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You know, I've been around for a while.

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I've met some interesting people.

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I've done some crazy things.

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See, you just might think that there's not much that can take you by surprise.

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You'd be wrong.

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The world is full of stories, science, and things that are made for you.

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The world is full of stories, science, and things that amaze and confound me.

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Every single day, incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

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Some I can answer.

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Oh, there's just... stuff I logic.

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Do monsters exist?

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In West Virginia, a town is terrorized by a seven-foot winged demon.

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Did it cause the death of 46 people?

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It had two huge black wings and no head, no arms.

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In Newfoundland, a macabre creature washes up on a local beach.

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Are our oceans concealing a mega-beast?

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It was nothing that either of us had ever seen or could imagine.

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And in Udelli, thousands are attacked by a metal-clogged monster.

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Was it a man or a beast?

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People ran off in absolute panic.

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They're just... they're fleeing from the sea.

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Yeah, it's a weird world, and I love it.

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The Udelli

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You know, I just had a lovely holiday at Scotland.

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Getting my castle, bagpipes, the whole deal.

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Even went to Loch Ness, where Nessie, famous Loch Ness monster, is supposed to live.

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We got on this boat, went out on the lock, searching for hours.

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Then guess what I saw?

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Nothing.

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Absolutely nothing.

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Total waste of time.

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And six blacks.

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A monster's nothing more than bait to lure gullible tourists

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to things like Yeti, Bigfoot, and Chupacopra exist.

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I got these for you.

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They just might.

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Point Pleasant, West Virginia

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Nearly 50 years ago, this sleepy farming town was brutally awoken by a series of monstrous events

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that are still a mystery today.

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Lauren Coleman is an author.

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He documented the incidents, which began on the night of November 15, 1966,

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when two young couples took a drive.

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Roger and Linda Scarber and the mallets were driving around

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in the old TNT area.

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It was called TNT because that's where dynamite was stored during World War II.

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Secluded and dark, TNT was also a well-known lovers' lane.

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But instead of fun, the four teenagers are about to encounter a living nightmare.

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All of a sudden, they see this creature.

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It's six feet tall and it's coming to them.

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It's having glowing red eyes in its chest, which are reflecting the headlights.

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It had two huge black wings.

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No head, no arms.

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All of a sudden, it goes into the air and starts flying.

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They started racing back to Point Pleasant and the creature was in back of the car.

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Really, they felt it almost was touching both sides of the highway.

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Reaching speeds of 100 miles an hour, the chase continues until finally the creature disappears.

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Was there something unpleasant in Point Pleasant?

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The next day, they come back out there and they see it flying overhead.

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So all of a sudden, you get more and more word of mouth in the town

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that this creature's been around, people are seeing it.

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The newspapers hadn't even caught on to the report yet.

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So the next day, you have Marcella Bennett saying she's going over to one of her relatives' houses,

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which is a bunch of houses right along the road that leads to the TMT.

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She gets close to the house and all of a sudden, on the roof of the house, sees the mothman.

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She's carrying her baby in her arms and falls on the baby out of terror and fright.

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Gets up, races off, and they tell the police too.

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What occurs, however, is that it gets into the newspaper and all of a sudden,

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you had within a few weeks, 200 people saying that they'd seen the mothman.

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This remarkable story sends shockwaves through the town.

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The media calls the creature the mothman.

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Local resident Fay LaPorte was 14 years old at the time.

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Three days after the first sighting, she decided to visit the scene for herself.

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There's the road over there that we drove down in my brother to come out here

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to try to find the so-called mothman we heard about.

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My brother said, well, I'm just going to see if I can find it

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and prove that it's just somebody in Halloween costume or something on wires or something.

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As we got to the area, my brother kept looking past me to the window.

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I said, well, what is it? What are you looking at?

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He said, well, don't look right now.

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He said, but there's something beside the car there by the window.

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It had the features of a bird combined with a hymn.

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We were really scared and I was begging and crying for my brother to go ahead and let's get out here.

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That's when I finally saw it open up its wings and just flew off in the sky so pretty it was gone.

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For the next year, the mothman terrorized the people of Point Pleasant.

