Something

Beastly This Way Comes

September 2011 —and for nine days a strange beast lurked in the West Sumatran rainforest. Short, stocky and dark-haired, locals spotted him near Lake Gunung Tujuh, picking through the dense undergrowth, scrabbling around under fallen logs and resting in clearings.

The vast wilderness that is Kerinci Seblat National Park is said to hide giant snakes and a new

species of golden-furred lion. But the misty, moun-tainous area was playing host to a far more

intriguing creature—Richard Freeman, one of Britain’s leading monster hunters.

Richard was on his fourth Sumatran expedition. The bearded 41-year-old is obsessed, he admits, with discovering ►

A Life Less Ordinary

Big hairy monsters—just the stuff of legend, right? Not according to richard Freeman

The 60- foot Naga snake. Fact or fi ction?

BY CRISPIN ANDREWS

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Something

Beastly This Way Comes

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What’s that lurking in the undergrowth?

Richard Freeman searches for

monsters

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the island’s most mysterious creature, the Orang Pendek, a great ape said to walk upright like a human. On previous expeditions, Richard spoke to locals who claimed to have seen the beast, and found footprints and hair samples. Sumatrans have talked about the Pendek for cen-turies, and since the fi rst western sight-ing in 1918 by a boy working for a Dutch colonist, other explorers have made similar discoveries.

But last year, on day four of his quest, Richard and his intrepid team of amateur explorers from the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) in Bideford, Devon, found something new. High in the uplands, something had torn a log away. It wasn’t a bear (there were no claw marks), but there was a print in the mud: the handprint, Richard believes, of an Orang Pendek.

“It had round palms and thick, sausage-like fi ngers—nothing like the long, slender fi ngers of an orangutan,” he says.

Richard and his team—Chris Clarke (retired Halliburton engineer), Adam Davies (civil servant) and Dave Archer (council worker)—didn’t fi nd the Pendek during the rest of their stay. But the print was yet more data to add to his growing body of work that seeks to fi nd the truth behind the world’s weirdest, supposedly mythological, creatures.

For Richard doesn’t consign the likes of the Yeti or Exmoor Beast to the realms of fantasy. To him, they could be obscure

creatures waiting to be discovered—he points out that the giant squid, Komodo dragon and the okapi were once believed to be the stuff of legend.

“I want to know what’s over that next mountain, what’s hiding in that remote valley or dense jungle,” says the CFZ’s director of zoology. “And I’ll keep going until I fi nd out.”

Growing up in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, Richard was in the woods looking for

owls and foxes while other kids played football. He loved David Attenbor-ough’s Life on Earth and watched, fascinated, as Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who discovered reptilian hu-manoids in Derbyshire caves, giant maggots in Welsh mines and dino-saurs in London. “These monsters were on our

doorsteps, not on some alien planet,” he says.

Then, in 1996, Richard found a copy of Animals & Men magazine while visit-ing Mr Potter’s Museum of Curiosities on Bodmin Moor. It was published by the CFZ—set up by musician and writer Jon Downes in 1992—and detailed their investigations into various strange ani-mals. Richard, who’d been working as a zookeeper and gravedigger, wanted in. Living in Yorkshire, he became the magazine’s local correspondent, writing about big-cat sightings in Selby, a plague of spiders in Leeds, and historical dragon tales from around the county.

A little while later, he also began a zoology degree at Leeds University but, P

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were no claw marks), but there was a print in the

and thick, sausage-like fi ngers—nothing like the long, slender fi ngers of an orangutan,”

doorsteps, not on some alien planet,” he says.

Then, in 1996, Richard found a copy of Animals & Mening Mr Potter’s Museum of Curiosities

Could this cast be the foot of

the mythical Orang

Pendek?

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by 2000, had grown disillusioned with the narrow focus of the course and his tutors (“One professor had spent his en-tire career studying periwinkle penises”). He decided to move to Devon and work for the CFZ full-time.

Richard’s fi rst big monster hunt was for the Naga, a 60-foot snake as thick as a barrel, said to inhabit the waterways of East Asia. TV company Bang Productions asked him to investigate recent sightings in the Mekong River, as part of a Discov-ery Channel series on the mysteries of the East. He couldn’t fi nd the monster, but it didn’t put him off. In the last 12

years, he’s been everywhere from the Mongolian desert in search of the local death worm (a fi ve-foot invertebrate that some say spews acid), to Guyana to fi nd the water tiger (an aquatic big cat).

Richard is now one of the country’s top cryptozoologists—an expert on supposedly mythological animals—and has written six books and appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.

He’s never actually found a monster on one of his trips—which are funded by a mixture of his own savings, the profi ts CFZ makes from publishing books, ►

The CFZ team (with Richard second from right) on

one of their expeditions to

Indonesia

Beast of Exmoor Britain’s best- known mystery creature, thought by some to be a black leopard. Pumas and lynx have also been “spotted” in other parts of the UK. All might be creatures let loose after the 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act required exotic-pet owners to install expensive security systems.

