November 15, 2024 • 35 mins
There is a story told over centuries, by local Congolese and explorers alike – a story that calls into question what we truly know about our world, and what may lurk still in the parts of the map that have yet to be fully filled in…
It's name is mokele-mbembe.
Written by Neil McRobert and produced by Richard MacLean Smith.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Lost worlds have always tugged firmly on the human imagination.
For millennia, we've shared tales of forgotten places where time
has not kept pace with history, where the clutter and
conformity of the contemporary world do not hold sway. The
most famous of all lost worlds is the mythical Atlantis,
(00:35):
first introduced in Plato's Dialogs to Maeus and Critius around
three hundred and sixty BCE. Atlantis is described as a
utopian island nation home to an advanced seafaring society. After
the Atlanteans supposedly went to war with Athens, the gods
(00:55):
punished them with fire and flood, sinking their proud home
Rome into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. For some,
Atlantis is an allegory for the inevitable downfall that follows
greed and hubris. For others, it is of very real civilization,
lost to antiquity, but shining still in the imagination. There
(01:20):
are other similar stories of sunken lands around the globe.
Limyria a nation submerged beneath the Indian Ocean, move a
fabled continent swallowed down by the Pacific. Then there is
the El Dorado, the legendary South American city of Gold
(01:41):
or Shambala, a mystical paradise of enlightenment hidden somewhere in
the Himalayas. Taken together, these stories point to a deep
rooted and universal desire to maintain some mystery in the world,
a mystery under constant erosion by the unceasing march of
(02:02):
technological development, and the human urge to explore, to fill
in the map of the world with fact distances and details.
But if the romance were squeezed out of our cartography,
it snuck back in through our fiction. In eighteen eighty five,
h Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon's Minds, often regarded as
(02:26):
the origin of the modern lost world genre in the
Western tradition, at least in it, Haggard's explorers, led by
the undauntable Allan Quartermaine mount an arduous trek through an
unmapped region of Central Africa in search of the fabled minds,
confronting ancient, unknown cultures. Three decades later, Arthur Conan Doyle
(02:53):
published The Lost World, in which another group of adventurers
discover a bubble of prehistory lingering atop an Amazonian plateau,
a microcosm of the past, full of ancient monsters and
rugged cave people. But there are other hidden parts of
the world and stories about them that reveal a darker truth.
(03:23):
In Joseph Comrade's seminal novel The Heart of Darkness, Sailor
Charles Marlowe speaks of his boyhood lust for adventure. Now,
when I was a little chap there were many blank
spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that
looked particularly inviting on a map, I would put my
finger on it and say, when I grow up, I
(03:45):
will go there. But there was one yet, the biggest,
the most blank, so to speak, that I had a
hankering after. That blank space on Marlowe's map was the
Congo Basin, an area of one point one million square
miles deep in central Africa, home to the world's second
(04:06):
largest rainforest, deepest river, and a huge range of flora
and fauna. It is a place that perhaps most represents
the stereotypical mystery and untamed wildness long attached to Africa
in the white European mind. The story is essentially an
account of Marlow's steamship journey up the Congo River in
(04:31):
search of the enigmatic Kurts, a sinister European ivory trader.
But as is so often the case, what Marlowe had
once viewed as an unknown space was rather simply unknown
to him. In reality, it was already populated by hundreds
(04:51):
of thousands of people, and the only strange and monstrous
things he discovered there were the brutal acts being perpose
traded on them. For Marlowe, the Congo ceased to be
a blank space of delightful mystery, and instead had become
a place of darkness. But there is a parallel story
(05:14):
to this sphere of dense forest and deep water, one
told over centuries by local Congolese and explorers alike, a
story that calls into question what we truly know about
our world and what may lurk still in the parts
of the map that have yet to be fully filled.
(05:35):
In You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith.
In the seventeen sixties, abbe Levan Bonaventure Proia, a French
writer and cleric, worked as a missionary in the Congo basin.
(05:59):
Years later, after returning to France, he wrote a book
detailing his experience of the region and compiling his fellow
missionaries knowledge of its natural wonders. No doubt, this book,
titled a History of Lango, Cocongo and other Kingdoms of Africa,
would have slipped into total obscurity were it not for
(06:21):
one enigmatic passage. Missionaries Proyar Rites have observed passing along
a forest the trail of an animal they have never seen,
but which must be monstrous. The marks of its claws
were noted upon the earth, and these composed a footprint
(06:42):
of about three feet in circumference. By observing the disposition
of his footsteps, it was recognized that he was not running,
and he carried his legs at the distance of seven
to eight feet apart. Proyar does not elaborate further. It
gives no additional details and what this unnamed creature is
(07:06):
or what it supposedly looks like. This is nonetheless considered
the first written reference to a creature known as morkel
and Bembe, Africa's most infamous undiscovered animal, or in modern
terminology cryptid. In the oral traditions of the local Bantu people,
(07:29):
the mockle and Bembe is alternatively spirit allegory or flesh
and blood creature. One tale goes that during a bloody
bout of tribal warfare, a band of Congolese pigmies were
fleeing through the rainforest when they reached a river too
wide and dangerous to cross with pursuers on their trail,
(07:52):
They were caught until a broad back breached the river's surface,
a living bridge that the pigmase scrambled across to safety.
