Mokele-mbembe: The (Not) Living Dinosaur

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1:00No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank's has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work. I mean, here's the thing is like, I know what hippos are, and I would

1:34argue they are monsters. Oh, yeah. Like if you described a hippo to somebody and their behavior, it'd be like, that is a monster. Right. I'm Paige. And I'm Megan. And this is Spooky Science Sisters. Hello, you're listening to Spooky Science Sisters, a podcast where we present to you a science-based and probably very giggly discussion on all things strange and unusual. We're all emerging from our winter caves and

2:08coming out to bask in the sunlight like a bunch of cold-blooded reptiles. So it's a good time, I think, to do an episode on a reptilian cryptid. And that means today we will be talking about Mokele Mbembe, which I'm very excited about. I'm also very excited because here's the thing, Megan, this is a Megan episode and I just get to learn. I love learning episodes. Paige is tired this week, but the good news for me is that next week I get a learning episode. So yeah,

2:44I have that to look forward to. Anyway, first we have to do something spooky, though. So Paige, has anything spooky happened to you recently? I don't think so. I don't think I have anything spooky to share. Boring. Boring. But also kind of nice. Yeah. It's been less of a disaster for one week. You! Yay! Yeah. So nothing for me. What about you? So you already know about this one, but I think it's the perfect something spooky. So I have to share it with everybody. So maybe a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, we were watching America's

3:20Funniest Home Videos with my six-year-old, Alice, which I don't know why I'm saying like, with my six-year-old. Like, you guys don't all know who that is. But, which by the way, that show is not the same anymore without... It is not funny. No, it's not. Like, with the advent of things like TikTok and Reels and all these places where people can just like upload funny videos, the dregs that are left for America's Funniest Home Videos are not America's Funniest Home Videos at all.

3:52But anyway, for a six-year-old, it is a good time and she likes to watch it as a family. So we're watching this a couple weeks ago and they had some segment, which I don't remember the premise of, but it was just like a bunch of kids having silly things happen to them, like having small accidents, like luckily nothing that would really hurt them, but just like, just whatever. It was just kids having like these unfortunate little funny incidents happened to them. So it occurred to me, had we gotten a video of Alice from an incident

4:24that happened last fall, that like we probably would have gotten on the show. So what happened last fall, and Paige was also there for this, but we were at a pumpkin patch fall farm thing. We live in Wisconsin, right? So it's all... We all go to the farm in the fall to get our own apples and pumpkins and all that. But we're at this big one and they had this pig riding, but like not real pigs, like it was like a metal thing where you rode the... Oh my God, this is so hard to explain.

4:57They had this pig racing game where it's basically like a rocking horse, but it's pigs that you sort of pump the handles back and forth and you go down towards the end of the track, sort of like the railroad track cars where you have to like pump the thing to make it move down the railroad tracks. But this is, you're sitting on a pig and moving. So they have these very clear signs on them that say like, do not go fast backwards.

5:27So Alice has made it down to the other end. She's coming back to the start so she can get off. And it occurs to me as she gets maybe like five feet from the end of it, like, oh, she is definitely going too fast. Girl was flying. She was flying. And she flips backwards. So she hits it. And, you know, it's just a big abrupt stop. She hits it. She flips backwards. And I was so certain that she was coming up

5:59from that and that she was like, we were going to go get stitches that day. Like I was so positive that was what was about to happen or she was going to have a concussion or whatever. And she did bump her head, but only a little bit. Like she did like the perfect backflip off this thing and landed in such a way that like she was pretty much totally fine other than a little bit shaken up. And it would have been the perfect submission for today's version of America's Funniest Home Videos because you just could not believe that she was

6:31okay. And it was just insane to watch her flip backwards off this thing. So I said this to Stephen and Alice that we could have submitted that video if we had had one of her. And later in that episode, so this is like 20 minutes later, I kid you not, they're doing another segment and they show a woman on one of these pig things flip backwards off of them in the same way that Alice did. I was like, what are the chances? Yeah. Like what are the chances

