MAJOR GENERAL MIKHAIL STEPHANOVITCH TOPILSKI

While it was not research, the Russian army and this officer had an extraordinary encounter with the creature called Almasty. There seem to be several versions of what happened in 1925 and I will tell them all.

Major General Mikhail Stephanovitch Topilski was the commander of a cavalry regiment in the Red Army during the Civil War after the Communist Revolution of 1917. In 1925, he and his men were given the task of hunting down anti-Communist forces in the Pamir Mountains southwest of the Tien Shan. They encountered more than just fighting men.


Version the first :  The army had been tracking a group of 12 plus fugitives, or "bandits" as they called them. While following the trail, the men heard gunshots, followed by three of the fugitives running towards them. The army opened fire, killed two and wounded the third.


The wounded man was an Uzbek from Samarkand. When he was questioned, he explained that the three had not been attacking the army. He claimed that they were fleeing from gigantic hairy men armed with clubs. Topilski expressed his skepticism so the man took him to where the fight had occurred. Outside of a cave next to a glacier were the bodies of five of the wounded man's companions and the body of a hairy giant.

The body had three bullet wounds. Lying next to it was a stick made of very hard wood. At first the body was thought to be that of an ape, as it was covered in hair. However, remembering that there were no apes in the Pamirs and that the body looked very human, a closer examination was made. The army doctor was included in this. There was no clothing or covering on the body except for the natural hair.  The doctor (who was later killed in combat) measured and further inspected the body. He announced that the creature was not human.

It was a male, 5' 8" tall, looked to be elderly, and was a brownish color with patches of greyish hair. The hair was longer but sparser on the chest, and short and thick in the stomach area. Mostly, the hair was very thick and without any undercoat. There was less hair on the buttocks. The doctor stated that from the shape, the creature sat like a human would. There was more hair on the hips. The knees were completely bare of hair, calloused. The entire foot was hairless and covered with hard brown skin.

It's hair was thinner near the hand and the palms had no hair on them, calloused like the knees. The face was a dark color, no beard or mustache. The temples were bald; the back of the head was covered by thick, matted hair. It lay with open eyes and teeth bared. The eyes were dark and the teeth large and even-shaped like human teeth. The forehead was slanted; the eyebrows "powerful". The jawbones were protruding, resembling a Mongol type of face. The nose was flat with a deeply sunk bridge. Ears were hairless and looked a little more pointed than usual with humans and with a longer lobe.

The chest was massive and looked powerful. The body had well-developed muscles. Genitalia resembled a human male's. The arms were of normal length, the hands slightly wider and the feet much wider and shorter than a man's. There were no important anatomical differences between it and a man.

Version the second : Topilski was leading his men on an assault on an anti-Soviet guerilla force (White Russian Army). They were following the information given them that these men were hiding in a cave high in the Pamirs. They were also told tales of a "beast-man" who lived in the higher areas of the Vanch.

Soon they came upon the cave that looked to be the reported stronghold of the guerilla force. Topilski ordered his men to open fire, aiming into the cave's opening. They were shocked when a hairy creature emerged, crying out, and falling under the hail of bullets. It lay there, mortally wounded. After a few minutes, Topilski and some of his men finally approached the lifeless body.

There is no mention of how Topilski and his army routed the guerilla force, but one of the survivors while questioned told of how they were hiding in the cave, and were attacked by several apelike creatures. Topilski ordered the cave searched; they found the body of one of the creatures. It is unclear whether he now had two bodies of the creatures or only one. But Topilski speaks as if there were only one creature to be examined.

"At first glance I thought the body was that of an ape. It was covered with hair all over. But I knew there were no apes in the Pamirs. Also, the body itself looked very much like that of a man. We tried pulling the hair, to see if it was just a hide used for disguise, but found that it was the creature's own natural hair. We turned the body over several times on its back and its front, and measured it."

He continued : "The body belonged to a male creature 165-170 cm [about 5 1/2 feet] tall, elderly or even old, judging by the grayish color of the hair in several places. The chest was covered with brownish hair and the belly with grayish hair. The hair was longer but sparser on the chest and close-cropped and thick on the belly. In general the hair was very thick, without any under fur. There was least hair on the buttocks, from which fact our doctor deduced that the creature sat like a human being. There was most hair on the hips. The knees were completely bare of hair and had callous growths on them. The whole foot including the sole was quite hairless and was covered by hard brown skin. The hair got thinner near the hand, and the palms had none at all but only callous skin."