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We were coming up the road here. We looked around the thing, found the curve there

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and we thought it was a car like it. So we stopped by the car and the thing came over the top of the car.

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Where I just like to say something supernatural, we can't explain it.

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Something like that. I know I can't explain it, but that's for sure.

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They wonder where it will all end.

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Thirteen months after the first sighting, they get their answer.

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The silver bridge between West Virginia and Ohio, starting at Point Pleasant,

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collapsed on December 15, 1967.

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Sixty-seven people fell into the water of the Ohio River.

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Forty-six died and two bodies never were even found.

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There's seemingly no apparent reason for this horrific tragedy.

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Then comes a terrifying report.

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The night before the disaster, the mothman was seen hanging from the silver bridge.

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And people were scared. They were so scared they didn't want to talk about the bridge.

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They didn't want to talk about mothman. They didn't want to talk about anything.

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This town became quiet and everybody for a long time said that nobody talked.

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And you still have people that won't talk about the bridge collapse today.

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The mothman was never seen again.

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For 45 years, this incredible story has baffled experts.

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But some believe recent evidence could finally explain the mystery of the mothman.

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Joe Nicol is a paranormal investigator with Skeptical Inquirer Science Magazine.

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We human beings misperceive all the time. People say, I know what I saw.

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Actually, they know what they think they saw.

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Joe believes the mothman wasn't quite the monstrous piece it was made out to be.

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I believe the Bardell is the creature that most clearly fits the bill.

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Was the mothman simply an owl?

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Nicol thinks the answer lies in then to Scarberry's first descriptions back in 1966.

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Her original description of mothman is of a very large winged creature.

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She said it had no neck, virtually no real head, just eyes, very large eyes,

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round and shining like a bicycle reflector.

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In the owl family, there are different degrees of what's called eye shine.

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Among the most potent is that of the Bard owl, which has a deep crimson eye shine.

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It's a large owl with big wingspan. It would look like just eyes set at the top of a body with wings up.

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It flies in a silent moth-like flight.

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It has pretty much exactly the characteristics of mothman, the original sightings.

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But does Nicol's theory explain the height?

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Eyewitnesses reported a creature that was six or seven feet tall.

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We know that people misperceive and I'm quite confident that somebody looking and not knowing what it is at night, quickly, maybe being frightened by it.

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I dare say I would misjudge the distance and therefore misjudge the height.

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Incredible, isn't it? Here we have an entire ton and a few of their lives from something that can't explain a creature seven feet tall,

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that can fly a hundred miles an hour and maybe even bring down a bridge and they blame it on this guy.

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I'm going to be wrong, he's scary.

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If you're a field mouse, perhaps the real question here is, why did so many people think they saw a monster?

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And even blame it for the death of 46 people? Weird or what?

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A mysterious winged creature called the mothman terrorizes the town in West Virginia.

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Is it proof that monsters exist? Jim Huran is a psychologist.

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He believes the mothman can be explained by a phenomena called MPI.

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Mass psychogenic illness or MPI is a psychological term for an outbreak of mysterious illness that has no medical cause, but it's entirely in someone's head.

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Before you know it, you have a contagion effect whereby those social symptoms start spreading in a large group of people.

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Mass psychogenic illness tends to be associated with negatives because people oftentimes report and care about and give a lot of credence to dramatic things in the environment.

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And oftentimes, just from our evolutionary standpoint, those are dangerous things, negative things.

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Was mothman the result of social contagion?

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Huran believes he can prove his theory by showing what might have happened in Point Pleasant.

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We're going to try to induce a mild case of mass psychogenic illness.

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I've selected a group of volunteers, I'm going to give them the suggestion that they're going to be visiting a very haunted place in the woods.

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We're going to take them out there and let their imaginations take over.

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Well, we should see if the mass psychogenic illness is a plausible explanation for the mothman's findings, is that we'll see a few people start having experiences, other people will notice that, and then we'll see an outbreak of similar symptoms, if that's what you want to call them, just due to social pressure.

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Was this bad? Was this fiction?

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Huran begins by telling the group he needs their help to solve a series of disturbing paranormal incidents reported in the area.

