From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control, DECANDT. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. A bit of a palette cleanser tonight. We have heard from many of our fellow conspiracy realists who are always asking us for more cryptid explorations. Now, long time listeners, you know we've examined in depth. What are some of the episodes. I'll always remember our pal who runs Expedition Bigfoot.
That was a great interview.
I love a wistful way you said. We'll always remember Expedition Bigfoot. You know it was a golden time in all of our lives. I think.
Let's see, we also looked at cryptids in Indonesia, right the ohl oh jeez, that was well.
Well that was another one. Oh man. There was the spooky fans. Remember those spooky fans that were killing everybody that we sort of lumped into cryptids because it was like a I don't know, there was a ghost.
At play, perhaps in South Korea, that's right. Yeah, And now we are traveling this evening to a place that has its own, largely unique population of alleged cryptids that many people in the West have not heard of. I mean, you've heard of the region, you've heard of India and Pakistan in Afghanistan, but you may not know they have monsters all their own, one of which is just by the way, spoiler, extremely adorable. Will get to it. Here
are the facts for anyone unfamiliar. We'd like to give you just a quick and dirty understanding of what cryptids are and why they fascinate us.
So cryptids are sneaky animals that might exist. That's how I will define a crypti.
That's what cryptid translates to actually in Latin as sneaky animal.
Yeah, it's a group term for any number of organisms that are alleged to exist or believed to exist, outside the bounds of modern acknowledged scientific consensus. And these are very old. Like you know, everybody has their own version of Bigfoot. As we'll see, there are also more regional cryptids like the Jersey Devil. Neither of those have been proven to exist, but every year there are dozens, if not hundreds of people who believe that they have seen one.
Well, And I mean it's all so tightly wound up in folklore and tradition of different cultures, and a lot of times there's a belief in these creatures that stems from either kind of superstition or even religion sometimes and that leads to, perhaps without proof, a genuine belief in some parts of the world, and these things existing.
Well, and every once in a while, as we're going to find in this episode, as we have in the past, there's a documented sighting of something in the way it's written about in that first documented sighting, it's so mysterious and strange that it creates its own lore.
Right, Yeah, there's a real umami to it, right, because humans seek to understand the world around them, and there are few things as intellectually take as the ability to discover a new animal.
You did promise a palate cleanser, Benz, and this is going to be sort of a chicken noodle soup for the conspiratorial soul here today. I like that phrase.
Yeah, we were talking about this off air. We wanted to do one fun one because we have deep water behind us and ahead. There's also a lot of scientific basis to the idea of cryptids. You know, some cryptids, the most plausible ones, turn out to be animals that we already knew existed, and perhaps society, often Western society, mistakenly concluded these animals were extinct. Our number one example
of this is the seilacanth. They were supposed to have died out millions of years ago, and then, surprise, surprise, some Western scientists got over to the part of Africa where the ceilacanth is still very much alive and they said, oh, we've proven cryptid. And all the people who are living in that area were like, no, this ugly fish has always been around. You can't eat it. It's a trash fish. And they were like, no, history, we are writing it.
But isn't there even a specific Indian selacanth that we've heard about for this episode.
Yes, yes, there very much is, and we are going to in the course of this exploration, introduce you, fellow conspiracy realist, to an amazing map that inspired a lot of this conversation. There are other cryptids, like the Tasmanian tiger, still officially considered extinct, but every single year a few people in Australia or Tasmania are certain they have seen one alive in the wild. It's a really the study of cryptozoology is a study of human encroachment into wilderness.
And you know, it's also weird. Like we think when you see stuff on the History Channel or Discovery ID or whatever, you get the sense that cryptids are kind of a modern concept. But it turns out, over the course of history, every single human culture has been fascinated by the story of fantastic creatures, and often it's because they were just working with what they had.
I mean, y'all, even some of the ones we know about. One could argue you are pretty fantastic. Can you imagine seeing some of these for the first time or catching a glimpse, you know, before there was scientific basis to explain, you know, the nature of connection between different species and phyla and kingdoms and all of that good stuff.
