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Season 08 Episode 1: May Their Passage Cleanse the World

38m 53s

Season 08 Episode 1: May Their Passage Cleanse the World

This episode of Unexplained, hosted by Richard McLean-Smith, explores the enduring legend of the Mongolian Death Worm, a creature said to inhabit the Gobi Desert. The story begins in 1922, when American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, often cited as an inspiration for Indiana Jones, was granted permission to search for early human fossils on the condition that he also attempt to capture the fabled worm. Locals described it as a headless, legless creature resembling a cow's intestine, capable of spitting corrosive yellow saliva and discharging deadly electric shocks. Andrews never found it, though he admitted the consistency of local testimony gave him pause. The episode traces how the legend influenced science fiction, including Ivan Yefremov's short story, Frank Herbert's Dune, and the film Tremors. It then follows Czech cryptozoologist Ivan Makurla, whose three expeditions between 1990 and 2004 failed to find the worm, and British researcher Richard Freeman's 2005 Centre for Fortean Zoology expedition. Freeman interviewed around two dozen witnesses with strikingly similar accounts but found no physical evidence. Both expeditions were plagued by violent sandstorms. Freeman ultimately theorized the creature might be a giant limbless burrowing reptile, possibly a worm lizard, while the episode concludes by speculating that an unidentified specimen may already be languishing in a forgotten museum collection.

