Original subtitles

(suspensful music)

- You know I've been around for awhile.

Met some interesting people.

Done some crazy things.

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

that can take my by surprise.

You'd be wrong.

(door opens)

The world is full of stories.

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.

- [Voiceover] Do monsters exist?

In West Virginia, a town is terrorized by

a seven foot winged demon.

Did it cause the death of 46 people?

- [Voiceover] It had two huge black wings.

And no head, no arms.

(waves crash)

- [Voiceover] In Newfoundland, a macabre creature

washes up on a local beach.

Are our oceans concealing a megabeast?

- [Voiceover] It was nothing that either of us

had ever seen or could imagine.

- [Voiceover] And in New Delhi,

thousands are attacked by a metal-clawed monster.

(faint screaming)

Was it a man or a beast?

- Yeah.

It's a weird world.

And I love it.

(suspenseful music)

- You know, I just had a lovely holiday in Scotland.

Had my castle, bagpipes, the whole deal.

Even went to Loch Ness, where Nessie,

famous Loch Ness monster is supposed to live.

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

searching for hours, and 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, Bigfoot, and chupacabra exist?

I got news for you.

They just might.

- [Voiceover] Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

(suspenseful music)

Nearly 50 years ago, this sleepy farming town

was brutally awoken by a series of monstrous events

that are still a mystery today.

(crickets)

Loren Coleman is an author.

He documented the incidents,

which began on the night of November 15, 1966,

when two young couples took a drive.

- Roger and Linda Scarberry and the Mallettes

were driving around on the old TNT area.

It was called TNT because that's

where dynamite was stored during World War II.

(crickets)

- [Voiceover] 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.

(crickets)

- All of a sudden, they see this creature

at 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.

(rustling)

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

(tires screeching)

They started racing back to Point Pleasant,

and the creature was in back of the car.

Really, they felt that it was almost touching

both sides of the highway.

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

(rustling)

- [Voiceover] Reaching speeds of 100 miles an hour,

the chase continues, until finally the creature disappears.

(ominous music)

Was there something unpleasant

in Point Pleasant?

- The next day, they come back out there

and they see it flying overhead.

So all of a sudden, you get more and more

kind of word of mouth in the town

that this creature's been around,

people are seeing it.

The newspapers hadn't even caught on

to the reports, yet.

So the next day, you have Marcella Bennett

saying she's going over to one of her relative's houses,

which it's a bunch of houses right along the road

that leads to the TNT.

She gets close to the house,

and all of a sudden on the roof of the house,

sees the Mothman.

She's carrying her baby in her arms,

and falls on the baby

out of terror and fright.

Gets up, races off, and they tell the police, too.

What occurs, however, is that it's then

that it gets into the newspaper,

and all of a sudden,

you had within a few weeks

200 people saying that they'd seen the Mothman.

- [Voiceover] This remarkable story sends shockwaves

through the town.

The media calls the creature

the Mothman.

(suspenseful music)

Local resident Faye LePort

was 14 years old at the time.

Three days after the first sighting,

she decided to visit the scene for herself.

- 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

"if I can find and prove that it's just somebody

"in a Halloween costume,

"or something on wires or something."

As we got to the area, my brother kept looking

past me to the window.

And I said, "Well, what is it? What are you looking at?"

And he said, "Well don't look right now,

"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 the eyes.

The eyes held me.

The most red, I can't even explain the red.

It was such a red,

I just can't describe it.

It's a color, it looks like they're really lit up,

but it's not a glow, but it's perfectly lit up

that you cannot miss it.

And that's all you see when you look at it.

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 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.

- [Voiceover] For the next year, the Mothman terrorizes

the people of Point Pleasant.

- [Voiceover] We were coming up the road here,

and we looked around the thing, around the curve there,

and we thought it was a car light.

So we stop the car, and the thing came over

the top of the car.

- I just think it's a, something supernatural

we can't explain, or something like that.

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

- [Voiceover] They wonder where it will all end.

(suspenseful music)

13 months after the first sighting,

they get their answer.

- [Coleman] The Silver Bridge

between West Virginia and Ohio,

starting at Point Pleasant,

collapsed on December 15, 1967.

67 people fell into the water of the Ohio River.

46 died, and two bodies never were even found.

- [Voiceover] There's seemingly no apparently reason

for this horrific tragedy.

Then comes a terrifying report.

The night before the disaster,

the Mothman was seen hanging from the Silver Bridge.

- And people were scared.

They were so scared they didn't wanna talk about the bridge.