CREATURE DISCOMFORTS SOME OF CRYPTOZOOLOGY’S OTHER PRIZED TARGETS

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and the occasional sponsorship. But he isn’t bothered if people think he’s a crank. “Until 1847, Westerners thought gorillas were imaginary,” he says. The animals he’s looking for are rare and know how to hide from humans, he continues,

and adds, “It took seven years’ round- the-clock filming before the first snow leopard was caught on camera. Our ex-peditions only last a few weeks.”

Richard, who now lives in Exeter, takes every project very seriously and conducts lots of scientific research into each crea-ture. Every trip is worthwhile, he says, because of all the extra information he gets from the fieldwork.

Indeed, despite his lack of qualifica-tions, Richard sees himself as just as important as any other naturalist. “I ex-pand knowledge by finding out about new species and showing how myths have a basis in reality,” he says. “The pri-mates [I study] will tell us more about human evolution and, if we were to un-cover an Orang Pendek, say, the Sumatran government would be under pressure to conserve their habitat. That would

help many other endangered animals.”But though he’s very open to nature’s

possibilities, Richard is quite prepared to explode some myths when he can’t find evidence to support them.

His research leads him to believe, for example, that the Beast of Gévaudan—France’s 18th-century man-eating wolf that was said to have inspired Little Red Riding Hood—was nothing more than a hyena escaped from a menagerie. The Loch Ness Monster? Just a big fish. A marine reptile couldn’t have survived the ice age when the loch was frozen, Rich-ard points out, and there’s not enough food in the water to support such a large predator. The death worm may just be an undiscovered worm-lizard combina-tion, he adds. The water tiger, meanwhile, could be a relative of the giant otter.

He’s also very alive to the possibility of hoaxes. In Thailand, so-called video footage of the Naga turned out to show a log floating down the river, and when he opened a box said to contain parts of the snake’s skeleton, he found an elephant’s tooth.

But the unmarried naturalist—his

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Megalodon shark A real-life 52-foot Jaws that ate large whales. Said to have died out 1.5 million years ago, but some believe it was around until the Ice Age—and, with only five per cent of the oceans explored and sightings of very large sharks continuing, it may still be with us.

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Nandi Bear In 2003, an unknown carnivore killed three people in Lilongwe, Malawi. Scientists believed it was a rabid hyena, but cryptozoologists think it was a “mythological” predator with front legs longer than hind legs.

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girlfriend Lisa comes on some trips with him—has had a close encounter. In 2008, he and his colleagues spent the night in an abandoned farmhouse in the Altai Mountains while hunting for the Almasty, Russia’s very own Bigfoot.

“It was 2.30am when we heard this huge guttural roar. Shortly afterwards, something passed by the door—whatever it was, it stood on two legs and was large enough to put that seven-foot doorway in the shade. It couldn’t have been a bear because it walked along the whole veranda and bears can only manage a few steps upright.”

To the locals he spoke to, the Almasty wasn’t a fantastical beast, just a rare local animal. One old woman told Richard his quest was like someone travelling across the world to talk to him about badgers. So he had high hopes of making a serious breakthrough. But by the time he got his camera ready, the creature had gone, and the expedition had to content itself with taking home some fur and faeces!

The idea of coming across an angry Yeti or giant lizard on a remote mountain pass doesn’t bother Richard. Neither does running into a tiger or a bear.

“It’s not the creatures you have to watch out for, it’s the places,” he says. A whirlwind wrecked his base camp in Mongolia and, in Russia, he fell down a crevasse, hanging onto a branch for a few

minutes before pulling himself to safety. While look-ing for the Naga in a cave system, he was more worried about getting lost than enormous snakes. “My guide looked about 100 —imagine a Thai version of Albert Steptoe. If he’d croaked, I’d have never found my way out.”

Richard is already planning his next trip—to Tasmania, to search for the thy-lacine, a dog-like marsupial said to have become extinct in the 1930s. Sightings persist, some “captured” on video. In the early 1990s, Henry Nix of Australia’s National University used a computer to show a 98 per cent correlation between locations of recent sightings and the animal’s optimum environment. Enough for a Freeman investigation, then—if he can get the money together.

“All the billionaires want to pay people to go UFO hunting,” he says. “We need one who’s interested in monsters. Then we could mount a proper expedition and have a chance of finding something.”

But Richard won’t give up on his mission to show that the world isn’t the relatively ordered place that mainstream science would have us believe. “When your mum and dad told you monsters don’t exist,” he says, “they lied.” n

» For more on the Centre for Fortean Zoology, visit cfz.org.uk

Waheela Large, wolf-like animals, supposedly found in the Nahanni Valley in northern Canada, with jaws powerful enough to bite off a man’s head. A relic population of prehistoric canines, such as dire wolves or borophagines, perhaps? Some sort of bear or dog? Cryptozoologists are undecided.

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