Pretty wild, Even something as simple as you live in an area and nobody you've ever known has ever seen a big cat in anywhere near where you are, and there's no writings about big cats, there's no official big cats anywhere near you. But then you swear you experienced seeing one and hearing one out in the woods, like you know you did, and what he like? What do you tell your friends? And what does that turn into? And it's the same with big reptiles, right.
Yes, yeah, it is the same with reptiles. As we'll find there are still reptiles out there to be discovered. An interesting side note for a different thing. I recently learned that some reptiles may indeed be capable of what mammals would recognize as affection. Story for another day, Story for another day.
Dude, have you ever seen a guy walking around holding a bearded dragon just on their chest? You know there's love in those eyes. I've seen it.
I've recently saw this video of a guy who he's out on the swamp. He's taking some people on a tour, I think, and he tells about this smamp puppy. You've seen a swamp puppy And they're like what, And it's an allegorty. He basically calls a wild alligator over to the boat, gives it some gimick.
Kind of whistle like a call an a gator car.
He was just talking to it like it's a dog man and he's just patting it on the nose. That you just pat him right on the nose and if they ever come at you just pop them right in that nose.
Chicken.
Maybe yeah, yeah, you guys. I don't know if this was like a common thing in Georgia. I think this guy might have made the rounds. But there's this dude named Joe would come tonight elementary school always talked about being swamp wise.
Did he tour everyone?
There's more than one. Maybe there's like like various.
Psychics calling themselves Madame Bell. Perhaps it's a brand name. Yeah, we know also that uh, first off, we're establishing here that the human species has a lot to learn about other non human animals, and humans are still very much animals. They are type of primate. We know that the humans have been attempting to explain the world around them since they started peopling. And so some of your favorite mythologies, some of your favorite legends, they originate from prototypes of
scientific investigation. One of the most famous would be the legend of the Cyclops, the giant with one eye instead of two. That most likely came from the discovery of the skull of an elephant and the misinterpretation. We talked about this in the past. If you look at an elephant's skull, you can look at the big hole in the middle where the trunk is and think, yeah, that's where I would put an eye if I was gone.
Man, I was hoping there was some kind of proto man that definitely had one eye. That was a real thing.
Oh, there's been a couple, a couple non consensually, but we know some cryptids also are the result of the great game of telephone oral communication, mistranslation, embellishment. One person travels from beyond the bounds of their known part of the world, and then they see amazing animals, perhaps in Asia, perhaps in Africa, perhaps in what we call the Americas. They come back, they tell their colleagues, they tell their peer groups, and the colleagues start to tell other people
the story. And every single time they tell the story, they embellish it a little bit, they exaggerate a little bit. They might even twist it around to support whatever their preexisting ideology is. You know, the weirdest thing is There are scammers now in the modern evenings talking about cryptids as a way to sort of bait and switch folks. But for most of human history, so far as we know,
these people were not trying to pull a scam. These early philosophers, these historians, these proto scientists, they wanted to understand the world around them, and they got it wrong pretty often. But they still, even with everything that looked like a misstep, they still played a important role in the larger or and important role in the larger advancement of civilization. India is no different. India is perhaps one of the best land areas to find an actual cryptid.
I mean, it's so old, it's massive. Yes, it has one of, if not the world's largest populations of human beings, but it also has a lot of wild countries.
Still. I think this came up in another episode recently. We were talking about our friend Mangesh telling us the story about how his father, I want to say, or maybe it was grandfather, was send minister grandfather like a minister of forestry or it was responsible for like overseeing a lot of this crazy you know jungle, and he you know, really pointed out to us how wild so much of India really, really is.
We also learned the phrase mega diverse. We've talked about biodiversity in the past, but very few places are mega diverse. Right now, as we are recording in twenty twenty four, the nation of India, not just the region of that subcontinent, but on the single nation of India has seven to eight percent of all of the recorded species in the world. There are thirty four universally agreed upon biodiversity hotspots, and
India has four of them. The Himalaya region, as you mentioned earlier, in nol Indo, Burma, or miandmar the western Sri Lanka. It goes on and on. But the question is what else is out there now? Are there any true cryptids unidentified life forms in India? Could any of these stories be real? We're going to pause for a word from our response, and then we're diving in. Here's
where it gets crazy. Yes, it sounds weird to think that the most heavily human occupied nation on the planet could still be very rife with wilderness and animals, but it's true. Like if you are if you are looking anywhere but the depths of the ocean, India is quite likely the place where you could find a real cryptid.