They didn't wanna talk about Mothman.

They didn't wanna talk about anything.

They just, this town became quiet.

And everybody, for a long time, said that nobody talked.

And you still have people that won't talk about

the bridge collapse, today.

- [Voiceover] The Mothman was never seen again.

For 45 years, this incredible story has baffled experts.

But some believe, recent evidence could finally explain

the mystery of the Mothman.

(coin pings and flips in air)

- [Voiceover] Joe Nickell is a paranormal investigator

with Skeptical Inquirer science magazine.

- [Voiceover] We human being misperceive all the time.

People say, I know what I saw.

Actually, they know what they think they saw.

- [Voiceover] Joe believes the Mothman

wasn't quite the monstrous beast it was made out to be.

- I believe the barred owl is the creature

that most clearly fits the bill.

- [Voiceover] Was the Mothman simply an owl?

Nickell thinks the answer lies in Linda Scarberry's

first descriptions

back in 1966.

- Her original description of Mothman

is of a very large, winged creature.

She said it had no neck,

and 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 wing span.

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.

- [Voiceover] But does Nickell's theory explain the height?

Eyewitnesses reported a creature

that was six or seven feet tall.

- 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.

Keep in mind that the barred owl

does not fly around with a yardstick in its claw

for measurement purposes.

So, if you're looking at it, and you don't know what it is,

because it's a funny-looking creature.

So I think that people misperceive the distance,

and therefore misjudge the height.

They were excited and they kind of focused in on it,

and that almost made it loom large

in their consciousness.

Barred owls were at the site.

This was at McClintic Wildlife Preserve,

overlaps the TNT area,

and there were barred owls in that area.

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.

- 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 100 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 do so many people think they saw a monster?

And even blame it for the death of 46 people?

Weird, or what?

- [Voiceover] A psychologist believes,

there's one sure way to solve the mystery of the Mothman:

Using fear.

- We're going to try to induce a mild case

of mass psychogenic illness.

(leaves crunching)

- [Voiceover] 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.

- [Voiceover] Mass psychogenic illness,

or MPI, is a psychological term for

an outbreak of myserious illness

that has no medical cause, but it's entirely

in someone's head.

And before you know it, you have a contagion effect,

whereby those social symptoms start spreading

in a large group of people.

Mass psychogenic illness tends to be

associated with negatives because

people oftentimes report and care about

and give a lot of credence to dramatic things

in the environment.

And oftentimes, just from our evolutionary standpoint,

those are dangerous things, negative things.

So when it comes to illness,

that's something we want to avoid.

So if we see someone get sick, that grabs our attention.

Just like when we see something that might be paranormal,

that grabs our attention, too.

- [Voiceover] Was Mothman the result of social contagion?

Houran believes he can prove his theory by showing

what might have happened in Point Pleasant.

- 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.

What we should see, if mass psychogenic illness

is a plausible explanation for the Mothman sightings,

is that we'll see a few people start having experiences,

other people will notice that,

and then we'll see an outbreak of similar symptoms,

if that's what you want to call them,

just due to social pressure.

Was this fact, was this fiction?

- [Voiceover] 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.

- Everyone stop, please.

Everyone fan out.

- [Voiceover] They are told to turn off their flashlights.

- [Voiceover] And stop.

- [Voiceover] From this point, they can only be turned on

when someone thinks they experience something paranormal.

- [Voiceover] Just get your sense of bearings.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- You felt a cold breeze? - Mm-hmm.

- Someone felt cold over there, too.

- Let me understand this.

Like, right here, you feel like there's

static electricity on your face?

- Mm-hmm.

- 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.

Tonight's experiments were very impressive,

because it kind of confirmed what I think happened

with the Mothman.

That is, we'd had the right type of people

in the right type of environment.

An environment that was spooky, full of context,

exactly the same kind of environment that

the Mothman experiences happened.

And a little bit of suggestion caused a flurry,

an outbreak of experiences that otherwise

wouldn't have happened.

It's exactly what I thought happened with Mothman.

(suspenseful music)

- [Voiceover] Was the Mothman all in the minds

of its victims?

And does this explain what eye witnesses

like Faye LePort saw?

(car driving)

Ken Gerhard is a professional monster hunter.

He believes the best way to solve the Mothman mystery

is to hunt it down himself.

- 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.

Mothman is a monster in the truest sense of the word.

I mean, here you have a creature that doesn't match

the description of anything we know about

in the natural world.

Something that's seemingly stepped right out

of a science fiction movie.

