In 1920 a Swiss geologist on an oil finding expedition in the jungles of Venezuela snapped a photo of an animal that by all accounts should not exist. If verified it would prove to be one of the most amazing anthropological discoveries in history and could rewrite the lineage of human evolution. But was the photo truly of an unknown animal, a simple case of mistaken identity or an outright fraud perpetuated by a huckster and Nazi sympathizer? Join us as we investigate the weird, wild tale of de Loys' Ape.
In 1920 a Swiss geologist on an oil finding expedition in the jungles of Venezuela snapped a photo of an animal that by all accounts should not exist. If verified it would prove to be one of the most amazing anthropological discoveries in history and could rewrite the lineage of human evolution. But was the photo truly of an unknown animal, a simple case of mistaken identity or an outright fraud perpetuated by a huckster and Nazi sympathizer? Join us as we investigate the weird, wild tale of de Loys' Ape.
THE MYSTERY OF DE LOYS’ APE
Narrated by Jay Nix
On this episode of the Beyond the Fringe, we’re going to take a journey into perhaps the most dangerous and unforgiving jungle on the planet, where in 1920 an unassuming Swiss geologist snapped a picture of a creature that would set the scientific world on its ear and possibly rewrite the history of the evolution.
This tale of an ape in the Americas has become one of the most famous and divisive in the annals of cryptozoology -- the pseudo-scientific branch of zoology that deals with unknown animals -- and is still hotly debated today over 100 years later. We’re not talking about Bigfoot or Sasquatch here. We’re talking about another mythical ape rumored to be haunting the forests of the western hemisphere. This is the weird, wild story of Amerathropoidis Loysi, or more easily pronounced and recognized as de Loys’s Ape.
Adherents to the veracity of de Loys’s photograph hail it as iron-clad proof that large, still unknown species of mammals are hiding out in the few remaining wild spots left on the map. And while countless species from insects to large mammals are assuredly still awaiting discovery in the remote corners of the planet, to use de Loys’s photo as proof of this dictum is akin to citing “Star Wars” as proof of extraterrestrial life. Scientists now have a wealth of information and data about South American fauna that was unavailable at the turn of the 20th century. In fact, at the time de Loys snapped his famous photo, much of the south American interior had yet to be properly explored. And as had happened when the Dutch and Belgian explorers first returned from the mysterious interior of Africa, it wasn’t long after men first set foot on the South American continent that tales of fantastic and terrifying beasts began to circulate in the salons and university hallways of Europe. As early as the 16th century Jesuit missionaries ventured deep into the impenetrable rain forests in an attempt to bring Christianity to the indigenous population. The few that returned recounted tales of fabled cities of gold, warlike tribes of female warriors for whom the Amazon river was named and flesh-eating man-like creatures who haunted the impenetrable forests. It is in this vein that we look at the incredible story of de Loys’s ape. But this is not simply an adventure story. It may have started out that way and was by all accounts the way de Loys had hoped it would be perceived by the public.
But due to influences beyond de Loys’s control, the tale was co-opted by an unscrupulous ethnologist and eventually devolved into something unseemly. As the legend of the American ape grew, it was further utilized to push idiotic and geographic evolutionary pseudo-science, all the while masked in thinly veiled antisemitism, racism and Naziism.
How this uproar could have erupted over a single photograph of an animal is the subject of tonight’s discussion. And to comprehend the tale’s intricate interconnections, we’re going to need a thorough overview of the region from where the story originated, the known and unknow creatures that supposedly inhabit the country, and the motives and motivations of the people involved. But before we get to far launching into the theories behind this story, it would probably be a good idea to hear the story itself. So, let’s do that first. Here is the tale of how de Loys’s ape emerged from myth into reality and thus into infamy.
In 1920, three desperate figures emerged from the jungles of Venezuela barely alive. They were exhausted, starving, ravaged by fever and nursing injuries suffered in a years-long running battle with the dangerous Montilone Indians. Of the 10-person expedition that had set off into the Rio Catatumbo region near Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela three years earlier, these three were the only ones left alive. One of the survivors was a Swiss geologist named François de Loys. And though most of the party’s belongings had been lost during their adventure, de Loys had managed to hold onto a few meager possessions including a single photograph taken deep in the rain forest the year before. The picture was that of a dead animal, an ape or a monkey by the look of things, that had been shot and then photographed atop a wooden packing crate. The limbs appeared long and muscular and the face sported an eerily human expression. Years later De Loys would share the encounter with the strange man-ape with the French Academy of Science. This is his story.