Other accounts present the macklay and bembey as a very
real and much less benign entity, but in either case
reference is always made to its grand site. In the
(08:16):
Lingala language, mockle and bembe means one who stops the
flow of rivers. In nineteen thirteen, a German explorer visited
what is now modern day Cameroon. The man Ludwig Freiheer
von steins u Lausnitz was on a government funded mission
(08:38):
to survey the German colonies. While trekking the bush, Ludwig
heard recurrent tales of a mysterious animal feared by natives
of the neighboring Congo. He was particularly astounded that these
accounts came from such experienced guides, who, despite coming from
(08:58):
different tribes separated by many miles of dense rainforest or
relaid similar details. The creature was said to inhabit shallow
waters and the exposed banks of sharp river bends. According
to cautionary tales, if anyone was unwary or unlucky enough
to paddle close to the creature's lair, the mokele and
(09:22):
Bembe would rush forth and destroy the canoes and the
people inside them with a heavy swipe of its tail.
It never ate the bodies, though they were left undisturbed
the floating detritus of the apparent beast's extreme territorialism, and
while local tribespeople spoke of the mochle and Bembe as
(09:44):
capable of hunting and killing an elephant, they were never
known to devour the carcass. Indeed, the mochle and Bembe
was said to enjoy an exclusively herbivorous diet, climbing laboriously
up the bank of the river to feast on the
local foliage. In particular, it is said to have a
(10:05):
taste for the mulumbo, an apple like fruit common to
the banks of rivers and lakes. To the people of
the Congo, the mochele and Bembe simply was an oversized
(10:28):
part of their ecosystem, like an elephant or a hippo,
and they described it with the same level of consistency. Supposedly,
the animal was very large, with a body a little
bigger than an adult elephant, covered in smooth, scaleless skin.
A small head sat at the end of a long,
(10:49):
sinuous neck, and it wielded an alligator like tail thick
with mussel. To Western explorers, however, physical discs scriptions of
the apparent monster, coupled with its eating habits, hinted at
an alluring, alarming question. Does a dinosaur live on the
(11:11):
so called lost world of the Congo basin? One man
attempted to find out. Professor Roy Mackell arrived in the
Congo for the first time in January nineteen eighty, a
respected biologist recently retired from the University of Chicago. He
(11:31):
was also vice president of the International Society of Cryptozoology
under world authority on the topic of the Lochness Monster.
Having grown tired of the endless, unrewarded search for NeSSI,
Mackell turned his attention to Africa after his friend, the
herpetologist James Powell, related a story he once heard from
(11:56):
a Bantu folk healer. The healer had told Old Powell
of a great jungle beast, a source of terror and
owe for the Bantu people. Keen to identify the creature,
Paw presented the healer with a picture book of animals.
The healer looked on passively as Paw turned the page
(12:17):
on one animal after another, when finally he told Paw
to stop, energetically pointing to one particular image on a page.
It was a picture of a Diplodocus, a sauropod dinosaur
measuring on average twenty seven meters long and four and
a half meters tour that went extinct one hundred and
(12:40):
forty five million years ago, and so Intrigued and buoyed
by the implications, Macaw and Powell made their way together
to the Republic of Congo. Starting from the city of
Ifondo in the northeast, the two friends began a month
long trek through the Licoala Swamp, a vast expanse of
(13:03):
over fifty five thousand maize like square miles of rivers,
shallow lakes, and low lying islands, as impenetrable to western
tourists as it is perfect for a semi aquatic lizard.
Their guide was Marion Nicole, a local pigmy whose help
would prove essential. As mocel and Bembay believers have argued,
(13:29):
the Likohala Swamp region is highly suitable for a large
prehistoric species to survive and breed in small populations. Not
only is it supremely isolated, it has remained almost unchanged
since the Cretaceous period, with a stable climate, minimal tectonic disruption,
(13:50):
and virtually no movement from its proximity to the equator. Here,
Macal argued a herd of dinosaurs could potentially go was
unnoticed as a swarm of insects. But it hadn't gone unnoticed,
(14:13):
as McAll and Powell quickly discovered while they trekked from
town to town. Stories of Maclay and Bembe encounters were
not hard to come by. One Bantu man, Furman Mossamele,
told them how as a young boy, he'd disturbed the
animal paddling near the town of Epina before he fled
(14:35):
in terror. Furman saw a small head rise from the river,
followed by a serpentine neck and broad ruddy back, just
like Powell's healer. Furman also pointed to a depiction of
a sauropod dinosaur in a book as the nearest comparison
to what he saw. Another first hand account from a
(14:57):
hunter named Nicholas Mondongo described a ruddy red river monster
standing in water only a few feet deep. He told
the fascinated researchers that the creature was at least ten
meters from its head to the tip of its thick tail,
and he too recognized the mochelae and bembe in the
(15:20):
drawings of the Diplodocus and other sauropods. Mikail had begun
his expedition with skepticism about the idea of a surviving
modern day dinosaur. However, after contemplating the scale of the
unexplored rainforest and hearing from more witnesses who each pointed
(15:40):
eagerly to pictures of surapods, he flew home with a
firm conviction something unknown was roaming the interior of the
Congo Basin. In October nineteen eighty one, Macau returned to Africa,
determined to find definitive roof This time, he headed up
(16:02):
a larger team, which included his International Society of Cryptosymology
colleague Richard Greenwell of Congolese biologist doctor Marcellan and Nanya,
and pastor Eugene Thomas, an American missionary who'd lived in
the country since the late fifties and who claimed to
have heard over fifty first hand reports of the apparent creature.