Mothman's main motivation seems to be

to chase and terrify people.

And possibly leave a path of destruction

and devastation in its wake.

There are many people who blame Mothman

for the collapse of the Silver Bridge.

And believe that's actually a death curse

associated with the Mothman.

So I would say yes, Mothman is the ultimate monster.

- [Voiceover] Gerhard has come to

the McClintic Wildlife Reserve,

close to where the Mothman was first sighted.

- It's very exciting to be here,

in the actual location where Mothman

was reported so many times back in the 1960's.

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.

(footsteps in leaves)

- [Voiceover] Using a camera trap,

Gerhard is hoping to catch Mothman unaware.

- 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.

- [Voiceover] To attract his prey,

Gerhard sets up a blasting device,

a machine that broadcasts the sound

of forest creatures in pain.

(screeching)

- [Gerhard] Many of the eyewitnesses say

that Mothman made kind of a squeaking,

mechanical mouse sound,

and fortunately I have a little sound

on here called "lip squeak."

And I think that's exactly what we need.

(recorded squeaking)

(leaves rustling)

Did you hear that?

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.

- [Voiceover] With his equipment set,

it is now a waiting game.

Will the Mothman reveal himself?

- 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 think

you take something

like this.

(shotgun racks)

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)

- [Voiceover] Returning the next day,

monster hunter Ken Gerhard checks to see

if he's found evidence of the Mothman.

(footsteps crunching in leaves)

- Huh.

Well, unfortunately, it doesn't look like

we got anything on film.

I may have been a little bit wrong

about the placement of this camera.

Lesson learned here is that monster hunting

is a very arduous and time-consuming process

and it may take quite a bit of time before we actually

get an image of our quarry.

(suspenseful music)

- [Voiceover] The high-tech approach has failed

to find anything, but Gerhard thinks he knows

exactly what Mothman is.

- [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 cumulation

of all of this negative energy.

Perhaps brought to life by some type of mechanism

far beyond the realm of human comprehension.

Beyond that, there have been reports

of winged humanoid creatures

all over the world for centuries.

And in many ancient cultures, for example in Japan,

where you have the tengu, which a bird man.

The tengu is often considered to be a bad omen,

or a harbinger of doom.

You have the banshee from Scottish lore,

and so in many of these mythologies and folklores,

these winged creatures are often considered

to be premonitions of doom and destruction.

So I think that's a very interesting tie-in between

Mothman and the timing of the bridge collapse.

- [Voiceover] 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?

(suspenseful music)

- [Voiceover] A fisherman finds a giant,

unidentifiable creature on a beach in Newfoundland.

- [Voiceover] It was nothing that either of us

had ever seen or could imagine.

- [Voiceover] Are monsters lurking in the deep?

- Ya! Hey! Ooh!

You know I used to love fishing.

Nothing better than the thrill of landing a big one,

the ultimate challenge between man and beast.

Well 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.

(water rushing)

(waves crashing)

- [Voiceover] In 2001, Garry Stenson was working

as a fisheries officer in Newfoundland, Canada,

when he received the strangest phone call

of his career. (phone ringing)

(phone lifting from base)

- Got a call from a fisherman who's telling me

about a creature on the beach that had washed up.

He started to describe it to me,

and it sounded unlike anything I had encountered.

(phone placed down on base)

- [Voiceover] Mystified, Garry decides

to meet the fisherman and investigate the strange sighting.

(waves crashing)

- [Garry] It's 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.

The whole thing was tapering to the tail end,

and once it got to the tail end, it just broke off.

We had thought that it might be something

like a giant squid, which we do have here.

But there were no tentacles that looked like that.

It didn't also look like a whale or a shark,

which it could be.

There was nothing that looked like a head,

there was nothing that looked like any sort of structures

that we could identify it.

- [Voiceover] In over 20 years, as a fisheries officer,

Garry thought he had seen it all.

Until now.

- I worked on a lot of whales,

and I 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.

(creepy music)

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.

- [Voiceover] As they cut into the carcass,

they made a bizarre discovery.

- 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'd be cartilage,

but there was no cartilage.

So we looked for bone.

If it was a whale, there'd be some bone in it.

But none of this, either.

We spent a lot of time trying to decide

what we thought it might be.

Of course, as a scientist, you're very curious.

In fact, the sign of a good scientist to me,

is somebody who's curious about what they see.

And, of course, we were very curious

as to what this might be.

So we decided that the best thing to do

would be to take some tissue with it.

And we brought that back with us.

