Man-Beast Hunts in the Far East

Primates in remote regions are wrong-footing the scientists

China's Wildman expedition

The hunt for China's yeren or "wildman" has been pursued since 1959, with more than 200 reported sightings. Footprints, samples of hair and faeces have been obtained, but no creatures captured or photographed. The latest publicised sighting was in September 1993, when a group of Chinese engineers saw three of them roaming the trails of the Shennongjia National Forest Park in western Hubei province. A local rumour that the son of a wildman and a shy human mother lived in seclusion in the mountains turned out to have been based solely on a videotape of a naked micro-cephalic man (a "pinhead") eating a banana.

 A Chinese poster appeals for information on the elusive wildmanOn 27 October 1994, the Chinese government set up a new body, the Committee for the Search of Strange and Rare Creatures, one of whose aims was to investigate wildman reports. Its members included scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The wildmen are thought to be unknown primates. The largest cast of a footprint is l6in long, leading to the assumption that the creatures could weigh as much as 660lb and stand more than 7ft tall. The committee has studied eight hair specimens, believed to come from animals ranging throughout China and Tibet — none, they say, come from humans or any known animal. The hair varies from black, collected in Yunnan province, to white from Tibet, to the reddish brown of the creatures seen by Hubei villagers.

A 30-strong wildman expedition set out for the mountains of Hubei on 7 April 1995, led by Professor Yuan Zhengxin, chairman of the new committee. "I am certain that within three years we will have captured one of these wild men," he blustered. Previous groups hunted for yeren in Shennongjia in 1977, 1980 and 1982. This time, against the better judgement of the expedition scientists and local government officials who feared a stampede of bounty hunters, the China Travel Service in Hubei offered cooking utensils, oil and grain to wildman hunters and various prizes: 500,000 yuan (£37,000) for bringing in one alive, £3,700 for a dead specimen, up to £2,960 for photographs or video recordings and £740 for hair or faeces.

On 11 July, Xinhua (the New China News Agency) announced that most of the expedition members had returned to Beijing. Wang Fangchen leader of the 30-member team, said that although the expedition — which used night-vision scopes and satellite orientation gear — ended without any "important findings", some "slim scientific evidence" had been obtained, including possible hair samples. Another search was planned for September.

Evil forces in Malaysia

A hunt began in January for kaki besar, the Malaysian 'Bigfoot', said to be eight feet tall. Army and police units, wildlife experts and local tribesmen combed several thousand square miles of dense jungle surrounding Tanjung Piai in Johor state, where sightings had recently been reported. On 12 January, fresh footprints, 18 inches long and displaying only four toes, were found in dense undergrowth, indicating the beast's hideout was nearby. Tribesmen burned twigs and dried leaves, banged tin cans and gongs, performed ritual dances and kept a 24-hour vigil with spears in attempts to drive away the creature, which they said had been sent to Malaysia by evil forces. No follow-up reports have been seen.

Sumatra’s Shy Apeman

An artist's impression of orang pendekIn Sumatra just across the Malacca Strait from the Malay peninsula, there is an ancient tradition of apelike men in the forests. They are known as orang pendek ('little man') or orang letjo ('gibbering man'). Orang merely means 'man' or 'manlike creature' — as in orang utan ('man of the woods'). Orang utang — a frequent misspelling — means 'man in debt'! A 1916 orang pendek sighting was written up by Dr Edward Jacobson in a Dutch scientific journal and there have been many sightings since. The creature is a very shy biped, between three and five feet tall, speaking an unintelligible language. It is covered with short dark brown to black hair and has no visible tail. Its arms are not as long as those of an anthropoid ape. It hardly ever climbs trees, but walks on the ground.

Hard evidence of orang pendek's existence might be gathered quite soon. Last November Debbie Martyr, 38, former editor of a south London newspaper, recorded dozens of remarkably consistent eye-witness accounts of the ape-man in and near the jungle-clad mountain in Kerinci Sadlat national park, western Sumatra. Martyr herself saw the creature three times. "He is wonderfully camouflaged," she said. "If he freezes, you can't see him." She brought plaster casts of footprints back to England and on 6 March this year returned to Sumatra with a grant from the Flora and Fauna Preservation Society. She hopes to glean photographic evidence, hair and faecal samples.

Pakistan’s “Big Hairy One”

Three researchers, two from France and one from Spain, were hunting for the Barmanu ("big hairy one" in local dialect) in the northern mountain region of Chitral in Pakistan last year, part of a long-term project. Trainee zoologist jordi Magraner had been on the trail for two years. "I've heard its cry twice," he said. "It's a guttural sound, short loud cries which echoed throughout the valley. They reminded you of a human cry and the sound of jackals."

 Jordi Magraner's sketch of the Pakistani BarmanuThe creature is described as squat and plump with a foul body odour, a large flat nose, protruding eyebrows, a massive neck and a receding forehead. It has large, human-type feet, turned inward, moves with the agility of a goat and is reputedly omnivorous.

Mystery footprints in Borneo

In 1969, John MacKinnon came upon enigmatic man-like footprints in the remote Ulu Segama national park in Sabah province, northern Borneo. The local name for this 'Bigfoot' is batatut. "The toes looked quite human," he wrote, "as did the shapely heel, but the sole was both too short and too broad to be that of a man and the big toe was on the opposite side to what seemed to be the arch of the foot... The size [of the tracks] would be about right for the Asiatic black bear, but the only bear known in Borneo, and peninsular Malaya for that matter, is the Malay sun bear, which is quite small." MacKinnon has discovered three new mammal species on the Vietnamese-Laos border since 1992.

[Fortean Times, November – December 1995.]

WCSRO, 2006.