And I mean in general, when we're talking about cryptids, not all of them are created equal in terms of their provenance. As we mentioned at the top of the show, there are certainly some of them that may have been misidentified in historical records, you know, in writing and early kind of naturalists and misunderstandings galore that played, you know, into that game of telephone can really make something into
something pretty outrageously cryptid. Like I guess what what I'm trying to say is there's sort of a there's a likelihood factor of whether some of these things are related in these tales to actual creatures, or if the game of telephone just got completely out of hand, driven by ideology or superstition or what have you.
Yeah, let's go to some examples. One of the most ancient cryptids in India and in Ethiopia is a little thing called the crow cutta. To describe it, it sounds like we're setting up a bar joke. What do you get when you cross a wolf, a dog, a hyena, and a lion, Well, you get the cro tutta.
Sounds like a delicious pastry, though, doesn't it.
It does very much. So, Yeah, it's an ancient cryptid. It's described by multiple historians throughout antiquity, including our boy Plenty, PLI, n Y. And it's weird when you look at what he writes in natural history. He is kind of the first crypto zoologist, Like the the scholarly burden of proof is not really a thing. So this guy is just
sort of like when Freud was making up psychoanalysis. He's saying, oh, I heard about this one thing, you know, and I heard about this other thing, and then other people took his descriptions and they ran with it, as you said, Noel, adding on their own twist.
Well, and as we you know, we described this thing. It's kind of fine for all these to play the game of like, well, let's filter these descriptions through the things we now know that science has explained, and what is maybe the more likely possibility of what this thing was, or there's the WCF moment where we don't really have a reasonable explanation.
Yeah, just quick side note from me, guys. Plenty is the dude that I've always heard as Plenty or Pliny the Elder.
Correct, Yeah, I've heard of both for sure. Something about the mouthfeel of Pliny is fun for me. But yeah, that's the guy.
Well isn't it so cool that that guy was around so long ago and we still like look to him as some of the for some of the original recorded descriptions of a lot of these things. As you said, Ben, this guy was all about weird creatures from different places because.
Clearly well traveled, right, I mean it wasn't from around here, you know, but he didn't.
When you look at the translated recorded writings of him, he's not discounting things. He's not immediately saying, well, you know, because of my extensive knowledge of natural history, this Krakata couldn't possibly exist. It's like it's like the concept is, well, what, maybe there is something like that, we just haven't found it yet.
He's got such abe if you've read natural history, He's like, hey, bro, you know what I heard. I heard there was this turtle that's like bigger than every turtle ever.
Yeah. You know. But back in those days too, it seems like historians and scientists and philosophers there was a little bit more of a healthy mix of mysticism in their vibes, you know what I mean. There was an acceptance of the impossible, right, They weren't always out to debunk necessarily, or they were even in some ways driven by some of these kind of metaphysical pursuits more so than what you might consider a scientist or a historian you know, to be today.
The Elder would have been an absolute beast on Twitter, that's for sure. But and he probably would have hosted a discovery show like River Monsters or something.
But I just to clarify, he's from Rome, right, ancient Roman mytory philosopher, natural philosopher.
Ye, yeah, natural philosopher, which was a quality job at the time if you could get it. According to what we know about about this creature, the qro cutta from plenty of the Elder, the animal was thought to be found most often in the rainforest areas of India and then parts of Africa. Ethiopia we'll call it today, Actually we'll call it Ethiopia back then because it's one of the oldest countries that is still a country. This cro cutta thing, it's definitely quadruped. It's about the size of
a mule. According to descriptions. It is known for hunting humans as well as regular dogs, and we know dogs were at this time already well domesticated, already speciated from wolves. The Krokutta had a lot of powers ascribed to it. It could change its color at will, It could blend into its surroundings like the predator it attacked from the shadows. It could eat a person in It could kill a person in seconds. It could digest them very quickly, and
it had a voracious appetite. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that it could mimic the sounds of human beings. There are legends of it going to someone's doorstep and then sounding like a person another person to get it outside, to get that person outside, and then eating it.