- [Voiceover] It seemed Garry and the fisherman

had discovered a creature unknown to science.

- [Garry] 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.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- It's incredible.

In the last century, giant weird blobs of,

ooh, I don't know 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 lobster.

Globster, clever.

(chuckle)

Well what the hell are they?

(suspenseful music)

- [Voiceover] Mathew Wedel is a professor of anatomy.

He believes the explanation is simple.

- It sounds like something very mysterious,

something completely unknown to science.

There are dozens of reports of globsters

from around the world going back over a century.

They're usually formless, and they don't contain any bones.

There's no evidence of a head or a tail or any limbs.

They're just big shapeless globs of flesh.

But there's no evidence so far,

that they're anything other than dead whales.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- 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 100 feet long,

and you get some idea of the strength of whale skin.

It's just incredible.

- [Voiceover] Scientists think protective collagen

allows whales to dive up to two miles

below the surface of the ocean.

- Many submarines would crush before they got down

to that depth.

Collagen is their pressure suit when they dive,

and their armor against things like sharks

that would try to take bites out of them.

- [Voiceover] Wedel also believes collagen causes whales

to decompose in a unique way.

- [Wedel] Decomposition for whales

is an interesting process because whales are different

from other animals in two ways, mainly.

The first is that they're so big,

just their sheer scale influences how they decompose.

The other thing is the skin of whales

is unique in the animal kingdom.

It's incredibly thick, it's incredibly strong.

You can hang up the entire weight of a whale

by a hook through its skin.

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

the way that normal animal skin does.

- [Voiceover] After death, scavengers rapidly devour

the insides of a dead whale. (camera click)

But they leave the gristly collagen alone.

- [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. (camera click)

- [Voiceover] But many globsters have tentacles.

Strange arms, and even hair.

Can Wedel's theory explain these bizarre features?

- Imagine the gnarliest piece of gristle

you've ever encountered that's 100 feet long

and a foot thick.

It lasts essentially forever.

It's only broken up really, by getting pounded on rocks

and torn apart by waves.

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 kind 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.

- [Voiceover] Are globsters simply giant globs of collagen

floating around in a suit of whale skin?

Or are they beasts from the deep?

- [Wedel] I love a good mystery as 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.

As much as I would like to believe that there is,

I have to go where the evidence leads.

And so far, all the evidence that we have

suggests that globsters are just

the rotting skin of dead whales.

- [Voiceover] Are globsters simply masses of mammal meat?

Some believe they are proof of something

far more terrifying.

- [Voiceover] It would absolutely be a monster.

(suspenseful tones)

- [Voiceover] Strange creatures called globsters

are washing up on beaches all over the world.

Are they simply dead whales?

(suspenseful music)

Dr. Hans Larsson is a paleontologist.

He thinks globsters could be a living relic

from our ancient past.

The researchers 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 100 meters depth hasn't been explored.

- [Voiceover] Some areas of the ocean are over

six miles deep.

Larsson believes that a terrifying creature

could be lurking in the depths.

The megalodon.

- [Larsson] The megalodon is a huge fish.

It looks a lot like a great white shark,

but it's much bigger.

- [Voiceover] It is known

as the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the deep.

A monster that terrorized the ocean for 25 million years.

And the right size for a globster.

- This is a tiger shark, about 15 or so feet long.

And look at the size of the teeth,

and the size of the mouth.

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 size tooth.

It would absolutely be a monster.

- [Voiceover] Most scientists believe this marine monster

became extinct one and a half million years ago.

But remarkably, Larsson isn't so sure.

- Some people have suggested that the cooling of the ocean

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?

- [Voiceover] 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 megolodons alive?

Could globsters be washed up remains

of a 25 million year old living fossil?

- [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.

If megalodon was one animal down there

that we didn't know about,

there could be a huge range of other animals as well.

Non air-breathing animals.

Things like other squids, other fishes,

both sharks and non-shark fishes, other invertebrates.

Who knows what other kids of crab-like animals

or arthropods or jellyfish animals are down there.

We just have no clue.

- [Voiceover] Do giant killers lurk in our oceans?

Are they monsters of the deep?

Or just globs of super strength blubber?

Weird, or what?

(suspenseful music)

- [Voiceover] In India, a rampaging man-beast

causes wide-spread panic in the nation's capital.

Are scientists creating man-made monsters?

- 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?

(sitar music)

- [Voiceover] Sanal Edamaruku is a journalist.

He was in Delhi in the summer of 2001,

and witnessed one of the most bizarre events

in its long history.

