The riddle of giant snakes
Creepy creatures inhabit the dense forests of South America and Africa. Researchers, soldiers and missionaries have seen giant snakes 20, 30 and even 40 meters long. Perhaps these are the surviving representatives of the giant species that were considered extinct millions of years ago?
1947, March - A Brazilian expedition of the Indian Protection Service carried out work in the swampy area between the Manso and Cristalino rivers. Suddenly, its participants noticed a huge snake sleeping on the grass and killed it with several shots. According to the researcher, Frenchman Serge Bonacase, the snake was at least 23 meters long!
Swallowed boa
The group included experts on local fauna, who concluded that they had met, without a doubt, an anaconda. The improbability of the case was only in the fact that the size of the giant snake was twice the parameters of all species known to science, which barely reached 10 meters. But this meeting did not make it into the books on natural history, because the expedition members, moving on foot through the dense jungle, found it impossible to transport the skin or head of this giant snake. No pictures were taken either, as the Indian Protection Service prohibited the use of cameras so as not to frighten the natives.
But if we talk about photographs, they turned out to be captured two boas, reaching 40 meters in length. They were met in 1953 at the headwaters of the Amazon, where an expedition was hastily sent, organized specifically to destroy these very reptiles, which terrified the entire area. The snake was found and killed. The photos, published in the daily newspaper Mundo Argentino, show the hunters behind the corpse of one of the human-sized kites.
Their size can be judged also because the head of one of the monsters was larger than the head of a man.
Promotional video:
These cases are just a few examples of encounters and stories regarding the existence of giant snakes in the Amazon. Sometimes these monsters attack and devour people, as happened in August 1988 in the state of Rondonia (Brazil). According to several eyewitnesses, a 3-year-old child named Daniel Meneses was attacked and swallowed by a giant boa, or sukuriha, up to 15 meters in length, that is, twice as large as all previously registered representatives of this species.
Amazonian monsters
Regarding giant anacondas or boas, the stories about the existence of giant snakes in the endless "green hell" first began to sound and have been repeated many times since that time, starting with the very arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors and travelers, but only in the XX century did the first reliable reports appear. meetings with these creatures. In the late 1940s, the director of the Hamburg Zoo, Lorenz Hagenbeck, did the first research on this mystery and stumbled upon the story of the priest Victor Heinz, who several times passed the Amazon in a canoe.
Heinz first met a giant anaconda on May 22, 1922, near the settlement of Obidos. Just 30 meters away, the priest suddenly saw a giant snake, which was carried by the current. The rowers immediately dropped their oars, frightened by the size of the monster: about 25 meters in length and as thick as a barrel for vegetable oil. “When we were at a sufficient distance,” the priest said, “and my rowers were speechless again, they, still afraid, told me that the snake did not crush us like a simple box of matches just because at that time it was busy digesting good portions of fish.
A few years later, on October 29, 1929, the missionary again encountered a giant serpent on the same river.
It was midnight when his rowers suddenly, in terror, began to turn the boat towards the shore, shouting that they saw a huge animal.
"At this time, I noticed how the water next to us receded, as if passing a large steamer, and I saw two green-bluish lights just a few meters ahead, reminiscent of the bow lights of a river vessel." When he tried to calm people down, saying that it was just a ship and that he could not touch their canoe, he was told that it was a giant snake.
Automatic queues
Father Heinz froze in horror, realizing that the lights were the eyes of a monster glowing in the night, which approached their canoe at a speed 10-15 times their own. When, it seemed, the monster was about to ram the side of them, he suddenly dodged and seemed to head back towards the middle of the river. Later, the locals told the priest that a giant sukuriha lived in this river.
Less than a few months later, in June 1930, trader Reimondo Zima, who lived in the small village of Faro on the banks of the Hamunda River, came across another representative of these giant reptiles. The serpent he met was evidently wounded, since only one of his eyes shone in the darkness of the night. For several seemingly endless minutes, the monster circled at high speed around the ship of the frightened merchant, raising waves so high that they threatened to turn the ship over, despite the fact that it was 13 meters in length. 1948 - a certain Pablo Tarvalho claimed that a giant snake had been chasing his barge for a long time. According to him, the creature that he observed, at least from a distance of 300 meters, had truly fantastic dimensions: 50 meters!
Sometimes some brave explorers, forgetting about fear, dared to approach these monsters. Missionary Protesius Frikel, while traveling along the banks in the upper reaches of the Trombetas River, met one monster, which, while resting, stuck its head ashore.