"The color of the face was dark, and the creature had neither beard nor mustache. The temples were bald and the back of the head was covered by thick, matted hair. The dead creature lay with its eyes open and its teeth bared. The eyes were dark and the teeth were large and even and shaped like human teeth. The forehead was slanting and the eyebrows were very powerful. The protruding jawbones made the face resemble the Mongol type of face. The nose was flat, with a deeply sunk bridge. The ears were hairless and looked a little more pointed than a human being's with a longer lobe. The lower jaw was very massive. The creature had a very powerful chest and well developed muscles. The arms were of normal length, the hands were slightly wider and the feet much wider and shorter than man's."

Version the third : This one begins as did Version Two, but includes the doctor's and the men's reactions along with Topilski's, and has no mention of a surviving guerilla's telling of attacks by apelike men. There is no entering the cave and discovering the body of an ape man.

The doctor would later write in his report : "he didn't look totally like a man, but it was not an ape either. It was a male, about two meters tall, (6 ft 7 inches) covered with dark brown hair and the face was dark, distinctly ape-like." What was it? Could the wild thing they had shot have been the Russian Kaptar we hear about today?

Every man questioned agreed that the creature ran from the cave on two feet, fully upright, dazed, terrified, and fatally injured. Some added it appeared to be confused and in pain as it fell. They said, being unable to carry the body with them, they buried it under a stone covered cairn near the cave's mouth.

Version the fourth : This one contained a slightly different description of the creature.

"The corpse that of a male, was about five and a half feet long and covered with dense grayish-brown hair except for the face, ears, palms, knees, feet and buttocks. (There were shaggy hairs on the upper lip). The skin on the hands, knees and feet was thickly callused. The face was dark with dark eyes, a heavy and massive lower jaw. Although the teeth were quite large, they seemed to be those of a human. The creature had a broad unusually muscular chest, but otherwise its torso was much like that of a man."

In this version, the creature was again buried under a pile of stones.

We will never quite know exactly what Major General Topilski and his men encountered that day at that mountain cave. The differences in the stories are to be expected when the tales are told years later by older memories, perhaps from those who wished to forget what they had witnessed that day.

Nancy

"I'll spark the thought; what you do with it is up to you."

RUSSIAN RESEARCH -- PART TWO

Many independent researchers made their way into the remote areas of Russia; some with the intention of studying the strange man-like, hairy creatures, and others who ran across them while traveling or while conducting their other research.

K.A. Satunin was a leading student of vertebrates in the Caucasus. He had an accidental encounter in the Talyish Mountains. He discovered a female "Biaban-Guli", which was the name used by the southern Causasus people. When he reached a nearby settlement, he tried to obtain more information on these hairy, man-like animals who appeared unable to speak.

In 1959, Y.I. Merezhinski was a senior lecturer in Anthropology and Ethnography at Kiev University. While in Azerbaijan, he was taken to a place where a "Kaptar" was known to come to drink.  He had promised his guide that he would only photograph it but encountered anger when he instead attempted to shoot it. His shot missed and his guide was no longer helpful. The creature was thin and it's body covered in hair. This matched the descriptions the local people had given.

Jumping back in history, N.A. Baikov, an eminent zoologist, met with a Manchurian hunter in 1914. The hunter was accompanied by an assistant, a "half-man", hairy being who walked stooped over and was unable to talk. Although Baikov expressed amazement at seeing such a creature, he did not give any more detail of it. However, the basic description he did give seems to match the descriptions of the "wild men" of the area.

A partial list of quick sightings and encounters include :

1941 : V.S. Karapetian, a physician, examined a male "wild man" in Daghestan.

1925 : M.S. Topilski, an army general, described in detail an examination made of a 'wild man' accidently killed in the Pamirs. (this report in detail next post).

1937 : Marshal P.S. Rybalko, commanding an army unit in Sinkiang reported catching a "wild man" in the marshes.

1937 : G.N. Kolpashnikov, a soldier, saw and described two "wild men" that had been accidently killed by a sentry.

