EVALUATING THE ELF CHIMP OF FLORIDA - GLOWING GREEN AND VERY MEAN!

 

Is this what the elf chimp looked like? (created by me using Magic Studio)

My previous ShukerNature blog article was devoted to fictional green pigs (click here to read it), so now, continuing this colourful theme, the current one presented here is devoted to a (supposedly) factual green chimpanzee.

As regular readers of my blog, books, and articles will know well by now, I've always been attracted to the more unusual, little-known cryptids, and never more so than when they appear to be confined to a single source, and with no apparent follow-ups either. So it was that when, many years ago, I read about the subject of this blog article of mine in just one solitary book and nowhere else, its details stayed in my memory, to fascinate but also frustrate me in equal measure. For in spite of having searched several times down through the years for additional information in other publications and widely online, I've never been able to uncover any further details. Consequently, I've decided to present here in article form on ShukerNature the scant details that I do have concerning what I have dubbed – for reasons explained later – the elf chimp of Florida, in the hope that my article might induce readers who may know more about this very curious cryptid to post their valuable information here.

My original – and only – source of information (not counting, obviously, the numerous paraphrased versions of it that have subsequently appeared in print and online) is John A. Keel's classic book Strange Creatures From Time and Space (USA 1970/UK 1976). A verbatim version of it later appeared in a revised edition of this book, published in 1994 and retitled The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings.

 

My American 1970 paperback, UK 1976 paperback, and American revised, retitled 1994 paperback of the Keel-authored books noted above (© John A. Keel estate/Fawcett Gold Medal Books/Sphere Books/Doubleday Books – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

In both editions of Keel's book, the relevant excerpt appears as Case #15 within the Florida-themed section of a chapter entitled 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon', and reads as follows:

"There's a terrible smell around here. Can't you smell it?" the girl complained. She was one of four teenagers parked in a Lovers' Lane near Elfers, [western] Florida, in January 1967. As the others took deep breaths "an animal about the size of a large chimpanzee" sprang onto the hood [bonnet] of the car.

"Then we panicked!" the driver later told investigator Joan Whritenour. "The thing looked like a big chimp, but it was greenish [Keel's italics] in color, with glowing green eyes. I started the motor and the thing jumped off and ran back into the woods. We tore like blazes back to the dance we were supposed to be attending."

A police officer from New Port Richey later visited the site and found a sticky green substance which remains unidentified.

The investigator named in Keel's account was ufologist Joan Whritenour (who edited the ufological periodical Saucer Scoop). In 1967 she co-authored with famous mysteries researcher/writer Brad Steiger a book entitled Flying Saucers Are Hostile, followed a year later by a second UFO-themed book, Allende Letters. As I've never been a ufological researcher, however, I've never owned a copy of either of these works, nor any issues of Saucer Scoop, so I have no idea whether they contain any mention of this case (although it's more cryptozoology-based than UFO-themed anyway). Consequently, could any ShukerNature readers who do own any or all of these publications please check through them and let me know? Thanks very much! Sadly, neither Steiger nor Whritenour are still alive, otherwise I'd have contacted them to request further details regarding the 1967 Elfers incident.

Keel himself provided no primary source for his above account's information, nor, as seen, did he attempt to assign any kind of identifying moniker to the green chimp (or chimp-like entity). Consequently, in order to make it more readily identifiable to and referable by future researchers, I have chosen to dub this creature the elf chimp – because it was seen near Elfers, and because the traditional elf-associated colour just so happens to be green.

 

The elf chimp was said to be greenish and to possess glowing green eyes (created by me using Magic Studio)

As a lifelong science-fiction movie buff (click here to visit my film review blog, Shuker In MovieLand), when I read about the creature's green colouration and the police officer's discovery of an unidentifiable sticky green substance at the site where the teenagers' encountered it I readily recalled how such a substance, frequently some kind of deadly radioactive spillage and/or of extraterrestrial origin, is a staple ingredient of sci fi-themed B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s. However, I personally doubt that anything so (melo)dramatic was the identity of the green gloop in this reputedly real-life incident.

Shifting my attention to more prosaic possibilities, I recalled the many reported cases down through the years of so-called luminous owls, spied widely around the world, but especially in Europe, North America, and Australia – all regions that just so happen to harbour the pallid-plumaged barn owl Tyto alba. Said to glow with intense brightness, sightings of mystery luminous owls have been discounted by some scientists as observations of normal barn owls that have inadvertently brushed against bioluminescent fungi such as the honey fungus Armillaria mellea (which are sticky to the touch, enhancing their adhesive capabilities) when perching in trees, with these glowing fungi and their spores becoming attached to their feathers. Comparable fungi, including Armillaria once again, also occur on the ground.

