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Thumbnail for July 18, 2001: Asian Enigma, Wild Forest Creatures of Laos - Linda Moulton Howe

July 18, 2001: Asian Enigma, Wild Forest Creatures of Laos - Linda Moulton Howe

Jul 18, 2001
36m
Linda Moulton Howe
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell welcomes investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe, who reports from Philadelphia with updates on the Hartsville, Tennessee energy burst and a firsthand account of her expedition to Laos for an upcoming Discovery Channel series called Asian Enigma. Linda reveals that the mysterious power surges at WJKM radio have continued, with another event striking at 4 a.m. on July 18th and forcing the station to relocate its computer equipment entirely.

Cornell physicist Michael Kelly, a consultant on the HAARP facility in Alaska, tells Linda the Hartsville event involved enormous concentrated energy inconsistent with conventional explanations. He suggests ball lightning as one possibility but acknowledges it cannot account for the mile-wide debris field of scorched birds. A seismic disturbance registering 2.6 on the Richter scale was also confirmed in nearby Franklin, Tennessee the day after the original burst.

Linda then describes her journey along Route 9 in Laos, a region climatologists say has remained unchanged since the age of dinosaurs. Local villagers and Vietnam War veterans have reported encounters with tall, bipedal, hair-covered creatures ranging from six to fifteen feet tall. She recounts navigating unexploded ordnance, encountering a venomous snake, and gathering physical evidence for the Discovery Channel production airing in November 2001.

Key Moments

  1. Human-faced creature using a leaf as umbrella: Howe relays a Lao villager's account from Villa Bui of a tall hairy creature with a human face and long reddish hair down its back, observed from 30 meters away reaching up, plucking a leaf, and holding it over its head as an umbrella in a rainstorm.

  2. Asian Enigma - Discovery Channel series: Howe announces that her work in Laos hunting the 'wild forest people' will air as part of Asian Enigma on the Discovery Channel beginning November 21, with descriptions tracing back to first- and second-century Chinese accounts of 'Sing Sing' - yellow-haired apes with human faces and feet.

  3. Hairy hominid in a 1990s mammal hotspot: Howe argues the Annamite border region between Laos and Vietnam is the same area where multiple new mammal species were scientifically described in the 1990s, providing biogeographic plausibility for the tall, hairy, Bigfoot-type 'kerry hominid' the locals describe.

  4. Unexploded ordnance is the cryptid's protection: Howe makes the central paradox of the episode explicit: U.S. Vietnam-era bombing turned huge swaths of Laos into permanently off-limits UXO zones, and that very contamination may be why a relict population of intelligent forest creatures could persist there undisturbed.