of a death worm to show for their efforts. However,
Richard Freeman believed that the trip had been good for
one thing, namely, that it confirmed his suspicions about the
creature's true identity. I don't think it's a worm at all,
he said later. Instead, he had come to believe it
(25:55):
was in fact some kind of limbless burrowing reptile, either
a giant member of an already known group of reptiles,
or a worm lizard. Worm lizards are also known as Amphisbinians,
(26:17):
named after Anfisbinia, a mythical Greek serpent with a second
head on its tail. They're one of the most mysterious
and poorly studied groups of reptiles, neither snakes nor lizards.
Most known species of this primitive group are found in
Africa and South America, but they also occur in the Caribbean, Mexico,
(26:40):
the Middle East, and even Florida. With tails that resemble
their heads. Worm lizards range anywhere from ten to seventy
centimeters long and have rings of scales that wrap around
their bodies meat eating predators. They search for prey underground burrow,
going through soil and loose sand, with strong, reinforced skulls
(27:05):
and muscular bodies. Specimens of worm lizards can be found
in museums all over the world, including the British Museum
of Natural History, eerily suspended in large jars of alcohol
to preserve them. ID cards list them as coming from
places like Guyana, the West Indies and Buenos Aires, but
(27:29):
specimens in museums are not always what they appear to be.
For nearly two hundred years, a mysterious giant gecko sat
in a storage area at the Natural History Museum of
Marseilles in France. No one knew anything about it, although
the style of taxidermy pointed to it having been collected
(27:52):
in the eighteen thirties. Larger than any gecko known today,
its main body was well ow for a foot long,
while its tail was another two feet long. On top
of that, it had always been thought to come from
New Zealand, but in twenty twenty three. Professor Matthew Heineke,
(28:13):
a herpetologist a specialist in reptiles and amphibians, applied the
latest DNA analysis to a sample taken from the specimen's
FEMA and compared the results with a data set of
the entire gecko family tree. It turned out that the
giant gecko was not from New Zealand at all, but
(28:34):
instead closely related to geckos found today in New Caledonia,
an island in the southwest Pacific Ocean, a good seven
hundred and fifty miles east of New Zealand. Could it
be that the Mongolian death worm has, in actuality already
been found, Perhaps decades ago Russian herpetologists, out hunting for
(29:00):
snakes in the Gobi Desert unwittingly caught one and added
it obliviously to their reptile collections. Is it out there now,
lurking suspended in alcohol in a dusty jar, somewhere unidentified
and long forgotten in the dark, cavernous basement of some
(29:22):
former Soviet era museum. That question, and the true identity
of the Mongolian death worm, for the time being at least,
remains unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and
(29:43):
produced by me Richard McLean Smith. Diane is an audio
producer and sound recordiced in her own right. You can
find out more about her work at Dianhope dot com
and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Unexplained as
an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith.
(30:05):
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are
also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
(30:25):
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
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the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
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(30:46):
Slash Unexplained Podcast
American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews and his expedition team were
getting restless. It was May nineteen twenty two, and the
men were in Erga, the capital city of Mongolia that
would later be renamed Ulamberta. Their goal was a meeting
with Mongolia's newly established prime Minister, the Aal kans Kuttak
(00:33):
dam dim Bazaar, in the hope of being granted a
permit to conduct an archaeological expedition in the heart of
the Gobi Desert. It was a fragile time in the
newly independent state. Only the year before, Mongolia had undergone
a revolution that left it in a precarious position, teetering
(00:54):
between the influence of the Soviet Union and Chinese governments,
with much in sand security among the new ruling powers
over whom they could trust. There had even been reports
that white men found in the region were being captured
and horribly tortured. One rumor told of a man being
(01:15):
skinned alive. So Andrews could have been forgiven for feeling
a little nervous when he finally received an invitation to
speak with Prime Minister dam dim Bazar. After making his
way to the Mongolian Parliament. It was ushered into a
back room, where he found Premier dam Dimbazar and a
(01:35):
group of his officials sitting together in somber silence. Some
pleasantries were exchanged before Andrews tentatively began his pitch for
the permits when dam Dimbazar held up his hand for
Andrews to stop. As the Prime Minister explained to Andrew's interpreter,
he was more than happy to grant Andrews's permission to
(01:58):
conduct his expedition, but only if he did something for
him in return, of course, said Andrews in reply, what
do you need? And so damn Dimbazar made his request
that while Andrews and his team were out searching for
ancient artifacts in the desert, they also spend some time
(02:21):
trying to capture something for him. For centuries, people of
the Gobi Desert had told extraordinary tales of a strange
creature that was said to be headless, legless, about two
to five feet long, and resemble approximately the intestines of
a cow. It was also rumored to spit a corrosive
(02:44):
yellow saliva and generate blasts of electricity so strong they
could kill a full grown camel. Some said it was
so poisonous that merely to touch it meant instant death.