One day while they were trudging through the forest along the Tarra River, two large monkeys walking upright and gnashing their teeth suddenly stepped out of the dense brush. They appeared incensed at the intruder’s presence and began screaming and shaking branches. Brandishing bush limbs as weapons, the primates advanced upon the party in menacing fashion. As the anxious explorers watched in amazement, the animals dropped the bushes that they were carrying and began defecating into their hands and then hurling the excrement at the men. As the pitch of the attack increased and the monkeys moved closer, the explorers raised their rifles and fired. Though the male was wounded, he managed to escape back into the jungle. The female on the other hand was killed instantly. This strange simian was something none of the men had seen before and no one had any idea what species it was. Thinking it prudent to preserve the specimen for return to civilization and closer scientific inspection, de Loys first sat the simian atop a wooden packing crate, propped the head up using a long stick placed under its chin, and took a series of photographs of the incredible discovery. The animal was then dismembered with the skull as well as the hands and various other bones wrapped in cloth for the return journey.
But as the expedition began to unravel and the men began dying all around him, de Loys became more focused on survival than conserving the bones of the mystery ape. Thus, by the time the trio of survivors emerged from their harrowing ordeal in the jungle, all that remained was the single photograph we have today.
After returning to Europe and resuming his career, de Loys slipped the photograph into an old notebook and subsequently forgot all about the encounter with the vicious animal. That is until one day a friend of de Loys, the ethnologist and anthropologist George Montandon, came upon the photo of the strange creature in de Loys’s records. An explorer in his own right, Montandon was fairly familiar with primate species in South America up to that point and had never seen anything like animal de Loys captured on film. Like others who had seen the photo, Montandon was struck by the creature’s eerily human countenance. According to de Loys, the animal was 4 ½ feet tall, had 32 teeth, and shared a commonality with apes rather than monkeys by not having a tail. If true, this would represent the first known specimen of an ape in the New World. For Montandon this could mean only one thing: an American anthropoid – or human-looking – ape would be the missing evolutionary link between man and primate! To bolster his theory, Montandon had his cousin who worked for Standard Oil in the United States send him a typical wooden petrol shipping crate like the one on which the animal was placed in the photo. For comparison, the anthropologist first placed a standard spider monkey atop the crate, and then a standard Frenchman. The results were striking. When judged against this experiment in scale, the creature in photo had to be upwards of 5 feet tall, almost a foot and a half taller than any known South American Primate. In 1929, Montandon convinced de Loys to recount his amazing story to the Illustrated London News. Concurrently, he presented a paper on the subject to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. In this paper, Montandon proposed a new genus for the creature, Ameranthropoid – or American anthropoid ape. And in tribute to his friend and discoverer of the animal, Montandon dubbed the animal Ameranthropoidis Loysi: de Loys’ American Ape.
Even until recently scientists and preeminent writers on the paranormal like Arthur C. Clarke would view de Loys’s photo as strong scientific evidence pointing to the existence of apes in the new world. Clark even included the story of de Loy’s monkey in his ground-breaking documentary series “Mysterious World”. The image is truly compelling. It isn’t one of those blurry over-the-shoulder shots in dense brush that are so popular with Bigfoot enthusiasts. This photo is crystal clear, sharply focused and appears to show what Montandon and others have claimed since the 1920’s: an upright ape killed in the forests of Venezuela. But not everyone has jumped on the Ameranthropoid bandwagon so readily. Even as Montandon had begun attempting to rewrite the evolutionary lineage of man, Sir Arthur Keith, famed Scottish anthropologist and conservator of the Hunterian Museum in England, stated flatly that the whole rigmarole was nonsense. The animal, according to Keith, was Ateles belzebuth, better known as the common spider monkey with the tail either hidden or cut off. Others sided with Keith in dismissing the animal as a fraud or hoax, but many others supported Montandon in his assertion that the primate was an ape and the first recorded instance of such an animal in the Western Hemisphere.
Many, like Clarke, have put forward a rather strong argument for the veracity of the photo. What possible motive would a Swiss geologist not much interested in zoology, with his companions dying and being murdered all around him and fighting for his very life in the inhospitable jungles of Venezuela, have to fake a photograph of a monkey?
So here we are. Stuck in the middle of yet another scientific tug of war. Is the animal really what Montandon claimed it to be, a simple case of mistaken identity, or a flat-out hoax? The photo clearly shows a real animal sitting on that wooden crate. That much is a given, and that is not where the mystery lies. It is the interpretation of what the animal is and what it represents that lies at the heart of tonight’s episode.
