In 1900, a certain Captain William Hitchens visited the African forests in the Simbiti area (Tanzania) and saw many mysterious creatures there, which he wrote about in an article for Discovery magazine in 1937.
The first type of creatures resembled a great ape. Once, two of these creatures were accidentally encountered in the forest by the captain and the aborigines accompanying him.
"They looked like little men, walked on two legs, but were covered from head to toe with red hair," Hitchens wrote, adding that the local population looked at them "with a mixture of fear and surprise" and called them whether people, or animals with the word "agogve".
Hitchens was the first to inform the world about the mysterious agogwe, but since then science has not come a step closer to solving these creatures. Were these primitive tribes of pygmies lost in the jungle (their clothes made of grass and skins could easily be confused with hair) or was it still a great ape not yet discovered by scientists?
Science knows great apes with red hair (orangutans), but they live very far from eastern Africa on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.
In addition to agogwe, in his article for Discovery magazine, Hitchens described a strange creature under the complicated name "khodumodumo", which is translated from the local dialect as "a monster with a huge open mouth."
He also mentioned the long creature "lukwata", which lives in rivers and lakes and is probably a huge fish.
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Hitchens' article provoked skeptical ridicule and a flurry of attacks and criticism among scientists. Few believed the captain, although earlier stories appeared in the press about the mysterious mokele-mbemba, a dinosaur-like creature with a long neck that lives somewhere in the swamps of the Congo.
And ten years before Hitchens' article in Discovery, there was a report from the Chamber's Journal describing a strange animal from Lake Edward, located between Uganda and Congo.
“There are stories about a monster from Lake Edward, which the locals refer to as 'rizima' or 'irizima', which roughly translates as 'something that is not just empty talk.' This mysterious beast supposedly looks like a giant hippopotamus with a horn like a rhinoceros on its head.
Not long ago, an adventurer went to the Congo forests to catch him. He stated that he saw something in the reeds of the marsh and that it was a huge animal. similar to a brontosaurus. It was ten times larger than the largest elephant.
In Cape Town, this guy was immediately called a liar, but the famous American scientific institute decided to send an expedition to capture this brontosaurus. But they didn't catch anyone. Failures pursued their expedition all the way."
The author of this article in the Chamber's Journal was someone under the pseudonym Fulahn. But they say that under this name Captain Hitchens himself wrote, who at that year did not dare to write under his own name, as he feared criticism.
The article also included a detailed description of this "irizima". It was indicated that he had thick legs like a hippopotamus, a small head similar to the head of a lizard, and a tail naked and thick at the base like an aardvark. It was also indicated that there is something like a proboscis on the head.
Another mysterious creature over which modern cryptozoologists puzzle over, and which was also described by Hitchens in his diaries, is a certain bear nandi or kerite.
It is also a large creature, described as a huge hyena. He has almost no neck, an elongated muzzle, small ears and a shuffling gait like a bear.
Now it is difficult to say what exactly Hitchens saw and how much truth is in his stories. But he was one of those who stood at the very origins of cryptozology, the science of mysterious animals, not recognized by science, and personally was in those places where these creatures probably live.