- [Voiceover] As thousands of people try to escape the heat,

they have no idea a six week reign of terror

is about to begin.

- [Voiceover] In the city, home to thousands of monkeys,

at first the attack seemed unremarkable.

Until the victims describe what they had seen.

- [Voiceover] What had attacked the workers?

Within 24 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.

(screaming)

- [Voiceover] All the victims describe the same thing.

A hairy creature with metallic claws and strange lights.

- [Voiceover] Then comes a new twist.

As rumors 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.

- [Voiceover] Then, tragedy strikes.

(screaming)

- [Voiceover] In the following days, more people die

as crowds rush to escape.

As panic rose, New Delhi becomes a ghost town.

- [Voiceover] Then, just as the terror reaches its peak,

the incredible happens.

- [Voiceover] 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.

- [Voiceover] There is nothing here that could make me feel

that there's anything more than superstition

rolled up with fear,

and rolled up with idea of religious iconography.

It just cannot produce the story.

- [Voiceover] Lakhani believes that powerful

religious beliefs could have helped create the Monkey Man.

- [Lakhani] In the Hindu tradition,

the word avatar is very central.

"Avatar" means "one who descends."

The Hindu say the spirit has a habit of descending to earth

in human form.

- [Voiceover] In the Hindu religion,

gods knowns 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?

- 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.

Any sober Hindu, when he looks at the story

in a very sober manner,

will immediately come to the conclusion

that this was not an avatar.

It's not just my take on it.

But every sober Hindu, no sober Hindu would really

consider this to be an avatar,

because there is nothing that monkey has done

which any way reflects what an avatar is all about.

Which is to benefit humanity, not frighten it.

You see, a layperson is very gullible.

I suspect it is quite possible

that a few pranksters got together,

dressed up as couple of monkeys, and set them loose

on the streets of New Delhi.

And for a layperson, who is gonna steep

in religious tradition,

it is understandable that somebody sees a few pranksters,

he somehow projects his own idea that this is an avatar

on the streets of New Delhi.

- [Voiceover] 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?

- I don't think Monkey Man existed at all.

I think all these things combined

with a few real monkeys jumping about

and perhaps some pranksters getting into the act

is the reason why we have got this story

developing in India as an avatar coming down to earth.

- 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

hinted 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?

(gasp)

Or what?

- [Voiceover] 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.

- 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.

(screaming)

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

I was pretty certain I knew exactly what it was.

- [Voiceover] Marlowe's theory is controversial

and alarming.

He thinks the Monkey Man is a real life monster

created by us.

- [Marlowe] Monsters exist and we certainly have

the ability now with genetic engineering

to create them.

Based on some of the descriptions,

there is a distinct possibility that Monkey Man

could be some kind of human-ape hybrid.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(marching)

Declassified Russian military files

have allegedly revealed that in the 1920's,

Joseph Stalin secretly tried to create

a super soldier.

- The 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 the chimps that he collected

the material from.

They were trying to create a soldier

that had superhuman strength.

They wanted the strength of an ape,

which is known to be about seven times that of a human,

with the intelligence of a human.

(military trucks running)

- [Voiceover] Incredibly, Marlowe believes

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

- 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.

- [Voiceover] Are scientists using modern technology

to create super soldiers from humans and apes?

Could this explain the Monkey Man?

- [Marlowe] Some of the evidence

that the Monkey Man is a human-ape hybrid

could be that they're frequently reported

wearing some sort of helmet,

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 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.

- [Voiceover] Was the Monkey Man an escaped

super soldier?

And why, in an age of predator drones and nuclear bombs,

would India need one?

- 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.

A super soldier might be engineered for stealth purposes.

They could pursue this type of a thing,

especially since in India, monkeys and apes running around

are not at all unusual.

They could infiltrate, they could blend in,

they could perform a number of different things,

in terms of intelligence gathering or otherwise

performing some sort of military function

without going detected.

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.

- [Voiceover] Was a hybrid man-ape let loose

on the streets of New Delhi?

Are we creating man-made monsters?

Weird, or what?

(suspenseful music)

- [Voiceover] So there we have it.

Monster stories from all over the world.

In West Virginia, a winged monster,

seven feet tall with red eyes

terrorized 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.

(screaming)

Are these bizarre stories evidence that monsters exist?

Can we dismiss thousands of eye witnesses

who claim these things are true?

You decide.

- Join me again next time for more stories that will

undoubtedly be weird

or what.

(suspenseful music)