What would seem like a cut and dry discussion of the scientific merits of the case, both pro and con, is anything but. If it were, the story would not have endured for as long as it has. There are other factors at play in this case, aspects that on first glance would seem to have no bearing on the tale whatsoever, but which will ultimately show the story in its true light. That’s why in order to get at the crux of the matter, we’re going to have to peel back the layers of the onion so to speak in order find what is really at the center of this legend of de Loys’s ape.
First thing we’re going to do is take a look at northern jungles of Venezuela and Columbia where the encounter with the mystery animal took place and see if there is any precedent for a large unknown man-like creature deep in the Amazonian rain forest.
Next, we’ll take a closer look at the photo itself to see if it is a true representation of an unknown animal, or a carefully crafted edit that resulted in a distortion of both the image and the truth of the matter.
Finally, we’ll look at the major players in this story to see if their motives were on the up and up and how that affected the public perception of the photo and the case as a whole.
So here we go. Let’s take a trip through space and time back to the shores of the Green Continent in the early days of global exploration.
Shortly after Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 – notice I didn’t say “discovered” – a medieval land rush was launched by the Spanish and Portuguese to secure all lands west of the Cape Verde islands for the monarchies of these two nations. Actually, European explorers at that time had been searching for a westward route to the Orient and when they ran into land on the far side of the Atlantic, that’s what they thought they had found. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer who sailed under the banner of Portugal and it is for him that the Americas would eventually be named. He first reached the norther coast of south American in 1499, but it was during his voyage in 1501 that the intrepid sailor traced the eastern coast of the new world all the way down to the southern tip near Patagonia. This convinced Vespucci that this new land was indeed a new continent and not the Asian mainland as was previously thought.
Immediately upon their arrival, the Spaniards and Portuguese began to carve up this new land into colonies, enslave and slaughter the native population and rape the land of its natural resources. Conquistadors like Francisco Pizarro stole anything they could get their hands on, gold, silver, gems, and essentially wiped out the entire Inca civilization through relentless bloodlust. And those natives that did not fall victim to the blade fell even more easily to the myriad diseases the Europeans carried and for which the local population had no immunity. The history of South America is a study in armed conflict, with border disputes and civil wars breaking out at the drop of a sombrero. In conjunction with the eradication of what some historians have estimated to be as much as 90% of the pre-colonial population of the continent, so too were the metallic riches of south America. As such the European’s thirst for gold was replaced by the desire for cacao, coffee, and rubber. But in the early days of the 20th century, another form of gold was discovered in the Amazonas. Black gold. Oil. And the rush was on to secure the Venezuelan oil reserves, which at over 300 billion barrels, would prove to be the largest of any country on the planet.
And so it was that in 1917 that an expedition sponsored by the Colon Development Company set off into the mountains of the Sierra de Perijee to survey likely sites for oil exploration and drilling. The geologist of this expedition was a 25-year-old Swiss named Louis Francois Fernand Hector de Loys. We previously discussed the outcome of this disastrous expedition and the part de Loys’s played so we don’t need to retrace those steps.
So now we turn our attention to the animal captured on film by de Loys. If it were a monkey, no big deal as the South American continent is literally crawling with them. But if on the other hand the animal was an anthropoid ape, then that would be a very big deal in that apes are not known anywhere in the western hemisphere. Gorillas and chimpanzees are native only to equatorial Africa and the Orangutan hails only from the lush jungles of southeast Asia. In South America: bupkis. But there are stories going back centuries that tell of strange, man-like creatures living deep in the jungles and along the Amazonian tributaries. One of the first to record these tales was none other than Sir Walter Raleigh who heard stories of hairy men during his time in Guyana between 1595 and 1596. Raleigh wrote “For mine owne part I saw them not, but I am resolued that so many people did not all combine or forethinke to make the report”.
A commonly held belief among Europeans of the time was that these monstrosities were the result of unholy unions between primates and human women. .
But regardless of their parentage, strange and sometimes terrifying man-apes were seen by the indigenous population and the colonials alike.
A Jesuit missionary, Father Simao de Vasconcellos, described in his writings about his time on the Green continent two different types of wild men. The first was known as the Goazis or Guyazis and were described as dwarves with their feet turned backwards. The other variety of hairy man-ape was called Curinqueans, which were 16 feet tall and whose lips and nostrils were adorned with gold nuggets.
