American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews and his expedition team were getting restless. It was May nineteen twenty two, and the men were in Erga, the capital city of Mongolia that would later be renamed Ulamberta. Their goal was a meeting with Mongolia's newly established prime Minister, the Aal kans Kuttak dam dim Bazaar, in the hope of being granted a permit to conduct an archaeological expedition in the heart of the Gobi Desert. It was a fragile time in the
newly independent state. Only the year before, Mongolia had undergone a revolution that left it in a precarious position, teetering between the influence of the Soviet Union and Chinese governments, with much in sand security among the new ruling powers over whom they could trust. There had even been reports that white men found in the region were being captured and horribly tortured. One rumor told of a man being
skinned alive. So Andrews could have been forgiven for feeling a little nervous when he finally received an invitation to speak with Prime Minister dam dim Bazar. After making his way to the Mongolian Parliament. It was ushered into a back room, where he found Premier dam Dimbazar and a group of his officials sitting together in somber silence. Some pleasantries were exchanged before Andrews tentatively began his pitch for the permits when dam Dimbazar held up his hand for
Andrews to stop. As the Prime Minister explained to Andrew's interpreter, he was more than happy to grant Andrews's permission to conduct his expedition, but only if he did something for him in return, of course, said Andrews in reply, what do you need? And so damn Dimbazar made his request that while Andrews and his team were out searching for ancient artifacts in the desert, they also spend some time
trying to capture something for him. For centuries, people of the Gobi Desert had told extraordinary tales of a strange creature that was said to be headless, legless, about two to five feet long, and resemble approximately the intestines of a cow. It was also rumored to spit a corrosive yellow saliva and generate blasts of electricity so strong they could kill a full grown camel. Some said it was so poisonous that merely to touch it meant instant death.
The creature reputed to live in the most desolate parts of the Gobi Desert, and they called it Allegrei or Hi, or, as it came to be known in English, the Mongolian death worm. You're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard McLain Smith. Welcome back. If ever there was a man on which to model the movie character Indiana Jones, it was Roy
Chapman Andrews born in eighteen eighty. The American explorer, adventurer, and naturalist would eventually become the director of the American Museum of Natural History, But in the nineteen twenties, Andrews was on a quest to find the earliest evidence of human life. Andrews was a proponent of the out of as, the theory of humanity's origins, in which it's believed the earliest humans emerged from the present day region of Asia
as opposed to Africa. Neither the Mongolian Prime Minister nor any of his officials had ever seen the so called Intestine worm for themselves, but as Andrews listened to them, conferring with his interpreter, he could tell from the look on their faces that they all very much believed it existed. Damn Dim Bazaar, for one, said he knew a man who had seen it, while a cabinet minister reported that a cousin of his late wife had also witnessed the
strange creature. The assembled dignitaries had practical instructions for Andrews. When he found one of the deadly worms, he must be sure to handle it with long steel forceps they set so as not to come into direct contact with the creature. They also advised that he should wear dark glasses to neutralize the disastrous effects of even looking at
such a poisonous creature. For six years, from nineteen twenty two to nineteen twenty eight, Andrews led several ventures known as the Central Asiatic Expeditions to search for the earliest human remains in Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. During these expeditions, Andrews and his team found many previously unknown fossil specimens, including the first scientifically recognized dinosaur eggs, But what they didn't find was a Mongolian death worm or any evidence
that they even existed. However, writing in his nineteen thirty two book The New Conquest of Central Asia, Andrews conceded that if the faith in its existence was not so strong and widespread among the Mongolians, and if everyone did not describe the animal exactly the same way, I would
believe it to be an idle myth. It would be another ten years or so before stories of the death worm emerged once more from out of the Gobi Desert, when sometime in the nineteen forties, Russian paleontologist Ivan Yefromov heard some locals talking about it while he was there looking for fossils of his own. Yefromov dabbled in writing science fiction, and the Mongol tales he heard inspired him to write a story called Olgoi Korkoy, a Russian version of
the worm's Mongolian name. In this fictional tale, his worms could grow around five feet long and had the power to kill people from a distance. It was just a short story, but it was a harbinger of more to come, because giant, lethal desert worms were destined to loom large
in science fiction over the coming decades. In the late nineteen fifties, an emerging author by the name of Frank Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon, in the United States and visited the Oregon Dunes, where the largest expanse of coastal sand dunes in North America rise to heights of up
to five hundred feet. There, Herbert's interest in deserts was sparked, and in a letter to his literary agent, he wrote that he was impressed by the idea of how moving junes might be able to swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, and highways. He went on to write what became the award winning epic series June, one of the world's best selling science fiction novels. The saga revolves largely around the uncompromisingly arid planet Oracus, which is inhabited by enormous deadly worms.
