MONKEY MOUNTAIN
One particular hill in Vietnam was the site of so many Rock Ape sightings that it became known as Monkey Mountain. The US Marines stationed there said the apes threw stones into the base compound which injured some troops.
Toward the end of the war, Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops reported so many sightings of Rock Apes that the North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretariat ordered an official scientific investigation.
Dr. Vo Quy, a respected ornithologist and environmental researcher, was dispatched from Hanoi and eventually found Rock Ape footprints, which he soon made casts of. Wider than a human foot, the prints were too large for a typical ape.
Another Vietnamese scientist followed suit after the war. In 1982, Tran Hong Viet from the Pedagogic University of Hanoi discovered further Rock Ape footprints.
While no photographs or bodies of these strange Yeti-like cryptids were ever recovered, the fact that so many soldiers from both sides attest to their existence should make us think twice before dismissing all stories.
It’s definitely possible for American GIS and Vietnamese troops to have misidentified Vietnam’s other monkey species for Rock Apes. Vietnam after all has a fair share of macaques, langurs, doucs and gibbons – but none of them grow taller than three feet, compared to the human-sized Rock Apes.
It’s also possible that encounters, especially at night, were hallucinations of men pushed by war and weariness (soldiers in war are almost always tired beyond belief) past normal limits. That many troops on both sides sometimes (almost regularly by 1972, towards the end of the war) used drugs like Marijuana adds weight to this argument.
But what if there’s really something big waiting to be discovered in the jungles of Vietnam?