In 1769, Dr. Edward Bancroft relays tales of an orangutan nearly 5 feet tall.
Then in 1800, Alexander von Humboldt heard stories of the Visitri or ‘devil’ that lived far back in the jungles of the upper Orinoco. This creature was vicious indeed and struck terror into the hearts of the local tribes.
Several decades later, Frank W. Lane would write an account of a group of gold prospectors in the River Araguaya in the Matto Grosso. Soon after hearing the roar of a great beast along the edge of a nearby river, the men discovered tracks in the sand measuring 21-inches long. Not far from where the men had found the tracks, they stumbled upon several dead cattle from a nearby hacienda that had had their tongues ripped out.
The Marquis de Wavrin reported tales of a large monkey in the area of the Matto Grosso near Paraguay which were known locally as “maribundas” or “marimondos”. Perhaps it was the roar of this animal that the gold prospectors had heard and the one that had killed the cattle.
Charles Barrington Brown, the government surveyor in British Guyana, reported tales that he had heard from the natives about a hairy man known as the Didi. Unlike all known south American primates that lived large troops, the Didi was said to live in pairs and as such was rarely seen. But if one wee to kill a Didi, the mate would become enraged and then track down the killer and strangle them in their sleep. In 1910, the British resident magistrate of Guyana, a man named Haines, claimed to have seen such a pair of Didis on the banks of the Konwaruk river.
And then there is the legend of the Mapinguary. This man-sized monster purportedly hails from the western part of the Matto Grosso near the Bolivian border. It was supposed to be vicious, aggressive and highly territorial. In 1930 a local man by the name of Inocencio was a member of an expedition exploring the Urubu River watershed northeast of present-day Manaus in Brazil. After becoming separated from his companions, Inocencio was forced to seek shelter in a tree for the night. After the sun had set and the jungle was dark, he heard what he thought were footsteps approaching through the undergrowth. His first instinct was to call out for help, but something told him to wait to see who it was before exposing his position. Soon the footsteps were accompanied by grunts and heavy breathing. Then as Inocencio gazed down upon the clearing near the base of the tree, a manlike animal emerged from the brush. It appeared to be sniffing the air and turning his head from side to side. When the creature turned toward the tree where Inocencio was hiding, it began to growl and gnash its teeth. It had apparently spotted Inocencio and become enraged, the grunts growing into a deafening roar. Just as Inocencio raised his rifle, the hairy man charged toward the tree. The terrified man fired two shots, hitting the animal once. The creature dove behind a fallen tree where it continued to roar and thrash about. Inocencio fired one last bullet in the direction of the commotion in the brush, and the animal moved away into the night, its cries still being heard for almost an hour. Dawn came slowly and Inocencio waited until the sun was well up before climbing down from his perch. He scanned the ground where he had seen the creature and found traces of blood and footprints leading away into the jungle. Taking a bearing on the sun, the native man turned and headed back toward the spot where he had last seen his comrades. After firing several shots in the air, Inocencio was located by the other members of the expedition and they continued on toward their objective.
Believe it on not, these are just a few of the many legends of man-apes that span the width and breadth of the continent. But as fascinating as they are, they remain only legends based on anecdotal evidence. No skeletal or fossil records of any of these purported animals has ever been identified, so the south American ape remains as elusive as ever. But what there are a lot of in south America are monkeys. Distinguished from their ape cousins by their tails, there are 15 recognized species of monkey in South America: Howler Monkeys, Tamarins, Capuchins, Marmosets, Woolly Monkeys, Uakari, and Spider Monkeys to name a few. And it is this last species we’ll want to take a closer look at. Because when you take a good look at a spider monkey – and in particular, the Black Spider Monkey -- and compare its features with those of the animal seen in the de Loys photo, you can see that they are surprisingly similar.
But it can’t be that easy, can it? That a creature thought to span the evolutionary bridge between man and beast is nothing more than a monkey, and a common one at that seems preposterous. Right? The late Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans was an eminent Belgian zoologist and is widely considered the father of cryptozoology. His magnum opus entitled “On the Track of Unknown Animals” is the seminal volume on the study of animals either unknown to science or those believed to have survived extinction. Many of the tales of man-like animals originating from South America are recorded in Heuvelmans’ book under the chapter “Apes in Green Hell”. Heuvelmans was a proponent of de Loys’s creature being an anthropoid ape. While others dismissed the animal as nothing more than a garden variety spider monkey, Heuvelmans conducted what he described as an extensive study of these monkeys at the Brussels zoo and determined that the differences the animal’s appearance when compared to that of de Loys’s ape could not be reconciled so easily. Now this doesn’t come as a total surprise as many biologists have accused Heuvelmans of overreaching in some of his assertions and of less-than diligent research. But Heuvelmans was by no means alone in this belief that de Loys animal was indeed an ape.