However, as swiftly pointed out by skeptics of this proposed solution, the total luminescence exhibited by a colony of such fungi in situ is still nowhere near as intense as has been reported for a fair few luminous owls. This in turns means that even if barn owls did find themselves with some glowing fungal spores attached to their plumage after having perched upon branches bearing them, the combined glow yielded by these spores would obviously be less still than the total glow emitted by the complete colony of bioluminescent fungi on those branches.

 

Honey fungus Armillaria mellea, depicted in a vintage illustration from English naturalist/illustrator James Sowerby's Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms, 1789-1781 (public domain)

Consequently, I consider it highly unlikely that even if it had climbed trees bearing glowing fungi and rolled on the ground where glowing fungi were growing, the elf chimp encountered by the teenagers could have appeared greenish.

No details concerning the nature of the woods from which it had emerged and back into which it had fled were included in Keel's account, but I am wondering whether it contained any kind of large pool, pond, ravine, lake, stream, or some other body of freshwater. For if so, this might explain not only the elf chimp's colour but also its vile smell. Such bodies of freshwater in Florida and in many other localities around the world all too regularly experience, especially during the summer months, the detrimental phenomenon of algal blooms.

An algal bloom is defined as a rapid growth of microscopic true algae or of cyanobacteria in water, which often results in a coloured scum appearing on the water surface. In marine bodies of water, these blooms are often red in colour, are caused by true algae, and some are known as red tides (but green ones also occur, depending upon the algal species involved), whereas in freshwater they are frequently bright green or bluish-green, and are caused by autotrophic gram-negative bacteria correctly referred to as cyanobacteria but which on account of their superficially alga-like outward appearance are popularly albeit inaccurately dubbed blue-green algae.

 

A bright green example of a severe freshwater algal bloom (public domain)

Algal blooms result when algae or cyanobacteria multiply quickly in waterways with an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus (often caused by fertilizer having been dumped into them), particularly when the water is warm and the weather is calm. Moreover, they can have harmful effects upon the health of humans and other animals if water containing a bloom is touched, swum in, swallowed, or when airborne droplets are inhaled. They also emit a foul, putrid smell that can irritate, and they clog the gills of fishes swimming in water polluted by them.

Florida's freshwater bodies are particularly prone to algal blooms – indeed, in summer 2023 a toxic cyanobacterial bloom was covering roughly half of Lake Okeechobee, Florida's largest inland lake (click here to access a news report concerning this disturbing turn of events). In short, if the elf chimp had entered a body of freshwater containing a cyanobacterial bloom, whether deliberately or accidentally, it could well appear greenish in colour, with the severe irritation to its skin conceivably explaining its belligerent behaviour, and the stench emitted by the cyanobacterial bloom's scum even explaining this creature's awful stink as noted by the teenagers.

On the negative side of any explanation involving algal blooms is that the encounter took place in January, whereas these blooms are most prominent during the warm, sunny summer months. Furthermore, if the body of water where an algal bloom might potentially develop is ensconced within a dark secluded forest with little sunlight penetrating through the trees, this is far from ideal for a bloom's development, as the latter requires plenty of sunlight to stimulate its growth via photosynthesis. And if the sticky green substance found at the site near Elfers by the police officer were indeed from an algal bloom (or from glowing fungi for that matter), why could it not be identified? Algal blooms (and glowing fungi) were already familiar phenomena, scientifically speaking, back then.

 

Artistic representation of the Florida skunk ape (© William M. Rebsamen)

Also needing to be considered is whether, in spite of its eyewitnesses' likening it to, or even directly identifying it as, a chimpanzee, the creature really was a chimp. An absconded exotic pet or an escapee/release from a private collection or menagerie certainly offer plausible explanations for why such a creature might be existing in a woodland near Elfier. However, there is also the intriguing possibility that it may be something truly cryptozoological – possibly a juvenile bigfoot, or, more specifically, a Florida skunk ape.

The reason that I proffer this option for consideration is that in the very same Florida-themed section of his book's 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon' chapter, Keel included as Case #14 another encounter with a hairy green-eyed green-glowing foetid creature of unidentified nature, but much larger than the elf chimp and more suggestive of a typical bigfoot entity. Again, he provided no source for his information, but here is how he described the encounter:

A young woman was changing a tire on a lonely stretch of highway outside Brooksville, [western] Florida, on Wednesday night, November 30, 1966, when she heard a noise in the bushes and became aware of a most unpleasant odor. Then a huge thing with large green eye and an eerie greenish glow on one side of its hairy torso stood up beside the road and studied her. She was terrified. The creature walked off into the woods when another car came along and stopped.

Worth noting here is that Brooksville and Elfers exist in adjacent counties within western Florida, with Brooksville a mere 38.7 miles north of Elfers.