The creature reputed to live in the most desolate parts
of the Gobi Desert, and they called it Allegrei or Hi, or,
(03:09):
as it came to be known in English, the Mongolian
death worm. You're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard McLain Smith.
Welcome back. If ever there was a man on which
(03:33):
to model the movie character Indiana Jones, it was Roy
Chapman Andrews born in eighteen eighty. The American explorer, adventurer,
and naturalist would eventually become the director of the American
Museum of Natural History, But in the nineteen twenties, Andrews
was on a quest to find the earliest evidence of
(03:55):
human life. Andrews was a proponent of the out of as,
the theory of humanity's origins, in which it's believed the
earliest humans emerged from the present day region of Asia
as opposed to Africa. Neither the Mongolian Prime Minister nor
any of his officials had ever seen the so called
(04:17):
Intestine worm for themselves, but as Andrews listened to them,
conferring with his interpreter, he could tell from the look
on their faces that they all very much believed it existed.
Damn Dim Bazaar, for one, said he knew a man
who had seen it, while a cabinet minister reported that
(04:39):
a cousin of his late wife had also witnessed the
strange creature. The assembled dignitaries had practical instructions for Andrews.
When he found one of the deadly worms, he must
be sure to handle it with long steel forceps they
set so as not to come into direct contact with
(05:00):
the creature. They also advised that he should wear dark
glasses to neutralize the disastrous effects of even looking at
such a poisonous creature. For six years, from nineteen twenty
two to nineteen twenty eight, Andrews led several ventures known
as the Central Asiatic Expeditions to search for the earliest
(05:23):
human remains in Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. During these expeditions,
Andrews and his team found many previously unknown fossil specimens,
including the first scientifically recognized dinosaur eggs, But what they
didn't find was a Mongolian death worm or any evidence
(05:46):
that they even existed. However, writing in his nineteen thirty
two book The New Conquest of Central Asia, Andrews conceded
that if the faith in its existence was not so
strong and widespread among the Mongolians, and if everyone did
not describe the animal exactly the same way, I would
(06:09):
believe it to be an idle myth. It would be
another ten years or so before stories of the death
worm emerged once more from out of the Gobi Desert,
when sometime in the nineteen forties, Russian paleontologist Ivan Yefromov
heard some locals talking about it while he was there
(06:31):
looking for fossils of his own. Yefromov dabbled in writing
science fiction, and the Mongol tales he heard inspired him to
write a story called Olgoi Korkoy, a Russian version of
the worm's Mongolian name. In this fictional tale, his worms
could grow around five feet long and had the power
(06:54):
to kill people from a distance. It was just a
short story, but it was a harbinger of more to come,
because giant, lethal desert worms were destined to loom large
in science fiction over the coming decades. In the late
(07:18):
nineteen fifties, an emerging author by the name of Frank
Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, in the United States and
visited the Oregon Dunes, where the largest expanse of coastal
sand dunes in North America rise to heights of up
to five hundred feet. There, Herbert's interest in deserts was sparked,
(07:42):
and in a letter to his literary agent, he wrote
that he was impressed by the idea of how moving
junes might be able to swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers,
and highways. He went on to write what became the
award winning epic series June, one of the world's best
(08:03):
selling science fiction novels. The saga revolves largely around the
uncompromisingly arid planet Oracus, which is inhabited by enormous deadly worms.
Another version of deadly fast tunneling desert worms appeared in
the nineteen ninety comedy horror film Tremours. Unlike the deathly
(08:29):
serious June series set on alien worlds, Tremours, with its
tongue in cheek black humor, was set in the Nevada Desert.
The idea for the story came to the writers S. S.
