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

Met some interesting people, done some crazy things.

So you just might think that there's not much that

can take me by surprise.

You'd be wrong.

The world is full of stories and science and

things that amaze and confound me every single day,

incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night.

Some I can answer.

Others just defy logic.

NARRATOR: Do monsters exist?

In West Virginia, a town is terrorized by

a seven-foot winged demon.

Did it cause the death of 46 people?

LOREN COLEMAN: It had two huge black wings

and no head, no arms.

NARRATOR: In Newfoundland, a macabre creature washes

up on a local beach.

Are our oceans concealing a mega beast?

GARRY STENSON: It was nothing that either of us

had ever seen or could imagine.

NARRATOR: And in New Delhi, thousands

are attacked by a metal-clawed monster.

Was it a man or a beast?

SANAL EDAMARAKU: People ran off in absolute panic.

They just were fleeing from the scene.

WILLIAM SHATNER: Yeah, it's a weird world.

And I love it.

[♪]

WILLIAM SHATNER: You know I just had a lovely

holiday in Scotland.

Edinburgh Castle, bagpipes - the whole deal.

Even went to Loch Ness where Nessie, the famous

Loch Ness monster, is supposed to live.

We got on this boat, went out on the loch,

searching for hours.

Then guess what I saw?

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Total waste of time and six bucks!

Are monsters nothing more than bait to lure gullible tourists?

Do things like Yeti, Big Foot and Chupacabra exist?

I've got news for you -

they just might.

NARRATOR: Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

Nearly 50 years ago, this sleepy farming town was

brutally awoken by a series of monstrous events

that are still a mystery today.

Loren Coleman is an author.

He documented the incidents,

which began on the night of November 15th, 1966,

when two young couples took a drive.

LOREN COLEMAN: Roger and Linda Scarberry and the

Malletts were driving around in the old TNT area.

It was called TNT because that's where dynamite

was stored during World War II.

NARRATOR: Secluded and dark, TNT was also

a well-known Lovers' Lane.

But instead of fun, the four teenagers are

about to encounter a living nightmare

LOREN COLEMAN: All of a sudden they see this creature.

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

It's having glowing red eyes in its chest,

which are reflecting the headlights.

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

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

They started racing back to Point Pleasant and

the creature was in back of the car.

Really they felt it almost was touching both sides

of the highway.

Red glowing eyes, no arms, just these huge wings.

NARRATOR: Reaching speeds of one hundred miles an hour, the

chase continues until finally the creature disappears.

[♪]

Was there something unpleasant in Point Pleasant?

This remarkable story sends shockwaves through the town.

The media call the creature the Mothman.

Local resident Faye Leport was fourteen years old at the time.

Three days after the first sighting, she decided

to visit the scene for herself.

FAYE LEPORT: That's the road over there that we

drove down, me and my brother, to come out here

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

My brother said well I'm just gonna see uh if I can

find it and prove that it's just somebody in a

Halloween costume or something on wires or something.

As we got to the, the area my brother kept looking

past me to the window.

I said well, what is it?

What are you looking at? You know?

He said well don't look right now and he said but

there's something beside the car there by the window.

So he slammed the brakes on and just like it was

nothing just leaped right up on the car.

Even though it was dark, you could still see the eyes.

It had the features of a bird, combined with a human.

We were really scared and I was begging and crying

for my brother to go ahead and, and let's get out of here.

That's when I finally saw it open up its wings and

just flew off in the sky so pretty and it was gone.

NARRATOR: For the next year, the Mothman

terrorizes the people of Point Pleasant.

WITNESS 1 (ARCHIVE): We were coming up around here

and we looked around the thing, around the curb

there and we thought it was a car light so we stopped

the car and the thing came over top of the car.

WITNESS 2 (ARCHIVE): Well I just think it's

something supernatural that we can't explain or

something like that.

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

NARRATOR: They wonder where it will all end.

Thirteen months after the first sighting,

they get their answer.

LOREN COLEMAN: The Silver Bridge, between

West Virginia and Ohio starting at Point Pleasant

collapsed on December 15th, 1967.