 

Map showing the proximity of Elfers to Brookesville, both situated in western Florida (© Google Maps – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Partial but not full-body contact with an cyanobacterial bloom could explain why only part of the torso of the Brooksville beast was glowing green – as an adult (judging from its huge size), the creature would be more experienced and wary about immersing in bloom-polluted water than a juvenile would be. Of course, as with the elf chimp case, the time of year in which this encounter occurred is outside the peak time for algal blooms, but some can exist all year long. Alternatively, had one side of its thorax simply brushed against some glowing fungi in the undergrowth?

Green glowing eyes have often been reported in bigfoot sightings (so too have red glowing eyes – click here for more insights into red eye-glow). This suggests that whatever the species responsible, a tapetum lucidum, i.e. a light-reflecting cell layer, is present at the back of each eye, behind the retina, as is commonplace in nocturnal mammals, assisting these creatures to see in dim light (by reflecting incoming light back out again through the retina, thus causing the reported glow or eyeshine).

However, as apes and monkeys are almost exclusively diurnal (only the Central and South American douroucoulis aka night or owl monkeys are habitually nocturnal, as well as lower primates such as lemurs and lorises), their eyes do not possess a tapetum – indicating, therefore, that whatever it was, the elf chimp was not a true chimp.

 

A douroucouli depicted in an exquisite vintage illustration from 1894 by John Gerrard Keulemans (public domain)

Having said that: an uncategorised species of ape that has evolved to be nocturnal might be expected, therefore, to have evolved such an adaptation. Again, the douroucoulis provide a precedent here. For although they do not possess a true tapetum, i.e. composed of riboflavin crystals (which nocturnal lemurs have), they do possess an analogous version composed of collagen fibrils, indicating that their nocturnal lifestyle is a secondary adaptation evolved from ancestral species that were diurnal in lifestyle.

In short, glowing green eyeshine at night does not necessarily rule out an ape identity for the bigfoot. Equally, however, those who favour a bear as this famous cryptid's true identity point to the fact that bears' eyes do possess a true tapetum and shine at night, the precise colour varying from red or orange to yellow or green, depending upon a number of different factors (and thereby making conflicting reports of green eyeshine and red eyeshine for the bigfoot less problematic).

As noted at the beginning of this ShukerNature blog article, I am unaware of any sequel to these cases, or the original source material (newspaper reports?) upon which Keel based his accounts. Does any additional coverage exist, for example, that names the teenagers and/or the police officer, which could therefore enable them to be traced and interviewed if still alive? Gathering further first-hand eyewitness testimony from them might yield new, extremely valuable details. Someone with ready access to the archives of local newspapers for Elfers and Brooksville might uncover such source material, which is why I have prepared this article – as a spur for further research by those better-placed geographically to conduct it than I am, living in Britain. It would certainly be fascinating to know whether the elf chimp and its much larger green-furred Brooksville counterpart were ever reported again, rather than being once-witnessed wonders of the kind all-too-frequently found hidden away in the cryptozoological archives.

 

The elf chimp – mean, green, and seen, but only once? (created by me using Magic Studio)

 

 

PICTURING A LOST GIBBON? A LONG-BURIED SINIAN SIMIAN DISCLOSED

Representation of the possible appearance in life of Junzi imperialis (© Hodari Nundu)

In June 2018, a new species of extinct gibbon was officially described and named in the journal Science, and was so different from all others that it also required the creation of a new genus in order to accommodate it. But what made this find more remarkable still was that instead of merely being another fossil species, one that vanished way back in prehistoric times, this new gibbon may have only died out a few centuries ago, i.e. during historical times, and was therefore familiar to modern humanity.

Hailing from China, it was formally dubbed Junzi imperialis by a team of researchers that included Dr Sam Turvey from the Zoological Society of London's Institute of Zoology, and with whom I have been communicating regarding their highly significant discovery. It is presently known from a single partial cranium and mandible found inside the tomb of an important noblewoman named Lady Xia in central China's Shaanxi Province, dating back approximately 2,300 years, alongside the remains of several other animal species, including leopards, lynx, cranes, various domestic animals, and a black bear. It may have been a pet, because gibbons were highly prized in this capacity within China back then. Lady Xia was the mother of King Zhuangxiang of Qin and the grandmother of Qin Shi Huang, who was China's first emperor.

The research team believes that subsequent extinction of Junzi imperialis probably resulted from adverse human activities, such as hunting and habitat destruction, which, if correct, would mean that this is the very first species of ape known to have died out due to such interactions. Moreover, the team also considers it likely that this is not the only Chinese gibbon species to have become extinct in historical times – the researchers believe it possible that additional lately-lost species still await formal discovery in this huge country via the eventual unearthing of preserved physical remains.