Yo.
If you guys seen that movie Annihilation, remember the part of me it's you know, there's a whole part of this. Yeah, the bear, but it's a combination of a bear, and it screams with the voice of a human, and it's sort of this like bear, pig, bore, alligator monster thing, this hybrid And that's what I'm picturing here. And I'm also wondering too if, like a lot of these h takes,
there's some fear involved. You're like, this is a thing that is absolutely terrifying is going to murder me, and therefore, in my mind, I'm projecting the scariest possible thing that it could be. Maybe you didn't even get a good look. You're mainly running away from this thing, you know.
Well, it's kind of I again, the way this creature is disc with such a combo of scary things. It gives me those vibes as well, But it also really reminds me of some of the skinwalker legends that exist, especially out in the Southwest. Here in the United States. We're from indigenous tribes that have lived there for way, way longer than anybody who was writing stuff down about that. So I don't know that alone gives me the creeps. Mostly, I think the mimicry part.
Right, Yeah, that's where we edge into the supernatural, or verge into the supernatural. Another complication in the legends, this Krokutta is said to be able to change genders. And believe it or not, folks, we can explain this. We have to ask one of the first questions for this crypti example, could the Krocutta be a case of misidentification? India does have large dangerous animals. I mean the tiger. Look, I could. I am confident that I could PvP kangaroo.
I am right about that. I don't want to do it.
I look forward to this.
I don't want to do it. But if worse comes to worse, I've got the agility, I've got the thumbs, I've got the knowledge. But no one or the vast majority of people cannot PvP a tiger, which means that the population of India, going back to pre written history, like before the recorded word, they knew about the tiger. They knew about dangerous animals, they did not identify this one.
And interestingly enough, there are multiple historical descriptions post plenty of the elder of the Krokutta being taken to Roman civilization. We know it goes. I mean, it's weirdly recent in the grand scheme of things. It was common era one eight when Roman Emperor got his hands on one.
So I'm just trying to backtrack a little bit to the switch swapping of gender. Is this maybe a case where you know, I mean, I always bring this up, but like the Brotherhood of the Wolf and the Beast of Gotto Van or whatever, and you're searching and hunting for this very murderous beast that you believe to be an individual, a single individual, right, and then maybe there
are more than one. And maybe there's this idea that you're hunting this one thing and you think it's a male, and then you catch one and it's a female, and you believe that it's changed genders because it could only be the one individual that was causing all that havoc. But in fact there are more than one. Maybe because there's a lack of understanding. I don't know. I'm just wondering what could lead to that misunderstanding or that belief.
Quite possibly, We're we're going to solve it here. So for the historical record, we know how the a book called the Augustine History argues that at some point the Roman emperor Antoninus A received one of these creatures as a gift. It was just like a flex you know,
It's like, here's a fancy souvenir. And then later another historian called Cassius Dio talks about an emperor named Septimus Severus who brought a crocutta to Rome, and Dio says this quote Indian species was then introduced to Rome for the first time so far as I am aware. It has the color of a lioness and tiger combined, and the general appearance of those animals as also of a
dog and folks gloriously blended. So okay, once you get past all the weird myths that game a telephone, we're pretty sure that this they're describing the spotted hyena and gr tracks right. It answers the idea of imitation, right, the idea of imitating calls right like a hyena laughs, et cetera. It also it also answers the gender question because we know that female spotted hyenas when they become
the dominant members of their pack. I don't want to be too crass here, but if you look at the biology the dominant female hyena, it's glitterius will enlarge, it will become fully a rectile, so it would appear to change gender.
That's fascinating. Yeah, that was gonna be my first bet. Those things are scary, man, those are and they're yeah, I mean, I don't know, guys. I always picture the hyenas from The Lion King because I found them to be pretty menacing in some of those scenes when I was a kid. That stuck with me they've got the sloped kind of you know, down on their haunches, ready to pounce kind of quality to them. And you're right that the human laugh almost like a mockingbird or something,
or like a parrot. It almost does have this sort of foremant quality to it, like a human local court.