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

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

NARRATOR: There's seemingly no apparent

reason for this horrific tragedy.

Then comes a terrifying report.

The night before the disaster, the Mothman was

seen hanging from the Silver Bridge.

LOREN COLEMAN: And people were scared.

They were so scared they didn't want to talk about

the bridge, they didn't want to talk about

Mothman, they didn't want to talk about anything.

NARRATOR: The Mothman was never seen again.

For forty-five years, this incredible story has

baffled experts.

But some believe recent evidence could finally

explain the mystery of the Mothman.

Joe Nickell is a paranormal investigator

with Skeptical Inquirer science magazine.

JOE NICKELL: We human beings misperceive all the time.

People say I know what I saw.

Actually they know what they think they saw.

NARRATOR: Joe believes the Mothman wasn't quite the

monstrous beast it was made out to be.

JOE NICKELL: I believe the barred owl is the creature

that most clearly fits the bill.

NARRATOR: Was the Mothman simply an owl?

Nickell thinks the answer lies in Linda Scarberry's

first descriptions back in 1966.

JOE NICKELL: Her original description of Mothman is

of a very large winged creature.

She said it had no neck, virtually no real head,

just eyes, very large eyes, round and shining

like a bicycle reflector.

In the owl family there are different degrees of

what's called eye shine.

Among the most potent is that of the barred owl,

which has a deep crimson eye shine.

It's a large owl with big wingspan.

It would look like just eyes set at the top of a

body with wings up.

It flies in a silent moth-like flight.

It has pretty much exactly the characteristics of

Mothman original sightings.

NARRATOR: But does Nickell's theory explain the height?

Eyewitnesses reported a creature that was

six or seven feet tall.

JOE NICKELL: We know that people misperceive and

I'm quite confident that somebody looking and not

knowing what it is at night quickly and maybe

being frightened by it, I dare say I would misjudge

the distance and therefore misjudge the height.

So I would say this in summary.

If it looked like a barred owl and acted like

a barred owl and had red reflector eyes,

maybe it was a barred owl.

WILLIAM SHATNER: It's incredible, isn't it?

Here we have an entire town in fear of their

lives from something they can't explain - a creature

seven feet tall that can fly a hundred miles an

hour and maybe even bring down a bridge and they

blame it on this guy?

Don't get me wrong.

He's scary - if you're a field mouse.

Perhaps the real question here is why did so many

people think they saw a monster and even blame it

for the death of forty-six people?

Weird or what?

NARRATOR: A psychologist believes there is one sure

way to solve the mystery of the Mothman. Using fear.

JIM HOURAN: We are going to try to induce a mild case

of mass psychogenic illness

I feel like someone is following me.

NARRATOR: A mysterious winged creature called the

Mothman terrorizes a town in West Virginia.

Is it proof that monsters exist?

Jim Houran is a psychologist.

He believes the Mothman can be explained by a

phenomenon called MPI.

JIM HOURAN: 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.

Before you know it, you have a contagion effect,

whereby those social symptoms start spreading

in a large group of people.

NARRATOR: Was Mothman the result of a social contagion?

Houran believes he can prove his theory by

showing what might have happened in Point Pleasant.

JIM HOURAN: We're gonna try to induce a mild case

of mass psychogenic illness.

I've selected a group of volunteers.

I'm going to give them the suggestion that they're

gonna be visiting a very haunted place in the woods.

We're gonna take them out there and let their

imaginations take over.

JIM HOURAN: Was this fact?

Was this fiction?

NARRATOR: Houran begins by telling the group he needs

their help to solve a series of disturbing

paranormal incidents reported in the area.

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

JIM HOURAN: Stop please. Everyone fan out.

NARRATOR: They are told to turn off their flashlights.

From this point they can only be turned on when someone

thinks they experience something paranormal.

In just minutes, flashlights come on and

reports of paranormal activity flood in.

Houran believes the flashlights act as social

cues which influence the other members of the group.

VOLUNTEER: I felt a cold breeze before the wind

starting blowing.