(16:28):
German electrical engineer and avid proponent of the mckelay and
Bembey theory, Hermann Regustas was also supposed to join the party,
providing vital expertise and the ability to employ satellite tracking. Sadly, however,
for reasons unknown, he and Macaw fell out, and he
(16:49):
neglected to join the team on their quest. Under turret,
macau moved forward. This time, he decided to refine the
search area, choosing to focus on the waterways and swamp
land itself. As their trip began at the end of
the rainy season, water levels were high enough to allow
(17:10):
the group to travel by river, faster than the previous
year's overland journey and closer to the habitat that the
creature would ostensibly call home. The team traveled in perogues,
long narrow canoes carved from a single tree trunk. Parogues
sit very low in the water, with only an inch
(17:32):
or two of draft, but their stability and maneuverability makes
them the vessel of choice for Bantu and Pygmy river communities.
The group's initial aim was to reach Lake Telee, a
remote lake thought to be a particular haunt of the
Macklay and Bembey. As rumor had it, it was there
(17:54):
in nineteen sixty that a group of Bogombay pigmies felt
one of the creatures us using long spears. Only no
sooner had they begun feasting on the carcass. One by one,
the group as said to have collapsed and died due
to a deadly poison said to saturate the creature's flesh.
(18:22):
Even without the threat of poison, the Bogombay Pygmy story
is the only account of the enigmatic beast being brought
down by humans, and without spears or hunting expertise of
their own, there was no doubt. The Macal party set
out with no little trepidation as they headed back into
the swamp. Embarking from Pastor Thomas's mission, Macau's team first
(18:48):
canoed southwest down the Tanga River and then south on
the larger le Koala o Zerb River. At some point
Macau heard a loud splash from near the bank. He
turned quickly to see a sizeable rogue wave come cresting
across from the shadowy vine encrusted overhang. The river. Water
(19:11):
washed across their pirogues, prompting the guides to scream out
in terror Mochle and Bembe. Mockele and Bembey with great persistence,
Macau just about managed to convince them not to flee.
After a half hour search, the team found no evidence
or tracks with which to identify whatever had created the wave.
(19:36):
Either way, the nervous guide e Cole assured the team
that of all the creatures it might have been, crocodiles
do not create waves when they enter the water, elephants
do not fully submerge themselves, and no hippos were known
to inhabit that section of the le Koala. When Macau
(19:58):
asked how the guide knew the no hippos in the area,
his response was swift and matter of fact. The Mokel
and Bembey had chased them all away, he said. Some
time later, the expedition reached the confluence of the Lekoala,
o Zerb and the Uncharted River. By Here they established
(20:20):
a base and visited several local villages, gathering more eyewitness testimony.
In total, they collected more than thirty independent reports of
apparent encounters with the Macklay and Bembey. One hunter escorted
Macau to a stretch of river bank where he discovered
(20:40):
a large trail that he couldn't identify. Some large animal
had clearly dredged itself from the river and headed into
the surrounding jungle, leaving foot wide clawed prints. The size
of the path it created was roughly the same as
that made by an elephant, But elephants do not have claws,
(21:03):
and the hunter emphasized that neither did they devastate the
plant life in quite the way this creature had. Feeling
confident they were on the cusp of a discovery, Macaal
and his team aimed to push on to Lake Telley. Unfortunately,
to their great disappointment, they learned how fallible the maps
(21:24):
of the local region had up till then been. As
it turned out, the river they were on was not
the northern reach of the Bye River as they had thought,
and to reach Lake Telley from their position would require
an overland slog through the most inhospitable terrain, equipped only
(21:46):
for a river journey, they had no choice but to
turn back. Macaw's great search for the dinosaur of the
Congo had reached an anticlimactic end. He flew back to
the u s no less persuaded of the creature's existence,
but with the heavy awareness that none of the evidence
(22:06):
he collected would convince the zoological community. Roy Macaw's nineteen
eighty seven book A Living Dinosaur in Search of Mockelay
and Bembe, which he subsequently wrote, did much to promote
(22:30):
the idea of prehistoric survival into the present day, though
macau was ultimately forced to concede that though the mystery
beckons pending new information from future expeditions, our speculations must
rest here. But Roy mackel had not been the only
cryptozoologist scourring the swamps for monsters after their falling out.
(22:56):
Herm and Rougustus, the German satellite specialists, had initiated his
own expedition, which also took place in the autumn of
nineteen eighty one. In fact, Ermine had started a four
month before. Like Mackel, Ermine also centered his attention on
the elusive Lake Telley, but he was successful in reaching it.
(23:22):
His team, which included his wife Kia in the role
as chief medical officer, arrived there on October twenty eighth,
when Mackel was still days from setting out on the river.
Seen from above, Lake Telley is a great shining disk,
two miles wide and enclosed on all sides by a
(23:44):
limitless blanket of trees. To some it looks like a
vast eye staring up from a dark green face, the
inlets and rivers running to and from it like scars.
It is here that the mochll Bembe is thought to
make its home. On the afternoon of their first day,
(24:06):
Rmin and Kia noticed sizeable waves radiating in the otherwise
calm water. However, it wasn't possible to see the source
of the disturbance that day, but the following morning, one
of the party believed they spotted a long, neck like
protuberance stretching out from the lake. It stayed in view
(24:30):
for a full five minutes before sinking out of sight.
It was a week later when Herman and Kia heard
a frightening noise emanating from the jungle around their shore
side camp. It began as a low roar which increased
in volume and violence to a deep throated, trumpeting growl.