7:01that that like, okay, sure. Someone else has that video, but that it played the exact same time that you were talking about it. Yeah. Like I'm sure plenty of people have written those pig things and they have a version of that video because. Yeah. That sign exists for a reason. Right. That sign exists for a reason. But like none of the kid videos had anything to do with, you know, them writing any sort of contraption like this. It was just insane. Just the fact that, yeah, it was crazy. So anyway, I might be a psychic about America's

7:34Funniest Home Videos. I'll keep testing it. But that's my something spooky. I'm psychic about things that matter. Not at all. It was really weird though. I would rather you be psychic about that than whatever weird thing you were doing to me. So. Yeah. Right. So insane pig contraptions aside, today we are really here to talk about Mokele Mbembe, which is a

8:13cryptid. And like the Loch Ness Monster or Nessie, this is another prehistoric reptile cryptid. But Mokele Mbembe is said to live in the Congo River Basin of Africa, which to be fair, is a much more hospitable environment for a giant aquatic reptile to live in compared to a highland loch. But we'll get into why it's still a little bit problematic to say that there are still living dinosaurs in Africa. But Mokele Mbembe is Lingala, which is a central

8:47Bantu language. And it means one who stops the flow of rivers. So the story of Mokele Mbembe gets started 250 years ago, almost exactly. Yeah. In 1776. And so there are three documented accounts by explorers or colonizers that people link to Mokele Mbembe and this reptile cryptid making its way sort of out of Africa and into the Western world. So we start in 1776. And

9:22this is when French missionary, Abbe Levain Bonaventure-Proyard, which man, it's been a long time since high school French, but we're doing our best, wrote about coming across tracks left by some enormous beast that were three feet in circumference and that had claws. And I've seen a couple of people point out, like, what a weird unit of measurement to use the circumference of the footprint.

9:54Like, why? Why the circumference? Why not just say across? But it is also funny because there are accounts online and even in books that use not circumference, but like assume like that it's a cross. And it's like, man, three feet across would be, I mean, I guess if you think about like a real sauropodinosaur, that would be probably appropriate for some of the biggest ones, but that would be a huge footprint. But three feet in circumference is probably like, well, it's one foot times 3.14, right? So it's, yeah, like only a foot across. Way less impressive.

10:33Okay, hold on. I'm trying to figure out how many feet my, how big is my foot in circumference? You're just over there measuring yourself. Well, uh, well, not exactly. I was just thinking like three feet isn't that big, but it is kind of big. Like, it's definitely bigger than my foot.

11:00Yeah, but your foot isn't, I mean, I assume these would be more like circular if you're thinking about. Yeah, I assume that we're measuring in circumference because they're, they are round.

11:12Anyway. Well, anyway, yeah, we did the math, people.

11:18We did it live. We did it live. We did some like seventh grade geometry live, and it was harder than it should have been. It was a little pathetic, but here we are. So, great. That's 1776. The next step here is 1909, and this is when Carl Hagenbeck, who is a German exotic animal dealer and showman who supplied animals to many zoos and circuses, including P.T. Barnum, and he writes this book called Beasts and Men, in which he says,

11:55the natives, it seemed, had told both my informants that in the depth of the great swamps, there dwelt a huge monster, half elephant, half dragon. It seems to me that it can only be some kind of dinosaur seemingly akin to the brontosaurus. So, he doesn't name what it is, but now we've planted this idea that there's some sort of living dinosaur in the Congo River Valley of Africa. So, then the third account, and sort of the most important one, because it's the first to mention

12:30Mokele Mbembe by name, and it was written down in 1913 by Captain Ludwig... I got another man. Captain Ludwig Freer von Steinzulauschnitz. That's pretty close, I think. And also, that's a sweet name. Which is an insane name. Insanely awesome. Yeah, I'm not saying, I'm not judging that the name is bad. It's just, that is a serious million-dollar name right there. But anyway, Captain Ludwig writes

13:04in a manuscript in 1913 about an expedition to Cameroon. And in his description of this creature he has heard about on his expedition, Mokele Mbembe is brownish-gray in color, the size of an elephant, with a long, flexible neck, and only one very long tooth that some say is a horn, and a long, muscular tail. Which, and he's like, he's getting these descriptions from

13:37Native peoples, he says, from Indigenous peoples, he says. Okay, so this isn't like a sighting of his, this is something that... Yeah, this is something that's being, like, stories that are being passed to him. I don't think he's actually seen this. And the description's kind of funny, because immediately I see it, and it's like, well, an elephant with a long, flexible neck, like, elephants have trunks that they stick up in the air. So, like, it kind of seems like it's the size of an elephant, and it has a long thing that sticks up in the air. Could it just be an elephant?