A Chinese painting of gibbons at play, dating back to c.1427 AD (public domain)

There is a second, equally intriguing but entirely independent line of evidence indicating that this prospect may indeed be true. A number of early classical Chinese paintings exist depicting gibbons that do not resemble any Chinese species currently still in existence. True, these may conceivably be very stylised portrayals of still-surviving Sinian gibbons, or they may even be representations of non-native specimens brought into China from elsewhere in Asia as exotic, greatly-valued pets.

However, there is also an exciting third possibility – that such illustrations are bona fide depictions of native but now-extinct Chinese gibbon species, perhaps including the newly-unveiled J. imperialis. Moreover, this would not be unprecedented - species such as China's very own giant panda and Roxellana's snub-nosed monkey, as well as Africa's gerenuk and Grevy's zebra, for instance, were all first made known to science via early pictorial evidence before physical, tangible evidence of their reality was obtained.

I now look forward to further discoveries of this same nature being subsequently made in China, providing new, significant glimpses of the gibbons from this vast land's distant – and perhaps not so distant – past.

Detail from the c.1427 AD Chinese painting included in full above (public domain)

BIRD-HEADED FISH-MEN AND PIG-RIDING MAN-BEASTS - MORE PERPLEXING PORTRAYALS FROM THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

A red river hog (aka bush pig), a species of wild pig habitually ridden through the Central African Republic's forests by dwarf hairy man-beasts…allegedly! (© Dr Karl Shuker)

In my previous ShukerNature blog article (click here), I documented a remarkable drawing by the late artist Jean Claude Thibault, a Frenchman resident for many years in the Central African Republic (CAR). It depicts what appears to be the mysterious emela-ntouka or 'killer of elephants' – a horned aquatic cryptid also reported elsewhere in Africa under such names as the chipekwe and irizima.

Thibault's emela-ntouka drawing (© Jean Claude Thibault)

Moreover, this was just one of four pictures depicting intriguing CAR entities that had been drawn by Thibault (sometime during the early 1990s or late 1980s), and which were shown to me in August 2012 by Anette Stichnoth. She was working at that time for the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Areas (APDS) – a region of especial conservation significance in the CAR (check out its website here). The drawings had lately been displayed in an art exhibition held by the APDS, not long after Thibault had died (about three years ago), and Anette was enquiring about the entities illustrated in them. A year later, she received some illuminating information concerning these entities from a CAR local who was very knowledgeable about his country's traditional lore and legends.

So now, with Anette's kind permission, this present ShukerNature blog article exclusively unveils Thibault's three other drawings online, accompanied by the information that she received concerning them, together with my own thoughts.

The mondjoli-mbembe - a bird-headed fish-man from the folklore of the Central African Republic (© Jean Claude Thibault)

Above is the first of these drawings. It depicts a truly bizarre entity known as the mondjoli-mbembe or, more simply, the fish-man. According to Anette's CAR informant, this bird-headed humanoid is a paranormal being that lives in marshes and swamps, feeding upon fishes, from which he obtains his mystical powers that enable him to vanish from one place and appear instantly somewhere else. Sometimes, moreover, he makes fishermen disappear who want to fish in the watery terrain that he inhabits. When he kills fishes, he leaves them in a heap, and if a fisherman should find that heap the mondjoli-mbembe has no objection to the man taking half of the fishes away. But he must not take all of them – otherwise the angry mondjoli-mbembe will follow him to his village and take his revenge, which is not a pleasant sight to behold!

Red river hogs, with one of them ridden by a pig genie (© Jean-Claude Thibault)

This second drawing by Thibault depicts a hairy bipedal humanoid entity of diminutive stature riding a species of central and western African wild pig known as the red river hog or bush pig Potamochoerus porcus (not to be confused with the closely-related and similarly-named but less visually-colourful bushpig P. larvatus of eastern and southern Africa). According to Anette's CAR informant, such entities as this individual are supernatural dwarf beings known as pig genii or pig ghosts, which act as pig-herds to the red river hogs, walking in front of them in the forest, and even riding on their backs. Moreover, should a hog refuse to allow one of these beings to ride it, the pig genie will punish it, and chase it away from the other hogs towards the traps set by human hunters.

The third Thibault drawing presented here also depicts pig genii, but this time they are about to take part alongside some humans in a ritual known as boyebe. Before human hunters set out on a foray, they supposedly perform boyebe, which consists of dancing around a fire with the pig genii, because the men believe that this will ensure that they achieve success in their hunting.