(24:53):
As they described it, the couple sat in their canoe,
rooted with fascination and fear as whatever made the noise
could be heard plowing through the trees, growling and battering
vegetation as it went. On November twenty seventh, after a
full month on the Lake Kia, claint have glimpsed a long,
(25:16):
sinuous appendage rising from the water, topped with a large
snakelike head. She estimated it to be over six and
a half feet in length. It apparently swayed in full
view as if waving to the awestruck woman, before sinking,
as ever, beneath the surface. Sadly, for all these sightings,
(25:40):
the Augustus expedition gathered no photographic or physical evidence. Hermann
blamed human error and humidity, and though he returned home
convinced of the existence of a relict dinosaur, his anecdotal
reports caused barely a stir. Two years after the Macal
(26:07):
and Rugusta expeditions, another team battled their way to the
shores of Lake Telley, but this time people paid attention.
Marcellan and Nanya was the Congolese zoologist who was part
of Macal's second expedition. He also had a government role
in the Ministry of Water and Forests. As such, he
(26:30):
was well placed and well provisioned to pursue his determined
search for the mackl and Bembe. In April nineteen eighty three,
he put together a seven person Congolese only team, whose
every member was familiar with the ecosystem they were set
to explore once again. The hunters were drawn towards Lake Telley,
(26:54):
like blood towards the heart. After days of canoeing and
trekking through dense jungle, they finally arrived and promptly set
up camp. On the second day of their stakeout, the
group observed a huge turtle near to their bank. By
Annanya's reckoning, it was over six feet long, easily double
(27:17):
the size of the commonly recognized African soft shell turtle.
Though some have wondered if this might in fact be
the root of the whole Mokelly and Benbe story, nothing
but an oversized turtle transformed through the prism of frightened
imaginations into something even grander. The truth is, the giant
(27:40):
turtle already has its own name and folklore attached the
endn Deci. They call it a creature in many ways,
just as fabled as the Mocklae and Bembey, And so
it would seem, even without offering up a surviving dinosaur,
Lake Hell was all already living up to its reputation
(28:02):
as a lost world of the Arthur Conan Doyle variety. Then,
on the third day May one, the dinosaur is said
to have made its presence known, and Nanya was filming
a troop of monkeys on the lake shore when he
heard one of his party crying out in excitement. Dashing
(28:25):
to the water's edge, he was stunned to see just
under three hundred meters off shore the rising neck and
back of a huge animal, and Nanya strode into the
water and toward the creature, feeling a jolt of adrenaline
when he saw its head turn at the sound of
his approach sixty meters in, and Nanya stopped and raised
(28:48):
his camera through the magnified lens. He later said he
took in all the details that he'd heard locals repeat
again and again. A foot long neck topped with an
undersized snakelike head with crocodilian eyes, its skin shaded from
(29:09):
its ruddy head down, a brown neck turning black across
its hump, and the ten feet of its back. In total,
the creature, he claimed, was over five meters in length.
It sank for a moment beneath the water, he later said,
only for its neck to soon re emerge and stay
(29:31):
visible for a full twenty minutes. In this time, the
zoologist determined that he was looking at something reptilian rather
than mammalian, and felt compelled to conclude that it did
indeed look very much like a sauropod dinosaur. When Marcellan
(29:58):
and Nanyas Mochli and Bembe finally submerged fully into the water,
his team apparently rushed to its last location in their pirogue,
but saw nothing beneath the dense vegetable matter that gathered
at the surface of the lake. It was when they
arrived back at the shore that Ananya claimed to make
(30:19):
the crushing discovery that he'd accidentally filmed the whole encounter
with an entirely inappropriate focus setting, having neglected to change
it after filming the monkeys. When he eventually apparently watched
the footage back, it displayed only an impenetrable blurry image
(30:41):
he did take several photos with a small thirty five
millimeter camera. However, his grainy images of something dark breaking
the surface of the lake have garnered both support and
condemnation over the years. There the search for Central Africa
living dinosaur could have rested in the uncertain ground between
(31:05):
anecdote myth and compromised evidence. But there is just something
about those empty places on the map human beings cannot
keep away. Other expeditions have followed over the last forty years,
plenty of them, most failed valiantly to gain any greater
(31:26):
evidence than Roy mackel, Hermann, Rugusta's or Marcellan and Anya.
In nineteen ninety two, a Japanese film crew recorded fifteen
seconds of video showing something long and distinctly serpentine swimming
across Lake Telley's glassy surface. It remains the most compelling
(31:49):
sign that something unknown still calls the lake its home.
But it is worth noting that Mocklay and Bembe is
not the only prehistoric relic reported from the Congo. Other
tales tell of the cassai rex, a ferocious carnival able
to kill rhinos, and the Ammela and Tuca, a horned
(32:12):
reptile as large as a bush elephant, with a striking
resemblance to the triceratops. And then there is the Kanga motto,
a huge bird with a seven foot wingspan, scaled rather
than feathered. It is said to attack the boats of
those that venture too far into the rivers and trees.
(32:36):
When European explorers showed them images of prehistoric pterosaurs, the
local people didn't react with or as others had to
the Mochele and Bembe. Instead, they seemed terrified. Lost world, then,
is perhaps the wrong term to be lost. Something must
(33:00):
first be found and known. We can be lost, and
we may well be should we tread too far into
the interior of the Central African rainforest. But the things
that we may meet there have always corded home. This
(33:23):
episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me
Richard mclin smith. Neil is the creator and host of
his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he
discusses the craft of horror, writing with everyone from Ta
Nanaeeve Do to the god of horror himself, Stephen King.
(33:44):
I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you as ever
for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it
if you haven't already done so. Unexplained will be coming
to YouTube very shortly in video form, so please watch
out for future developments there. You can subscribe to the
channel at YouTube dot com, Forward Slash at Unexplained Pod.