Wilson and Brent Maddock while they were producing a series
of educational safety videos for the US Navy. Climbing a
(08:51):
large desert boulder to get some footage from a high
vantage point near one of the desert naval bases, they
asked each other, what if there was something that wouldn't
let them leave the rock? They were on something like
a shark, they thought, but on land. Like Frank Herbert,
(09:11):
the writers of Tremors envisaged monstrous tunneling worms, highly sensitive
to the slightest vibration and hungry for human flesh. Explanations
of what inspired the creation of the monster worms have
included whales, dragons, and even giant nematodes. What's not recorded
(09:34):
is whether Herbert or the Tremor's team had ever come
across stories of the Mongolian death worm, but one young
Czechoslovakian man called Ivan mccurla most certainly had born in
Bohemia in nineteen forty three in what is now part
of present day Czech Republic. Mccurlo had read all about
(09:57):
the accounts of Broyd Chapman Andrews, and even Yefhramov's fictional
tale about the supposedly deadly Mongolian worms. It sparked a
childhood fascination with legendary creatures that never left him. At
the age of sixteen, mcurla moved to Prague, where he
(10:17):
studied mechanical engineering and zoology and electronics before deciding to
pursue his longtime hobby of cryptozoology more seriously. Ivan mccurla
(10:39):
organized expeditions to unsuccessfully search for the Lockness Monster, the
Tasmanian tiger, and the so called elephant bird of Madagascar,
and authored numerous books on cryptozoology, but what he became
best known for was his passionate quest to find the
Mongolian death worm. In one nineteen eighty seven book about
(11:03):
the land and legends of the Gobi Desert, macurla described
how the creature was said to live near water sources
in the western or southern part of the country, only
coming to the surface after rainfall, and that when it
travels under ground, it creates waves of sand on the
surface by which it can be detected. At the time,
(11:27):
macurla was unable to see this for himself due to
the Communist era travel restrictions in both Czechoslovakia and Mongolia.
That all changed one November in nineteen eighty nine, when
the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which had ruled unopposed for forty years,
were suddenly swept aside. Now free to travel, Macurla, along
(11:53):
with photographer friend Eerie Scubian, and a doctor called YadA Procopec,
made their fur expedition to the Gobi Desert the following year.
It was a difficult trip. There were still official restrictions
on travel within the country and practical difficulties getting to
the remote parts of the Gobi Desert that the worm
(12:16):
was said to inhabit. Despite the severe lack of transport infrastructure,
with no buses and barely any roads, macurl eventually managed
to convince someone to drive them into the southern Gobi.
Once there, his team began collating eyewitness accounts. One after another.
(12:37):
Locals gave eerily similar accounts of a creature they described
as looking like a cow's intestine filled with blood, usually
about half a meter in length and as thick as
an average male's thigh. Another strange but consistently described trait
(12:59):
was how the creature had no eyes, nostrils, or mouth,
making it difficult to tell its head from its tail.
It was also reported to move strangely unlike ordinary worms
by rolling or squirming sideways. One night, after befriending a
(13:20):
couple of Mongolian nomads after a few bottles of vodka,
the Czech team were treated to more unsettling details about
the alleged worm. The nomad said that it not only
spits an acid, corroding anything it touches, but that this
substance turns everything yellow. The color yellow they set attracted
(13:45):
more worms. Once, they claimed, a young boy was playing
outside with a yellow boar when there was a sudden
disturbance in the sand around him. Moments later, a giant
word broke through the surface and stopped to regard the boy.
(14:05):
Untroubled by its appearance, the boy was said to have
been killed instantly when he tried to touch it. When
the parents allegedly came across the tragic scene, they found
a disturbingly large trail in the sand that led away
from their sun. In anger, they followed the trail until
(14:28):
they too came across the worm, only to both then
also be killed by it. One elderly woman local to
the same area explained that when the worm wanted to
kill someone, it would move half its length out of
the sand and inflate a bubble over its exposed body,
(14:50):
from which it squirted its deadly poison. Sadly for Ivan mccurla,
he and his team failed to find a death worm
on their expedition. Three years later, however, maccurla returned to
(15:12):
Mongolia for a follow up trip. Over the course of
eight weeks, he and his team used explosives to blast
holes in the desert to try and scare the worms
out of hiding, but still they found nothing. Then, on
a visit to a Buddhist monastery, things got a little scary.
(15:36):
That afternoon, maccurla was approached by a monk who knew
all about his expedition. As they sat in the quiet temple,
the hot air thick with the smell of incense, the
monk told mccurla that the Algoy Korkoy was a creature
of supernatural evil and that he was endangering his life
(15:59):
searching for it. That night, as mccurla slept night mayish
images of the giant worm flashed through his unconscious mind.