Another version of deadly fast tunneling desert worms appeared in the nineteen ninety comedy horror film Tremours. Unlike the deathly serious June series set on alien worlds, Tremours, with its tongue in cheek black humor, was set in the Nevada Desert. The idea for the story came to the writers S. S. Wilson and Brent Maddock while they were producing a series
of educational safety videos for the US Navy. Climbing a large desert boulder to get some footage from a high vantage point near one of the desert naval bases, they asked each other, what if there was something that wouldn't let them leave the rock? They were on something like a shark, they thought, but on land. Like Frank Herbert, the writers of Tremors envisaged monstrous tunneling worms, highly sensitive
to the slightest vibration and hungry for human flesh. Explanations of what inspired the creation of the monster worms have included whales, dragons, and even giant nematodes. What's not recorded is whether Herbert or the Tremor's team had ever come across stories of the Mongolian death worm, but one young Czechoslovakian man called Ivan mccurla most certainly had born in Bohemia in nineteen forty three in what is now part
of present day Czech Republic. Mccurlo had read all about the accounts of Broyd Chapman Andrews, and even Yefhramov's fictional tale about the supposedly deadly Mongolian worms. It sparked a childhood fascination with legendary creatures that never left him. At the age of sixteen, mcurla moved to Prague, where he studied mechanical engineering and zoology and electronics before deciding to
pursue his longtime hobby of cryptozoology more seriously. Ivan mccurla organized expeditions to unsuccessfully search for the Lockness Monster, the Tasmanian tiger, and the so called elephant bird of Madagascar, and authored numerous books on cryptozoology, but what he became best known for was his passionate quest to find the
Mongolian death worm. In one nineteen eighty seven book about the land and legends of the Gobi Desert, macurla described how the creature was said to live near water sources in the western or southern part of the country, only coming to the surface after rainfall, and that when it travels under ground, it creates waves of sand on the
surface by which it can be detected. At the time, macurla was unable to see this for himself due to the Communist era travel restrictions in both Czechoslovakia and Mongolia. That all changed one November in nineteen eighty nine, when the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which had ruled unopposed for forty years,
were suddenly swept aside. Now free to travel, Macurla, along with photographer friend Eerie Scubian, and a doctor called YadA Procopec, made their fur expedition to the Gobi Desert the following year. It was a difficult trip. There were still official restrictions on travel within the country and practical difficulties getting to the remote parts of the Gobi Desert that the worm
was said to inhabit. Despite the severe lack of transport infrastructure, with no buses and barely any roads, macurl eventually managed to convince someone to drive them into the southern Gobi. Once there, his team began collating eyewitness accounts. One after another. Locals gave eerily similar accounts of a creature they described as looking like a cow's intestine filled with blood, usually about half a meter in length and as thick as
an average male's thigh. Another strange but consistently described trait was how the creature had no eyes, nostrils, or mouth, making it difficult to tell its head from its tail. It was also reported to move strangely unlike ordinary worms by rolling or squirming sideways. One night, after befriending a couple of Mongolian nomads after a few bottles of vodka, the Czech team were treated to more unsettling details about
the alleged worm. The nomad said that it not only spits an acid, corroding anything it touches, but that this substance turns everything yellow. The color yellow they set attracted more worms. Once, they claimed, a young boy was playing outside with a yellow boar when there was a sudden disturbance in the sand around him. Moments later, a giant word broke through the surface and stopped to regard the boy. Untroubled by its appearance, the boy was said to have
been killed instantly when he tried to touch it. When the parents allegedly came across the tragic scene, they found a disturbingly large trail in the sand that led away from their sun. In anger, they followed the trail until they too came across the worm, only to both then also be killed by it. One elderly woman local to the same area explained that when the worm wanted to kill someone, it would move half its length out of the sand and inflate a bubble over its exposed body,
from which it squirted its deadly poison. Sadly for Ivan mccurla, he and his team failed to find a death worm on their expedition. Three years later, however, maccurla returned to Mongolia for a follow up trip. Over the course of eight weeks, he and his team used explosives to blast holes in the desert to try and scare the worms out of hiding, but still they found nothing. Then, on a visit to a Buddhist monastery, things got a little scary.