In 1953, Charles H. Dewisme who was a writer and friend of Bernard Heuvelmans, traveled to Columbia to try and obtain first-hand accounts of the large monkeys and supposed apes that haunted the dense jungles along the border with Venezuela. Dewisme showed the photo of de Loys’s ape to the several hunters, native residents of the rain forests and even the chieftain of the Arawak tribe to see if any could identify the creature as being the legendary Marimundo. While they all agreed that the animal resembled a Marimundo, they were also in agreement that it was not the same animal. But when he spoke to the Yuco people who lived in the Codazzi area in the Sierra de Perijaa – the very region where de Loys took his famous picture – they told Dewisme that a large ape without a tail did indeed live in their forest and they were as familiar with it as they were the tapir and the jaguar.
But again, this tale of the tail-less ape of the mountains remains just that without any corroborating evidence. And as attractive as it is to ascribe de Loys’s ape to the legend of the Marimunda, there is a sizable problem with doing this and that problem is the photo itself.
Okay, yes. I did say that the photo was not faked, which technically it was not, and that yes it depicts an actual animal, which it certainly does. So, what would be the problem? Well, the problem is that the photo – the one you’ll see when you Google it, and I hope you will – is not the original version of the photo. It is not the photo as it was taken and developed. The popularly represented image of de Loys’s ape is a rather close-up view of the animal resting on the crate with a stick under its chin. There is nothing else in the picture, apart from that wooden crate, that provides any sort of scale that can be used to determine the size of the animal. And we can’t reliably use the crate for scale because we don’t know its dimensions. Now you may remember that Montandon had his American cousin send him a wooden petrol packing crate to experiment with in order to determine the animal’s size. But this only works by assuming the crate in the photo is the same type and size of crate Montandon used in his tests. Yeah, it makes sense that an expedition surveying for oil might use a crate to carry supplies that was supposedly of a standardized size used in the oil industry. But that’s a stretch. Not all wooden boxes are equal and the dimensions of this crate swing wildly about the scale depending on who you talk to. But take that for what it’s worth of a sec and let’s move onto the photographs field of view. In the close-up version of the photograph in question, one can’t see anything in the frame but the crate and the animal. There is a river or some other body of water visible in the background and what would appear to be a small stump or stick protruding out of the sandy bank behind the animals left hand, but that’s it. Not much information from which to draw any decisive conclusions.
Yet like I said, this is not the original version of the photo. The actual photo of the animal as taken encompasses a much wider field of view and provides a greater opportunity to study the animal with relation to its surroundings. In this expanded original version, the river is more readily visible in the background with both banks clearly seen. The animal seated on the crated is visible in the foreground on the near-side river bank. And it is here in this wider view of the animal and its surroundings that we get our first clue that the photo may not be all its cracked up to be. According to de Loys, the expedition encountered the two apes deep in the inaccessible jungle. Yet when one looks to either side of the animal, two plant stalks are clearly seen. There is also another one partially obscured by the animal’s left hand. To the untrained eye, these stalks might not seem that important, but to someone familiar with South American flora these innocuous stumps cast serious doubt on the entire account given by de Loys. That’s because these stumps aren’t some run-of-the-mill palms, but rather the stalks of non-native cultivated banana plants. Food crops such as these would only be found in areas of concentrated human habitation, no in the deepest reaches of the rain forest. This alone confirms that the photo was not taken in wild unexplored territory, but more likely in or very close to a village or town. These stumps also give a truer estimation of scale with relation to the not only the size of the animal, but to the crate upon which it is posed. By ignoring de Loys’s claim that the animal was 4 ½ feet tall and judging the creature’s appearance based on its relation to nearby objects, it is much easier to conclude that the figure in the photo is not unusually large for a common species of spider monkey.