Human hunters and pig genii about to take part together in the pre-hunting ritual of boyebe (© Jean Claude Thibault)

There seems little doubt that the mondjoli-mbembe is entirely mythical, a grotesque, composite bird-man equipped with magical powers and confined exclusively to the CAR's corpus of traditional folklore. Conversely, the pig genii are very similar indeed in basic form to a number of dwarf hairy bipedal man-beasts of possible hominoid identity reported widely across tropical Africa. These include such cryptozoologically familiar forms as the agogwe of Tanzania and Mozambique, the fating 'ho of Senegal, the Congolese kakundakari, and the séhité of the Ivory Coast.

Les Bêtes Humaines d'Afrique (front cover illustration © Alika Lindbergh/Plon Publishing)

According to veteran cryptozoologist Dr Bernard Heuvelmans, who devoted a major section to them in his book Les Bêtes Humaines d'Afrique (1980), these primate cryptids could variously be surviving gracile australopithecines (early bipedal African hominids known to have existed from 3.9 million to 1.7 million years ago), proto-pygmies, and/or proto-bushmen. Other suggestions include chimpanzees Pan troglodytes that have become more bipedal than is typical for their species, or bonobos P. paniscus – which walk upright quite commonly anyway. Some of these entities are deemed by their superstitious human neighbours to be preternatural, but descriptions of them given by Western eyewitnesses suggest otherwise – that they are corporeal yet highly elusive, currently-unclassified hominoids, exactly as proposed by Heuvelmans.

The CAR pig genii may well fall into this category too, with their pig-riding, pig-herding proclivities and their fire-dancing, pre-hunting rituals alongside humans owing rather more to native imagination than to ethnological interaction. Interestingly, according to traditional lore in Brazil a short hairy man-beast inhabiting its jungles and called the curupira (click here to see a painting depicting it) is said to ride those wild pig-like ungulates known as peccaries and even small deer called brockets or mazamas. So such folklore motifs are clearly not confined to Africa.

If any ShukerNature reader has additional information concerning the CAR entities depicted in Thibault's drawings, I'd welcome any details that you could send me or post here – thanks very much!

Restoration of Australopithecus africanus, a species of gracile australopithecine that existed from around 3.03 million to 2.04 million years ago (© Nachosan/Wikipedia)

FROM KING CHEETAHS TO KOOLOOKAMBAS - VOLUME 2 OF THE JOURNAL OF CRYPTOZOOLOGY IS NOW AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER

The orang pendek of Sumatra in Indonesia's Greater Sundas island group has attracted considerable cryptozoological attention, but could there also be diminutive yet previously less-publicised man-beasts existing still-undiscovered by science on Indonesia's much smaller Lesser Sundas island of Flores?

Does an ornate 16th-century painting from India's Mughal Empire hold the key to the former existence in Asia of a mystery cat analogous to Africa's king cheetah?

How can the vast diversity of reports appertaining to mysterious freshwater cryptids across the length and breadth of Spain be explained?

What is the taxonomic identity of the koolookamba, a longstanding African mystery ape known not only from reports but also from captive specimens - just an aberrant version of chimpanzee, or a taxonomically discrete form in its own right, or even a bona fide chimpanzee-gorilla hybrid?

These are the fascinating subjects and thought-provoking questions under consideration in the papers contained within Volume 2 of the Journal of Cryptozoology - the world's only peer-reviewed scientific periodical devoted to mystery animals - which is now available to pre-order here. Don't miss it!

Engravings from 1896 of Mafuca, the most famous koolookamba to have been exhibited in captivity

FAREWELL, LITTLE SNOWFLAKE - TEN YEARS ON, MY TRIBUTE TO A UNIQUE ICON: THE WORLD'S ONLY WHITE GORILLA

Little Snowflake as an adult

He was claimed to be the most photographed animal of all time (even appearing on the front cover of dance music duo Basement Jaxx's album Rooty), and he was indisputably one of the animal kingdom's greatest, most readily recognisable icons. He died 10 years ago this week, so here (first published in Fortean Times shortly after he died, but now expanded and updated in ShukerNature) is my tribute to Little Snowflake - the world's only known white gorilla.

As any cryptozoologist will confirm, Africa has always been replete with legends of bizarre-sounding beasts - some of which, notwithstanding, have ultimately proven to be real animals hitherto undescribed by science, as with the okapi, giant forest hog, and pygmy hippopotamus. Far more unlikely even than these, however, must surely be various ancient native legends of huge ghostly gorillas with pure-white fur worshipped as jungle deities. After all, none of these pallid entities had ever been spied by western explorers, so science scoffed at the mere notion of a white gorilla. Conversely, fiction writers and film makers alike were captivated by this semi-supernatural image, which duly featured in various adventure novels and movies.

A Virgil Finlay illustration from 1949 for The White Gorilla by Elmer B Mason

An early example, published in 1915, was written by Elmer B. Mason and succinctly entitled The White Gorilla.