That afternoon, maccurla was approached by a monk who knew all about his expedition. As they sat in the quiet temple, the hot air thick with the smell of incense, the monk told mccurla that the Algoy Korkoy was a creature of supernatural evil and that he was endangering his life searching for it. That night, as mccurla slept night mayish images of the giant worm flashed through his unconscious mind. He woke up with a start to find his back
covered in blood filled boils procopec. The expedition's doctor became alarmed when Over the next few days, even more hemotoments appeared on mccurler's body, and he began to show signs of heart failure. This incident was captured in a TV documentary the teammate called The Sand Monster Mystery, which aired
on Czech television in nineteen ninety three. Thankfully, mccurla went on to make a full recovery and undaunted, in the summer of two thousand and four, he launched what would be his third and final expedition to find the Mongolian
death worm. This time he enlisted the help of Pilot. Together, they filmed great swathes of the goby's vast expanses via a video camera attached to an aircraft, as well as using night vision goggles to search in the dark, but yet again, the team failed to find any evidence of the worm. In an interview on Prague TV after this final, unsuccessful expedition, mccurla seemed resigned to never finding the creature.
He said that for many years he believed the creature could be a zoological reality, but after his most recent experiences, he began to suspect that it might in fact be some kind of psychological phenomenon. Instead a hallucination, perhaps brought on by the extreme heat of the Gobi Desert. The following year of two thousand and five, it was time for a British team to have a crack at finding
the worm. As the director of the Center for Forty in Zoology or c f SAID, a cryptozoological club based in Exeter in the southwest of England, Richard Freeman was no stranger to quests for mysterious creatures. A lifelong fan of doctor who he'd been a zookeeper and head of reptiles at a major UK zoo for a while before also being drawn into the world of crypto zoology, Freeman relished the search of animals that mainstream biologists believed were
legendary more extinct. His past expeditions included hunts for the Cupa cabra, a blood drinking nocturnal creature from Puerto Rico, and the Orang pendeck, a supposed ape man said to live in unexplored valleys in Sa Martra. Now he had assembled a small team of fellow c f SAID members
to go to Mongolia with him. Arriving in Mongolia's capital, Ulambatar, the team headed south towards a remote area of the Gobi Desert region covering over eight thousand square miles called Noyan, where many reported sightings of the death worms had come from. As they drove, Freeman looked out at the jeep's window, transfixed vast fields of sand dunes merged with gravel plains that seemed to stretch into infinity, appearing like giant mirrors.
Due to being coated with the mineral mica. The surrounding cliffs were so red they seemed to be on fire. As the party traveled deep into the south, they met and interviewed around twenty four apparent eyewitnesses, who all had stories of seeing the giant death worm. As both explorers Chapman and mccurlor had noted before them, descriptions of the
worm were remarkably consistent. Almost all the witnesses claimed to have seen it, lying on the ground, motionless, being about two feet long and as thick as an arm, with scaly skin. All believed it to be extremely poisonous. One elderly man named Luvsandorsch claimed to have seen it back in nineteen seventy two. It was traveling across the desert one day when he saw what he first thought was a human arm lying on top of the sand. It was only when he got closer that he noticed it
was moving. It was a large wormlike creature, he said, that kept changing colour to match its surroundings. He said they were thought to live underground in soft sand, and that they were able to generate an electrical charge, but they weren't around as much as they used to be. A woman named Sukh took Freeman's team to a location near the border with China and a forest of sacks, all a strange shrubby drought tolerant plant which grows in thickets.