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Speaker 15The American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews and his expedition team were getting restless. It was May 1922 and the men were in Urga, the capital city of Mongolia, that would later be renamed Ulaanbaatar. Their goal was a meeting with Mongolia's newly established prime minister, Jalkhans Kutak Damdimbazar, in the hope of being granted a permit to conduct an archaeological expedition in the heart of the Gobi Desert. It was a fragile time in the newly independent state. Only the year before, Mongolia had undergone a revolution that left it in a precarious position. Teetering between the influence of the Soviet Union and Chinese governments, with much insecurity among the new ruling powers over who they could trust. There had even been reports that white men found in the region were being captured and horribly tortured. One rumor told of a man being skinned alive. So Andrews could have been forgiven for feeling a little nervous when he finally received an invitation to the Gobi Desert. to speak with Prime Minister Damdimbazar. After making his way to the Mongolian parliament, he was ushered into a back room where he found Premier Damdimbazar and a group of his officials sitting together in somber silence. Some pleasantries were exchanged before Andrews tentatively began his pitch for the permits when Damdimbazar held up his hand for Andrews to stop. As the Prime Minister explained to Andrews, he was more than happy to grant Andrews permission to conduct his expedition, but only if he did something for him in return. Of course, said Andrews in reply, what do you need? And so Damdimbazar made his request that while Andrews and his team were out searching for ancient artifacts in the desert, they also spend some time trying to capture something for him. For centuries, people of the Gobi Desert had told extraordinary tales of a strange creature that was said to be headless, legless, about two to five feet long and resemble approximately the intestines of a cow. It was also rumoured to spit a corrosive yellow saliva and generate blasts of electricity so strong they could kill a full-grown camel. Some say that the Gobi Desert was so poisonous that merely to touch it meant instant death. The creature was reputed to live in the most desolate parts of the Gobi Desert and they called it Alagorai Hohai or, as it came to be known in English, the Mongolian Death Worm. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm Richard McLean-Smith. Welcome back. If ever there was a man on which to model the movie character Indiana Jones, it was Roy Chapman Andrews. Born in 1880, the American explorer, adventurer and naturalist would eventually become the director of the American Museum of Natural History. But in the 1920s, Andrews was on a quest to become a naturalist. To find the earliest evidence of human life. Andrews was a proponent of the Out of Asia theory, the theory of humanity's origins, in which it's believed the earliest humans emerged from the present-day region of Asia as opposed to Africa. Neither the Mongolian prime minister nor any of his officials had ever seen the so-called intestine worm for themselves. But as Andrews listened to them conferring with his interpreter, he could tell from the look on their faces that they all very much believed it existed. Dam-Dim-Bazaar, for one, said he knew a man who had seen it, while a cabinet minister reported that a cousin of his late wife had also witnessed the strange creature. The assembled dignitaries had practical instructions for Andrews when he found one of the deadly worms. He must be sure to handle it with long steel forceps, they said, so as not to come into direct contact with the creature. They also advised that he should wear dark glasses to neutralize the disastrous effects of even looking at such a poisonous creature. For six years, from 1922 to 1928, Andrews led several ventures known as the Central Asiatic Expeditions to search for the earliest human remains in Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. During these expeditions, Andrews and his team found many previously unknown fossil specimens, including the first scientifically recognized dinosaur eggs. But what they didn't find was a Mongolian death worm, or any evidence that they even existed. However, writing in his 1932 book, The New Conquest, of Central Asia, Andrews conceded that if the faith in its existence was not so strong and widespread among the Mongolians, and if everyone did not describe the animal exactly the same way, I would believe it to be an idle myth. It would be another ten years or so before stories of the death worm emerged once more from out of the Gobi Desert, when, sometime in the 19th century, on the 1840s, paleontologist Ivan Yefremov heard some locals talking about it while he was there looking for fossils of his own. Yefremov dabbled in writing science fiction and the Mongol tales he heard inspired him to write a story called Olgoy Korkoy, a Russian version of the worm's Mongolian name. In this fictional tale his worms could grow around five feet long and had the power to kill people from a distance. It was just a short story but it was a harbinger of more to come because giant lethal desert worms were destined to loom large in science fiction over the coming decades. In the late 1900s 1950s an emerging author by the name of Frank Herbert traveled to Florence, Oregon in the United States and visited the Oregon Dunes where the largest expanse of coastal sand dunes in North America rise to heights of up to 500 feet. There Herbert's interest in deserts was sparked and in a letter to his literary agent he wrote that he was impressed by the idea of how moving dunes might be able to swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, and highways. He went on to write what became the award-winning epic series, Dune, one of the world's best-selling science fiction novels. The saga revolves largely around the uncompromisingly arid planet, Arrakis, which is inhabited by enormous deadly worms. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. Another version of deadly, fast-tunneling desert worms appeared in the 1990 comedy-horror film Tremors. Unlike the deathly serious Dune series set on alien worlds, Tremors, with its tongue-in-cheek black humor, was set in the Nevada desert. The idea for the story came to the writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock while they were producing a series of educational films. The film was based on a novel by the author of the novel, The Dune. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. The Dune is the world's largest desert, and the Dune is one of the world's largest deserts. safety videos for the U.S. Navy. Climbing a large desert boulder to get some footage from a high vantage point near one of the desert naval bases, they asked each other, what if there was something that wouldn't let them leave the rock they were on, something like a shark, they thought, but on land. Like Frank Herbert, the writers of Tremors envisaged monstrous tunneling worms, highly sensitive to the slightest vibration, and hungry for human flesh. Explanations of what inspired the creation of the monster worms have included whales, dragons, and even giant nematodes. What's not recorded is whether Herbert or the Tremors team had ever come across stories of the Mongolian death worm, but one young Czechoslovakian man called Ivan Makurla most certainly had. Born in Bohemia in 1943, in what is now part of present day Czech Republic, Makurla had read all about the accounts of Roy Chapman Andrews, and even Yefremov's fictional tale about the supposedly deadly Mongolian worms. It sparked a childhood fascination with legendary creatures that never left him. At the age of 16, Makurla moved to Prague, where he studied mechanical engineering and zoology and electronics, before deciding to pursue his long-time hobby of cryptozoology more seriously.
