Mokele-mbembe

Paleontologist Donald Prothero remarks that "the quest for Mokele-Mbembe ... is part of the effort by creationists to overthrow the theory of evolution and teaching of science by any means possible".

Historian Edward Guimont has argued that the mokele-mbembe myth grows out of earlier pseudohistorical claims about Great Zimbabwe, and in turn influenced the later reptilian conspiracy theory.

[3] Source:[4] The first report of the mokele-mbembe comes from German Captain Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz [de], as described by Willy Ley in the book The Lungfish and the Unicorn (1941).

According to German adventurer Lt. Paul Gratz's account from 1911:The crocodile is found only in very isolated specimens in Lake Bangweulu, except in the mouths of the large rivers at the north.

In the swamp lives the nsanga, much feared by the natives, a degenerate saurian which one might well confuse with the crocodile were it not that its skin has no scales and its toes are armed with claws.

[9] Another similar creature, the jago-nini, was described by Alfred Aloysius Smith, who had worked for a British trading company in what is now Gabon in the late 19th century, who briefly mentions it in his 1927 memoir.

They did not find any direct physical evidence, but nonetheless argued consistent statements from claimed eyewitnesses tended to support the creature's existence.

[15] In 2001, BBC broadcast in the TV series Congo a collective interview with a group of Biaka pygmies, who identified the mokele-mbembe as a rhinoceros while looking at an illustrated manual of wildlife.

[16] Neither species of African rhinoceros is common in the Congo Basin, and the mokele-mbembe may be a mixture of mythology and folk memory from a time when rhinoceroses were found in the area.

[17][18] The team spent roughly four weeks in the Likuoala swamp region visiting various Aka (pygmy) villages, collecting stories of the creature's existence.

[19] In 2018, Lensgreve of Knuthenborg, Adam Christoffer Knuth, along with a film crew from Danish Radio and a DNA scientist, traveled to Lake Tele in Congo, in search of the mokele-mbembe.

They concluded that the reports of the monster were not result of hard evidence or genuine first-hand accounts of native encounters with the creature, but rather a "distillation of many creatively varied stories from widely separated regions.