Apart from the reduced scale of the animal when view from the wider angle shot, there are other indications that de Loys’s creature is not an unknown ape. One need look no farther than at the hands and feet to see that this animal was clearly built for life in the trees, not walking on the ground. Both its hands and feet sport long curved digits perfectly suited for grasping branches in the upper reaches of the forest canopy. The feet in fact don’t look like feet at all, but rather a second set of hands, which is a common trait of monkeys. And each of the animals’ thumbs are shortened when compared to the other digits of the hand. This is also common morphological characteristic of spider monkeys. Earlier we touched on the animal’s eerie human like countenance. Of course, after the creature was killed and tension in the muscles relaxed, the face would tend to sag a bit, and the jaw hang lower. This slightly open-mouth gape is what gives the animal it’s human-esque appearance. But the most egregious clue visible in the photo concerns the animal’s sex, evidence of which is front and center in the frame. You can’t miss it. An initial glance might convince the viewer the he or she is looking at a male animal in that what appears to be the penis hangs down between the animal’s legs. But de Loys avows that the animal the party shot was a female. That’s when knowing a bit about spider monkey anatomy comes in handy. The organ protruding from the animal’s groin area is in fact not a penis, but rather the highly over-developed clitoris of a female. Want to take a stab at what common South American female primate sports such an eye-catching protuberance? Yep, it’s our old friend Ateles belzebuth, the spider monkey.
Taken en masse, the evidence pointing to de Loys’s ape being a garden variety spider monkey now seems overwhelming. And for most biologists and anthropologists like Sir Arthur Keith, the question of the animal’s identity was never in doubt in the first place. But if that is indeed the case – that de Loys’s mystery ape is nothing more than a spider monkey, then the question now becomes why did de Loys expend so much effort in perpetrating such an obvious hoax? Well, the answer to that question is simple. He didn’t.
What?! Yeah, this zoological miasma was not the brainchild of Francois de Loys. In fact, the after-action report the survivors submitted to the Colon Development Company upon their return to civilization mentions nothing about any ape-men attacking the expedition. And like I mentioned earlier, when de Loys returned to Europe after the expedition, he put the photo in a notebook and tossed it in a drawer to be forgotten. Strange way to treat the scientific find of the millennium, wouldn’t you say? And while it has been noted by his contemporaries that de Loys was a bit of a prankster and enjoyed playing practical jokes now and again, the case of the mysterious ape he photographed doesn’t appear to be one of them. In fact, this whole to-do would never have gotten started, and the photograph would never have seen the light of day were it not for the intervention of de Loys’s buddy, George Montandon.
Okay, so now the question becomes why did this Montandon craft and perpetuate this hoax of a missing link? Once we get to know a little bit more about Georgie-boy and his beliefs and motivations, this will become readily and disturbingly obvious.
George-Alexis Montandon was born in Cotaillod, Switzerland on April 19, 1879. The youngest of four children born to James and Cornelie Montandon, George trained as a surgeon at the Universities of both Geneva and Zurich and was a member of clinical staff from 1906 to 1908, when he joined the military to fulfill his obligation to the service of the country. Afterwards, Montandon gravitated toward the field of anthropology, first traveling to Germany and then to England to pursue his studies. He then sought to become an explorer and joined his first expedition to Ethiopia in October of 1909. At the onset of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Montandon traveled to Russia, married a 22-year-old native of Vladivostok named Maria with whom he had three children and became enthralled by Communist ideology. Upon his return to Switzerland, he applied for an ethnology professorship at Neuchatel University, but was turned down. The official reason given was lack of funding, but in reality, the more likely reason the State Council torpedoed his appointment was due to his membership in the Swiss Communist Party.
With prospects in his homeland drying up, he opted for greener pastures in France where he relocated in 1925. Montandon continued with his anthropological studies in Paris while he worked at the National Museum of Natural History, and in 1929 published what would be his first foray into human evolution entitled Human Ologenese. In 1931 he began his formal studies at the School of Anthropology, where just two years later he would be appointed to the chair of the Ethnology department. Also, in 1933 he would publish his next and most divisive work to date, a theory of racial evolution called La Races, les Races.
Becoming disillusioned with the European status quo, Montandon’s communist tendencies began to eschew toward racial hierarchy and anti-Semitism. In 1940 when the German troops invaded France, Montandon was one of the first to throw his hat into the ring and began openly collaborating with the Nazis. He was appointed director of the periodical L’Ethnie Francaise, a racially charged review funded by the German Institute in Paris. He then becomes president of the Ethics Commission of the PPF (or French People’s Party). Montandon, who had become a naturalized French citizen in 1936, briefly lost his citizenship after Vichy revoked all such decrees in 1941. But due to his moral and political flexibilities, his citizenship was quickly returned to him. It was about this time that he was attached to the General Commissariat for the Jewish Question as an ethnologist. One of his duties was to conduct “interviews” of suspected Jews and determine their true ethnicity. Anyone failing his ludicrous tete-a-tete would be reported to the Vichy police, arrested, and deported to a concentration camp.