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As night falls, the group sets out into the woods.

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Everyone, stop please.

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Everyone, fan out.

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They're told to turn off their flashlights.

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And stop.

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From this point, they can only be turned on when someone thinks they experienced something paranormal.

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Just give your sense of bearing.

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In just minutes, flashlights come on and reports of paranormal activity flood in.

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Huran believes the flashlights act as social cues which influence the other members of the group.

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You felt the cold breeze? Someone felt cold over there too.

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I feel like someone's falling. Someone is just waiting to say something.

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I'm like, what?

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And we understand this. Like right here, you feel like there's static electricity on your face?

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As soon as one or two cues took hold, then you start seeing a flurry of other flashlights going on.

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It percolated throughout the entire group, exactly what we would expect with psychogenic illness in a group.

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Tonight's experiments were very impressive because it kind of confirmed what I think happened with the mothman.

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That is, we had a right type of people in the right type of environment, an environment that was spooky, full of context,

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exactly the same kind of environment that the mothman experiences happened.

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And a little bit of suggestion caused a flurry and outbreak of experiences that otherwise wouldn't have happened.

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Was the mothman all in the minds of his victims?

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And does this explain what eyewitnesses like Fay LaPorte saw?

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Ken Gerhardt is a professional monster on it.

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He believes the best way to solve the mothman mystery is to hunt it down himself.

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For the past decades, I have gone out and searched for hard physical evidence that we share our world with creatures, legendary beasts,

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things that have not been classified or verified by scientists.

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Mothman is a monster in the truest sense of the word.

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I mean, here you have a creature that doesn't match the description of anything we know about in the natural world.

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Something that seemingly stepped right out of a science fiction movie.

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Gerhardt has come to the McClintic Wildlife Reserve, close to where the mothman was first sighted.

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It's very exciting to be here in the actual location where mothman was reported so many times back in the 1960s.

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If mothman is a real physical animal, it's going to make an impact on its environment.

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This could be tracks on the ground, nests, markings and the like.

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Using a camera trap, Gerhardt is hoping to catch a mothman unaware.

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This is actually a motion-activated camera with an infrared beam,

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and anything that passes within that beam is actually going to be captured on this particular camera.

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I can put the camera out overnight and come back the following morning to determine whether, in fact, I've captured an image of the subject.

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To attract his prey, Gerhardt sets up a blasting device, a machine that broadcasts the sound of forest creatures in pain.

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Many of the eyewitnesses said the mothman made kind of a squeaking mechanical mouse sound,

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and fortunately I have a little sound on here called lip-squeak, and I think that's exactly what we need.

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Did you hear that? Something moving around there in the brush. I don't know what it was, but basically that last sound definitely,

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about some type of response or reaction.

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With his equipment set, it is now a waiting game. Will the mothman reveal something?

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I don't know about you.

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But if I were a monster hunter, indeed, if I were hunting the mothman,

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I think I'd be taking something a little more substantial than this.

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I mean, at least, I think you'd take something like this.

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Wouldn't you?

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But we have to ask the question, if monsters really exist, why is no one, a monster hunter or not,

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then able to catch one? Then again, these monsters were just ordinary critters.

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They wouldn't really be monsters, would they?

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Returning the next day, monster hunter Ken Gearhart checks to see if he's found evidence of the mothman.

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Well, unfortunately, it doesn't look like we got anything on film.

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I may have been a little bit wrong about the placement of this camera.

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The lesson learned here is that monster hunting is a very arduous and time-consuming process,

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and it may take quite a bit of time before we actually get an image of our quarry.

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The high-tech approaches fail to find anything, but Gearhart thinks he knows exactly what mothman is.

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I believe mothman to be the product of negative energy.

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Consider for a moment the main location where mothman was encountered.

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Many of the Native American tribes would avoid this area completely because they believed it to be haunted by monsters and evil spirits.

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And then you have the great curse of chief corn stock, the Shawnee chief who, on his deathbed, cursed the area because the white man had betrayed him.