1906 : B. Baradin, an explorer from St. Petersburg, encountered a creature at close range during an expedition.

1905 : Knight, a British 'adventurer' while returning from Tibet had a sighting.

1906 : H.J. Elwes, British botanist, also had a sighting.

1925 : Tombazi, and Italian topographer saw a 'wild man' in the mountains of Sikkim.

1957 : A.G. Pronin, a hydrologist, reported his sighting while in the Pamirs.

1942 : M.M. Bespalko, an artist, also had a sighting in the Pamirs.

1934 : B.M. Zdorik, geologist, saw one sound asleep in the mountains of Tajikistan.

1948 : M.A. Stronin, geologist, Tien Shans region. It seemed to become frightened and ran across a nearby slope.

1948 : A.P. Agafanov, geological engineer, while in Tien Shans, was shown a family relic - a cut-off and dried-out hand of a 'wild man'. The back of the hand was covered with brown hair.

1954 : Professor Hoy Vai-Loo, Chinese historian, claimed to have captured a kind of "wild man" while in a mountain village in the Shansi province. He used the creature for simple labor.

1950 : N.Y. Serikova, Russian livestock specialist, had just started his new job in the Karbarda, Caucasus and not yet heard any local stories of the "Almasti".  He had no idea what he witnessed from a short distance, but his detailed description identified it as one of the Almasti.

Next post : Major General Mikhail Topilski




Nancy


"I'll spark the thought; what you do with it is up to you."

RUSSIAN RESEARCH

When most people think of the possibility of sasquatch-type creatures on the other side of the world, they immediately think "Yeti." However, there is much more information out there by the Russians than anything from the Himalayas. Only problem is that not much of it is widely publicized in English.

There are some publications, some authors that will publish translations. And with internet programs available that will translate, if the material is on the internet, you can get some idea of what is being said.


John Green was frustrated by the apparent unavailability of information from those countries. So for years he corresponded with Professor B.F. Porshnev, Igor Bourtsev, and Dmitri Bayanov of the Hominid Problem Seminar at Moscow. Green had some articles translated but found the translation not easy to follow and he made an attempt to paraphrase what Porshnev wrote and hoped he did not distort or confuse what he was trying to say.


First off, the group used names for the creatures that Green was not comfortable using as they carried the concept of primitive man. Green felt that might give people a one-sided view of the evidence offered. But he was equally uncomfortable using the term Sasquatch if there were any possibility that the Russian creatures were something different.


The name that this group preferred was Homo troglodytes. This was also the name that Karl Linnaeus  used to label the two creatures he studied more than two centuries before the Russian study. Linnaeus talked of these creatures that resembled man physically but yet were hair covered and lacked speech. "Troglodyte" is generally taken to mean "cave man" but scientifically also can be used to mean the Anthropoid apes. John Green used the term Troglodyte with that understanding.


When Linnaeus explored the alleged novelty of the two creatures, he was amazed that people were getting so excited over monkeys while natural scientists were ignoring the troglodytes as if they did not exist. -- Ah, yes. Somethings never change.


The Mongolian scientist T. Jamtsarano and his investigation into the manlike creatures in Mongolia was discussed in an earlier post. V.A. Khakhlov was unaware of Jamtsarano's work when he began gathering information between 1907 and 1914 in the Tien Shan region of Mongolia.


He learned quite a bit of the creature "Kshee-guiek", as the Khazastan people called them. So he wrote to the Russian Academy of Science on June 1, 1914, renaming the creature Primihomo Asiaticus.


Jamtsarano and Khakhlov researched and reached their conclusions independently of each other. But both established that the natives of the regions believed in the existence of similar creatures. They agreed concerning habitat, appearance, and behaviors. It would be difficult to believe that in two different regions of central Asia that such similar folklore could be so alike. And have descriptions that would match fossils discovered at a later time. Fossils that neither the people nor Jamtsarano or Khakhlov were aware existed.


Later, Mongolian professor G.P. Dementiev and others would carry out extensive field research. They obtained more precise anatomical, morphological and biological information.


P.P. Sushkin, being inspired by the evidence found by Khakhlov and other travellers throughout Central Asia, conducted further academic research. His conclusions were that transformation from ape to man took place in the high mountains of Central Asia, passing through the intermediate form of an upright-walking animal. However, he restricted his research to information gathered from a limited region of Central Asia which caused the arrival at this mistaken theory.