14:11Could it just be an elephant? Right. But also then there's the horn detail. It's like, well, there are also other very large gray animals with horns that live in Africa. So anyway, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna come back to these ideas when we get into debunking, but immediately this is throwing up some red flags of, like, I feel like maybe we're misinterpreting what we're actually seeing here. Okay, so this 1913 account is really what kicks off McKellie Mbembe's whole deal and what pushes it to the wider Western

14:50world and gets people excited about this idea of a dinosaur living in Africa. And after 1913, you have sightings that happen for a few years. The cryptid did lose some steam with the outbreak of World War I, because obviously people are, you know, a little bit busy to be worried about finding dinosaurs in Africa. And it's like sort of like the Mothman thing. It sort of just like peters off when people get busy with other things. Sure. And then sightings do pick back up afterwards.

15:25And there have been various cryptozoologists that have made attempts to find the creature over the years. And the most recent of these was at least into the 2010s. I think the most recent one I saw was in 2013, which again, we will come back to. One of the prominent ones, though, or prominent people who looks into this is a man named Ray Mackle, who is a biochemist who specialized in virology at

15:56the University of Chicago. But he decided that was not exciting enough and turned to cryptozoology. He looked into and had written a book about Nessie, and he was also particularly fascinated by Mokeli Mbembe, and also wrote a book about Mokeli Mbembe. And he is an important figure in cryptozoology and a person that cryptozoologists like to hold up as legitimizing their cause because

16:27he had a PhD in biology. So they see him as like being this sort of important science authority figure. But it's like worth pointing out that he, again, was a biochemist and like studied viruses, not wildlife biology. So yeah, he's a scientist. That's what matters. Right. You know, and I think as like somebody with a PhD, it's like the more you learn about a specific part of science, like the

17:00more you realize you don't know about other things. So like, I suppose I understand him pivoting and like I understand as somebody who, you know, obviously I'm not a wildlife biologist. I'm not, you know, all these other things that we talk about on the podcast. And so I do feel like having the PhD has given me like special skills in terms of being able to like research things and really look into things in depth and understand things from a scientific perspective. But I'm still like

17:30very aware of my own boundaries. Long story short, though, my point is there are parts of geology that I just wouldn't even fathom getting into. Sure. Or like acting like I'm any sort of authority on. So for him to make this pivot, which like, again, people can pivot, whatever. But just the fact that he has the PhD does not mean that he was qualified to like be looking into exotic animals and wildlife biology, whatever. But anyway, I digress. His book, Ray Mackle's book is called A Living

18:06Dinosaur in Search of Mokeli Mbembe. And it was published in 1987. There was also a Hollywood movie that was made about Mokeli Mbembe in 1985 called Baby Secret of the Lost Legend, which features a little baby, Mokeli Mbembe, like puppet or animatronic. It looks not great.

18:32But it does have a 5 out of 10 on IMDb. So I feel like it can't be totally unwatchable. So we might have to see if we can. That's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, for if you see the special effects for the dinosaur, like 5 out of 10 is, you know, it's pretty good considering how that dinosaur looks. It's so cute. Yeah. So we might have to find that one and check it out sometime. So the other thing to note here about Mokeli Mbembe is that it is very popular and I think still remains popular

19:09with young earth creationists. So they really latched on to this because obviously if you have a living dinosaur, then it means this idea that, you know, dinosaurs lived tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years ago and never crossed paths with humans is not accurate. So it sort of gives them something to hold on to in that respect. So that's sort of sketchy. Accurate.

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20:13When you've got a one track mind, you go where the cravings take you. Welcome to Racetrack. Breakfast that satisfies. Snacks that sing. Drinks that refresh.