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So in that respect, I believe mothman to be the cumulation of all of this negative energy,

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perhaps brought to life by some type of mechanism far beyond the realm of human comprehension.

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Beyond that, there have been reports of ringed humanoid creatures all over the world for centuries,

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and in many ancient cultures, for example in Japan where you have the Tengu, which is a bird man,

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the Tengu is often considered to be a bad omen or a harbinger of doom.

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You have the Banshee from Scottish lore, and so in many of these mythologies and folk lords,

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these winged creatures are often considered to be premonitions of doom and destruction.

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So I think that's a very interesting tie-in between mothman and the timing of the bridge collapse.

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Was mothman a bad omen that somehow materialized in point pleasant?

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Or could it simply have been mass hysteria created by an owl?

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Weird. Or what?

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What?

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A fisherman finds a giant, unidentifiable creature on a beach in Newfoundland.

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It was nothing that either of us had ever seen or could imagine.

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Are monsters lurking in the deep?

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Hey, well, you know I used to love fishing.

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Nothing better than the thrill of landing a big one, the ultimate challenge between man and beast.

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Well, there you are now, man, you catch something.

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You're not expecting it.

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Strange things make you wonder, what is living in the depths of our oceans?

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I don't know.

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In 2001, Gary Stenson was working as a fisheries officer in Newfoundland, Canada,

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when he received the strangest phone call of his career.

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Got a call from a fisherman who was telling me about a creature on the beach that had washed up.

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He started to describe it to me, and it sounded unlike anything that I had encountered.

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Mystified, Gary decides to meet the fisherman and investigate the strange sighting.

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It's a very isolated area, and as we came up to it, we saw this large creature laying on the beach itself.

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I've never seen anything that looked like this.

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The whole thing was tapering to the tail end, and once it got to the tail end, it just broke off.

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We had thought that it might be something like a giant squid, which we do have here,

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but there are no tentacles that looked like that.

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It didn't also look like a whale or a shark, which it could be.

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There was nothing that looked like a head, there was nothing that looked like any sort of structures that we could identify it.

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In over 20 years, as a fisheries officer, Gary thought he had seen it all, until now.

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I've worked on a lot of whales, and I've worked on a lot of seals,

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and he was some shark set up from a shore, but on this creature, it was nothing like that.

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And there was nothing that we could tell where it came from.

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From a distance, it had what looked like hair standing up all over it.

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It was about 5.5 meters long, about 2 meters wide, and about a meter high in the middle of it.

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There were a number of lobes. They looked almost like short arms with notches in between.

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It smelled a lot like rotting tissue.

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It was pretty heavy. We tried pushing on it, it was solid.

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It was nothing that we could move.

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So what we did was we took our knives and we tried to cut up and cut into the tissue.

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As they cut into the carcass, they made a bizarre discovery.

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The exterior of it was very hard, it was quite tough, but there was no sign of any organs.

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If it was a shark, there'd be cartilage, but there was no cartilage.

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So we looked for a bone. If it was a whale, there'd be some bone in it, but none of this either.

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We spent a lot of time trying to decide what we thought it might be.

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Of course, as a scientist, you're very curious, and in fact, as a scientist to me,

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as somebody who's curious about what they see.

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And of course, we were very curious as to what this might be.

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So we decided that the best thing to do would be to take some tissue with it,

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and we brought that back with us.

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It seemed Gary and the fisherman had discovered a creature unknown to science.

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It was nothing that I'd ever seen or could imagine.

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It's not impossible that there's something out there that we haven't seen before that's lurking in the depths.

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A giant creature washes up in Niflilon.

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Was it an unknown species or a monster from the deep?

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And if there was one, could there be others?

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Remarkably, the answer is yes.

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It's incredible.

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In the last century, giant weird blobs of...

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Ooh, I don't know what.

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They've been washing up all over the planet. Are they something awful from the bowels of ships?

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I hope not.

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In fact, it's so hard to identify that the only named scientist who could come up with is Glopsters.

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Part glob, part monster.

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Glopster, clever.

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But what the hell are they?

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Matthew Adele is a professor of anatomy.

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He believes the explanation is simple.

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It sounds like something very mysterious, something completely unknown to science.

