HUMAN QUADRUPEDS
A four-legged feat and some very odd videos
A human-sized figure scuttling around in a crablike manner
In Canada, Julie McCann, 38, of Vernon, British Columbia, has set an unofficial world record for running on all fours. On 10 August she completed the 100ms (328ft) in 22.99 seconds, comfortably beating the official Guinness Women’s World Record of 25 seconds. Mrs McCann, who has been running on all fours since she was three, was inspired to make an attempt on the women’s world record after reading about Kenichi Ito of Japan setting the men’s record of 15.71 seconds in 2015. She is now submitting video and witness reports of her feat to Guinness to try to get her record formally recognised. [UPI] 10 Aug 2021.
Meanwhile, two strange videos have recently been doing the rounds online, purporting to show humans, or humanoids, running bizarrely on all fours. The first was allegedly recorded on a home security system in Costa Rica and shared by a pseudonymous poster on Reddit (see youtu. be/bCVcHPNcNRs) and seems to show a human-sized figure scuttling around on all fours in a crablike manner. Shot at night, the video shows the figure entering the screen from the left, sidling across a dimly lit road, and disappearing off to the right, attracting the attention of several dogs that react in a disturbed manner, shying away from the “crab” and barking at it. It then scurries back into shot and runs along the road to disappear off the bottom of the screen. As the entity is wreathed in shadow throughout, it is impossible to make out any features that might identify it. Speculation about the being’s identity ranges from a harmless eccentric, a drunken prankster – although it shows impressive co-ordination for anyone who has been drinking – or a fastmoving sloth, to a manifestation of La Mona, an entity also known as the Dwarf or Monkey Witch. In the mythology of Costa Rica’s Chorotega people, these are witches who could transform into monstrous monkeys to move at high speed through the trees, bringing grief to their enemies. Other Reddit commentators raise the low resolution, weird aspect ratios and heavy compression of the video as indicators that it might be faked but, as with many pieces of fortean evidence, the anonymity of the original source makes any definitive resolution of the mystery almost impossible.
The second video shows what appears to be a very skinny naked person, probably female, running along a pavement on all fours, dexterously and at a considerable speed. The video, again shot at night on security cameras, features recordings from three consecutive cameras that pick up the person running down a path along a street and round a corner before disappearing off screen (see youtu.be/rNhXj9ZMt3o). The video was entitled “Dog Girl from Tamaulipas” and was most likely shot in Mexico, as the title suggests. Again, suggestions have varied from the highly speculative – a werewolf– to the more plausible suggestion that this is someone with Uner Tan syndrome. This is a developmental disorder that results in severe learning disabilities and an inability to walk bipedally. Most famously, this was experienced by a family in southern Turkey who were the subject of a BBC documentary The Family That Walks on All Fours (see FT210:24), although they show nowhere near the running skills or turn of speed that the person in the video does. One source suggests this is an unnamed girl with Uner Tan syndrome who was discovered in 2009 in the Ampliacion Unidad Nacional area of Tamaulipas who is normally kept secluded by her family, and that the video comes from cameras used to monitor her safety – although why she is emaciated, naked and apparently running in the street is not explained. coasttocoastam.com, 26 Apr; ordonews.com, 4 Aug; themotherofallnerds.com, 19 Oct 2020.