20:27It's a stop that pulls you in. We don't blame you for having a one track mind because once you stop at Racetrack, no other stop will do. Same time tomorrow? You know it. Racetrack. Whatever gets you going. Yeah, that's sort of the background on Mokele Mbembe. And now we can jump into debunking because you know the deal here. We do not actually think that there is a sauropi dinosaur running around

20:59the Congo River Valley in Africa. Okay, okay, okay. Yes, agreed. I'm not going to disagree with you there just so we're clear. But what I'm not clear on is like where do people stand with this now? Like you mentioned that there was the attempt in until like the early 2010s to find it. Yeah, so my impression is that Mokele Mbembe is more of a fringe cryptid.

21:34Okay. Like there aren't a lot of people who actually believe that it's out there. It tends to be like it's more of like a niche group that still thinks that it's out there. I don't feel like I, you know, hear as many people talk about it. But you know, if you look for it in your podcast app, every major cryptid spooky podcast who covers cryptids has covered Mokele Mbembe. But yeah, I don't think that it's one that people are like super bent on. Yes, it exists today the same way

22:04that they are like Bigfoot and stuff like that. Sure. Okay. So the important thing, sort of the number one thing here about Mokele Mbembe is that there have been many searches, many expeditions that have gone out to look for this thing and they have turned up zero evidence. There have been no conclusive photographs or videos, no bones, no footprints, no poop, no nothing to suggest that there is a large

22:35dinosaur living in the Congo. The quote unquote best evidence is a video from a 1992 documentary that was made by a Japanese documentary crew and they were going out to, I think, to search for Mokele Mbembe. And that video, which I have linked it here for Paige, I will link it in the show notes, it's rough. Like think of the most blurry worst Loch Ness video you've ever seen and this might be

23:07worse than that. Right. Well, first of all, the camera has not stopped moving. Yeah, it's tough to say like is it a stationary thing in the water, but like the camera and the thing is moving so it makes it look like it's moving and the ripples are just water moving past it. It could just be like a piece of junk. It could be some other animal. It doesn't look like anything convincing to me. So this is the best we've got. It's not great. Right. It looks like a branch. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. Exactly.

23:41Exactly. Like it is a more remote area. It is a less populated area. So, you know, you can forgive maybe not having the best video, photo evidence, whatever. But, you know, there have been people there for a long time and you'd think that somebody would have pulled out their phone or pulled out something and gotten a better picture by now if some giant thing was still living there. This whole thing started with a footprint, essentially, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

24:13Yeah. With like a footprint that is a foot across and I guess had claws. So that's a little bit, I don't know. Like, I don't really know what they meant by claws. Well, it could have just been like an elephant footprints. How big is an elephant foot? This is what I should have done earlier.

24:31So the most recent attempt that I came across was apparently made by a guy named Stephen McCullough who in 2012 collected over $27,000 on Kickstarter to go search for McKellie Mbembe. And despite spending almost all of that money or all of it, I didn't find all the details here, but apparently he went in 2012 and like basically immediately gave up and didn't find anything. Good. So that was a good

25:10use of $27,000. Yeah. So I was super glad that people gave that guy $27,000. Listen, you guys can give me $27,000. I'll go look. I might, you know, I'll go, I'll go see some animals. That'd be great. How long was he there? I don't know. It was like the update was, I think the Kickstarter ended in March or May. And then I think it was in the Skeptoid podcast that was like, by the time it was October of 2012, he had already spent all the money and given up and it was done.

25:46Good work. So I doubt that it was long.

25:54Because if you think about like, it would have probably taken him a few months to just like logistically figure out like, how are you going to get there? Where are you going to stay? Like, what are you going to do? You know, figure out your guides, all that stuff. And then by October, no, it's done. So I don't think it went great for Stephen. Sorry, not sorry. Okay. So there's basically no evidence that people have found that is anything convincing other than anecdotes and like

26:27sort of some vague, you know, footprints that were recorded by missionaries in 1776 and some sightings that are, you know, a little bit sketchy as well and pretty easy to write off. But, you know, there are people telling stories about seeing it. There are people finding like supposed evidence that they've seen it. So we have to talk about what people are actually seeing here, what's actually going on here. So unsurprisingly, and we've talked about this before, Africa has been a hotbed of