And now I just have images of whoope as the hyaena becoming the alpha. I don't like any of it.
Yeah, if you ever come back, we're gonna kill you.
So we have solved that effectively, one cryptid case, an ancient one. But let's move to other things. Because again our pals, the historians of old, to my knowledge, they have all passed on. They wrote a lot about weird animals. And another one that's continually fascinating is something called the manticore. It's also ancient, but it's a little tougher to explain because it's got a weird vibe. It looks as the head of a person right well.
But again to me though, it feels like a continuation of the crocutta because of that human voice quality. Now all of a sudden it's got the whole human head, you know. And you hear about the manticore and all kinds of law and like, you know, tantamount to fighting a dragon or something almost you know, you really do hear about you know, these brave knights or what have you that would go out to slay a manticore. Yeah.
Yeah, it's got the body of a lion, the head of a man, and then in a Shamelan twist, it also has the tail of a scorpion that can shoot poisonous starts. I mean, this.
Looks like a giant clitists.
And a giant glitterist. This looks like a drawing that we would make when we were children, if all of us were children at some point.
I mean.
The earliest mention of it comes from another ancient historian, a Greek historian uh Tasius. He had a book called Indica in the fifth century BCE, and the.
Acts in the couch right right right, and thank you for everybody wrote in with some really fun ones about Indica versus Sativa and are they a myth?
Anyway? Starry to derail it?
Well, the perfect because Indica, the actual book or the manuscript, is lost to time, and we only know about it because we hear other writers, later writers name checking it. Going back to Plitty in Natural History. He has the following description of Tasius and the manticore.
Yeah, and he writes that amongst these same men there is found an animal have to lapse into the voice, called the mantichora, which has three rows of teeth like a comb, the face and ears of a human, and bluish eyes. It is red in color, with the body of a lion and a tail with stigers like a scorpion. Its voice is as if the sounds of the pipe were mixed with a trumpet, and it is a creature of great speed which avidly goes after human flesh. Guys, the sound of the pipe mixed with the troupe. This
sounds like Jurassic Park, Foley work right here. I mean, all of those crazy roars they did in Jurassic Park. A lot of those are combining different animals and sometimes musical instruments and drones to make these other worldly kind of you know roars. Guys.
It's making me think of psychological manipulation war tactics that we've talked about in the past.
This is what I'm thinking about here, yeah.
Right where It's like if you could convince with either instrumentation like you know, imagine war drums, but in this case some kind of horns and other sounds that you're shooting out at great distances when your army is gathered together behind a big wall right or across a ridge, but you're making these sounds to make it feel as though there's a super creepy creature just across the ridge.
I think think about like, you know, warring people with wild animals, where they dress them up and like armor and things like that, sometimes like rhinoceroses or what have you. Elephants,
even war elephants. You know, people are hearing these sounds coming across the battlefield and only seeing them when they're in the thick of the heat of battle, and they might be hallucinating some stuff, seeing things that this armor or what have you maybe make them think are like actually parts of the animals themselves.
Yeah, and with this one, with this guy, we see the game of telephone. Because those original accounts, right, the first one is lost to history as far as we know. The second one that name checks that original author goes on to influence everybody else who writes about the manticre without actually having seen one or what they thought was one, And to date, there has been no proven capture of
a mant core. There have been no proven accounts of attacks on humans from manti cores, despite their fearsome reputation. So in this case, our verdict at Presant has to be the following unknown because there's a lot of wilderness in India, but this creature the way it's described does not fit our current understanding biology. There is a much more likely cryptid that we should go to. We're walking through different flavors of cryptids because India has quite a few.
We've got to introduce you to. I don't know about you, guys. One of my favorites the boats Billy or ghost cat.
Yeah, this is another sick cryptid again, the manicore. If you wanted to design something that was just the most terrifying thing, make the manicore, especially if it's that fast with all that gear already attached.
To a human face.
Yeah, that one's that's too much. But just big cats in general, as we've seen in other episodes in the past, where the thought that there could be even just a mountain lion lurking in a place where it should be it's horrifying. But this guy, do you say it ben.
Uh bolts Billy, a ghost cat, a cat that's like like hiding from you out there.