However, it is interesting in itself that the Russian research approached the problem as being more related to man than ape. Western European scientists on the other hand, researching in Nepal and the Himalayas, looked at the creature first as relating to bear and then to ape. Not to man.




frontiersofzoology.com

More from Porshnev and the Russians in a later post.

Nancy


"I'll spark the thought; what you do with it is up to you."

MURPHYSBORO MUD MONSTER aka "BIG MUDDY MONSTER" - ILLINOIS

In the summer of 1973, Illinois became the center of bigfoot activity. For two weeks the Murphysboro Mud Monster, also called  Big Muddy Monster, struck fear into the residents' hearts.

It began around midnight June 25, 1973. A young couple, Randy Needham and Judy Johnson, had parked near the boat ramp on the Big Muddy River near the city of Murphysboro. As they sat there, they heard a strange, roaring cry that came from the nearby woods. They looked towards the trees and saw a huge shape coming toward them, continuing to make the cry. When it got within 20 ft of their car, they realized that this was a 7 ft tall creature with matted, whitish hair or fur streaked with mud from the river. Knowing that this was "something not human", they fled to the police station.

Officers Meryl Lindsay and Jimmie Nash were sent to check out their story. They found a number of footprints in the mud that were approximately 10-12 in. long and approximately 3 in. wide. They returned to the station.

At 2:00 am Lindsay, Nash and Officer Bob Scott and Needham returned to the area again. They found even more tracks in the area. Lindsay left to get a camera. The others began to follow the tracks that were leading along the river. Suddenly about 100 yards away, the men heard a scream. They didn't wait to see what had made it but fled quickly back to the patrol car. After a while, when everything remained quiet, they emerged from the car and began to investigate. The men spent the rest of the night trying to track down a "splashing sound" heard in the distance. When they left at daylight, everything was quiet.

The next night, the creature returned. It's not quite clear the timing of the sightings, but one witness was a 4 yr old boy, Christian Baril, who informed his parents that he had just seen a "big white ghost in the yard". The parents did not believe him at that time.

Randy Creath and Cheryl Ray were sitting on the back porch of her house at around 10:30 pm. They heard something moving in the woods near the river. When it emerged they saw a muddy, white creature staring at them. Cheryl insisted that it had glowing, pink eyes. She claimed they glowed; it was not reflected light. They estimated it at 350 lbs and 7 ft. tall, with a rounded head and long ape-like arms.

Ray  turned the porch light on and Creath went towards the woods for a closer look. The creature seemed not to care and ambled off into the woods. They called the police. The Baril's, upon speaking with the investigators, now realized that their son had really seen something in the yard and shared their information with the police.

Large footprints were found, along with broken tree branches and crushed undergrowth. There was also a strong odor that then faded. Officers Jimmie Nash and Ronald Manwaring were among those checking this story. Manwaring started following the footpath through the woods. He noticed the stench and a slimy film on the tree branches. "I saw this substance and smelled the smell myself," said Manwaring.

They brought in Jerry Nellis and his German Shepherd dog, trained to search and track. The dog tracked the creature through the woods, down a hill to a small pond. Eventually the trees and underbrush became too thick for the dog and Nellis to get through and the dog was pulled from the track. As the officers searched the area with flashlights, the dog appeared to find another part of the trail and proceeded to lead them to an abandoned barn. Once there, the dog refused to go into the barn, remaining outside shaking with fear and barking. The officers finally entered the barn only to find it empty. The search was called off for the night.

There were two more encounters reported to the police that summer. On July 4th, some traveling carnival workers claimed to have seen the monster looking at their Shetland ponies. On July 7th, Mrs. Nedra Green heard screaming coming from a shed on her farm. She did not investigate it.

Jerry Nellis maintained that "in my opinion . . . we were tracking a bear." He then added, "We never got a good view of any tracks. Is there a Sasquatch? I don't know -- it makes for a good story, though."

Police Chief Toby Berger summed it up. "A lot of things in life are unexplained, and this is another one. We don't know what the creature is, but we do believe what these people saw was real."

Nancy

"I'll spark the thought; what you do with it is up to you."