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There are dozens of reports of Glopsters from around the world going back over a century.

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They're usually formless and they don't contain any bones.

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There's no evidence of a head or a tail or any limbs.

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They're just big, shapeless globs of flesh.

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But there's no evidence so far that they're anything other than dead whales.

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But if Glopsters are whales, how could tons of bones and internal organs be missing?

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Adele thinks the answer lies in one of the strongest elements in nature.

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Collagen.

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A protein found in whale skin.

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Collagen is similar to steel in terms of tensile strength.

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So it's one of the toughest substances known to man.

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If you feel the back of your heel, feel your Achilles tendon.

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That's a big rope of collagen the size of your finger.

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Now imagine something like that woven in overlapping belts around an animal 100 feet long

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and you get some idea of the strength of whale skin.

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It's just incredible.

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Scientists think protective collagen allows whales to dive up to two miles below the surface of the ocean.

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Many submarines would crush before they got down to that depth.

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Collagen is their pressure suit when they dive and their armor against things like sharks

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that would try to take bites out of them.

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Adele also believes collagen causes whales to decompose in a unique way.

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Decomposition for whales is an interesting process because whales are different from other animals in two ways mainly.

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The first is that they're so big, just their sheer scale influences how they decompose.

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The other thing is the skin of whales is unique in the animal kingdom.

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It's incredibly thick, it's incredibly strong.

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You can hang up the entire weight of a whale by a hook through its skin.

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When a whale dies, the skin doesn't fall apart the way that normal animal skin does.

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After death, scavengers rapidly devour the insides of a dead whale.

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But they leave the grisly collagen alone.

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Once animals have eaten their way into the body to get the good stuff,

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it's easy for the bones to slide right out and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

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The skin falls off like a sock off of a foot.

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And now you have a hundred foot long tube of skin floating through the ocean.

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But many globsters have tentacles, strange arms, even hair.

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Can Waddell's theory explain these bizarre features?

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Imagine the gnarliest piece of gristle you've ever encountered that's a hundred feet long and a foot thick.

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It lasts essentially forever.

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It's only broken up really by getting pounded on rocks and torn apart by waves.

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That sack of skin can float around in the ocean for months or maybe even years.

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It can rip, it can tear, it can shred into all kinds of interesting shapes.

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The collagen actually frays just like an old pair of pants.

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And those threads of collagen that stick out are usually pink or red and they look like hair.

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Are globsters simply giant blobs of collagen floating around in a suit of whale skin?

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Or are they beasts from the deep?

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I love a good mystery as much as the next person.

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And I would love to think that there are giant, unknown animals in the ocean.

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And there probably are some new kinds of sharks and maybe even new species of whales.

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But there's no real sea monster.

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As much as I would like to believe that there is, I have to go where the evidence leads.

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And so far, all of the evidence that we have suggests that globsters are just the rotting skin of dead whales.

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Are globsters simply masses of mammal meat?

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Some believe they are proof of something far more terrifying.

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Dr. Hans Larson is a paleontologist.

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He thinks globsters could be a living relic from our ancient past.

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The researchers who point to globsters and say they're nothing more than whales,

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they're probably right for most cases.

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But pretty much the entire ocean below 100 meters depth hasn't been explored.

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Some areas of the ocean are over six miles deep.

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Larson believes that a terrifying creature could be lurking in the depths.

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The megalodon.

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The megalodon is a huge fish.

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It looks a lot like a great white shark, but it's much bigger.

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It is known as the Tyrontosaurus Rex of the Deep,

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a monster that terrorized the ocean for 25 million years,

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and the right size for a globster.

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This is a tiger shark about 15 or so feet long.

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And look at the size of the teeth and the size of the mouth.

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It's pretty impressive.

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I mean, this would be scary enough in the water should you be in front of it.

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But compare that to a megalodon, and this is an average size tooth.

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It would absolutely be a monster.

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Most scientists believe this marine monster became extinct one and a half million years ago.

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But remarkably, Larson isn't so sure.

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Some people have suggested that the cooling of the ocean

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may have driven megalodon to extinction.