It was there she said that she supposedly saw a brownish gray worm about half a meter in length writhing within the plants, before disappearing among the roots of a tree. The team found numerous burrows in the area, assumed to be made by rodents, which they surmised might be an
excellent food source for the death worms. But no sooner had they begun to set traps to catch the rodents and worms, an enormous sandstorm rose up in the distance that quickly descended, shredding their tents to confetti and forcing them to leave the area. After moving on from the forest of Saxel, Freeman's expedition met with an old ex army colonel named Hervu, who still lived near an abandoned military base called ovoutin Autreat years ago when he was
a soldier. Hervu set out on a motorbike patrol just as the desert sun was beginning to set. At some point, he apparently came upon what he thought was a busted old tire on the ground, all coiled up, but as he got closer, he realized it wasn't a tire at all, but some kind of weird worm like creature. For half an hour, Urzu watched it as it lay there, unmoving, the light glinting off its scaly skin, still wet from
recent rain. Eventually, he rushed off to get his camera, only to find on his return that the creature had gone. That night, the ex colonel took Freeman and his team to the site of the encounter, where they camped, laying out rodent traps and laboriously digging holes in the dirt. They sank bucket traps, hoping to lure in a death worm, but the traps caught nothing. Again, the team moved on, this time to a nearby oasis rich in wildlife, where
they met with a woman named could Youuenger. Back in the nineteen eighties, could Youuenger was out walking with her grandfather when he called her over to look at something again. It was a brownish forty centimeter long wormlike creature with no discernible head or tail. She didn't remember much else about it, other than that she was very frightened of it.
Once again, Freeman's team set out bucket traps to try and catch the creature, but as they started digging holes around the oasis, Freeman gazed up to see a small dust devil beginning to grow about a mile away. His interest turned to consternation as the small dusty vortex rapidly grew larger, then began barreling directly toward them. When it hit, the fierce winds and blowing dust engulfed the entire camp,
smashing and scattering everything in their path. The wind was so strong that at one point Freeman saw one of their Mongolian drivers flying past him, horizontally hanging on to a billowing tent as it was swept out into the desert. Thinking back to Ivan mccurlur's hunch, that perhaps the worms were in fact some kind of psychological phenomenon. It was as if something didn't want them to discover the truth.
After a month in Mongolia, the Center for Fortian Zoology expedition was over, and there was no specimen or even sighting of a death worm to show for their efforts. However, Richard Freeman believed that the trip had been good for one thing, namely, that it confirmed his suspicions about the creature's true identity. I don't think it's a worm at all,
he said later. Instead, he had come to believe it was in fact some kind of limbless burrowing reptile, either a giant member of an already known group of reptiles, or a worm lizard. Worm lizards are also known as Amphisbinians, named after Anfisbinia, a mythical Greek serpent with a second head on its tail. They're one of the most mysterious and poorly studied groups of reptiles, neither snakes nor lizards.
Most known species of this primitive group are found in Africa and South America, but they also occur in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Middle East, and even Florida. With tails that resemble their heads. Worm lizards range anywhere from ten to seventy centimeters long and have rings of scales that wrap around their bodies meat eating predators. They search for prey underground burrow, going through soil and loose sand, with strong, reinforced skulls
and muscular bodies. Specimens of worm lizards can be found in museums all over the world, including the British Museum of Natural History, eerily suspended in large jars of alcohol to preserve them. ID cards list them as coming from places like Guyana, the West Indies and Buenos Aires, but specimens in museums are not always what they appear to be. For nearly two hundred years, a mysterious giant gecko sat in a storage area at the Natural History Museum of
Marseilles in France. No one knew anything about it, although the style of taxidermy pointed to it having been collected in the eighteen thirties. Larger than any gecko known today, its main body was well ow for a foot long, while its tail was another two feet long. On top of that, it had always been thought to come from
New Zealand, but in twenty twenty three. Professor Matthew Heineke, a herpetologist a specialist in reptiles and amphibians, applied the latest DNA analysis to a sample taken from the specimen's FEMA and compared the results with a data set of the entire gecko family tree. It turned out that the giant gecko was not from New Zealand at all, but instead closely related to geckos found today in New Caledonia, an island in the southwest Pacific Ocean, a good seven
hundred and fifty miles east of New Zealand. Could it be that the Mongolian death worm has, in actuality already been found, Perhaps decades ago Russian herpetologists, out hunting for snakes in the Gobi Desert unwittingly caught one and added it obliviously to their reptile collections. Is it out there now, lurking suspended in alcohol in a dusty jar, somewhere unidentified and long forgotten in the dark, cavernous basement of some
former Soviet era museum. That question, and the true identity of the Mongolian death worm, for the time being at least, remains unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by me Richard McLean Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordiced in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianhope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
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