Since time immemorial, a strange and dangerous "creeping reptile" - a killer worm has lived in the vast expanses of the uninhabited and almost unexplored Gobi desert. It is called in Mongolian olgoi-khorhoy, and among zoologists it is known as the Mongolian worm. Scientists consider its existence doubtful, but in principle possible.
The Mongolian worm allegedly has an unusually large size, reaching a length of about a meter. Its reddish brown hide is covered in thorns. It is deadly poisonous and capable of killing any animals and humans with one touch. Olgoy-khorhoy injects a stream of poisonous liquid into the victim's body, which eats away his tissues, enters the bloodstream and kills.
No poisons act on the worm itself, and it has not yet been possible to harm the invulnerable monster by any other means. It seems that nature has given its creeping creation reliable means of protection from humans and any predators. All Mongols know about this creature and tell about it, as they say, true stories that happened to their relatives, neighbors, friends of neighbors or neighbors of friends.
In one of the stories, a little boy was playing near a house in a small playpen for children. Suddenly a killer worm crept into the playpen. As soon as the baby touched him, he immediately fell down dead. After a while, the parents saw a dead child in the arena and, following the trail, determined where the monster had crawled to find and deal with it. However, the monster fully lived up to its name - he killed all his pursuers and disappeared into the sands.
The first European researcher to study the Mongolian worm was the Czech Ivan Mekerle. He learned about the outlandish reptile from a student from Mongolia. “We have a terrible creature in Mongolia,” the student said. - We call him olgoy-khorhoy. It lives in the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert. It can kill a person, a horse and even a camel. Ivan Mekerle was very interested in this message. However, getting any information about the killer worm from Mongolia turned out to be not so easy, since the country's authorities did not allow research in the desert area.
The situation seemed completely hopeless, the Czech did not even manage to contact those of his local colleagues who could assist him in finding traces of the strange creature. But after a few years, the political situation in Mongolia changed, the communist dictatorship collapsed, and the country became more open and accessible to foreigners. Then Ivan Mekerle organized the first expedition on the trail of the worm. Often in the evenings Mekerle would sit with his new Mongol friends and ask them about the strange creature. Each of the interlocutors of the Czech researcher had a story to tell on this topic, but no one saw the killer worm with their own eyes. The monster instinctively did something like a cruel and prudent criminal: almost never left living witnesses. After his arrival, only corpses and a trace on the ground remained.
Ivan Mekerla was lucky and unlucky: he did not catch the Mongolian worm, but he left for Europe safe and sound. Nevertheless, he still managed to find something interesting - he found several strange remains, resembling paws, and parts of the skeleton, not similar to any of the known animals. One woman told him that the killer worm lives in the sand and does not crawl on the surface, but buries itself in the sand. If he has outlined a victim and is preparing to attack her, then he does not crawl out entirely, but only sticks out his head and half of the body.
Thus, the question of the Mongolian worm remained unresolved, although some zoologists believe that it is just a kind of cobra. Information about the Gobi Desert and its inhabitants is still scarce, so a meter-long snake or lizard leading a secretive lifestyle may well have remained undetected.
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In connection with the unresolved mystery of the Mongolian worm, eyewitness accounts of another similar creature in South America are of particular interest. Its habitat is floodplains, steep banks and coastal tropical thickets. In Portuguese it is called minhoku. A thick worm up to 1.2 m long makes long passages in wet ground, which sometimes reach residential buildings in the center of the village. Minhoku is very dangerous: it attacks people, causes significant damage to the economy, killing livestock right in the barns and pens. The American killer worm, too, has never been caught, killed or photographed, so there are only stories of living witnesses of his "exploits".
You can also remember the medieval legends about the European dragon. The monster, similar to a two-meter snake or lizard, allegedly lived in Central Europe - in the foothills of the Alps, in southern Germany. The villagers were very afraid of him. Particularly dangerous were meetings with a dragon for lonely pedestrians on the road far from their homes, in the forest, in the pasture. In some localities, the traditional prohibition to go to the forest alone was preserved for a long time.
Information about the appearance of the European dragon, which was called the cave worm in the Alpine valleys, ceased at the beginning of the 20th century. If this animal existed, now it is probably already extinct. The Mongolian worm, if it really lives in the sands of the Gobi Desert, has every chance of surviving - there is an almost virgin natural environment.
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