He woke up with a start to find his back
covered in blood filled boils procopec. The expedition's doctor became
(16:20):
alarmed when Over the next few days, even more hemotoments
appeared on mccurler's body, and he began to show signs
of heart failure. This incident was captured in a TV
documentary the teammate called The Sand Monster Mystery, which aired
on Czech television in nineteen ninety three. Thankfully, mccurla went
(16:45):
on to make a full recovery and undaunted, in the
summer of two thousand and four, he launched what would
be his third and final expedition to find the Mongolian
death worm. This time he enlisted the help of Pilot. Together,
they filmed great swathes of the goby's vast expanses via
(17:06):
a video camera attached to an aircraft, as well as
using night vision goggles to search in the dark, but
yet again, the team failed to find any evidence of
the worm. In an interview on Prague TV after this final,
unsuccessful expedition, mccurla seemed resigned to never finding the creature.
(17:29):
He said that for many years he believed the creature
could be a zoological reality, but after his most recent experiences,
he began to suspect that it might in fact be
some kind of psychological phenomenon. Instead a hallucination, perhaps brought
on by the extreme heat of the Gobi Desert. The
(17:53):
following year of two thousand and five, it was time
for a British team to have a crack at finding
the worm. As the director of the Center for Forty
in Zoology or c f SAID, a cryptozoological club based
(18:16):
in Exeter in the southwest of England, Richard Freeman was
no stranger to quests for mysterious creatures. A lifelong fan
of doctor who he'd been a zookeeper and head of
reptiles at a major UK zoo for a while before
also being drawn into the world of crypto zoology, Freeman
(18:40):
relished the search of animals that mainstream biologists believed were
legendary more extinct. His past expeditions included hunts for the
Cupa cabra, a blood drinking nocturnal creature from Puerto Rico,
and the Orang pendeck, a supposed ape man said to
(19:00):
live in unexplored valleys in Sa Martra. Now he had
assembled a small team of fellow c f SAID members
to go to Mongolia with him. Arriving in Mongolia's capital, Ulambatar,
the team headed south towards a remote area of the
Gobi Desert region covering over eight thousand square miles called Noyan,
(19:26):
where many reported sightings of the death worms had come from.
As they drove, Freeman looked out at the jeep's window,
transfixed vast fields of sand dunes merged with gravel plains
that seemed to stretch into infinity, appearing like giant mirrors.
(19:46):
Due to being coated with the mineral mica. The surrounding
cliffs were so red they seemed to be on fire.
As the party traveled deep into the south, they met
and interviewed around twenty four apparent eyewitnesses, who all had
stories of seeing the giant death worm. As both explorers
(20:11):
Chapman and mccurlor had noted before them, descriptions of the
worm were remarkably consistent. Almost all the witnesses claimed to
have seen it, lying on the ground, motionless, being about
two feet long and as thick as an arm, with
scaly skin. All believed it to be extremely poisonous. One
(20:36):
elderly man named Luvsandorsch claimed to have seen it back
in nineteen seventy two. It was traveling across the desert
one day when he saw what he first thought was
a human arm lying on top of the sand. It
was only when he got closer that he noticed it
was moving. It was a large wormlike creature, he said,
(20:59):
that kept changing colour to match its surroundings. He said
they were thought to live underground in soft sand, and
that they were able to generate an electrical charge, but
they weren't around as much as they used to be.
A woman named Sukh took Freeman's team to a location
(21:21):
near the border with China and a forest of sacks,
all a strange shrubby drought tolerant plant which grows in thickets.
It was there she said that she supposedly saw a
brownish gray worm about half a meter in length writhing
within the plants, before disappearing among the roots of a tree.
(21:45):
The team found numerous burrows in the area, assumed to
be made by rodents, which they surmised might be an
excellent food source for the death worms. But no sooner
had they begun to set traps to catch the rodents
and worms, an enormous sandstorm rose up in the distance
(22:05):
that quickly descended, shredding their tents to confetti and forcing
them to leave the area. After moving on from the
forest of Saxel, Freeman's expedition met with an old ex
(22:28):
army colonel named Hervu, who still lived near an abandoned
military base called ovoutin Autreat years ago when he was
a soldier. Hervu set out on a motorbike patrol just
as the desert sun was beginning to set. At some point,
he apparently came upon what he thought was a busted
(22:51):
old tire on the ground, all coiled up, but as
he got closer, he realized it wasn't a tire at all,
but some kind of weird worm like creature. For half
an hour, Urzu watched it as it lay there, unmoving,
the light glinting off its scaly skin, still wet from
(23:14):
recent rain. Eventually, he rushed off to get his camera,
only to find on his return that the creature had gone.