JIM HOURAN: You felt a cold breeze?

Someone felt cold over there too.

VOLUNTEER 2: I feel like someone is following me,

and someone is trying to say something.

VOLUNTEER 3: I feel like electricity like

static on my face.

JIM HOURAN: Let me understand this.

Right here you feel like there's static electricity

on your face?

JIM HOURAN: As soon as one or two cues took hold,

then you start seeing a flurry of other

flashlights going on.

It percolated throughout the entire group, exactly

what we would expect with psychogenic illness in a group.

NARRATOR: Was the Mothman all in the minds of its victims?

And does this explain what eyewitnesses like

Faye Leport saw?

Ken Gerhard is a professional monster hunter.

He believes the best way to solve the Mothman

mystery is to hunt it down himself.

KEN GERHARD: For the past decades, I have gone out

and searched for hard physical evidence that

we share our world with creatures, legendary

beasts, things that have not been classified or

verified by scientists.

NARRATOR: Gerhard has come to the McClintic Wildlife

Reserve, close to where the Mothman was first sighted.

KEN GERHARD: It's very exciting to be here uh in

the actual location where Mothman was reported

so many times back in the 1960s.

If Mothman is a real physical animal,

it's gonna make an impact on its environment and this

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

NARRATOR: Using a camera trap, Gerhard is hoping

to catch Mothman unaware.

KEN GERHARD: This is actually

a motion-activated camera with an infrared beam and

anything that passes within that beam is

actually gonna be captured on this particular camera.

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.

NARRATOR: To attract his prey, Gerhard sets up

a 'Blasting Device' - a machine that broadcasts

the sound of forest creatures in pain.

[animal in pain sound]

KEN GERHARD: Many of the eyewitnesses said the

Mothman made kind of a squeaking mechanical mouse

sound and uh fortunately I have a little sound on here

called lip squeak and I think that's exactly what we need.

[animal squeaking sound]

[ruslting]

Did you hear that?

There's something moving around there in the brush.

I don't know what it was but basically that last

sound definitely evoked some type of response or reaction.

NARRATOR: With his equipment set,

it's now a waiting game.

Will the Mothman reveal himself?

WILLIAM SHATNER: I don't know about you,

but if I were a monster hunter, indeed if I were

hunting the Mothman, I think I'd be taking

something a little more substantial than this.

[squeak]

I mean at least I would think you'd take something

like this, wouldn't you?

But we have to ask the question if monsters

really exist, why has no one, monster hunter or not,

been able to catch one?

Then again, if monsters were just ordinary critters,

they wouldn't really be monsters, would they?

[squeak]

NARRATOR: Returning the next day, monster hunter Ken Gerhard

checks to see if he's found evidence of the Mothman.

KEN GERHARD: Huh. Well unfortunately it doesn't look

like we got anything on film.

I uh I may have been a little bit wrong about

the, the placement of this camera.

The lesson learned here is that monster hunting is

a very arduous and time consuming process and it

may take quite a, quite a bit of time before

we actually get an image of our quarry.

NARRATOR: The high tech approach has failed to

find anything, but Gerhard thinks he knows exactly

what Mothman is.

KEN GERHARD: I believe Mothman to be the product

of negative energy.

Consider for a moment the main location where

Mothman was encountered.

Many of the Native American tribes would

avoid this area completely because they believed it

to be haunted by monsters and evil spirits and then

you have the great curse of Chief Cornstalk,

the Shawnee Chief who on his deathbed, cursed the area

because the white men had betrayed him.

So in that respect, I believe Mothman to be the

accumulation of all of this negative energy,

perhaps brought to life by some type of mechanism far

beyond the realm of human comprehension.

NARRATOR: Was Mothman a bad omen that somehow

materialized in Point Pleasant?

Or could it simply have been mass hysteria

created by an owl?

Weird - or what?

[♪]

NARRATOR: A fisherman finds a giant unidentifiable creature

on a beach in Newfoundland.

GARRY STENSON: It was nothing that either of us

had ever seen or could imagine.

