History
Frank Melland describes the creature in his 1923 book "In Witchbound Africa." The kongamato is said to live around certain rivers and is considered very dangerous. [6] [7] [8] It often attacks boats and anyone who bothers it. It is said to be red or black, with a wingspan of 1.20 m to 2.10 m. Members of the Kaonde tribe, after seeing an image in Melland's book, determined that the creature looked exactly like a pterosaur. [9]
Two years later, the press correspondent J. Ward Price reported from England on an eerie encounter. He was traveling with the future King Edward VIII in the then British colonies in Africa. During this trip, they met a local man who had ventured deep into the dreaded Jiundu Marshes. It seemed a miracle that this man had escaped with his life at all, as he had been attacked and severely injured there. According to him, the gaping wound on his back had been inflicted by a large bird that had attacked him in the marshes. It was striking that the injured man claimed the bird had had terrifying teeth in its beak. When the injured man was later shown pictures of prehistoric pterosaurs, he fled in panic. [10]
In 1932, naturalist Gerald Russell and anomalist and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson claimed to have sighted a kongamato together in Cameroon. [11] Further sightings were reported by engineer J.P.F. Brown from Zaire in 1956 and by a married couple named Gregor from Southern Rhodesia. [12]
In 1957, a man with severe chest injuries appeared in the hospital in the area where Brown also claimed to have seen his pterosaurs. He stated that he had been attacked by a large bird in the Bangweulu Swamps. When the doctors asked him to draw the attacker, he sketched the outline of a pterosaur. An alleged photograph of a kongamato also surfaced in the late 1950s, but this was later proven to be a fake.
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
