In March 1947, a Brazilian expedition organized by the Indian Protection Service was working in a marshy area between the Manso and Cristalino rivers. Suddenly, its participants noticed a huge snake sleeping on the grass and finished it off with several shots. According to one of the researchers, the Frenchman Serge Bonacase, the reptile reached a length of at least 23 meters!
The group included local fauna experts who came to the conclusion that they had, without a doubt, an anaconda. Its unusualness was only in its size, which was twice the size of all species known to science, which did not even reach 10 meters.
However, this encounter is not mentioned in the natural history books, as the expedition members, moving on foot through the dense jungle, found it impossible to transport the skin or the head of a 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, there are those where two boas 40 meters long are captured. They were met in 1953 at the headwaters of the Amazon by an expedition organized specifically to destroy these very reptiles that terrified the entire area. The snake was found and killed.
Photos published in the daily newspaper Mundo Argentino show the hunters near a dead human-sized snake. The size of the animal can also be judged by the size of the head of one of the monsters - it was larger than a human. These examples are just a few of the known encounters with giant snakes in the Amazon.
Sometimes these creatures attack people and devour them, as happened in August 1988 in the Brazilian state of Rondonia. According to several eyewitnesses, a three-year-old child named Daniel Meneses was swallowed by a giant boa, or sukuriyu, which reached 15 meters in length, that is, twice as large as all previously recorded representatives of this species.
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Unpleasant encounters in the "green hell"
The stories about the existence of huge snakes in the endless "green hell" first sounded after the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors and travelers to America, but only in the 20th century did the first reliable reports of encounters with these reptiles appear.
In the late 1940s, the director of the Hamburg Zoo, Lorenz Hagenbeck, the son of the famous catcher and animal dealer Karl Hagenbeck, conducted the first research on materials about mysterious creatures and came across the story of the priest Victor Heinz, who several times passed the Amazon in a canoe.
The first meeting took place on May 22, 1922, near the settlement of Obid wasps. Just 30 meters away, the priest suddenly saw a huge snake, which was carried by the current. The rowers immediately dropped the oars, frightened by the size of the reptile: about 25 meters in length, as thick as a barrel for vegetable oil.
“When we were far enough away,” the priest says, “and my rowers regained their ability to speak, they, still being afraid, told me that the snake did not crush us like a simple box of matches just because at that moment it was busy digesting a good portion fishes.
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, in great fear, began to turn the canoe towards the shore, shouting that they saw a huge animal.
"At that moment, 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 hit their canoe, he was told that it was a giant snake.
Father Heinz froze with horror, realizing that the lights were the glowing eyes of a creature that was approaching their canoe at a speed 10-15 times their own. When, it seemed, the monster was about to ram the side, he unexpectedly dodged and seemed to head back towards the middle of the river. Later, local residents informed the priest that a giant sukuriyu lived in this river.
Not even a few months had passed before the trader Reimondo Zima, who lived in the small village of Faro on the banks of the Hamunda River, came across another specimen of a huge reptile. The animal he met was probably wounded, since only one of his eyes shone in the darkness of the night. For several seemingly endless minutes, it circled at high speed around the ship of the frightened merchant, raising waves of such a height that they threatened to sink the ship, despite the fact that its length was 13 meters.
A few years later, in 1948, a certain Pablo Tarvalho claimed that a giant snake had been chasing his barge for a long time. According to him, the snake, which he observed at a distance of about 300 meters, had a truly fabulous length - 50 meters!
Sometimes some brave explorers, forgetting about fear, dared to approach these mythical creatures.
Missionary Prosthesius Frikel, while traveling along the banks of the Trombetas River in its upper reaches, met one monster, which, while resting, stuck its head ashore.
Showing undoubted courage, the holy father approached the monster at a distance of “some six steps. Only a small part of his body and his head protruded from the water, on which one could see eyes, "large as saucers."
Interested in both his own encounters and the stories he had heard from others, Father Heinz sent to Hamburg the director of the zoo, Hagenbeck, a report of his observations, along with two photographs.
One of them was made 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 animal was so huge (according to rough estimates - 9 meters in length) that even four people could not carry its head and that, falling, it broke several bushes and trees.
Another photo was taken in 1948. It shows the remains of a snake that appeared in the vicinity of Fuerte Abuna, in the Ecuadorian region of Guapor. To destroy the monster, the soldiers used a machine gun, from which they fired at least five hundred rounds - and the ammunition consumption was clearly worth it, considering that the animal encountered was 35 meters in length.
Helicopter shot
The habitat of the giant snake may not be limited to South America alone, although it was there that the largest specimens were found. There have been reports of encounters with reptiles of unusual sizes from Africa, and in smaller numbers from some areas of Asia, such as Thailand, India and Bangladesh.
Chronicles say that in the III century BC. e. a similar animal, 30 cubits (15 meters) long, was shown in Alexandria to King Ptolemy I. This is the largest specimen caught in Africa, after the python caught in the Ivory Coast. He reached 9.81 meters in length, thus convincingly confirming that the belief of most African peoples in huge snakes is well founded.
In 1959, indisputable proof of the existence of monstrous reptiles was obtained - an aerial photograph taken by the crew of a military helicopter patrolling the sky over the Katanga region, then part of the Belgian Congo.
It all happened almost immediately after takeoff from the base in Kamina. When the patrol flew a hundred kilometers, Colonel Geiseb was surprised to notice how a giant snake was moving below, which he initially took for a tree trunk. He immediately called out to the pilot, Colonel Remy van Djerde, and they decided to descend.