NARRATOR: Are monsters lurking in the deep?

WILLIAM SHATNER: Ah! Hey. Oooh.

You know I used to love fishing.

Nothing better than the thrill of landing a big one -

the ultimate challenge between man and beast.

But every now and then you catch something you're not expecting.

Strange things that make you wonder - what is

living in the depths of our oceans?

I don't know.

NARRATOR: In 2001, Garry Stenson was working as

a fisheries officer in Newfoundland, Canada when

he received the strangest phone call of his career.

GARRY STENSON: I got a call from a fisherman.

He was telling me about a creature on the beach that

had washed up.

He started to describe it to me and it sounded

unlike anything that I had encountered.

NARRATOR: Mystified, Garry decides to meet the

fisherman and investigate the strange sighting.

GARRY STENSON: It was a very isolated area and as

we came up to it we saw this large creature laying

on the beach itself.

I've never seen anything that looked like this.

There was nothing that looked like a head.

There was nothing that looked like any sort of

structure that we, that we could identify it.

NARRATOR: In over twenty years as a fisheries officer,

Garry thought he had seen it all - until now.

GARRY STENSON: I've worked on a lot of whales and

I've worked on a lot of seals and even some sharks

that have come ashore, but this creature was nothing

like that and there was nothing that we could tell

where it came from.

From a distance, it had what looked like hair,

standing up all over it.

It was about five and a half meters long, about

two meters wide and about a meter high in the middle of it.

There were a number of lobes.

They looked almost like short arms, with notches in between.

It smelled a lot like rotting tissue.

It was pretty heavy.

We tried pushing on it, it was solid.

It was nothing that we could move.

So what we did was we took our knives and we tried

to cut up and cut into the tissue.

NARRATOR: As they cut into the carcass, they made

a bizarre discovery.

GARRY STENSON: The exterior of it was very hard,

it was quite tough but there was no sign of any organs.

If it was a shark, there would be cartilage but

there was no cartilage.

So we looked for bone.

If it was a whale, there would be some bone in it,

but there was none of this either.

NARRATOR: It seemed Garry and the fisherman had

discovered a creature unknown to science.

GARRY STENSON: It was nothing that either of

us had ever seen or could imagine.

It's not impossible that there's something out there

that we haven't seen before that's lurking in the depths.

NARRATOR: A giant creature washes up in Newfoundland.

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

And if there was one, could there be others?

Remarkably, the answer is yes.

WILLIAM SHATNER: It's incredible.

In the last century, giant weird blobs of - ooh well

I dunno what - have been washing up all over the planet.

Are they something awful from the bowels of ships? I hope not.

In fact, they're so hard to identify that the only

name scientists could come up with is globsters.

Part glob, part monster.

Globster. Clever.

But what the hell are they?

NARRATOR: Mathew Wedel is a professor of anatomy.

He believes the explanation is simple.

MATHEW WEDEL: It sounds like something very

mysterious, something completely unknown to

science but there's no evidence so far that

they're anything other than dead whales.

NARRATOR: But if globsters are whales, how could tons

of bones and internal organs be missing?

Wedel thinks the answer lies in one of the

strongest elements in nature - collagen,

a protein found in whale skin.

MATHEW WEDEL: Collagen is similar to steel in terms

of tensile strength so it's one of the toughest

substances known to man.

If you feel the back of your heel, feel your

Achilles tendon, that's a big rope of collagen the

size of your finger.

Now imagine something like that woven in overlapping

belts around an animal a hundred feet long and you

get some idea of the strength of whale skin.

It's just incredible.

NARRATOR: Scientists think protective collagen allows

whales to dive up to two miles below the surface of the ocean.

MATHEW WEDEL: Many submarines would crush

before they got down to that depth.

Collagen is their pressure suit when they dive and

their armour against things like sharks that

would try to take bites out of them.

NARRATOR: Wedel also believes collagen causes

whales to decompose in a unique way.

MATHEW WEDEL: Decomposition for whales

is an interesting process.

When a whale dies, the skin doesn't fall apart

the way that normal animal skin does.