(34:05):
You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok
dot com. Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. Unexplained is an
AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard mcclainsmith. All other
elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
by me Richard mcclainsmith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is
(34:28):
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(34:49):
You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
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Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast
Lost worlds have always tugged firmly on the human imagination.
For millennia, we've shared tales of forgotten places where time
has not kept pace with history, where the clutter and
conformity of the contemporary world do not hold sway. The
most famous of all lost worlds is the mythical Atlantis,
(00:35):
first introduced in Plato's Dialogs to Maeus and Critius around
three hundred and sixty BCE. Atlantis is described as a
utopian island nation home to an advanced seafaring society. After
the Atlanteans supposedly went to war with Athens, the gods
(00:55):
punished them with fire and flood, sinking their proud home
Rome into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. For some,
Atlantis is an allegory for the inevitable downfall that follows
greed and hubris. For others, it is of very real civilization,
lost to antiquity, but shining still in the imagination. There
(01:20):
are other similar stories of sunken lands around the globe.
Limyria a nation submerged beneath the Indian Ocean, move a
fabled continent swallowed down by the Pacific. Then there is
the El Dorado, the legendary South American city of Gold
(01:41):
or Shambala, a mystical paradise of enlightenment hidden somewhere in
the Himalayas. Taken together, these stories point to a deep
rooted and universal desire to maintain some mystery in the world,
a mystery under constant erosion by the unceasing march of
(02:02):
technological development, and the human urge to explore, to fill
in the map of the world with fact distances and details.
But if the romance were squeezed out of our cartography,
it snuck back in through our fiction. In eighteen eighty five,
h Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon's Minds, often regarded as
(02:26):
the origin of the modern lost world genre in the
Western tradition, at least in it, Haggard's explorers, led by
the undauntable Allan Quartermaine mount an arduous trek through an
unmapped region of Central Africa in search of the fabled minds,
confronting ancient, unknown cultures. Three decades later, Arthur Conan Doyle
(02:53):
published The Lost World, in which another group of adventurers
discover a bubble of prehistory lingering atop an Amazonian plateau,
a microcosm of the past, full of ancient monsters and
rugged cave people. But there are other hidden parts of
the world and stories about them that reveal a darker truth.
(03:23):
In Joseph Comrade's seminal novel The Heart of Darkness, Sailor
Charles Marlowe speaks of his boyhood lust for adventure. Now,
when I was a little chap there were many blank
spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that
looked particularly inviting on a map, I would put my
finger on it and say, when I grow up, I
(03:45):
will go there. But there was one yet, the biggest,
the most blank, so to speak, that I had a
hankering after. That blank space on Marlowe's map was the
Congo Basin, an area of one point one million square
miles deep in central Africa, home to the world's second
(04:06):
largest rainforest, deepest river, and a huge range of flora
and fauna. It is a place that perhaps most represents
the stereotypical mystery and untamed wildness long attached to Africa
in the white European mind. The story is essentially an
account of Marlow's steamship journey up the Congo River in
(04:31):
search of the enigmatic Kurts, a sinister European ivory trader.
But as is so often the case, what Marlowe had
once viewed as an unknown space was rather simply unknown
to him. In reality, it was already populated by hundreds
(04:51):
of thousands of people, and the only strange and monstrous
things he discovered there were the brutal acts being perpose
traded on them. For Marlowe, the Congo ceased to be
a blank space of delightful mystery, and instead had become
a place of darkness. But there is a parallel story
(05:14):
to this sphere of dense forest and deep water, one
told over centuries by local Congolese and explorers alike, a
story that calls into question what we truly know about
our world and what may lurk still in the parts
of the map that have yet to be fully filled.
(05:35):
In You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean Smith.
In the seventeen sixties, abbe Levan Bonaventure Proia, a French
writer and cleric, worked as a missionary in the Congo basin.
(05:59):
Years later, after returning to France, he wrote a book
detailing his experience of the region and compiling his fellow
missionaries knowledge of its natural wonders. No doubt, this book,
titled a History of Lango, Cocongo and other Kingdoms of Africa,
would have slipped into total obscurity were it not for
(06:21):
one enigmatic passage. Missionaries Proyar Rites have observed passing along
a forest the trail of an animal they have never seen,
but which must be monstrous. The marks of its claws
were noted upon the earth, and these composed a footprint
(06:42):
of about three feet in circumference. By observing the disposition
of his footsteps, it was recognized that he was not running,
and he carried his legs at the distance of seven
to eight feet apart. Proyar does not elaborate further. It
gives no additional details and what this unnamed creature is
(07:06):
or what it supposedly looks like. This is nonetheless considered
the first written reference to a creature known as morkel
and Bembe, Africa's most infamous undiscovered animal, or in modern
terminology cryptid. In the oral traditions of the local Bantu people,
(07:29):
the mockle and Bembe is alternatively spirit allegory or flesh
and blood creature. One tale goes that during a bloody
bout of tribal warfare, a band of Congolese pigmies were
fleeing through the rainforest when they reached a river too
wide and dangerous to cross with pursuers on their trail,
(07:52):
They were caught until a broad back breached the river's surface,
a living bridge that the pigmase scrambled across to safety.