It's not just in the woods, it's hiding in the woods.
Yeah, I like just calling it the boot billy. That's a lot less like the wild boot billy coming coming at you.
It's it's often described as a cross between a cat, a dog, and a mongoose. So smaller than a.
Lot the mongoose bark crags, larger.
Than a hyena. Oh, the mongoose is awesome, dude. That's ticky tappy all day, dude.
One of the most efficient hunters that exists out there. Doesn't give an f kind of you know, like one of those honey badgers where oh, I'm sorry, you're you're a cobra. Oh you got your rattlesnake too bad, I'm a mongoose come at you.
Well, they've got asymmetric warfare down. Check out our North Woods Operation episode where I think, if I recall, I went on a little bit of tangent kissing the ass of the mongoose. That's why they named the operation whatever.
All right, can you say really quickly, I was talking about like war animals and all of that stuff, And I said, you know, rhinos out low because it was you know, in the movie three hundred. But apparently that misconception because rhino's apparently would be very difficult to train and it would be unwieldy to use.
In that terrible right. Exactly that too.
But there's a very famous wood cut by Albrick Durr, who is a very famous artist, and I'm not getting the timeline right, but it was definitely would have been representative of the time where there was like, you know, a massive battlefield kind of night type you know, warfare. But this wasn't real. And I don't know if Albert Duhr was doing that game of telephone thing and being smart or if he really thought he saw this thing.
It's another example of how this stuff can just kind of like churn up its own lore.
Right, Yeah, I mean this is this is a game. Well, let's do this part. Now, this is a game you can play at home with your friends. Fellow conspiracy realist, describe an unfamiliar animal to a friend of yours or family member, and then ask them to draw a picture of what they heard you describe. And that explains to us even now, you could do this at home even now.
That explains to us so much cryptid lore, because imagine someone is going, someone's going, well, you know, out in the brains of Africa, there is a creature that functions.
As though it was born with armor. It has opponents, now to a great horn, it runs at its enemies, and then you know they're like, all right, just draw that. It's basically producers talking to people in the nineteen eighties, right, which explains all those films.
You nailed it.
That's very kind. We also know that the boots Billy and we are not native speakers. Here is kind of a regional a regional terror. People genuinely believe this ghost cat was real. We found a case from twenty ten, so about fourteen years ago, when residents of a neighborhood called Sanjay Park they had claimed a ghost cat was responsible for killing and eating forty five pigeons and one goat over the course of about ten days. And the guy who owned these birds in this goat, dude named
Faraz Dilivar Kahn. He said, look, I have seen this thing. I saw it eating my pigeons. It is quote fat and broad with a long tail. It's black in color. It has a face like a dog and a back like a mongoose, which, honestly saying a back like a mongoose. I don't think that really clocks for a lot of people in the West. We're not mongee experts. Correct.
Is that a dis or accomplished.
I just want to be I just want.
To Yeah, speaking of uh fat and broad, I just wanted to give this update. I was doing a little Joe research and I found out who he is and he has a real name. Uh and I'll just let you click on that link I just put in the chat boys. That is the real name of the recording artist known as Joe.
Oh, Dick Flood.
His name is Dick Flood.
Wow, please please, And apparently.
Richard was by father's name.
Please call legendary Dick Flood, who's playing and recording under the sobriquet Joe in one of Fervor's most accomplished artists.
He's this is a record label, I guess. And he had a group called Dick Flood and the Pathfinders.
Yeah, yes, nice, nice. Let the floodgates loose.
I'm glad we had that shared experience though growing up, y'all, is this is another thing that just brings us.
It's like McGruff, the crime dog, you know, ohly a.
Real human person that came to our schools.
Yes, all right, don't ruin McGruff for me. That is an anthropomorphic dog. It's with a real bad drug problem. Apparently, Yes, with a real you know what, cool vibe.
Though.