26:58monster and cryptid stories in the Western world ever since European colonizers set foot on the continent hundreds of years ago. And in some cases, it's because they just couldn't believe that large animals that live there were actually real animals. And we've talked before about how gorillas and okapis actually started out as cryptids because people heard about these things and said, no way that this is a real animal until, you know, people actually brought bodies and photos

27:31and all this stuff back with them. And you can also imagine how people might have been told some weird stories about things like giraffes or hippos or elephants or crocodiles and thought that sounds like a horrific monster, not like any sort of real animal that actually exists. So there's that. The other part of this, which I sort of alluded to this before, but you've got these colonialist and racist ideas that Africa is this primitive, uncivilized, less evolved continents

28:06compared to Europe or other parts of the Western world. So, you know, it means there must still be prehistoric creatures living there. And that's definitely part of what inspired the 1909 account that was written by Hagenbeck, who's like the exotic animal provider. And obviously, you know, he's got skin in the game because he wants to keep people buying what he's selling, right? Like he wants to keep funding his expeditions probably to go like capture animals in the wild that he's going to bring back and sell to zoos and circuses. Sure. And Donald Prothero in the book Abominable Science

28:44and Darren Nash in Hunting Monsters, which are both like, if you're going to do the whole, like, obviously, go buy our book and read it. But also, if you're going to do the whole, like, reading skeptical accounts of various cryptids and, like, super deep dives into them, Abominable Science and Hunting Monsters are just invaluable references. So I totally suggest those, and I'm sure I've talked about them before. But both Donald and Darren argue that McKellian Bembe is the result of people

29:18trying to cash in on the dinosaur craze that was happening in the early 1900s. So conveniently, at the time that Hagenbeck writes this about, you know, could be dinosaurs in Africa in his 1909 book, and when, oh my God, I gotta look back at his name because it's so insane. Captain Ludwig writes his manuscript in 1913. This is conveniently right around the time when

29:52sauropod fossils started to show up. So the first sauropod fossils were put on display in museums in 1905. In 1907, you had some prominent sauropod fossils that were discovered in Africa. So again, people are thinking, like, hey, maybe they still exist here. In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published The Lost World. So, you know, this world where there's still all these prehistoric creatures that exist. So there's this pop culture idea that this could happen that's on everybody's brain.

30:23So it seems pretty likely that, you know, people were trying to cash in on this. People were excited about this idea. It's like this perfect time to establish this dinosaur cryptid in this continent that's mysterious and, you know, stereotypically spooky and dark to people of the Western world, and unfairly so, obviously. And this idea of Africa as uncivilized and primitive with respect to it being a good spot for a living dinosaur persisted for a long time. Ray Mackle, so this is the University of

30:59Chicago biochemist turned cryptozoologist that we talked about towards the beginning of the episode. You know, he is still perpetuating this in his 1987 book, which as I was writing that, I was like, oh, 1987 was almost 40 years ago. So that is not so recent. But also, I was born in 1987. So we're going to pretend like it was only 20 years ago and it was so recent. It was just a couple years ago. But anyway, he says in like the intro to his book, he says, Africa, for two centuries, the name has

31:35conjured up for Westerners an image of a dark continent filled with strange beasts, primitive peoples, vast unexplored deserts, swamps, and jungles. Which like is, yeah, kind of a big yikes. I was like, oh, we're still saying that in 1987. I don't know, man. Yeah, but like I took a class on African history as like one of my electives in college. And that was 2000. My God, that was longer ago than I want it to be. So that hurts my feelings a lot. But yeah, that would have been like almost

32:0920 years. No! Don't think about it. It was yesterday. Okay, well, that was the early 2010s. So it was still this millennium. I'm so old. Anyway, but no, but I took a class on it. And the professor for that, you know, went through all these different examples of, yeah, how this idea of Africa is being primitive and uncivilized and, you know, is just continues to go on and on and on.