By now, Montandon had garnered the notice of pro-French forces and in particular le Resistance. And the only people the French freedom fighters detested more than the Nazis themselves were the French citizens who collaborated with them. On August 3rd, 1944, a unit of the resistance stormed the Montandon home in Clamart. We know for sure that Maria was killed during the attack, but as for George there two versions of his ultimate fate.
The first is that he too was killed in the resistance raid.
The second states that while Montandon was seriously injured in the attack, he did not die that day. This version of events is borne out by research conducted by Marc Knobel in the late 1990’s. According to Knobel, shortly after the assassination attempt by the resistance, a wounded Montandon was taken to Lariboisiere Hospital, which at the time was still under German administration. After his wounds were dressed and his condition stabilized, he was then transported to the Karl-Weirich-Kranenhaus Hospital in Fulda, Germany. While it has been suggested that Montandon was in the later stages of cancer by this time and would not have been long for this world anyway, he would not overcome the injuries received in the attack and as such died on 30 August 1944.
Dude was a pants pickle on so many levels and his warped, racist views, bone-headed theories concerning the evolution of man and his brazen antisemitism are testaments to this. But this overt racism, abhorrent as it was, does not in itself explain why he would go to such lengths to perpetuate the hoax of de Loys’s ape and attempt to pass it off as a new and unheralded species of primate. Or does it? As a matter of fact, it goes straight to the very heart of the matter and explains perfectly why Montandon drove so strong to the hoop with respect to de Loys’s ape.
Now I mentioned that Francois de Loys wasn’t central in perpetrating the hoax with which his name has become synonymous. But he did play a part. When his chum George Montandon stumbled across the photo de Loys took of the monkey in South America, he saw the perfect opportunity to promote his pet theory of racist evolution that by this time had become almost universally regarded as garbage. This theory proposed that humans did in fact evolve from apes, so nothing new there. But it went even further by claiming that humans – which Montandon categorized in 5 classes of “super races” as well as a dizzying array of subsequent sub- and sub-sub races, evolved only from those apes specific to a particular geographic area. Thus, Asians and Polynesian races evolved from Orangutans, Africans from gorillas and Europeans and Arabians from chimpanzees. This is an oversimplification of his convoluted nonsense, but you get the picture. While this theorem was widely panned in all academic circles, Montandon was not without his supporters. The Nazis of course loved the Frenchman’s bigoted views, which dovetailed nicely into their own warped sense of self-worth as they scoured the Earth looking for proof that the Aryans were descended from Norse gods. But there was a tiny little problem with Montandon’s theory of geographical evolution. While there were plenty of species of apes from which the lineage of man could sprout in the Old World, there were no known apes in the New World. This lack of anthropoidal seed stock as it were was a big hurtle for Montandon’s theory to overcome. As I mentioned earlier, there were stories about man-apes in the remote corners of South America but nothing concrete. But when de Loys returned to Europe with the photograph of the strange mega-monkey, the pseudo-anthropologist saw a golden opportunity to add weight to his cockeyed concept. Montandon was no doubt aware of the native legends concerning mysterious and unidentified man-apes on the green continent. And by attributing the various characteristics described in the legends concerning these mystery animals to de Loys’s animal after the fact, he hoped to lend more credence to the tale he crafted around the American ape. Given de Loys’s rumored appreciation of a good practical joke, he perhaps saw stretching the truth when it came to the backstory of the photo a great lark. But this would be a decision de Loys would soon come to regret.