At an altitude of 40 meters, all four members of the helicopter crew observed the animal's movements for several minutes and even saw how it, threatening, raised its terrible head to the helicopter, which, with the roar of engines, disturbed the peace of the forest.
The skin on the reptile's back was green and pinkish, and on the belly it was whitish. The snake was as thick as a man and reached, according to military estimates, 14 meters in length, had a triangular and wide head (about 80 centimeters), strong and sharp teeth, comparable in size to those of a horse. Such a bastard could easily eat a person.
The mechanic's assistant managed to capture the monster on film and received a picture of excellent quality, which, after detailed examination, confirmed that the size of the monster was exactly what the flight crew members said. This photograph, and the evidence from the Belgian military, is the most compelling evidence for the existence of much larger kites than previously thought possible.
Perhaps these are just overgrown specimens of known species, but it is possible 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 fossil remains found in Egypt, they reach 16-20 meters in length. Be that as it may, a veil of secrecy still shelters the giant snakes that live in dense rainforests, and the mere mention of them causes panic among the locals.
Unknown giants of the desert
Once, in the vicinity of a Tunisian city, I had a chance to hear several stories about mysterious creatures, which the locals call tagerga and whose dimensions can reach the thickness of a human thigh and a length of 4.5 meters.
Mohammed Sharaa, a drover who spent his entire life in the deserts, argued that they can be found at a bad "baraka" (fate) in some areas bordering on the Great Desert, as well as in the mountains near Gafsa, a settlement in southern Tunisia. Local residents are afraid to death of these snakes because of their large size, and most importantly, their special venom.
Is there any connection between these animals and strange creatures that were met in the same places by Roman soldiers in the 3rd century BC? uh, during the First Punic War?
According to the historians Titus Livy, Aelius Tuberon and Seneca himself, in 255 BC. e. Roman legionnaires camped on the banks of the Bagrad (now Mejerda) River, met a huge serpent that did not allow them to draw water. The Legionnaires tried to kill him in many ways, but it took the use of ballistas and even catapults loaded with heavy stones to finish him off.
Huge anaconda in the Amazon
According to historians, when the snake died, the stench from it spread throughout the area. His skin was brought to Rome as a trophy and was displayed for a century. From it one could judge the truly incredible dimensions of the serpent: 120 Roman feet, that is, 36 meters in length!
The reptiles, which may have survived to this day in Tunisia, do not, of course, reach this size, but a little deeper, in the deserts of Algeria, there are traces of the presence of huge snakes. In 1959, nomads in the Benud area talked about snakes that devoured their horses and sheep. They set traps, where from time to time reptiles came across, but in order to cope with one of them, who swallowed a camel, it took the help of an entire French garrison.
The 26th battalion of dragoons was called under the command of captains Grassen and Laveau, which was located near the village of Beni Unif and conducted several raids there. In the end, the soldiers met with the largest snake they have seen in their lives. At first they shot her with guns, but then they had to use a machine gun.
Then the soldiers measured the length of the dead snake - it turned out to be at least 20 meters! Her head reached 1.5 meters in length and was decorated with a peculiar crown of hair. They intended to preserve the skin of an unusual reptile, but after a while they could not find any remnants of it …
A year earlier, a resident of Tunisia, Beluris Abd el-Khader, who served in the French units in the same village of Beni Unif, claimed that he was bitten by a snake that reached 13-14 meters in length. He managed to kill her, and for some time he kept her skin, which the inhabitants of the surrounding settlements came to look at, but in the end he sold it for 45 thousand francs of that time. Thus, nothing has survived from this reptile either.
To these two cases, described by the zoologist Bernard Eyvelmans in his book "The Last Dragons of Africa", there are added testimonies of the nomads of the Abadla region, neighboring Algeria, about the "big snake" that could jump and attack a person. It reached at least 10 meters in length, was even larger than the African python, but was very different from him. According to stories, his head was decorated with a bunch of hair, similar to that of horned vipers.
A few years after the events described in the Algerian region bordering Morocco, workers repairing a dam over the Dhor Torba moat also encountered unusually large snakes several times. Excavator driver Hamsa Ramani has seen a snake 6 or 7 meters in length more than once, and even watched him eat grease at a construction site. Together with three other workers, he saw another large snake appear between two construction sites. This animal was not lucky: the Algerian crushed it with his excavator.
In 2012, this image from Malaysia flew around the world. It filmed a 17-meter python, which was killed by his equally huge brother. Workers watched the fight between two pythons
When the animal calmed down (the convulsions lasted 25 minutes), the workers were able to see it more closely. The snake was 9.2 meters long, the skin was dark brown and the belly was white. On the pointed head there was a semblance of a mane 10 centimeters wide and the same length, chestnut eyes, fangs about 6 centimeters each.
The skin of the snake was shown to the assistant director of the construction site, who said that in the vicinity, reptiles 11 and 12 meters long are not uncommon. At the same time, another worker assured that he saw a snake 10.5 meters long, yellow-brown in color, with black stripes, a white belly and with a semblance of horns on its head sticking out forward. At the same construction site, two years later, we saw a snake 12-15 meters long.
What species could the described creatures correspond to? Their color, horns and manes, as well as the fame of their poisonousness, indicate that they belong to vipers, however, the largest known viper still known - Gabonese - barely reaches 2 meters in length. And all the evidence indicates that the specimens encountered were 4-5 times larger!
Could a poisonous snake of this size even exceed the size of a python exist on Earth?
According to official science, in the Pleistocene in South America, giant snakes up to 18 meters long lived, whose poisonous teeth were no less than a tiger's fang. Maybe the amazing creatures that now terrify the inhabitants of some areas of the Earth are an unknown species of giant vipers that have adapted to the conditions of a dry climate?