32:45And I'm sure it does to this day to some extent, which is, you know, unfair and not right in a lot of ways. And it's like a very colonizer view, I guess, of everything. So anyway, not awesome. But if we want to give credence to like some of the sightings and some of the stories that are coming out of this region, as I mentioned before, you know, there are large animals in Africa that could be mistaken as something monstrous or mythical under the right circumstances. I mean, here's the thing

33:18is like, I know what hippos are, and I would argue they are monsters. Oh, yeah. Like if you described a hippo to somebody and their behavior, it'd be like, that is a monster. Right. Which there is like a Hungry Hippo horror movie coming out, so. Oh, hell yeah. We'll put that one on.

33:42Yeah. And I should note that there may be Banshee folklore about some sort of strange, large water-dwelling creature, so indigenous folklore about some creature living in the Congo River basin that predates these 1900s accounts and like potentially predates, you know, any earlier stories as well. I will say that I searched around, though, and like I couldn't find,

34:13like they just say, even the Wikipedia page or if you look at sort of more pro, I guess, cryptozoology websites or books. Like they say, you know, this folklore has existed with the Bantu people for hundreds of years, for centuries, but then you can't find like any recountings of the actual indigenous stories. Sure. So it's like unclear if that means, like I can't tell if it's just people are trying to legitimize

34:45the later stuff, but like saying it exists, but it doesn't really, or if there's something else going on. Some people do believe that there was maybe some sort of extinct rhinoceros that potentially inspired actual folklore that existed about some weird creature that was living in the region that then people sort of like misinterpreted and turned into this sauropod dinosaur because everybody was dinosaur crazy at the time the stories hit Europe and the U.S. It's probably more likely that

35:17the 1909 and 1913 accounts were folklore that got blended together about a bunch of different mythical creatures or possibly like sort of folklore about real creatures that were sort of strange that lived in the region and that, you know, people just sort of took and crammed into this one cryptid, Michele Mbembe. Sure. Which I feel like we've seen that before. Yeah. Yeah. It's totally a thing that happens with other cryptids. But yeah, in the searching

35:48that I did, like I couldn't find actual indigenous stories, which seemed like a little bit of a red flag to me. Like either we're overriding what their stories actually were, which I think we are. Like I don't think that their stories were talking about a dinosaur necessarily, if they exist. Or like we just made up that there were stories at all and they didn't have them. But to that point, there is some sort of creature called an Emerula Ntuka, which means eater of the top palms in the Bomataba dialect, which is also a Bantu language. And this is said to be a horned

36:25dinosaur-like creature that some people lump together as the same as Michele Mbembe. Like I saw it described as another name for Michele Mbembe. While others say that it is its own separate creature. But if you remember from Captain Ludwig's account, like he says that the story said that Michele Mbembe had some sort of horn. And that's what Emerula Ntuka has. So it sort of seems like, you know, again, it's at least two examples, two folklore stories that got

36:57stuck together to become this one cryptid that we've like hung on to today. And again, the important thing here is that, you know, Michele Mbembe didn't really become a sauropod dinosaur until after that 1913 account took off. And that vision is very much rooted in colonialism and outdated ideas about the African continent. And also, like, from a paleontological perspective, outdated depictions

37:28of sauropod dinosaurs. So, like, doesn't even really make sense from that perspective as well. So, yeah. So that's Michele Mbembe. I think it's, I think it's, like, mostly, it's hard to say that it's a fun one. It's hard to say that it's a harmless one because it, you know, it does sort of have this darker colonialism racism aspect to it. So I think you have to be really careful with it. But I also think that makes it important. So I'm glad that you picked this one to talk about.

37:58Yeah. It's a good example of that sort of thing happening. So anyway, that's Michele Mbembe. All right. Well, I think that wraps up our 104th episode, which it feels very weird every time I say 100 and anything. I can't believe we're here. But anyways, here we are. If you liked this episode, hit subscribe and share with a friend. Check the show notes for links to all of our social media accounts, our Discord server, and Patreon. If you have any questions about previous topics or ideas

38:29for future episodes, email us at thesisters at spookysciencesisters.com. As always, thank you for listening and stay spooky. Spooky Science Sisters is a proud member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. For more information or to check out other shows, please visit evergreenpodcasts.com. Thank you.