Other accounts present the macklay and bembey as a very
real and much less benign entity, but in either case
reference is always made to its grand site. In the
(08:16):
Lingala language, mockle and bembe means one who stops the
flow of rivers. In nineteen thirteen, a German explorer visited
what is now modern day Cameroon. The man Ludwig Freiheer
von steins u Lausnitz was on a government funded mission
(08:38):
to survey the German colonies. While trekking the bush, Ludwig
heard recurrent tales of a mysterious animal feared by natives
of the neighboring Congo. He was particularly astounded that these
accounts came from such experienced guides, who, despite coming from
(08:58):
different tribes separated by many miles of dense rainforest or
relaid similar details. The creature was said to inhabit shallow
waters and the exposed banks of sharp river bends. According
to cautionary tales, if anyone was unwary or unlucky enough
to paddle close to the creature's lair, the mokele and
(09:22):
Bembe would rush forth and destroy the canoes and the
people inside them with a heavy swipe of its tail.
It never ate the bodies, though they were left undisturbed
the floating detritus of the apparent beast's extreme territorialism, and
while local tribespeople spoke of the mochle and Bembe as
(09:44):
capable of hunting and killing an elephant, they were never
known to devour the carcass. Indeed, the mochle and Bembe
was said to enjoy an exclusively herbivorous diet, climbing laboriously
up the bank of the river to feast on the
local foliage. In particular, it is said to have a
(10:05):
taste for the mulumbo, an apple like fruit common to
the banks of rivers and lakes. To the people of
the Congo, the mochele and Bembe simply was an oversized
(10:28):
part of their ecosystem, like an elephant or a hippo,
and they described it with the same level of consistency. Supposedly,
the animal was very large, with a body a little
bigger than an adult elephant, covered in smooth, scaleless skin.
A small head sat at the end of a long,
(10:49):
sinuous neck, and it wielded an alligator like tail thick
with mussel. To Western explorers, however, physical discs scriptions of
the apparent monster, coupled with its eating habits, hinted at
an alluring, alarming question. Does a dinosaur live on the
(11:11):
so called lost world of the Congo basin? One man
attempted to find out. Professor Roy Mackell arrived in the
Congo for the first time in January nineteen eighty, a
respected biologist recently retired from the University of Chicago. He
(11:31):
was also vice president of the International Society of Cryptozoology
under world authority on the topic of the Lochness Monster.
Having grown tired of the endless, unrewarded search for NeSSI,
Mackell turned his attention to Africa after his friend, the
herpetologist James Powell, related a story he once heard from
(11:56):
a Bantu folk healer. The healer had told Old Powell
of a great jungle beast, a source of terror and
owe for the Bantu people. Keen to identify the creature,
Paw presented the healer with a picture book of animals.
The healer looked on passively as Paw turned the page
(12:17):
on one animal after another, when finally he told Paw
to stop, energetically pointing to one particular image on a page.
It was a picture of a Diplodocus, a sauropod dinosaur
measuring on average twenty seven meters long and four and
a half meters tour that went extinct one hundred and
(12:40):
forty five million years ago, and so Intrigued and buoyed
by the implications, Macaw and Powell made their way together
to the Republic of Congo. Starting from the city of
Ifondo in the northeast, the two friends began a month
long trek through the Licoala Swamp, a vast expanse of
(13:03):
over fifty five thousand maize like square miles of rivers,
shallow lakes, and low lying islands, as impenetrable to western
tourists as it is perfect for a semi aquatic lizard.
Their guide was Marion Nicole, a local pigmy whose help
would prove essential. As mocel and Bembay believers have argued,
(13:29):
the Likohala Swamp region is highly suitable for a large
prehistoric species to survive and breed in small populations. Not
only is it supremely isolated, it has remained almost unchanged
since the Cretaceous period, with a stable climate, minimal tectonic disruption,
(13:50):
and virtually no movement from its proximity to the equator. Here,
Macal argued a herd of dinosaurs could potentially go was
unnoticed as a swarm of insects. But it hadn't gone unnoticed,
(14:13):
as McAll and Powell quickly discovered while they trekked from
town to town. Stories of Maclay and Bembe encounters were
not hard to come by. One Bantu man, Furman Mossamele,
told them how as a young boy, he'd disturbed the
animal paddling near the town of Epina before he fled
(14:35):
in terror. Furman saw a small head rise from the river,
followed by a serpentine neck and broad ruddy back, just
like Powell's healer. Furman also pointed to a depiction of
a sauropod dinosaur in a book as the nearest comparison
to what he saw. Another first hand account from a
(14:57):
hunter named Nicholas Mondongo described a ruddy red river monster
standing in water only a few feet deep. He told
the fascinated researchers that the creature was at least ten
meters from its head to the tip of its thick tail,
and he too recognized the mochelae and bembe in the
(15:20):
drawings of the Diplodocus and other sauropods. Mikail had begun
his expedition with skepticism about the idea of a surviving
modern day dinosaur. However, after contemplating the scale of the
unexplored rainforest and hearing from more witnesses who each pointed
(15:40):
eagerly to pictures of surapods, he flew home with a
firm conviction something unknown was roaming the interior of the
Congo Basin. In October nineteen eighty one, Macau returned to Africa,
determined to find definitive roof This time, he headed up
(16:02):
a larger team, which included his International Society of Cryptosymology
colleague Richard Greenwell of Congolese biologist doctor Marcellan and Nanya,
and pastor Eugene Thomas, an American missionary who'd lived in
the country since the late fifties and who claimed to
have heard over fifty first hand reports of the apparent creature.
(16:28):
German electrical engineer and avid proponent of the mckelay and
Bembey theory, Hermann Regustas was also supposed to join the party,
providing vital expertise and the ability to employ satellite tracking. Sadly, however,
for reasons unknown, he and Macaw fell out, and he
(16:49):
neglected to join the team on their quest. Under turret,
macau moved forward. This time, he decided to refine the
search area, choosing to focus on the waterways and swamp
land itself. As their trip began at the end of
the rainy season, water levels were high enough to allow
(17:10):
the group to travel by river, faster than the previous
year's overland journey and closer to the habitat that the
creature would ostensibly call home. The team traveled in perogues,
long narrow canoes carved from a single tree trunk. Parogues
sit very low in the water, with only an inch
(17:32):
or two of draft, but their stability and maneuverability makes
them the vessel of choice for Bantu and Pygmy river communities.
