In the 1930s, the young couple Leon and Charles Miller chose New Guinea, the home of wild cannibals, for their honeymoon.
Having reached the Sterren Mountains and ascended the Merouake River to its source, our couple, accompanied by local porters, thugs discovered the Kirrirri tribe, which was not yet known at that time, on the border of virgin forests and snow zones.
It was in their village that Leona Miller once saw how women peeled a coconut using a strange device resembling the tip of an elephant's tusk or a rhino horn. Interested, she told Charles about this, who, after a short examination, was convinced that there were a lot of such knives in the village.
These knives, as Charles Miller would later write in his book "The Caravan of Cannibals", were made of a kind of material resembling a horn, consisting of layers that converge on a cone until the latter turned out to be a sharp point, a tip. The knife reached 45 centimeters in length and was 15 centimeters at the base. At the back it had a tapered cavity. But at the same time he weighed about ten kilograms.
After questioning one of the elders named Vro, Charlie received from him a drawing of a lizard, made in the sand. "He had a long neck and a huge body with a big belly."
“Also,” said Vro, “he has a big horn on his forehead.
Thinking that he did not understand something, Miller asked to repeat the drawing. This time the animal was depicted in more detail - the head was crowned with a wide crest, and the chest was protected by triangular scales … Everything is like in books with reconstructions of dinosaurs in our museums, the traveler specifies.
To better determine the size of the animal, Vro drew two lines of nine meters in the sand - from the nose to the tip of the tail. Then I figured it out and added another three meters.
Promotional video:
So, we were talking about some kind of reptile 12 meters long! Skeptically examining the sketches, Miller, holding back a grin, asked all the same where these creatures live.
“Two or three days from here, towards the hills to the northwest,” the man replied with gestures.
Miller decided to make a sensational report and asked several kirrirri to take him to the places where giant lizards live. It will not be difficult, the answer followed, for the inhabitants often see them - this is Paradise (Row), and the name comes from the cry of the monster, interspersed with a whistle. The expedition was scheduled to start tomorrow.
Papua New Guinea has many unexplored places, but could dinosaurs really survive there?
Face to face with Ray
On the first night, after a day spent in rugged mountainous terrain, the young couple climbed to a huge plateau overgrown with bushes and trees, where they set up camp with the help of guides. At dawn, they moved west along the edge of the plateau, which descended more and more steeply until it formed sheer cliffs tens of meters high.
When they reached the western edge of the plateau, the guides gave directions to go north; they were noticeably nervous and moved with precautions. But then they came to the goal. The people of the tribe asked the Millers to lie prone on a bed of greenery and look down. Down there lay a huge, triangular-shaped swamp. It connected two plateaus - the one on which they were located, and similar. A small stream flowed from there. Survey of the area was interrupted by movement in the reeds …
Struck by what he saw, Miller was literally paralyzed. When his wife looked in the same direction, she first froze in amazement, and then buried her head in the mat, unable to raise her eyes in fear.
Gradually Miller came to his senses and aimed the camera at the animal, whose head and neck were protruding from the reeds.
“As if posing for me, the colossal messenger of distant eras moved through the swamp. At one point, its tail wagged so far in the grass that it seemed to me that it was another animal. When it turned, I saw the horny tip. I heard a whistle: "Rau-u-!""
Turning off the camera, Miller thought that Ray heard some sounds, “As he suddenly stopped, he squatted on his hind legs, the front ones hanging in the air, and turned his head in our direction. He was four hundred meters away from us, but I already felt that he was drilling us with his evil eyes. I pressed myself into the mat and breathed freely only when he cleared out in the reeds."
At this point, Miller, not forgetting that he must shoot, noted that the creature has a yellow-brown color, similar to the color of the reeds in which it lives. In addition, it is covered with scales, and the scales look like armor of unequal shape, serving as camouflage. Therefore, they say, even on color film, it is quite difficult to see it.