Faraz Con apparently gets fed up with this ghost cat eating all his birds and maybe eating the goat was the last straw. So ten days past, almost two weeks, he goes to the local authorities. He calls the police, he calls the fire department, he calls the forestry folks. It's November three, around ten pm, twenty ten. The authorities all show up. They take this seriously. They get there, they know there are dead birds and a dead goat. And when they get there, they say, dang, this ghost
cat ghosted us. It's probably out in the forest somewhere. We can't find it. It faded from the news. But the thing that keeps us captivated by this idea is that these people living in Sanjay Park, they are familiar with the wildlife around them. If they saw something, they would be able to identify it. They know what kind of animals might target livestock, and they said, look, we've seen wildcats before, this is not a wild cat. So in this case, our verdict has to be again unknown.
Well, it stinks because if you had, if you just had some wild like house cats, right, even domesticated house cats that were hanging out in that area, they could take down those pigeons easy. I've seen it happen. I have seen a cat jump in the air on like a porch and an apartment, you know, just that one of those tiny little areas, just jump up, grab a bird out of the air and just pull it down.
Those little fellows are like cruise missiles, man, you know, they seek and destroy.
But but you have people who have this, as you said, been like. They know the difference. They see something that is not a cat like that. It's also not a cat like just a bigger regular cat. It's something different.
Not a cat like that.
And I think it's probably pretty clear already. But we're not saying these people were stupid either. We're not saying these people were like all bugaboo and confused. They just didn't have access to the same wealth of like the whole of human civilization that we do you know, so they were having the kind of make it up as they went along.
Also, given that this is twenty ten, you know, these folks are very well aware of what surrounds them and they're also they also wanted to be an animal. They understand, you know what I mean. This is not a Bigfoot fan. This guy is a dude who was out a significant amount of capital. Because forty five pigeons, that's a lot of pigeons. Also, do you know the going price on a goat, because let me spoil it for you, it is kind of expensive if you live in that part
of the world. It's like someone stole your car, you know what I mean, You're not happy about it. You just lost your camera.
And this just give you, guys goat sucker vibes like chuop Ofcabre type vibes as well. I mean, that's a big part of the reporting on the Cheep Ofcabre is that it was killing livestock and then it becomes this like boogeyman almost you know.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, let's take a break for a word from our sponsors, and then we're going to introduce you to one of the most adorable of India's cryptids. We've returned, okay, Loris. You guys know what the laurus looks like. Like, it's weird. It's got big eyes. It's always been.
The trees, right, He's got a.
Lords always look like a laurus. Always looks like it's scheming like a raccoon. You know. They got hands. They're just close enough to human hands.
The meer cat vibes almost like a meer cat mixed with a sloth.
Perhaps, Yeah, because they are they they're even called like the slow loris or the loris. I mean that's the way they're colloquially known, right, Yeah, but yeah, it just makes me think of a sloth or just a cute little guy.
It's just challenge it.
Look, man, don't don't bother me. Just trying to get some fruits and some leaves.
It's a little sad. You got big old, we big old dark circles around it. And it looks like a little hang dog.
It looks like you, what's the tree? You know, it looks like it what's a tree? Which we're fine with. This idea of the tailed slow Laurus is fascinating because it's originally reported in the Lushai Hills of Assam State, and there is an actual photograph of this creature. There are no extravagant claims about this. The primary difference between a tailed slow Loris and the other slow lords of
the world, it's just that it's in the name. It has a tale, white, possibly prehensile are There is a genuine photograph that came from like capture in eighteen eighty nine when it was a common animal. It was first reported in writing in nineteen oh eight or nineteen oh two, early twentieth century. And the dude who captured these animals got two of them and then sent it off to his friends in London. He has a name we have
to share with everyone. His name was Thomas Henry digs Letouche loves to who.
I can't, Okay, So I mean, so again, we're just making it clear. The Loris is a subfamily of primates, right, I mean, this is like an app absolutely you know, documented creature. But we're just talking about one slight, little little twist on the loris that turns it into a cryptid because we don't have record of this variation.
This is the way I'm imagining, you, guys. I imagine this Laura's thing. But then I think about a lemur, and you know the tail of a lemur, which is very scientific one. Yeah, I think about that, but that's not how they described and what the well, the picture is a little hard to make out. What part is the tail, right, I think if we're kind of objective about it. But the way it's described is like super bushy, right, not like a Lemur's tale.
