Read Monsters You Never Heard Of for Free Online

monkey-like body. She could not see any mouth or nose, but its large eyes seemed to glow with a greenish light. Will only got a fleeting glimpse of the figure. He had the impression of something with a large head, and tan body.
    The story got into the newspapers, and the thing was dubbed the Dover Demon.
    No one else ever reported seeing the Dover Demon. No physical evidence of its existence was ever produced. A lot of people talked to the four young witnesses about their strange encounters. A few thought it was all a hoax. Most people got the feeling that the witnesses were telling the truth. But even if they were telling the truth, as far as they knew it, that does not mean that they actually saw a strange little creature with a large head and skinny body. They may have seen something quite ordinary—a cat or dog perhaps, It was night. No one really got a good close-up look at the creature. They may have just gotten excited and made a mistake about what they saw. At least one of the witnesses knew about the other sightings before he made his report. People often see strange things—or think that they do—especially at night.

    This is John Baxter's drawing of the figure he said he saw.
    But what if it wasn't a hoax or a mistake? What could the Dover Demon be?
    A lot of people who are interested in the subject are also interested in UFOs. They think that the Dover Demon might be something that came out of a UFO, though there had been no important UFO sightings around Dover at that time.
    Then someone suggested that the Dover Demon might be a Mannegishi. The Mannegishi are creatures of the mythology of the Cree Indians of Canada. They are supposed to be little people with round heads and no noses. They have long thin arms and legs. Their main purpose in life, according to Cree legends, is to play jokes on the big people.

CHAPTER 9

    THE BIGGEST SNAKE

    How long can a snake grow? According to the Guinness Book of World Records , the longest and heaviest of all snakes is the anaconda of South America. The book says that a 37 1/2-foot anaconda was "reliably reported" to have been killed on the upper Orinoco River in eastern Columbia. That snake should have weighed about 1,000 pounds.
    A 33 1/2-foot anaconda was killed in southeastern Columbia in November, 1956.
    A 1,000-pound, 37 1/2-foot snake is enormous . Even a 20-foot snake is a giant, and among anacondas the 20-foot length is fairly common. But there are rumors of anacondas and other snakes which are far, far larger.

    Major Percy Fawcett's meeting with a 62-foot anaconda, from a drawing by his son.
    Take the story of Major Percy Fawcett, a British Army officer and frequent traveler in the Amazon jungles of South America. He had heard stories of 50- and 60-foot anacondas. But he didn't believe them. Then one day early in 1907, Major Fawcett and several local Indians were in a canoe drifting along the Rio Abuna river. Suddenly, a giant triangular head appeared practically underneath the boat. It was a monstrous anaconda. The creature slithered out of the water and onto the bank. Fawcett didn't stand around watching it. He grabbed his rifle and shot it. He made a rough measurement of the creature. It turned out to be 62 feet long. It also had a terrible odor. "Everything about this snake was repulsive," Fawcett commented.
    Fawcett said that later he heard of even larger anacondas.
    When Fawcett got back to London a lot of people called him a liar because of his 62-foot snake story: But if he was a liar, he wasn't the only one.
    The Belgian naturalist, Bernard Heuvelmans, has a long-time interest in strange, unusual, and unknown animals. He met a Frenchman named Serge Bonacase, who had been in Brazil in 1947. Bonacase told the naturalist an astonishing story.
    He said he was with a group of Frenchmen and Brazilians that spotted an anaconda asleep in the grass. They got about twenty yards away from it and fired their rifles at it several times. Only after they killed it did