A USA movie of the same title directed by Harry L. Fraser was released in 1945, and starred stuntman Ray "Crash" Corrigan as an embittered African explorer determined to track down and kill the elusive but ferocious white ape that had previously savaged him.

'The White Gorilla', starring Ray "Crash" Corrigan

Returning to novels: another one, originally published in French in 1957, was entitled Le Gorille Blanc and was penned by famous French science-fiction author Henri Vernes.

In 1966, it was republished in English as The White Gorilla, but by an incredible coincidence this very same year ended with an astonishing, totally unexpected discovery that effortlessly transcended and supplanted romantic fiction with truly remarkable fact.

Le Gorille Blanc by Henri Vernes

On 1 October 1966, amid the dense jungle of the tiny West African country of Rio Muni (a former Spanish colony now part of Equatorial Guinea), an adult female lowland gorilla was shot while devouring bananas within the grove of local farmer Benito Mañé. When warily inspected afterwards, the gorilla was found to be dead, but clinging to her body, its head buried within her deep fur, was a tiny baby gorilla that was still alive. Moreover, as Mañé and the other villagers crowding near to view the corpse and its attached baby could clearly see, this was no ordinary gorilla infant. Mañé's description of it was as accurate as it was concise: 'Nfumu! Ngi! - 'White! Gorilla!'.

And indeed it was, covered entirely in snowy-white fur. It was not a full, complete albino, however, because its eyes were not pink but bright blue - thus corresponding with the condition exhibited by the white tigers of Rewa and the Timbavati white lions. News of this amazing discovery soon reached Dr Paul Zahl of the National Geographic Society's Natural Sciences Division, by way of Spanish naturalist Dr Jorge Sabater Pi, who had meanwhile purchased the little gorilla - a two-year-old male - from Mañé for £50. Sabater subsequently spent some time taming the young ape during its sojourn at the Centro de Adaptacion y Experimentacion de Ikunde, sited in Rio Muni but owned by Barcelona Zoo.

Little Snowflake debuting in National Geographic Magazine, March 1967

Officially christened Nfumu, this white wonder was soon nicknamed Copito de Nieve - Spanish for 'Little Snowflake' - by Barcelona Zoo's director, Dr Antonio Jonch Cuspinera upon its arrival at Barcelona Zoo. And even though this name inevitably became somewhat incongruous when applied to what eventually became a fully-grown gorilla weighing around 400 lb, standing almost 6 ft tall, and sporting an 8-ft armspan, this is how the people of Barcelona - and far beyond - have popularly referred to their zoo's most famous inhabitant ever since. Little Snowflake he began, and Little Snowflake he remained.

Little Snowflake, full-grown (Ettore Balocchi/Flickr/Wikipedia)

Although records exist of gorillas with patches of white pigmentation that eventually disappeared, no other confirmed record of a pure-white gorilla is known, The closest item that I have been able to uncover is a snippet from Lawrence G. Green's Great African Mysteries (1937), in which he states:

"In the Upper Tano district of the Gold Coast Colony [now Ghana] a persistent native rumour of a 'wild man of the trees' was investigated some years ago. The natives dreaded the raids of this creature - described as a white giant. He killed children and sometimes carried off a woman over his shoulder. A white hunter set out to solve the mystery, and nearly lost his life in the attempt. He came face to face with the gorilla - a white-haired specimen - and failed to kill with the first shot. Then the gorilla was on him with a roar, breaking both his arms. Weakened by the wound, the gorilla crept away soon afterwards and the hunter survived."

This account seems highly sensationalised, and even if genuine it may simply be that the gorilla was an old individual whose dark hair had become silvered all over, an extreme example of the typical male silverback condition.

Painting of a belligerent white gorilla in the wild (image source unknown to me)

As for Little Snowflake, his origin was a complete mystery. Although legends of white gorillas have emerged elsewhere in Africa, ironically there are no such myths prevalent in or around Equatorial Guinea, for the local villagers were just as astounded by his discovery as the scientists. Moreover, with no indication of any previous white gorillas in the area from which he could have inherited the two copies of the recessive mutant allele (gene form) needed to produce his pallid colouring, for many years scientists assumed that it may well have arisen via a spontaneous mutation, thus originating with Little Snowflake and lacking any genetic precursor (but see Postscript at the end of this ShukerNature post for new findings relating to the genetics responsible).

Consequently, zoologists at Barcelona Zoo hoped that by breeding Little Snowflake with normal gorillas at the zoo, the exceedingly rare recessive gene responsible for his unique appearance may be perpetuated, and that in the future other white gorillas may be born. As yet, however, this has not happened, but he was nothing if not obliging, having mated with three different female gorillas and sired no less than 22 offspring, all normal-coloured. Whereas in the wild his white fur would have made him dangerously conspicuous, in captivity Little Snowflake's dazzling pelage posed no problems for him - at least, not initially. However, he did suffer from a common complication associated with albinism - photophobia, a marked visual sensitivity to bright light.