Like different, right, Like the Lemur's tale is often used for balance, right, because they're a boreal meaning they live in trees. But the Laura's here, the slow loris they have kind of like a stubby tail, you know, like sometimes the humans are born with a vestigial little bump at the end of their cocksix or do some.
Cats too, right? Or maybe wait, are cats born without tails? Or they just been cut off? I'm sorry this is.
I think they're usually cut off. I'm sure there are some stuffy tailed cats.
No bad one which still still exists. His name is Robert. He he lives good friend Frank. I think I think Robert as well.
But Robert had a little stumpy tail.
And I believe that there are, you know, very cruel practices that involve cutting off the cat's tails. But I do I gotta wonder though, if there are cats that maybe are born without tails, whether it be like some sort of mutation.
You might have accidentally adopted a luries.
Maybe so so.
Sorry, I'm just thinking of all those types people have mistakenly adopted an animal that they thought was a dog or a cat, learned it was something different.
Genetic mutation. By the way, it is a thing. It is, okay, But you got to wonder if that's something that we see too, you know, rare mutations that lead to this type of identification as like something that we don't know about.
Slightly prescient. Yeah, So the story is our buddy digs litche He and his crew uh. He and his crew captured two of these specimens. They reported that they were familiar with them uh and that it was common to see this type of lord around. They caged the animals, but due to their wait for it, slow movements, they didn't bother to escape proof anything. It's like if you capture a sloth, are you worried it's going to run away?
To really take them to lift the latch, she would just like that scene in Zootopia where the sloths work at the DMV and like the stamp. Yea, so it's so funny.
So they messed up though with this creature, which again is documented. There is a photograph. As soon as the human turn away, these purportedly slow little guys saw their chance. They got out of the cage and they high tailed it quickly back to the forest. Since that moment in eighteen eighty nine, they have never been seen again. We don't know if they're still out there. We don't know if maybe they were a specific genre of life form that died out due to human predation or human pressures.
But I like what you're bringing up, nolwhich is prescient. There is the idea, or there is the possibility that this was the result of an isolated mutation, an ata astic gene triggering tail growth in a small number of individuals. How kind of like how malungeons have creepy stuff.
Going on, right, I guess that's funny. I think of maybe a mutation that will cause a tailed animal to not have a tail, to be a little bit simpler mutation, but one that actually gives you a taiale out of nowhere. Maybe that one's like more of like a supermutation, like you like a superpower, and then you got a wonder too. Evolutionarily, if the tail ended up being a functional thing, maybe that species evolves to have the tail because that becomes a you know, a desirable trait.
If you see one, don't kill it, don't eat it, don't pull a Darwin, get a photograph.
Do you know what I mean?
Such a flexer. He totally ate those animals.
And he loved every bite.
So what do you think, gents? Is this going to be a two parter?
It's a great place to divide it because we've got some coming up. There are a lot more in the super dark kind of weirder realm and maybe resemble some things that we know from other even you know more you know you United States centric views of kryptids. Oh dude.
The that map that we found that we mentioned at the very top of this episode has things like about creatures that have bioluminescence that shouldn't, creatures of all different shapes and sizes, and weird stuff that we got to get into. So yeah, we definitely need more of this.
Oh yeah, And I mean, just to tease the first one we're going to talk about on the next episode, The Monkey Man of New Delhi might interest you if you've seen the Dev Patel film Monkey Man, which is out in theaters now, where he's like this fight club type avenger who is totally capitalizing on the mythology of this cryptid. Yes the most Yeah.
Also, Oh, there's so much to go into with the Monkey Man. That's one of my favorites. We don't have time. We got to save it. We want to take a second and think truth is fiction hyt on Reddit Truth is Fiction yt Your awesome cryptid map of India helped inspire a lot of tonight's conversation. We have more stories to explore in depth. There's so many we didn't get to.
Each of these, each of which has their own rich mythology, fascinating parallels to known biology, or degrees of symbolism, especially with the Monkey Man relating to the societies in which those stories were told. We can will go in to the feedback loop in a future episode, which is very important to understand. We hope you tune in. If you enjoyed tonight's episode, be sure to also tune in for our upcoming exploration of trolls not the ones online as well.
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