In 1929 de Loys was strong-armed to appear before the French Academy of Science by Montandon as the latter attempted to defend his racial evolutionary hypothesis to the scientific establishment. But the men were confronted by a tough crown. Both were raked over the coals, treated with contempt by members of the academy and the photo and the theory dissected and derided as baloney. In a last-ditch effort of add credence to his new-world ape claims, Montandon began tossing out some of the tribal narratives of beasts like the guayazi, the di-di, the vasitri, and Marimunda, including the latter’s penchant for defecating into its hand and hurling the droppings at its foes – a tendency that he had convinced de Loys to include in his own account. After this dreadful experience, de Loys would never speak publicly on the subject of the mystery ape again. He was after all still perusing his career as a geologist and had his reputation to think of and acting as a witting accomplice to Montandon and his outright lies would certainly not aid him to this end. So de Loys removed himself from the narrative, as it were and spoke no further on the subject
Of course, we’re now familiar with the ignominious end that befell Montandon after having cast his lot with the Nazis during the second world war. So, with the two major players out of the game so to speak, one would think that the whole rancid house of cards would have simply imploded into ridicule and obscurity. But in that we’re still talking about it today speaks to the story’s resilience. We’ve discussed how Heuvelmans saw in the photo exactly what he wanted to see: an unknow animal to add to his growing cryptozoological menagerie. Even a certified genius and avowed skeptic like Arthur C. Clarke couldn’t resist putting his stamp of approval on the story and promoted it in books and documentaries. The ideological tug of war over the animal’s provenance is portrayed in the media as an equally weighted debate between Montandon and Keith, both of whom are often described as “eminent anthropologists”. We know that moniker certainly doesn’t apply to George Montandon, and Sir Arthur Keith fared little better after having been connected to the Piltdown Man hoax, which was perpetrated in East Sussex, England in 1912. (This is another story ripe for the BTR treatment on a future episode.)
But even if after all this discussion and exposition you still need further proof that de Loys ape was all a sham, I’m more than happy to oblige.
In 1962, a letter was received in the offices of the Spanish language magazine Diario El Universal and was addressed to the editor at the time, Guillermo Jose Schael. While this letter generated little interest at the time and was filed away, it was rediscovered in the archives of the periodical in 1999 and subsequently published in the Venezuelan scientific magazine Interciencia. The letter was written by Dr. Enrique Tejera and was in essence a bombshell with regards to the legend of de Loys’s ape.
In 1917, long before he completed his medical studies, Dr. Tejera was working in a camp for oil exploration in the region of Perijá, Venezuela. The engineer in charge of the project was Dr. Martín Tovar Lange, and the geologist was a Swiss national named François de Loys. Tejera describes de Loys as a prankster, confirming previously discussed suspicions on this matter. One day [those working in the camp] presented de Loys with a monkey with a deformed or injured tail that required its eventual amputation. After the operation, de Loys began referring to his new companion as "el hombre mono", or the “monkey man”. El Hombre Mono accompanied de Loys wherever he went and the two were almost inseparable. But during an excursion into the Mene Grande region of Venezuela, the monkey fell ill and died. De Loys stated that he wanted a photo of his companion, so he posed the body of the animal atop a wooden crate along the banks of a river and exposed a single frame. And for decades, the doctor thought no more about the innocent or the photo of the geologist’s dead pet.
That is until 1961. During a trip to Paris in that year, the doctor was visiting the Museum of Man in the Trocadéro Gardens. As he was examining the various displays, Dr. Tejera came upon a photograph that had been blown up so as to take up the entire wall. To his amazement, Tejera immediately recognized the image as the picture de Loys had captured of his pet monkey in 1917. And below the mural on a small plaque was inscribed the caption: "The first anthropoid ape discovered in America." Dr. Tejera was struck by how cleverly the photo had been cropped and modified so that the plants were no longer visible in the background, and that it was not possible to determine the type of box on which the monkey was sitting. But there could be no mistake. This was not a photo of an unknown ape, but rather a semi-domesticated monkey. And in Enrique Tejera, we finally have an objective witness to the photo’s origin and subject matter.
With respect to the legend of de Loys’s ape, I think we can effectively put it to bed as an obvious fraud. All available evidence shows this to be case. But that does not mean that we can dismiss out of hand the possibility of an unknown ape living in the isolated wilds of South America. If we are to believe the local tribes that inhabit these areas, there a number of different creatures that science has yet to recognize. It might seem easy to ignore these reports of strange animals as little more than native lore or superstition. But we should remember that some of the most fascinating zoological discoveries in were animals previously described by local inhabitants but dismissed as mere fantasy by European explorers. A prime example of this were tales of ferocious man-beasts that inhabited the dense jungles of equatorial Africa. These mythical creatures turned out to be the mountain gorilla. Likewise were the stories circulated by forest tribes that spoke of an animal that appeared to be a hybrid between a giraffe and a zebra. Imagine the chagrin of the white colonists when the Okapi was finally recognized by sciene in 1901.
So perhaps there is something behind these tales of strange creatures haunting the far reaches of the Amazon. Only continued exploration into these remote places can answer once and for all the question of the American ape. But with the continued loss of habitat due to deforestation of the rain forests, whatever unknown animals do indeed inhabit these regions may not be long for this world. How tragic would it be for man’s ecological short sightedness to result in the extinction of a species potentially so closely related to our own before it could even be recognized as such.