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Speaker 15Ivan Makurla organized expeditions to unsuccessfully search for the Loch Ness monster, the Tasmanian tiger, and the so-called elephant bird of Madagascar, and authored numerous books on cryptozoology. But what he became best known for was his passionate quest to find the Mongolian death worm. In one 1987 book about the land and legends of the Gobi Desert, Makurla described how the creature was said to live near water sources in the western or southern part of the country, only coming to the surface after rainfall, and that when it travels underground, it creates waves of sand on the surface by which it can be detected. At the time, Makurla was unable to see this for himself. Due to the communist-era travel restrictions in both Czechoslovakia and Mongolia. That all changed one November in 1989, when the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which had ruled unopposed for 40 years, was suddenly swept aside. Now free to travel, Makurla, along with photographer friend Yuri Skupin, and a doctor called Yada Prokopec, made their first expedition, to the Gobi Desert, the following year. It was a difficult trip. There were still official restrictions on travel within the country, and practical difficulties getting to the remote parts of the Gobi Desert that the worm was said to inhabit. Despite the severe lack of transport infrastructure, with no buses and barely any roads, Makurla eventually managed to convince someone to drive them into the southern Gobi. Once there, his team began collating eyewitness accounts. One after another, locals gave eerily similar accounts of a creature they described as looking like a cow's intestine filled with blood, usually about half a metre in length and as thick as an average male's thigh. Another strange but consistently described trait was how the creature had no eyes, nostrils or mouth, making it hard to see what was going on. It was also reported to move strangely, unlike ordinary worms, by rolling or squirming sideways. One night, after befriending a couple of Mongolian nomads after a few bottles of vodka, the Czech team were treated to more unsettling details about the alleged worm. The nomads said that it not only seemed like a worm, but also that it was a human being. Spits an acid, corroding anything it touches, but that this substance turns everything yellow. The colour yellow, they said, attracted more worms. Once, they claimed, a young boy was playing outside with a yellow ball when there was a sudden disturbance in the sand around him. Moments later, a giant worm broke through the surface and stopped to regard the boy. Untroubled by its appearance, the boy was said to have been killed instantly when he tried to touch it. When the parents allegedly came across the tragic scene, they found a disturbingly large trail in the sand that led away from their son. In anger, they followed the trail until they too came across the worm, only to both then also be killed by it. One elderly woman, local to the same area, explained that when the worm wanted to kill someone, it would move half its length out of the sand and inflate a bubble over its exposed body, from which it squirted its deadly poison. Sadly, for Ivan Makurla, he and his team failed to find a death worm on their expedition. Three years later, however, Makurla returned to Mongolia for a follow-up trip. Over the course of eight weeks, he and his team used explosives to blast holes in the desert to try and scare the worms out of hiding. But still, they found nothing. Then, on a visit to a Buddhist monastery, things got a little more complicated. That afternoon, Makurla was approached by a monk who knew all about his expedition. As they sat in the quiet temple, the hot air thick with the smell of incense, the monk told Makurla that the Algoi Korkoi was a creature of supernatural evil, and that he was endangering his life, searching for it. That night, as Makurla slept, nightmarish images of the giant worm flashed through his unconscious mind. He woke up with a start to find his back covered in blood-filled boils. Prokopec, the expedition's doctor, became alarmed when over the next few days, even more hematomas appeared on Makurla's body and he began to show signs of heart failure. This incident was captured in a TV documentary, the teammate called The Sand Monster Mystery, which aired on Czech television in 1993. Thankfully, Makurla went on to make a full recovery, and undaunted, in the summer of 2004, he launched what would be his third and final expedition to find the Mongolian death worm. This time, he enlisted the help of a pilot. Together, they filmed great swathes of the Gobi's vast expanses, via a video camera attached to an aircraft, as well as using night vision goggles to search in the dark. But yet again, the team failed to find any evidence of the worm. In an interview on Prague TV, after this final, unsuccessful expedition, Makurla seemed resigned to never finding the creature. He said that for many years, he believed the creature could be as a zoological reality, but after his most recent experiences, he began to suspect that it might in fact be some kind of psychological phenomenon instead. A hallucination, perhaps, brought on by the extreme heat of the Gobi desert. The following year of 2005, it was time for a British team to have a crack at finding the worm. As the director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, or CFZ, a crypto-zoological club based in Exeter in the southwest of England, Richard Freeman was no stranger to quests for mysterious creatures. A lifelong fan of Doctor Who, he'd been a zookeeper and head of reptiles at a major UK zoo for a while. He'd been a zookeeper for a while, and he'd been a zookeeper for a while before also being drawn into the world of cryptozoology. Freeman relished the search of animals that mainstream biologists believed were legendary or extinct. His past expeditions included hunts for the chupacabra, a blood-drinking, nocturnal creature from Puerto Rico, and the orang pendek, a supposed ape-man said to live in unexplored valleys in Sumatra. Now, he had assembled a small team of fellow CFZ members to go to Mongolia with him. Arriving in Mongolia's capital, Ulaanbaatar, the team headed south towards a remote area of the Gobi Desert region covering over 8,000 square miles called Noyan, where many reported sightings of the death worms had come from. As they drove, Freeman, looked out at the jeep's window, transfixed. Vast fields of sand dunes merged with gravel plains that seemed to stretch into infinity, appearing like giant mirrors due to being coated with the mineral mica. The surrounding cliffs were so red they seemed to be on fire. As the party travelled deep into the south, they met and interviewed around 24 apparent eyewitnesses who all had stories of seeing the giant death worm. As both explorers Chapman and McCurler had noted before them, descriptions of the worm were remarkably consistent. Almost all the witnesses claimed to have seen it lying on the ground motionless, being about two feet long and as thick as an arm with scaly skin. All believed it to be extremely poisonous. One elderly man named Liv Sandorj claimed to have seen it back in 1972. He was travelling across the desert one day when he saw what he first thought was a human arm lying on top of the sand. It was only when he got closer that he noticed it was moving. It was a large, worm-like creature, he said, that kept changing colour to match its surroundings. "It was a human arm. It was a human arm. It was a human arm. It was a human arm." He said they were thought to live underground, in soft sand, and that they were able to generate an electrical charge, but they weren't around as much as they used to be. A woman named Suk Hee took Freeman's team to a location near the border with China in the forest of Saxall, a strange shrubby, drought-tolerant plant which grows in thickets. It was there, supposedly, she saw a brownish-grey worm, about half a metre in length, writhing within the plants before disappearing among the roots of a tree. The