The group's initial aim was to reach Lake Telee, a
remote lake thought to be a particular haunt of the
Macklay and Bembey. As rumor had it, it was there
(17:54):
in nineteen sixty that a group of Bogombay pigmies felt
one of the creatures us using long spears. Only no
sooner had they begun feasting on the carcass. One by one,
the group as said to have collapsed and died due
to a deadly poison said to saturate the creature's flesh.
(18:22):
Even without the threat of poison, the Bogombay Pygmy story
is the only account of the enigmatic beast being brought
down by humans, and without spears or hunting expertise of
their own, there was no doubt. The Macal party set
out with no little trepidation as they headed back into
the swamp. Embarking from Pastor Thomas's mission, Macau's team first
(18:48):
canoed southwest down the Tanga River and then south on
the larger le Koala o Zerb River. At some point
Macau heard a loud splash from near the bank. He
turned quickly to see a sizeable rogue wave come cresting
across from the shadowy vine encrusted overhang. The river. Water
(19:11):
washed across their pirogues, prompting the guides to scream out
in terror Mochle and Bembe. Mockele and Bembey with great persistence,
Macau just about managed to convince them not to flee.
After a half hour search, the team found no evidence
or tracks with which to identify whatever had created the wave.
(19:36):
Either way, the nervous guide e Cole assured the team
that of all the creatures it might have been, crocodiles
do not create waves when they enter the water, elephants
do not fully submerge themselves, and no hippos were known
to inhabit that section of the le Koala. When Macau
(19:58):
asked how the guide knew the no hippos in the area,
his response was swift and matter of fact. The Mokel
and Bembey had chased them all away, he said. Some
time later, the expedition reached the confluence of the Lekoala,
o Zerb and the Uncharted River. By Here they established
(20:20):
a base and visited several local villages, gathering more eyewitness testimony.
In total, they collected more than thirty independent reports of
apparent encounters with the Macklay and Bembey. One hunter escorted
Macau to a stretch of river bank where he discovered
(20:40):
a large trail that he couldn't identify. Some large animal
had clearly dredged itself from the river and headed into
the surrounding jungle, leaving foot wide clawed prints. The size
of the path it created was roughly the same as
that made by an elephant, But elephants do not have claws,
(21:03):
and the hunter emphasized that neither did they devastate the
plant life in quite the way this creature had. Feeling
confident they were on the cusp of a discovery, Macaal
and his team aimed to push on to Lake Telley. Unfortunately,
to their great disappointment, they learned how fallible the maps
(21:24):
of the local region had up till then been. As
it turned out, the river they were on was not
the northern reach of the Bye River as they had thought,
and to reach Lake Telley from their position would require
an overland slog through the most inhospitable terrain, equipped only
(21:46):
for a river journey, they had no choice but to
turn back. Macaw's great search for the dinosaur of the
Congo had reached an anticlimactic end. He flew back to
the u s no less persuaded of the creature's existence,
but with the heavy awareness that none of the evidence
(22:06):
he collected would convince the zoological community. Roy Macaw's nineteen
eighty seven book A Living Dinosaur in Search of Mockelay
and Bembe, which he subsequently wrote, did much to promote
(22:30):
the idea of prehistoric survival into the present day, though
macau was ultimately forced to concede that though the mystery
beckons pending new information from future expeditions, our speculations must
rest here. But Roy mackel had not been the only
cryptozoologist scourring the swamps for monsters after their falling out.
(22:56):
Herm and Rougustus, the German satellite specialists, had initiated his
own expedition, which also took place in the autumn of
nineteen eighty one. In fact, Ermine had started a four
month before. Like Mackel, Ermine also centered his attention on
the elusive Lake Telley, but he was successful in reaching it.
(23:22):
His team, which included his wife Kia in the role
as chief medical officer, arrived there on October twenty eighth,
when Mackel was still days from setting out on the river.
Seen from above, Lake Telley is a great shining disk,
two miles wide and enclosed on all sides by a
(23:44):
limitless blanket of trees. To some it looks like a
vast eye staring up from a dark green face, the
inlets and rivers running to and from it like scars.
It is here that the mochll Bembe is thought to
make its home. On the afternoon of their first day,
(24:06):
Rmin and Kia noticed sizeable waves radiating in the otherwise
calm water. However, it wasn't possible to see the source
of the disturbance that day, but the following morning, one
of the party believed they spotted a long, neck like
protuberance stretching out from the lake. It stayed in view
(24:30):
for a full five minutes before sinking out of sight.
It was a week later when Herman and Kia heard
a frightening noise emanating from the jungle around their shore
side camp. It began as a low roar which increased
in volume and violence to a deep throated, trumpeting growl.
(24:53):
As they described it, the couple sat in their canoe,
rooted with fascination and fear as whatever made the noise
could be heard plowing through the trees, growling and battering
vegetation as it went. On November twenty seventh, after a
full month on the Lake Kia, claint have glimpsed a long,
(25:16):
sinuous appendage rising from the water, topped with a large
snakelike head. She estimated it to be over six and
a half feet in length. It apparently swayed in full
view as if waving to the awestruck woman, before sinking,
as ever, beneath the surface. Sadly, for all these sightings,
(25:40):
the Augustus expedition gathered no photographic or physical evidence. Hermann
blamed human error and humidity, and though he returned home
convinced of the existence of a relict dinosaur, his anecdotal
reports caused barely a stir. Two years after the Macal
(26:07):
and Rugusta expeditions, another team battled their way to the
shores of Lake Telley, but this time people paid attention.
