fuzzy, and their tape recording of the “roaring trumpeting noise” heard frequently around Lake Tele, was impossible to identify.
In 1986, Rory Nugent was in the Likouala Swamp near Lake Tele when he saw a long, thin neck come up out of the water. The creature gave every appearance of being a dinosaur. Nugent immediately took two photographs of the monster before it submerged.
Nugent’s moment of triumph was dashed when he was stopped from re-entering his canoe by the rifles of his guides. They ordered him to destroy the film or they would take the camera from him. Angrily, they made their point perfectly clear that if he did not do so at once, the great creature would pursue them and kill all of them before they could leave the lake.
Reluctantly, Nugent yielded to their demands. He was well aware that the Mokele-mbembe was extremely aggressive and had been known to flip over canoes with its tail, then chomp down on the occupants with its huge teeth. Although the beast was said most often to be herbivorous, it also used its great tail to assist in tipping over an elephant or a hippopotamus.
Dr. Bill Gibbons, a zoologist who specializes in attempting to track down new species and has tracked the Mokele-mbembe, told the (London) Sunday Times [June 3, 1999] that he is certain that Mokele-mbembe exists. According to Dr. Gibbons, cryptozoologists had heard reports that hunters from the Kabonga tribe had killed a Mokele-mbembe and had tried to eat it. Its flesh proved inedible and the carcass was left to rot and be gnawed and pecked at by scavengers.
In 1996, zoologist Professor Michelle Gupton told the British press that she was attacked by a huge water monster as she investigated the shoreline of Lake Tele. According to Ms. Gupton, the brownish-gray creature about the size of an elephant suddenly rose out of the waters of the lake right in front of her. Awestruck, she reached out to touch its smooth skin.
That was a nearly fatal mistake on the part of the zoologist. The monster snapped at her with its huge teeth, slashing out a foot-long slice of skin on the side of her stomach.
Ms. Gupton said that she passed out from the pain and was later rescued by members of her party who had been searching the surrounding jungle for signs of Mokele-mbembe. She was rushed to a hospital where her wound was treated. In her considered opinion, her experience proves that dinosaurs are far from extinct.
In the mid-1930s, a high school student at Frederick, South Dakota, Don Neff, found some strange looking teeth on the banks of the Elm River. After doing some investigating, the inquisitive student found the remains of a giant 28-foot marine lizard buried in the shale and mud along the river.
When brought to his attention, Professor James Bump, director of the museum of the State School of Mines, in Rapid City, South Dakota, said that the remains had probably been there for “several million years.” Professor Bump had his degree in metallurgy, but as director of the museum, he was becoming increasingly interested in the discovery of such fossils as the high school boy had brought to him. Bump’s first estimate of “several million years” for the marine creature was later revised when the species was identified as a mosasaur, which had been supposedly extinct for 130 million years.
Prof. Bump’s excavation was considered a great archeological find, and in 1940 he and his associates made an important collection of Whitneyan fossils from south of the White River and east of Rockyford under the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society.
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