The White Gorilla by Henri Vernes

Tragically, by 2001 he had developed another, much more serious condition that again may well have been due to his albinism - skin cancer. Little Snowflake, of course, lacked any melanin in his skin, the dark pigment that acts as a shield against the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. For a time, he responded to treatment, but by late September 2003 zoo officials were sad to announce that his condition had progressed to a terminal state and that Little Snowflake, by now roughly 40 years old, had only a few months at most to live.

Faced with the shattering news that he was dying, thousands of Barcelona's people visited Little Snowflake each day, paying their respects to one of their city's greatest stars and symbols. And in the early hours of 24 November 2003, Little Snowflake quite literally melted away, euthanised peacefully while asleep by the zoo's vets to spare him any further suffering. Farewell, Little Snowflake. The world will be a duller place without your unique glory, but your essence lives on in each of your many offspring, and one day the great genetic lottery may create more white gorillas in your image, to astonish and enchant all over again (but, hopefully, without resulting in skin cancer).

A 2005 DVD by Nature documenting the life and times of Little Snowflake

POSTCRIPT 1: In June 2013, after sequencing Little Snowflake's genome during the previous year from a sample of frozen blood taken before he died, a team of Spanish researchers (led by Tomas Marques-Bonet from the University of Pompeu Fabra) announced that their results indicated he was very inbred, because his parents shared 12% of their genome, suggesting that they may well have been uncle and niece.

This inbred condition may in turn have caused the mutant allele responsible for his white colouration (now known to be the allele  SLC45A2) to have surfaced.

"You lookin' at me?" - With a large white gorilla fluffy toy at a car boot sale in September 2014 ((c) Dr Karl Shuker)

POSTCRIPT 2: On  19 September 2015, I visited Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire, England, famed for its very extensive collection of primate species, and also its extremely unusual chocolate-brown chimpanzees (a rare colour mutation). While chatting about these chimps with one of the zookeepers there, I was fascinated to learn from him that not so long ago, while conducting his ongoing wildlife conservation work in the northern portion of the People's Republic of Congo (=Congo Brazzaville) for the World Conservation Society, Dr Thomas Breuer once briefly caught sight of an adult female gorilla with a small white-furred baby gorilla clutching tightly to her. Tragically, however, when he saw this same gorilla again about a week or so later, there was no sign of the white baby gorilla, which was never seen again. It is possible, therefore, that its conspicuous fur colouration attracted the wrong kind of attention from predators, hunters, or possibly even another gorilla.

As far as I am aware, this is the only record of a white gorilla other than Little Snowflake, and I am not aware that it has ever been documented anywhere before, so I am extremely grateful to that zookeeper for passing on to me this very valuable, significant snippet of information.

White gorilla illustration by Herge

Finally: more xenobiology than cryptozoology, and apes in name only, but wonderful all the same - here are the white apes of Barsoom as featured in the excellent 2012 Disney movie 'John Carter', which I thoroughly enjoyed when watching it last Christmas, and which was based upon A Princess of Mars - the first book in the Barsoom series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

John Carter vs the white apes of Barsoom ((c) Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

THE BILI (BONDO) APES – UNMASKING THE CONGO'S GIANT CHIMPANZEES

This photograph of a shot Bili ape appeared in Vol. 1 of Adolf Friedrich Herzog von Mecklenburg’s tome Vom Kongo zum Niger und Nil: Berichte der Deutschen Zentralafrika-Expedition 1910/1911, which was published in 1912 – more than a century before this highly distinctive ape form’s reality was formally recognised by science

Here's the latest in my occasional series of ShukerNature cryptozoology articles re anomalous and controversial chimpanzee forms (click here for my account of the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo, here for the koolookamba, here for Ufiti, and here for 'apeman' Oliver).

Until quite recently, even amid the many remote regions of darkest Africa, the possibility of an unknown form of anthropoid existing there yet still eluding scientific recognition seemed ludicrous - but then came the Bili (aka Bondo) ape.

The saga of this remarkable, highly controversial primate began more than a century ago, when in 1898 a Belgian army officer returned home from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo with some gorilla skulls obtained by him in a forested region near the village of Bili, on the Uele River in northern Congo's Bondo area - even though no other gorillas had been found within hundreds of miles of Bili before (or since). He donated them to Belgium's Congo Museum in Tervueren, where in due course they were examined by its curator, Henri Schouteden. He was sufficiently struck by their anatomical differences from other gorilla skulls as well as by their unique provenance (roughly halfway between the extreme edges of the western and eastern distribution of any gorilla populations) to classify them as a new subspecies of gorilla, which he dubbed Gorilla gorilla uellensis.