team found numerous burrows in the area, assumed to be made by rodents, which they surmised might be an excellent food source for the death worms. But no sooner had they begun to set traps to catch the rodents and worms, an enormous sandstorm rose in the area, up in the distance that quickly descended, shredding their tents to confetti and forcing them to leave the area. After moving on from the forest of Saxor, Freeman's expedition met with an old ex-army colonel named Hervu, who still lived near an abandoned military base called Ovutin Otriat. Years ago, when he was a soldier, Hervu set out on a motorbike patrol, just as the desert sun was beginning to set. At some point, he apparently came upon what he thought was a busted old tyre on the ground, all coiled up. But as he got closer, he realised it wasn't a tyre at all, but some kind of weird, worm-like creature. For half an hour, Hervu watched it. As it lay there unmoving, the light glinting off its scaly skin, still wet from recent rain. Eventually, he rushed off to get his camera, only to find on his return that the creature had gone. That night, the ex-colonel took Freeman and his team to the site of the encounter, where they camped, laying out rodent traps and laboriously digging holes in the dirt. They sank, bucket traps, hoping to lure in a death worm, but the traps caught nothing. Again, the team moved on, this time to a nearby oasis, rich in wildlife, where they met with a woman named Kujuenga. Back in the 1980s, Kujuenga was out walking with her grandfather when he called her over to look at something. Again, it was a brownish, 40cm long, worm-like creature, with no discernible head or tail. She didn't remember much else about it, other than that she was very frightened of it. Once again, Freeman's team set out bucket traps to try and catch the creature, but as they started digging holes around the oasis, Freeman gazed up to see a small dust devil beginning to grow about a mile away. His interest turned to consternation as the small dusty vortex rapidly grew larger, then began barreling directly toward them. When it hit, the fierce winds and blowing dust engulfed the entire camp, smashing and scattering everything in their path. The wind was so strong that at one point, Freeman saw one of their Mongolian drivers flying past him horizontally, hanging on to a billowing tent as it was swept out into the desert. Thinking back to Ivan Makurla's hunch that perhaps the worms were in fact some kind of psychological phenomenon, it was as if something didn't want them to discover the truth. After a month in Mongolia, the Centre for Fortean Zoology expedition was over, and there was no specimen or even sighting of a death worm to show for their efforts. However, Richard Freeman believed that the trip had been good for one thing, namely that it confirmed his suspicions about the creature's true identity. I don't think it's a worm at all, he said later. Instead, he had come to believe it was in fact some kind of limbless, burrowing reptile, either a giant member of an already known group of reptiles or a worm lizard. Worm lizards are also known as Amphizbenians, named after Amphizbenia, a mythical Greek serpent with a second head on its tail. They're one of the most mysterious and poorly studied groups of reptiles. Neither snakes nor lizards, most known species of this primitive group, are found in Africa and South America. They're also known as the Amphizbenians, and they're also known as the Amphizbenians, but they also occur in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Middle East, and even Florida. With tails that resemble their heads, worm lizards range anywhere from 10 to 70 centimetres long and have rings of scales that wrap around their bodies. Meat-eating predators, they search for prey underground, burrowing through soil and loose sand, with strong, reinforced skulls and muscular bodies. Specimens of worm lizards can be found in museums all over the world, including the British Museum of Natural History, eerily suspended in large jars of alcohol to preserve them. ID cards list them as coming from places like Guyana, the West Indies, and Buenos Aires. But specimens in museums are not always what they appear to be. In nearly 200 years, a mysterious giant gecko sat in a storage area at the Natural History Museum of Marseilles in France. No one knew anything about it, although the style of taxidermy pointed to it having been collected in the 1830s. Larger than any gecko known today, its main body was well over a foot long, while its tail was another two feet long on top of that. It had always been thought to come from New Zealand, but in 2023, Professor Matthew Heinecker, a herpetologist, a specialist in reptiles and amphibians, applied the latest DNA analysis to a sample taken from the specimen's femur, and compared the results with a dataset of the entire gecko family tree. It turned out that the giant gecko was not from New Zealand at all, but instead, closely related to geckos found today in New Caledonia, an island in the southwest Pacific Ocean, a good 750 miles east of New Zealand. Could it be that the Mongolian death worm has in actuality already been found? Perhaps, decades ago, Russian herpetologists, out hunting for snakes in the Gobi Desert, unwittingly caught one, and added it. obliviously to their reptile collections? Is it out there now, lurking, suspended in alcohol in a dusty jar somewhere, unidentified and long forgotten, in the dark, cavernous basement of some former Soviet-era museum? That question, and the true identity of the Mongolian death worm, for the time being at least, remains unanswered. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by me, Richard McLean Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You can find out more about her work at dianehope.com and on Instagram at inthesoundfield. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLean Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me, Richard McLean Smith. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. You can find out more at unexplainedpodcast.com and reach us online through Twitter at unexplainedpod and Facebook at facebook.com forward slash unexplainedpodcast.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. In 1922, American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews sought a Gobi Desert expedition permit from Mongolia's Prime Minister Damdimbazar, who granted it on the condition that Andrews also try to capture the legendary Mongolian Death Worm.
  2. The Mongolian Death Worm, known locally as Alagorai Hohai, was described as a headless, legless creature two to five feet long, resembling a cow's intestine, that spat corrosive yellow saliva and emitted lethal electric shocks.
  3. Andrews led the Central Asiatic Expeditions from 1922 to 1928, discovering dinosaur eggs and fossils but never finding the worm, though he conceded the widespread, consistent local belief made him hesitate to dismiss it as pure myth.
  4. Soviet paleontologist Ivan Yefremov's 1940s short story about the worm, along with Frank Herbert's Dune and the film Tremors, helped inspire decades of science fiction featuring giant deadly desert worms.
  5. Czech cryptozoologist Ivan Makurla dedicated much of his life to finding the worm, mounting three expeditions between 1990 and 2004, all unsuccessful, and eventually suspected it might be a heat-induced psychological phenomenon.
  6. British cryptozoologist Richard Freeman led a 2005 Centre for Fortean Zoology expedition, interviewing around 24 witnesses who gave remarkably consistent descriptions, but found no specimen despite extensive trapping.
  7. Both expeditions were repeatedly disrupted by violent sandstorms and dust devils, which some team members felt was almost as if something was preventing their discovery.
  8. Freeman concluded the creature was likely a limbless burrowing reptile such as a giant worm lizard, and the episode raises the possibility that an unidentified specimen may already sit forgotten in an old Soviet-era museum collection.