Showing undoubted courage, the holy father swam to the monster, which remained in place, and approached him at a distance "in some six steps." Only a small part of his torso and head protruded from the water, on which one could see eyes, "big as saucers."
Taking an interest in both his own encounters and stories from others, Father Heinz sent to Hamburg the director of the zoo a report of his observations, along with two photographs. One of them was made back in 1933 by members of the Brazilian Borders Commission, who claimed that they killed the animal with several rounds from a machine gun. According to their testimony, the monster was so huge (according to rough estimates - 9 meters in length) that even four of them could not bear its head and that, falling, she broke several bushes and trees.
Another photo was from 1948, and it showed the remains of a snake that appeared in the vicinity of Fuerte Abuna in the Ecuadorian region of Guapor. To destroy the giant snake, the soldiers launched a machine gun, from which they fired at least 500 shots, and the ammunition consumption was clearly worth it, considering that the mythical creature reached 35 meters in length.
Meeting at the Rio Negro
Having all this information, the director of the Hamburg Zoo made some kind of a composite sketch of a sukurihu, or a giant boa, which, according to his calculations, could reach 40 meters in length and 80 centimeters thick. Its weight was supposed to be 5 tons, have phosphorescent eyes, a dark chestnut body with a white speckled belly. Of course, this colossus could not represent the only type of giant snakes that inhabit the Amazonian jungle.
One of the most experienced explorers of these regions at the beginning of the 20th century, Major Percy Fawcett, told how in the spring of 1907, while sailing along the Rio Negro, he almost collided with one such specimen, sticking out a triangular head and a significant part of its body. The animal hurriedly headed for the shore, but the explorer, who was also a skilled hunter, managed to aim and hit the huge snake with a gun.
Agonizing, the giant serpent washed ashore, where Fawcett could see it more closely. “The animal had almost died, and its body was still beating violent convulsions,” he wrote, claiming that the part of the snake that turned out to be outside reached 14 meters, while the remaining one was at least five, thus, the total length of the snake was, at least 19 meters.
The snake was not too fat, only 30 centimeters, perhaps because it had been without food for a long time. Fawcett also argued that a terrible stench emanated from the snake and that when he wanted to cut off a piece from his body as a hunting trophy, it turned out that the animal had not yet died completely, began to beat again, and this forced the researcher to abandon his intentions.
In the African wilderness
The giant snake's habitat is probably not limited to South America, although it was there that the largest specimens were found. However, from Africa, and to a lesser extent from some regions of Asia, such as Thailand, India and Bangladesh, there have been reports of encounters with unusual-sized snakes. Historical chronicles show that in the III century BC. e. one such animal was brought to Alexandria by King Ptolemy II and that the length of this serpent was 30 cubits (15 meters). This is the largest specimen caught in Africa, after the python caught on the Ivory Coast: it reached 9.81 meters and fully confirmed that the belief of most African peoples in huge snakes is well founded.
1959 - One indisputable proof of the existence of monstrous snakes was obtained: an aerial photograph taken by the crew of one military helicopter. The helicopter was on patrol in the skies over the Katanga region, then part of the Belgian Congo, and everything happened almost immediately after takeoff from the base in Kamina. When the helicopter flew 100 kilometers, Colonel Geiseb was surprised to see that a giant kite was moving below, which he initially took for a tree trunk. He immediately called out to the pilot, Colonel Remy van Lierde, and they decided to descend to a height of 40 meters. It was then that two military men, along with the rest of the crew, paratrooper Deboeuf and assistant mechanic Kindt, for several minutes saw the movement of the animal in the bushes and even saw how it, threatening, raised its terrible head towards the helicopter,which with the roar of engines disturbed the peace of the forest.
The military calculated that the length of the snake, whose skin was green and pinkish on the back and whitish on the belly, reached 14 meters, being as thick as a man. The triangular and broad head (approximately 80 cm) had strong and sharp teeth, comparable in size to those of a horse. Everything indicated that the monster could easily devour a person. The mechanic's assistant captured the monster with a camera and obtained a picture of remarkable quality, which, after detailed examination, confirmed that the size of the monster was exactly what the flight crew members called it. This photograph and evidence from the Belgian military is the strongest evidence for much larger kites than previously thought possible.
Perhaps they are only overgrown specimens of known species, but it cannot be ruled out that we are talking about surviving representatives of giant species that were considered extinct, such as the gigantophis, which lived in the Middle Eocene 40 million years ago and whose fossilized remains that can be found in Egypt, they reach 16-20 meters in length. Be that as it may, the mystery of giant snakes that live in dense tropical forests remains unsolved to this day, and the mere mention of them causes panic among the local population.
N. Nepomniachtchi