Category: Weird News

African Pterodactyls?

On: By: Romeyn

M.D.W. Jeffreys, M.A., Ph.D.

In September, 1939, the West African Review contained an article “Living Monster or Fabulous.Animal?” Readers will recollect that some years earlier there had been a type of “Challenger Expedition” into Central Africa to search the Iruwuni forests of the Belgian Congo for a huge, mysterious, antedeluvian monster. “Is the Brontosauros still alive in the morasses of the Congo?” were the headlines in some of the London papers. No report of the traces of any such monsters ever appeared, and I was not surprised. I had been right through the Belgian Congo in 1923, and had come into intimate contact with a number of what would be called Native Commissioners or District Officers in British territory, as well as with noted big-game hunters. None of these men, who were in positions to know before anyone else of the existence of such monsters, ever alluded to the possible existence of them. Yet stories do circulate among natives of animals never listed in any Museum. Continue reading “African Pterodactyls?” →

Stalin’s half-man, half-ape super-warriors

On: By: Romeyn

Super-troopers: Stalin wanted Planet of the Apes-like troops, insensitive to pain and hardship.

CHRIS STEPHEN AND ALLAN HALL

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.”
In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a “living war machine”. The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created. Continue reading “Stalin’s half-man, half-ape super-warriors” →