NARRATOR: After death, scavengers rapidly devour

the inside of a dead whale, but they leave the

gristly collagen alone.

MATHEW WEDEL: Once animals have eaten their way into

the body to get the good stuff, it's easy for the

bones to slide right out and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

The skin falls off like a sock off of a foot and now

you have a hundred foot long tube of skin floating

through the ocean.

NARRATOR: But many globsters have tentacles,

strange arms, even hair.

Can Wedel's theory explain these bizarre features?

MATHEW WEDEL: Imagine, that sack of skin can float around

in the ocean for months or maybe even years.

It can rip, it can tear, it can shred into all

kinds of interesting shapes and the collagen

actually frays, just like an old pair of pants and

those threads of collagen that stick out are usually

pink or red and they look like hair.

NARRATOR: Are globsters simply giant blobs of

collagen floating around in a suit of whale skin?

Or are they beasts from the deep?

MATHEW WEDEL: I love a good mystery much as the

next person and I would love to think that there

are giant unknown animals in the ocean and there

probably are some new kinds of sharks and maybe

even new species of whales, but there's

no real sea monster.

NARRATOR: Are globsters simply masses of mammal meat?

Some believe they are proof of something

far more terrifying.

HANS LARSSON: It would absolutely be a monster.

NARRATOR: Strange creatures called globsters

are washing up on beaches all over the world.

Are they simply dead whales?

Dr. Hans Larsson is a paleontologist.

He thinks globsters could be a living relic from our

ancient past.

HANS LARSSON: The researchers who, who point

to globsters and say they're nothing more than whales,

they're probably right for most cases,

but pretty much the entire ocean below a hundred

meters' depth hasn't been explored.

NARRATOR: Some areas of the ocean are over six miles deep.

Larsson believes that a terrifying creature could

be lurking in the depths - the Megalodon.

HANS LARSSON: Megalodon is a huge fish.

It looks a lot like a great white shark

but it's much bigger.

NARRATOR: It's known as the Tyrannosaurus Rex of

the sea, a monster that terrorized the ocean

for twenty-five million years -

and the right size for a globster.

HANS LARSSON: This is a tiger shark about fifteen

or so feet long and look at the size of the teeth

and the size of the mouth so it's pretty impressive.

I mean this would be scary enough in the water should

you be in front of it but compare that to

a Megalodon and this is an average sized tooth.

It would absolutely be a monster.

NARRATOR: Most scientists believe this marine monster

became extinct one and a half million years ago.

But remarkably, Larsson isn't so sure.

HANS LARSSON: Some people have suggested that the cooling

of the oceans may have driven megalodon to extinction.

I think we should be a little bit skeptical about

that because all the other animals in the ocean

survived quite well.

And if that whole ecosystem could survive

the global cooling of the oceans and the ice ages,

why not megalodon?

NARRATOR: Could science be wrong?

Another giant of the deep, the coelacanth was supposed

to have died out 65 million years ago with the dinosaurs.

But then, in 1938, a fisherman hauled one up.

Are Megalodons alive?

Could globsters be washed up remains of a 25 million

year old living fossil?

HANS LARSSON: We have glimpses of some other

fishes down there, other sharks and other non-shark

fishes but we know practically nothing about them.

I think that that world is just unexplored.

NARRATOR: Do giant killers lurk in our oceans?

Are they monsters of the deep or just globs of

super strength blubber?

Weird or what?

[♪]

In India, a rampaging man-beast causes

widespread panic in the nation's capital.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: They scream and cry and run off.

You know, it was absolute panic.

NARRATOR: Are scientists creating manmade monsters?

WILLIAM SHATNER: You know, when it comes to trying to

prove there's no such thing as monsters,

there's one big problem -

there's just no hard evidence.

They never seem to hang around long enough.

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

What if instead of creepy shadows or deep dark

corners of our imagination, the monsters

we're looking for are right under our noses?

What if we're the ones creating them?

NARRATOR: Sanal Edamaraku is a journalist.