That night, the ex colonel took Freeman and his team
to the site of the encounter, where they camped, laying
out rodent traps and laboriously digging holes in the dirt.
(23:36):
They sank bucket traps, hoping to lure in a death worm,
but the traps caught nothing. Again, the team moved on,
this time to a nearby oasis rich in wildlife, where
they met with a woman named could Youuenger. Back in
the nineteen eighties, could Youuenger was out walking with her
(23:58):
grandfather when he called her over to look at something again.
It was a brownish forty centimeter long wormlike creature with
no discernible head or tail. She didn't remember much else
about it, other than that she was very frightened of it.
Once again, Freeman's team set out bucket traps to try
(24:21):
and catch the creature, but as they started digging holes
around the oasis, Freeman gazed up to see a small
dust devil beginning to grow about a mile away. His
interest turned to consternation as the small dusty vortex rapidly
grew larger, then began barreling directly toward them. When it hit,
(24:46):
the fierce winds and blowing dust engulfed the entire camp,
smashing and scattering everything in their path. The wind was
so strong that at one point Freeman saw one of
their Mongolian drivers flying past him, horizontally hanging on to
a billowing tent as it was swept out into the desert.
(25:08):
Thinking back to Ivan mccurlur's hunch, that perhaps the worms
were in fact some kind of psychological phenomenon. It was
as if something didn't want them to discover the truth.
After a month in Mongolia, the Center for Fortian Zoology
expedition was over, and there was no specimen or even
(25:32):
sighting of a death worm to show for their efforts. However,
Richard Freeman believed that the trip had been good for
one thing, namely, that it confirmed his suspicions about the
creature's true identity. I don't think it's a worm at all,
he said later. Instead, he had come to believe it
(25:55):
was in fact some kind of limbless burrowing reptile, either
a giant member of an already known group of reptiles,
or a worm lizard. Worm lizards are also known as Amphisbinians,
(26:17):
named after Anfisbinia, a mythical Greek serpent with a second
head on its tail. They're one of the most mysterious
and poorly studied groups of reptiles, neither snakes nor lizards.
Most known species of this primitive group are found in
Africa and South America, but they also occur in the Caribbean, Mexico,
(26:40):
the Middle East, and even Florida. With tails that resemble
their heads. Worm lizards range anywhere from ten to seventy
centimeters long and have rings of scales that wrap around
their bodies meat eating predators. They search for prey underground burrow,
going through soil and loose sand, with strong, reinforced skulls
(27:05):
and muscular bodies. Specimens of worm lizards can be found
in museums all over the world, including the British Museum
of Natural History, eerily suspended in large jars of alcohol
to preserve them. ID cards list them as coming from
places like Guyana, the West Indies and Buenos Aires, but
(27:29):
specimens in museums are not always what they appear to be.
For nearly two hundred years, a mysterious giant gecko sat
in a storage area at the Natural History Museum of
Marseilles in France. No one knew anything about it, although
the style of taxidermy pointed to it having been collected
(27:52):
in the eighteen thirties. Larger than any gecko known today,
its main body was well ow for a foot long,
while its tail was another two feet long. On top
of that, it had always been thought to come from
New Zealand, but in twenty twenty three. Professor Matthew Heineke,
(28:13):
a herpetologist a specialist in reptiles and amphibians, applied the
latest DNA analysis to a sample taken from the specimen's
FEMA and compared the results with a data set of
the entire gecko family tree. It turned out that the
giant gecko was not from New Zealand at all, but
(28:34):
instead closely related to geckos found today in New Caledonia,
an island in the southwest Pacific Ocean, a good seven
hundred and fifty miles east of New Zealand. Could it
be that the Mongolian death worm has, in actuality already
been found, Perhaps decades ago Russian herpetologists, out hunting for
(29:00):
snakes in the Gobi Desert unwittingly caught one and added
it obliviously to their reptile collections. Is it out there now,
lurking suspended in alcohol in a dusty jar, somewhere unidentified
and long forgotten in the dark, cavernous basement of some
(29:22):
former Soviet era museum. That question, and the true identity
of the Mongolian death worm, for the time being at least,
remains unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and
(29:43):
produced by me Richard McLean Smith. Diane is an audio
producer and sound recordiced in her own right. You can
find out more about her work at Dianhope dot com
and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Unexplained as
an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith.
(30:05):
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are
also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
(30:25):
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
you'd like to share. You can find out more at
Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter
at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com Forward
(30:46):
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