“Two more times after that, Ray showed up and allowed me to see a leathery ridge around the head and another along the spine. My film ended when the creature disappeared into a grove of dwarf eucalyptus trees.
Miller lied to everything?
A lot speaks in favor of the fact that Miller is a liar. For he does not give any convincing evidence, except for his story.
First of all, if Charles Miller saw so many lizard horns in use by the locals, why didn't he deliver one to paleontologists? This would revolutionize science. And then, in his richly illustrated book, Miller does not provide a photo of the "old age" trophy.
Now about the film that Miller, a professional cameraman, brought back from Papuasia. (He subsequently worked as such in Los Angeles.) Miller's book was published in London in 1950. He tells in it that he showed parts of the film, filmed in New Guinea, to the magnates of the British film business. But there was not a word about "dinosaur" tape. Moreover, the value of such a film would be invaluable. It is unlikely that he went unnoticed.
Furthermore, Miller's very description of the creature speaks against him. His monster does not match the "reconstructions seen in museums." It is a curious mixture of features of various known creatures, very vaguely reminiscent of one or another animal: it has a long neck and a giant tail, like in sauropods (brontosaurs and other diplodocus), a head crowned with a horn and a leathery crest, like in Triceratops, a body with a ridge of triangular plates - like a stegosaurus, but this ridge is double.
Miller's dinosaur is described as a mixture of Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Sauropod Triceratops
Stegosaurus
Diplodocus (sauropod)
It turns out that this is not a dinosaur at all, but like a revived corpse, created by the imagination of a whole group of paleontologists, each of whom drew his own, and then all this was connected, as in a cartoon.
Of course, one cannot a priori assert that such a being is impossible in nature. Zoology has already presented such surprises. But in Paradise, traits of completely different groups of animals are combined.
On the other hand, stegosaurs are known only from the Cretaceous period of North America, and it is strange that they ended up so far in Asia, in a corner of it, which, it seems, never connected with it.
In short, the story with Ray painfully resembles a fake.
New information
However, this is not the end of the New Guinea dinosaur story. Since 1990, large unidentified dinosaur-like reptiles have been spotted in New Guinea.
In particular, a strange creature was seen on the islet of Umbinga in the province of West New Britain. Another creature was seen on the island, which is located a kilometer from the Ambungi island, and on the Ambungi island itself (perhaps the creature was a waterfowl and easily swam between the islands?)
Alice Pasington (local resident of Ambungi Island, interviewed in 2012), in 1999, working in her garden in broad daylight, at a distance of 40 meters, she saw a creature about 3 meters long, which slowly moved, keeping its long neck upright and then began to eat leaves plants.
Judging by its size and smooth skin, it was a young sauropod specimen. Having dined, the animal calmly, not paying attention to Alice, went down to the sea and disappeared under the water, leaving five-toed footprints on the shore, which Alice later showed to her neighbors.
An image of this creature based on Alice's story about its appearance
Similar creatures, but much larger in size (in one of the observations, only the neck of the creature was about 3 meters, and the total body length, not counting the length of the tail - 8) have been observed more than once recently by several people simultaneously in the coastal strip in the ocean, like near Ambungi Island. and near the island of Gasmata, located nearby.
And in the already mentioned Western New Britain, judging by the stories of local residents, there is also a creature named Doren who also comes ashore to feed. He eats animal food, collects crabs, can climb into the garden and rotate everything that is planted there, but not with the aim of eating plants, but with the aim of searching for invertebrates in the land.
Doren's front legs are shorter than the hind legs and when this animal moves slowly, it often walks on four legs. But on two backs it runs very quickly and easily runs away from a person.
In November 2010, local Protestant church pastor Ken John watched Doren one meter away through a crack in the village toilet door.
His parishioners know this creature well too, and this is how they draw his tracks:
And the footprints are very similar to the fossilized dinosaur paw prints that paleontologists find …