Summary:

This episode of Unexplained, hosted by Richard McLean-Smith, explores the enduring legend of the Mongolian Death Worm, a creature said to inhabit the Gobi Desert. The story begins in 1922, when American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, often cited as an inspiration for Indiana Jones, was granted permission to search for early human fossils on the condition that he also attempt to capture the fabled worm. Locals described it as a headless, legless creature resembling a cow's intestine, capable of spitting corrosive yellow saliva and discharging deadly electric shocks. Andrews never found it, though he admitted the consistency of local testimony gave him pause.

The episode traces how the legend influenced science fiction, including Ivan Yefremov's short story, Frank Herbert's Dune, and the film Tremors. It then follows Czech cryptozoologist Ivan Makurla, whose three expeditions between 1990 and 2004 failed to find the worm, and British researcher Richard Freeman's 2005 Centre for Fortean Zoology expedition. Freeman interviewed around two dozen witnesses with strikingly similar accounts but found no physical evidence. Both expeditions were plagued by violent sandstorms. Freeman ultimately theorized the creature might be a giant limbless burrowing reptile, possibly a worm lizard, while the episode concludes by speculating that an unidentified specimen may already be languishing in a forgotten museum collection.

FAQs

It is a legendary creature from the Gobi Desert said to be 2-5 feet long, resemble a cow's intestine, spit corrosive yellow saliva, and generate lethal electric shocks.

An American explorer and naturalist who led expeditions to Mongolia in the 1920s and was reportedly an inspiration for Indiana Jones.

No. During his Central Asiatic Expeditions from 1922 to 1928, he found dinosaur eggs and fossils but no evidence of the death worm.

A Czechoslovakian cryptozoologist who led several expeditions to search for the Mongolian Death Worm and other legendary creatures.

After a monk warned him the creature was supernatural, he developed blood-filled boils and signs of heart failure, but he later recovered.

Freeman believed it was not a worm but likely a limbless, burrowing reptile, possibly a giant worm lizard.

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