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I think we should be a little bit skeptical about that,

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because all the other animals in the ocean survived quite well.

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And if that whole ecosystem could survive the global cooling of the oceans and the ice ages,

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why not megalodon?

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Could science be wrong?

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Do giant killers work in oceans?

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Are they monsters of the deep, or just globs of super strength blubber?

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Weird, what?

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Music

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In India, a rampaging man-beast causes widespread panic in the nation's capital.

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It's cream and cry and runoff.

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You know, it is absolutely panic.

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Are scientists creating man-made monsters?

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You know, when it comes to trying to prove there's no such thing as monsters, there's one big problem.

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There's just no hard evidence. They never seem to hang around long enough.

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But what if we're looking in the wrong places?

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What if instead of creepy shadows or deep dark corners of our imagination,

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the monsters we're looking for are right under our noses?

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What if we're the ones creating them?

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Sanal Indamaruku is a journalist.

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He was in Delhi in the summer of 2001,

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and witnessed one of the most bizarre events in its long history.

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It was very, very warm.

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The temperatures went up to 48 degrees Celsius with enormous humidity,

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which made life unbearable.

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Nobody could sleep in home, especially poor sections of the bibi town.

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A lot of people have been sleeping on the rooftop.

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As thousands of people try to escape the heat,

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they have no idea a six-week reign of terror is about to begin.

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Two factory workers said that they have been sleeping on the factory balcony in the evening,

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and suddenly some strange creature jumped from the floor to the second floor,

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scratched them, attacked them, screamed and burned them.

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In a city home to thousands of monkeys,

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at first the attacks seemed unremarkable,

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until the victims described what they had seen.

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They said that it had two, three special things, metallic rows,

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then there's special lights coming from its forehead, one green and the other red,

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and these lights were moving and it scratched,

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and there's special whistling sounds and this was the end.

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It was like a wildfire, it spread everywhere, people had been speaking about this creature.

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What had attacked the workers?

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Within 24 hours, the newspapers give the creature a name, the Monkey Man.

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All the victims describe the same thing,

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a hairy creature with metallic claws and strange lights.

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00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:39,000
Everybody has been speaking about this special kind of movement that it has,

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it's controlled by somebody.

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Some people said that it could be a half-man-hab robot,

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and especially created by the neighboring country of Pakistan to make trouble in India.

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Then comes a new twist.

401
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As rumors were heard,

402
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the police have been investigating the crime of the police,

403
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:02,000
and then comes a new twist.

404
00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:05,000
As rumors grow, so does the panic.

405
00:33:05,000 --> 00:33:09,000
Just two weeks after the first sighting of the Monkey Man,

406
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the entire city of New Delhi is besieged by terror.

407
00:33:14,000 --> 00:33:16,000
So many people have been injured.

408
00:33:16,000 --> 00:33:23,000
Initially, every night, we had five to six people got attacked by the Monkey Man

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with scratches, bruises and other body damages,

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and the number increased.

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Later, per night, there were 120, 130 people got attacked by the Monkey Man,

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and there were more than 800 people hospitalized at different parts of the time.

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Then, tragedy strikes.

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One lady was on a rooftop sleeping,

415
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and someone saw the Monkey Man, screamed,

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and the whole people started running off.

417
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She had been running off,

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and she fallen down from the second floor,

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straight down to the floor, and she died.

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00:34:02,000 --> 00:34:06,000
In the following days, more people died as crowds rushed to escape.

421
00:34:06,000 --> 00:34:11,000
As panic grows, New Delhi becomes a ghost town.

422
00:34:13,000 --> 00:34:15,000
People were so afraid to come out,

423
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the Delhi streets were completely empty after the book.

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Totally empty.

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Not where the car would go out.

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The whole city was completely afraid of Monkey Man.

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00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:31,000
Then, just as the terror reaches its peak, the incredible happens.

428
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There was no Monkey Man reported anywhere after third or fourth week of May,

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and it simply disappeared.

430
00:34:39,000 --> 00:34:42,000
What happened in New Delhi?

431
00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:47,000
Something held this giant city in its fearful grip for weeks.

