Kongamato
The kongamato ( "who laid the Boats") to one today in the Jiundu swamps in western Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo ) living pterosaurs be.
description
The Kongamato is said to have a wingspan of about 1.20 to 2.10 meters. The pterosaur has no feathers, but a smooth red or black colored skin and a long beak, studded with teeth. The locals gave the animal its name "overpowering boats" because it supposedly capsized the fishermen's canoes on its hunt. In addition, the being is said to bring death to everyone who looks at it.
Sightings
The first account of the Kongamato was recorded in 1923 by the British adventurer Frank H. Melland. The Kaonde tribe told the British about the strange "demon of the swamps". When Melland showed the local population drawings of pterosaurs, they allegedly identified them without hesitation as Kongamato.
Two years later, press correspondent J. Ward Price from England reported an uncanny encounter. With the later King Edward VIII he was traveling in the former British colonies in Africa . During this trip they met a local who had penetrated far into the dreaded Jiundu swamps. It seemed a miracle that this man had got away with his life in the first place because something had attacked and seriously injured him there. The gaping flesh wound on his back, he said, was caused by a large bird that attacked him in the swamps. It was noticeable that the injured person claimed that the bird had terrible teeth in its beak. When the injured person was later shown pictures of prehistoric pterosaurs, he fled in a panic.
In 1932 the naturalist Gerald Russell and the anomalist and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson jointly sighted a Kongamato in Cameroon . The engineer JPF Brown from Zaire and a married couple named Gregor from Southern Rhodesia reported further sightings in 1956 .
In 1957, in the area where Brown claims to have seen his pterosaurs, a man with severe chest injuries appeared in the hospital and claimed to have been attacked by a large bird in the Bangweulu swamps. When the doctors asked him to draw the attacker, he sketched the outline of a pterosaur. An alleged photo of a Kongamato also surfaced in the late 1950s, but later turned out to be a fake.
Attempts to explain
Some scientists believe that it could be sightings of native stork species such as the shoebill stork that lives in Zaire's swamps. However, no cases are known in which these animals have behaved aggressively towards humans.
A second explanation is that it could be an as yet unclassified large bat . However, some cryptozoologists also believe that a pterosaur could really have survived in the poorly researched swamp regions.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cryptozoology Online , under: Kongamato (accessed: January 16, 2014)
- ↑ Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, "Cryptozoology A To Z: The Encyclopedia Of Loch Monsters Sasquatch Chupacabras And Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature", Simon and Schuster, 2013, p. 127