Marcellan and Nanya was the Congolese zoologist who was part
of Macal's second expedition. He also had a government role
in the Ministry of Water and Forests. As such, he
(26:30):
was well placed and well provisioned to pursue his determined
search for the mackl and Bembe. In April nineteen eighty three,
he put together a seven person Congolese only team, whose
every member was familiar with the ecosystem they were set
to explore once again. The hunters were drawn towards Lake Telley,
(26:54):
like blood towards the heart. After days of canoeing and
trekking through dense jungle, they finally arrived and promptly set
up camp. On the second day of their stakeout, the
group observed a huge turtle near to their bank. By
Annanya's reckoning, it was over six feet long, easily double
(27:17):
the size of the commonly recognized African soft shell turtle.
Though some have wondered if this might in fact be
the root of the whole Mokelly and Benbe story, nothing
but an oversized turtle transformed through the prism of frightened
imaginations into something even grander. The truth is, the giant
(27:40):
turtle already has its own name and folklore attached the
endn Deci. They call it a creature in many ways,
just as fabled as the Mocklae and Bembey, And so
it would seem, even without offering up a surviving dinosaur,
Lake Hell was all already living up to its reputation
(28:02):
as a lost world of the Arthur Conan Doyle variety. Then,
on the third day May one, the dinosaur is said
to have made its presence known, and Nanya was filming
a troop of monkeys on the lake shore when he
heard one of his party crying out in excitement. Dashing
(28:25):
to the water's edge, he was stunned to see just
under three hundred meters off shore the rising neck and
back of a huge animal, and Nanya strode into the
water and toward the creature, feeling a jolt of adrenaline
when he saw its head turn at the sound of
his approach sixty meters in, and Nanya stopped and raised
(28:48):
his camera through the magnified lens. He later said he
took in all the details that he'd heard locals repeat
again and again. A foot long neck topped with an
undersized snakelike head with crocodilian eyes, its skin shaded from
(29:09):
its ruddy head down, a brown neck turning black across
its hump, and the ten feet of its back. In total,
the creature, he claimed, was over five meters in length.
It sank for a moment beneath the water, he later said,
only for its neck to soon re emerge and stay
(29:31):
visible for a full twenty minutes. In this time, the
zoologist determined that he was looking at something reptilian rather
than mammalian, and felt compelled to conclude that it did
indeed look very much like a sauropod dinosaur. When Marcellan
(29:58):
and Nanyas Mochli and Bembe finally submerged fully into the water,
his team apparently rushed to its last location in their pirogue,
but saw nothing beneath the dense vegetable matter that gathered
at the surface of the lake. It was when they
arrived back at the shore that Ananya claimed to make
(30:19):
the crushing discovery that he'd accidentally filmed the whole encounter
with an entirely inappropriate focus setting, having neglected to change
it after filming the monkeys. When he eventually apparently watched
the footage back, it displayed only an impenetrable blurry image
(30:41):
he did take several photos with a small thirty five
millimeter camera. However, his grainy images of something dark breaking
the surface of the lake have garnered both support and
condemnation over the years. There the search for Central Africa
living dinosaur could have rested in the uncertain ground between
(31:05):
anecdote myth and compromised evidence. But there is just something
about those empty places on the map human beings cannot
keep away. Other expeditions have followed over the last forty years,
plenty of them, most failed valiantly to gain any greater
(31:26):
evidence than Roy mackel, Hermann, Rugusta's or Marcellan and Anya.
In nineteen ninety two, a Japanese film crew recorded fifteen
seconds of video showing something long and distinctly serpentine swimming
across Lake Telley's glassy surface. It remains the most compelling
(31:49):
sign that something unknown still calls the lake its home.
But it is worth noting that Mocklay and Bembe is
not the only prehistoric relic reported from the Congo. Other
tales tell of the cassai rex, a ferocious carnival able
to kill rhinos, and the Ammela and Tuca, a horned
(32:12):
reptile as large as a bush elephant, with a striking
resemblance to the triceratops. And then there is the Kanga motto,
a huge bird with a seven foot wingspan, scaled rather
than feathered. It is said to attack the boats of
those that venture too far into the rivers and trees.
(32:36):
When European explorers showed them images of prehistoric pterosaurs, the
local people didn't react with or as others had to
the Mochele and Bembe. Instead, they seemed terrified. Lost world, then,
is perhaps the wrong term to be lost. Something must
(33:00):
first be found and known. We can be lost, and
we may well be should we tread too far into
the interior of the Central African rainforest. But the things
that we may meet there have always corded home. This
(33:23):
episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me
Richard mclin smith. Neil is the creator and host of
his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he
discusses the craft of horror, writing with everyone from Ta
Nanaeeve Do to the god of horror himself, Stephen King.
(33:44):
I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you as ever
for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it
if you haven't already done so. Unexplained will be coming
to YouTube very shortly in video form, so please watch
out for future developments there. You can subscribe to the
channel at YouTube dot com, Forward Slash at Unexplained Pod.
(34:05):
You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok
dot com. Forward Slash at Unexplained Podcast. Unexplained is an
AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard mcclainsmith. All other
elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
by me Richard mcclainsmith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is
(34:28):
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 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.
(34:49):
You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and
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