432
00:34:48,000 --> 00:34:50,000
Was it a monster?

433
00:34:50,000 --> 00:34:53,000
Could the Monkey Man be real?

434
00:34:55,000 --> 00:34:59,000
Jay Lakhani is a teacher of the Hindu religion.

435
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:04,000
He believes the Monkey Man can be explained by Indian culture.

436
00:35:06,000 --> 00:35:10,000
There is nothing here that would make me feel that there is anything more

437
00:35:10,000 --> 00:35:13,000
than superstition, kind of rolled up with fear,

438
00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:16,000
and rolled up with the idea of religious iconography,

439
00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:18,000
which has kind of produced this story.

440
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The county thinks that powerful religious beliefs could have helped create the Monkey Man.

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00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:31,000
In the Hindu tradition, the word avatar is very central.

442
00:35:31,000 --> 00:35:33,000
Avatar means one who descends.

443
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The Hindus say the spirit is a habit of descending to earth in human form.

444
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In the Hindu religion, gods known as avatars are believed to descend to earth in times of need.

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Many are depicted as part human, part animal.

446
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Was the Monkey Man a well-meaning avatar that was mistaken for something evil?

447
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:01,000
India is a poor country struggling with lots of issues,

448
00:36:01,000 --> 00:36:06,000
so it's understandable that the public would like to project the idea that an avatar is here to rescue them.

449
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Any sober Hindu, when he looks at the story in a very sober manner,

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will immediately come to the conclusion that this was not an avatar.

451
00:36:13,000 --> 00:36:16,000
It's not just my take on it, but every sober Hindu,

452
00:36:16,000 --> 00:36:20,000
no sober Hindu would really consider this to be an avatar,

453
00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:24,000
because there is nothing that the monkey has done which reflects what an avatar is all about.

454
00:36:24,000 --> 00:36:27,000
It is to benefit humanity, not frighten it.

455
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:31,000
You see, a lay person is very gullible.

456
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:35,000
I suspect it is quite possible that a few pranksters go together,

457
00:36:35,000 --> 00:36:39,000
dressed up as a couple of monkeys, and set them loose on the streets of New Delhi.

458
00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:43,000
For a lay person who is kind of steeped in religious tradition,

459
00:36:43,000 --> 00:36:46,000
it is understandable that suddenly when he sees a few pranksters,

460
00:36:46,000 --> 00:36:51,000
he somehow projects his own idea that this is an avatar on the streets of New Delhi.

461
00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:56,000
Were thousands of New Delhi residents, victims of pranks,

462
00:36:56,000 --> 00:37:00,000
blown out of proportion by widely held religious beliefs?

463
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:03,000
Did the Monkey Man exist at all?

464
00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:06,000
I don't think the Monkey Man existed at all.

465
00:37:06,000 --> 00:37:10,000
I think all these things combined with a few real monkeys jumping about,

466
00:37:10,000 --> 00:37:13,000
and perhaps some pranksters getting into the act,

467
00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:18,000
is the reason why we have got this story developing in India as an avatar, coming down to Earth.

468
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:21,000
So is that the end of this mystery?

469
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:23,000
Maybe not.

470
00:37:24,000 --> 00:37:28,000
Could Monkey Man be a product of the human imagination in a different way?

471
00:37:28,000 --> 00:37:34,000
Not a religiously inspired delusion, but a manifestation of the dark side of science.

472
00:37:35,000 --> 00:37:43,000
Recently, declassified documents hinted some kind of twisted Soviet genetic experiment.

473
00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:50,000
Was the Monkey Man a secret weapon that escaped the evil lab of a mad scientist that spawned him?

474
00:37:52,000 --> 00:37:54,000
Is that weird?

475
00:37:56,000 --> 00:37:58,000
Or what?

476
00:37:59,000 --> 00:38:06,000
In New Delhi, thousands of people claim to have been attacked by a metal-clawed monster known as the Monkey Man.

477
00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:09,000
Was it simply mass hysteria?

478
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:12,000
Or religious superstition?

479
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:17,000
Scott Marlin is a cryptozoologist with a remarkable theory.

