Mokele-Mbembe

Lake Télé is a shallow circular lake a kilometer and a half across, in the
Likouala swamp of the northern Republic of the Congo, reached on foot from
Epena over several days of flooded forest. The witnesses are Bomitaba
fishermen working the lake and its channels. They give something as large as a
forest elephant: long neck, small head, heavy tail, hide like a river
turtle’s, brown running to red. It holds to deep water, they say, and comes
ashore for the fruit of a riverside liana.

The company’s interest is in a procedure two expeditions ran in 1980 and 1981.
Witnesses in villages several days’ walk apart, none of whom had heard the
others, were shown one sheet of illustrations: elephant, rhinoceros,
hippopotamus, crocodile, and a sauropod dinosaur. They selected the sauropod,
did so before it was named to them, and offered none of the others as a near
match. The sheet was shown again in 1992 with the order changed and the result
held.

Twelve expeditions have reached the lake since 1980. What they returned is
testimony, one wake filmed from a light aircraft in 1992 at a distance that
settles nothing, and casts of bank prints taken in mud too soft to read. None
of it included bone, tissue, or a photograph of an animal. The last account
the company holds is from a fisherman at Boha, more than
thirty years old. The file went dormant because the swamp is hard to reach and
nobody is filing, not because anything was resolved.