He was in Delhi in the summer of 2001 and

witnessed for what many is the most bizarre events

in its long history.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: It became very, very warm.

The temperatures went up to forty-eight degrees

Celsius with enormous humidity, which made life unbearable.

Nobody could sleep in home, especially poor

section of the town.

So a lot of people have been sleeping on the rooftop.

NARRATOR: As thousands of people try to escape the heat,

they have no idea a six-week reign of terror

is about to begin.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: Two factory workers said that

they had been sleeping on the factory balcony in the

evening and suddenly some strange creature jumped

from the floor to the second floor and scratched them,

attacked them, screeched and went off.

NARRATOR: In a city home to thousands of monkeys,

at first the attack seemed unremarkable -

until the victims described what they had seen.

[speaking foreign language]

SANAL EDAMARAKU: They said that it had two, three

special things - metallic claws, then special lights

coming from its forehead, one green and the other

red and these lights were moving and it scratched,

made a special whistling sound and disappeared.

The story was like wildfire.

It spread everywhere.

People have been speaking about this special creature.

NARRATOR: What had attacked the workers?

Within twenty-four hours, the newspapers give the

creature a name - the monkey man.

The very next night, it strikes again.

By the end of the week there are reports of

a dozen more attacks.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: Everyone so afraid, so afraid.

People ran off in absolute panic.

They just were fleeing from the scene.

They scream and cry and hearing this sound people

shut off the windows, close lights.

You know it was absolute panic.

NARRATOR: All the victims describe the same thing,

a hairy creature with metallic claws and strange lights.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: Everybody has been speaking about

the uh this special kind of movement that it has,

as if it's controlled by somebody.

Some people said that it could be a half man,

half robot and specially created by the neighbouring

country Pakistan to make trouble in India.

NARRATOR: But then comes a new twist.

As rumours grow, so does the panic.

Just two weeks after the first sighting of the

Monkey Man, the entire city of New Delhi is

besieged by terror.

Then, tragedy strikes.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: One lady was on a rooftop sleeping

and someone saw the monkey man, screamed and whole

people started running off.

She had been running off and she had fallen down

from the second floor, straight down, hitting the

floor and she died.

NARRATOR: In the following days, more people die as

crowds rush to escape.

As the panic grows, New Delhi becomes a ghost town.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: People were so afraid to come out.

The Delhi streets were completely empty after

eight o'clock, totally empty.

Not even a car would go out.

The whole city was completely afraid of monkey man.

NARRATOR: Then, just as the terror reaches its peak,

the incredible happens.

SANAL EDAMARAKU: There was no monkey man reported

anywhere after third or fourth week of May and

it simply disappeared.

NARRATOR: What happened in New Delhi?

Something held this giant city in its fearful grip for weeks.

Was it a monster? Could the Monkey Man be real?

Jay Lakhani is a teacher of the Hindu religion.

He believes the Monkey Man can be explained by Indian culture.

JAY LAKHANI: There is nothing here that would

make me feel that there is anything more than

superstition kind of rolled up with fear and

rolled up with this idea of religious iconography

that just kind of produced this story.

NARRATOR: Lakhani thinks that powerful religious

beliefs could have helped create the Monkey Man.

JAY LAKHANI: In the Hindu tradition the word Avatar

is very central.

Avatar means one who descends.

The Hindus say the spirit has a habit of descending

to earth in human form.

NARRATOR: In the Hindu religion, gods known as avatars

are believed to descend to Earth in times of need.

Many are depicted as part human, part animal.

Was the Monkey Man a well-meaning avatar that

was mistaken for something evil?

JAY LAKHANI: India is a poor country struggling

with lots of issues so it's understandable the

public would like to project the idea that an

avatar is here to rescue them.

You see a layperson is very, very gullible.

I suspect it is quite possible that a few

pranksters got together, dressed up a couple of

monkeys and set them loose on the streets of New Delhi.

But for a layperson who is kind of steeped in

religious tradition it is understandable that when

he sees a few pranksters he somehow projects his own

idea that this is an avatar on the streets of New Delhi.