480
00:38:19,000 --> 00:38:21,000
I believe monsters exist.

481
00:38:21,000 --> 00:38:29,000
They may not necessarily be the Saturday or Friday night movie version of the monsters that terrify us on the silver screen,

482
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:35,000
but there are things out there that go bump in the night that are terrifying to say the least.

483
00:38:37,000 --> 00:38:41,000
When I first heard the story of India's Monkey Man, I was pretty certain I knew exactly what it was.

484
00:38:42,000 --> 00:38:46,000
Marlin's theory is controversial and alarming.

485
00:38:47,000 --> 00:38:53,000
He thinks the Monkey Man is a real-life monster created by us.

486
00:38:54,000 --> 00:39:00,000
Monsters exist, and we certainly have the ability now with genetic engineering to create them.

487
00:39:01,000 --> 00:39:07,000
Based on some of the descriptions, there's a distinct possibility that Monkey Men could be some kind of human ape hybrid.

488
00:39:08,000 --> 00:39:13,000
Could someone have created a creature half-man, half-ape?

489
00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:15,000
And if so, why?

490
00:39:16,000 --> 00:39:25,000
Declassified Russian military vials have allegedly revealed that in the 1920s, Joseph Stalin secretly tried to create a super-soldier.

491
00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:33,000
The super-soldier is a genetically engineered creature that is designed with a military purpose in mind.

492
00:39:34,000 --> 00:39:52,000
Stalin commissioned a scientist to attempt a hybridization who went to Africa, collected ape DNA, and then attempted to impregnate human women with the sperm of the chimps that he collected the material from.

493
00:39:53,000 --> 00:39:58,000
They were trying to create a soldier that had superhuman strength.

494
00:39:58,000 --> 00:40:06,000
They wanted the strength of an ape, which is known to be about seven times that of a human, with the intelligence of a human.

495
00:40:08,000 --> 00:40:14,000
Incredibly, Marlin believes Stalin wasn't the only one who was messing with nature.

496
00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:18,000
Not to be outdone by the Russians, we attempted to do the same thing.

497
00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:23,000
The attempt was not successful by all accounts.

498
00:40:23,000 --> 00:40:28,000
But a lot of that had to do with the lack of knowledge on the genetics.

499
00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:31,000
Today it could probably be done.

500
00:40:32,000 --> 00:40:38,000
Are scientists using modern technology to create super-soldiers from humans and apes?

501
00:40:39,000 --> 00:40:41,000
Could this explain the Monkey Man?

502
00:40:42,000 --> 00:40:56,000
Some of the evidence that the Monkey Man is a human ape hybrid could be that they are frequently reported wearing some sort of helmet or flashing lights and that kind of thing, which would probably be some sort of communications device.

503
00:40:57,000 --> 00:41:01,000
The most alarming feature that's reported are metal claws.

504
00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:04,000
That seems more of a military weapon.

505
00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:21,000
If such experimentation were going on and these creatures were intelligent enough, as presumably they would be, to escape from the facility that was creating them, they could certainly account for the Monkey Man.

506
00:41:22,000 --> 00:41:25,000
Was the Monkey Man an escaped super-soldier?

507
00:41:27,000 --> 00:41:32,000
And why, in an age of predator groans and nuclear bombs, would India need one?

508
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:49,000
Creating a super-soldier using hybridization genetics would probably be a good solution for a country like India, where, yeah, they belong to the nuclear club, but it's not a very popular solution to solving one's problems as a country.

509
00:41:50,000 --> 00:41:55,000
A super-soldier might be engineered for stealth purposes.

510
00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:03,000
They could pursue this type of a thing, especially since in India, monkeys and apes running around are not at all unusual.

511
00:42:04,000 --> 00:42:17,000
They could infiltrate, they could blend in, they could perform a number of different things in terms of intelligence gathering or otherwise performing some sort of military function without going detected.

512
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:23,000
Was a hybrid man-ape let loose on the streets of New Delhi?

513
00:42:24,000 --> 00:42:30,000
Are we creating man-made monsters? Weird or what?

514
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:38,000
Join me again next time for more stories that will undoubtedly be weird or what.