Less convinced of their separate taxonomic status, conversely, was mammalogist Prof. Colin Groves, whose examination of these skulls in 1970 led him to announce that they were indistinguishable from western lowland gorillas. Thereafter, the Bili ape sank back into obscurity - until 1996, when Kenyan-based conservationist and wildlife photographer Karl Ammann, intrigued by its strange history and apparent disappearance, set out on the first of several Congolese quests to rediscover this mysterious primate.

And rediscover it he did, bringing back such compelling evidence for its presence that several other notable investigators launched their own searches, and returned with equally fascinating clues concerning the Bili ape's nature. Such researchers included primatologist Dr Shelly Williams from Maryland's Jane Goodall Institute, Dr Richard Wrangham from the Leakey Foundation, Dr Christophe Boesch from Leipzig's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Dr Esteban Sarmiento from New York's American Museum of Natural History, and Dr George Schaller from New York's Wildlife Conservation Society.

What made their various finds so especially interesting was the ambivalent identity that they collectively yielded for the Bili ape - because, uniquely, it deftly yet bemusingly combines characteristics of gorillas with those of chimpanzees, creating a shadowy anthropoid that is at once both yet neither. For instance: if the Bili ape is a chimpanzee, it is a veritable giant, because videos of living specimens and photographs of dead ones suggest a height of 5-6 ft - a mighty stature supported by the discovery of enormous footprints, some measuring almost 14 in long, and therefore nearly 2 in longer even than those of the mountain gorilla!

A dead Bili ape, revealing its noticeably large size (http://www.factzoo.com/mammals)

Also, very large ground nests constructed by Bili apes have been found that compare with those created by gorillas; normal chimps build smaller, tree-borne nests. Further evidence of the Bili ape's great size comes from local Bondo hunters, who distinguish two distinct apes - 'tree-beaters' (normal chimps) and 'lion-killers' (the Bili apes). The latter earn their name from their combined size and ferocity, a mix potent enough to ensure their terrestrial safety even in a jungle profusely populated by lions and leopards.

Indeed, so unafraid of these great cats are the Bili apes that according to media claims they hoot loudly when the moon rises and sets - an activity unknown among normal, smaller chimps, who avoid doing so in case they attract predators. However, these latter claims have been denied by Amsterdam University field researcher Cleve Hicks, who spent a year with colleagues tracking Bili apes during from mid-2005 to June 2006, followed by a second study spanning July 2006-February 2007.

Particularly noticeable is the presence of a pronounced sagittal crest running along the top of one of the original skulls collected by the Belgian army officer, and also on a Bili ape skull found by Ammann in 1996 - because this crest, normally an indication of powerful jaws as the jaw muscles are attached to it, is characteristic of gorillas, not of chimps. Conversely, the facial anatomy of the Bili skulls is decidedly chimp-like, not gorilla-like. In addition, hair samples taken from Bili ape ground nests have been shown to contain mitochondrial DNA similar to that of chimps, and the fruit-rich content of examined faecal droppings is again consistent with a chimp identity - although, perplexingly, the droppings themselves outwardly resemble those of gorillas.

So what is the Bili ape - a gorilla-sized chimp (freak population?/new subspecies?/new species?), an aberrant form of gorilla (freak population?/new subspecies?/new species?) that has evolved certain chimp-like anatomical and behavioural characteristics, or even possibly a genuine chimpanzee-gorilla hybrid? No confirmed crossbreeding between chimp and gorilla has ever been recorded, but the two species are sufficiently similar genetically to engender viable offspring. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively from the maternal parent, so if such interspecific matings are indeed occurring they must involve female chimps and male gorillas, to explain why the mitochondrial DNA from the Bili ape samples is chimp-like.

Happily, however, the Bili ape's identity was eventually unmasked. Comprehensive DNA analyses, including nuclear DNA (thus shedding light on both the maternal and the paternal lineages of the Bili ape), had been underway since autumn 2003 at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, under the auspices of conservation geneticist Dr Ed Louis, and involving DNA comparisons with gorillas, chimps, and also bonobos (pygmy chimps).

So too had analyses of mitochondrial DNA taken from faecal samples conducted by Dr Cleve Hicks and other Amsterdam University colleagues, who had also examined these primates' behaviour in the field. And in 2006, this latter team announced that their findings all confirmed that the Bili ape belongs to a known subspecies of chimp – the eastern chimpanzee Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii. Presumably, therefore, the Bili ape's very distinctive morphological features have evolved through its population's isolation from others of this subspecies but involve relatively little change at the genetic level. After years of mystery and intrigue, the riddle of the Bili ape had at last been solved.

This ShukerNature post is excerpted from my book The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals (Coachwhip: Landisville, 2012).