NARRATOR: Were thousands of New Delhi residents

victims of pranks blown out of proportion by

widely held religious beliefs?

Did the Monkey Man exist at all?

JAY LAKHANI: I don't think the monkey man existed at all.

I think all these things combined with a few real

monkeys kind of jumping about and perhaps some

pranksters getting into the, onto the act is the

reason why you got this story developing in India

as an avatar coming down to earth.

WILLIAM SHATNER: So is that the end of this mystery?

Maybe not.

Could monkey man be a product of the human

imagination in a different way?

Not a religiously inspired delusion but

a manifestation of the dark side of science.

Recently declassified documents hint at some

kind of twisted Soviet genetic experiment.

Was the monkey man a secret weapon that escaped

the evil lab of a mad scientist that spawned him?

Is that weird or what?

NARRATOR: In New Delhi, thousands of people claim

to have been attacked by a metal-clawed monster known

as the Monkey Man.

Was it simply mass hysteria or religious superstition?

Scott Marlowe is a cryptozoologist with

a remarkable theory.

SCOTT MARLOWE: I believe monsters exist.

They may not necessarily be the Saturday or Friday

night movie version of the monsters that terrify us on

the silver screen, but there are things out there that

go bump in the night that are terrifying to say the least.

When I first heard the story of India's Monkey Man,

I was pretty certain I knew exactly what it was.

NARRATOR: Marlowe's theory is controversial and alarming.

He thinks the Monkey Man is a real life monster

created by us.

SCOTT MARLOWE: Monsters exist and we certainly have

the ability now with genetic engineering to create them.

Based on some of the descriptions there's a

distinct possibility that Monkey Man could be some

kind of human-ape hybrid.

NARRATOR: Could someone have created a creature

half man, half ape?

And if so, why?

Incredibly, this concept isn't as weird as it sounds.

It could even be based in fact.

Declassified Russian military files have

allegedly revealed that in the 1920s Joseph Stalin

secretly tried to create a super soldier.

SCOTT MARLOWE: A super soldier is a genetically

engineered creature that is designed with a

military purpose in mind.

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 these chimps that he collected

the material from.

They were trying to create a soldier that uh had

superhuman strength.

They wanted the strength of an ape, which was known

to be about seven times that of a human, uh

with the intelligence of a human.

NARRATOR: Incredibly, Marlowe believes Stalin

wasn't the only one who was messing with nature.

SCOTT MARLOWE: Not to be outdone by the Russians,

we attempted to do the same thing.

The attempt was not successful by all accounts

but a lot of that had to do with the lack of

knowledge on the genetics.

Today it could probably be done.

NARRATOR: Are scientists using modern technology to

create super soldiers from humans and apes?

Could this explain the Monkey Man?

SCOTT MARLOWE: 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

uh or flashing lights and that kind of thing,

which would probably be some sort of communications device.

The most alarming feature that's reported are metal claws.

That is, seems more of a military weapon.

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.

NARRATOR: Was the Monkey Man an escaped super soldier?

And why in an age of predator drones and

nuclear bombs would India need one?

SCOTT MARLOWE: 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.

SCOTT MARLOWE: A super soldier might be

engineered for stealth purposes.

I do know if Monkey Men had been created with

genetic engineering for a military purpose, I would be

extremely concerned, if not deathly afraid of the outcome.

NARRATOR: Was a hybrid man-ape let loose on the

streets of New Delhi?

Are we creating manmade monsters?

Weird or what?

NARRATOR: So there we have it - monster stories from

all over the world.

[♪]

In West Virginia, a winged monster seven feet tall

with red eyes terrorizes the town of Point Pleasant.

[♪]

In Newfoundland, a mysterious giant mass of

flesh emerges from the depths of the ocean.

[♪]

And in India, a half man/half beast attacks

thousands and sends an entire city into panic.

Are these bizarre stories evidence that monsters exist?

Can we dismiss thousands of eyewitnesses who claim

these things are true?

You decide.

Join me next time for more stories that will

undoubtedly be weird or what?

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