Southeast Asia - Dr. Helmut Loofs-Wissowa

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New Zealand Herald - Dmitri Bayanov

Dr. Helmut Loofs-Wissowa (Australian anthropologist and historian) believes that a species of higher primate *distinct* from gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and Homo sapiens exists in Indochina. [the website owner finds this a significant remark]

During 1960 he studied reports of "gorillas" from Vietnamese, Laotians, Americans, and Australians. He recently traveled into the jungle near the Laotian/Vietnam border to interview villagers about powerfully built, hairy, man-like creatures that lived in the area until the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail destroyed their habitat.

Loofs-Wissowa took along photos and drawings of great apes, Java Man (Homo erectus), and the Minnesota Iceman. All of his informants pointed to the Iceman as being the best representation of the creatures.

My original hypothesis has been validated inasmuch as there are irrefutable indication for the existence - at least into the recent past, if not into the present - of obviously non-sapiens hominids, almost certainly of the relic Neanderthal type, in the area I hypothesized them to be."

The difficulties Loofs-Wissowa faces include: The lack of acceptance of the observations of indigenous people; The impossibility of a researcher finding, trapping and hauling a reluctant wildman from his mountain or forest home; and the moral and ethical difficulties of even setting out to capture -or worse, kill - a specimen.

"One last-ditch argument by skeptics often is that even though you are not supposed to kill a wildman, there must be lots of bodies or skeletons of them around where you claim them to live: 'Why can you not bring us home a skull or at least some bones, to convince us?" "But must there?

"How many bodies or skeletons of the great apes were found before their existence became known through eye-witness accounts...the time has come in wildman research to shift the onus of proof squarely on to the skeptics and to realize that beyond a certain point doubt is...a hindrance to the advancement of real science.

© Dmitri Bayanov, July 24, 1996
Source: Bigfoot Coop Newsletter, volume 17 April 1997