➡ American soldiers during the Vietnam War reported encounters with a creature in the jungles of Vietnam, known as the “rock ape”. This creature, described as a half-man, half-ape, was said to exhibit human-like behavior and live in groups. The soldiers’ stories include instances of the creatures throwing rocks and not being afraid of human contact. These tales have contributed to the legend of the creature, which remains unidentified by mainstream science.
➡ During the Vietnam War, soldiers reported seeing a creature, described as human-like and around 6 feet tall, in the brush. Some thought it was a “rock ape” or an orangutan, but others disagreed, saying it didn’t match known descriptions of these animals. These sightings, along with similar reports dating back to the 1800s, have led to speculation about an unknown primate living in Vietnam. Despite skepticism and theories about hallucinations, footprints found by scientists suggest these creatures might be real.
➡ The text discusses different theories about the identity of the ‘rock ape’, a creature reported in Vietnam. Some suggest it could be an orangutan, a white-cheeked gibbon, or a Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, but these animals don’t match the size or behavior of the rock ape. Others think it might be the orang pen deck, a creature from Sumatra, or a new primate species. The text also mentions the discovery of the seola, a creature once thought to be mythical, suggesting that the rock ape could also be a yet-to-be-discovered species.

Let’s see. Legend has it that there’s a half-man, half-ape-like creature in the jungles of Vietnam. I know what you’re all thinking, another Bigfoot video. But this isn’t your average Bigfoot tale. Because in this one, it’s American soldiers telling stories from the Vietnam War. And the stories are incredible. Here’s how today’s project goes. Southern Vietnam is home to a Bigfoot-like primate that exhibits human-like behavior, but has yet to be formally identified by mainstream science. Let’s see what the evidence says. My name is Face, and welcome to Project Conspiracy. The alleged creature has several names.

The locals in Vietnam call it the Patutut or Nhuy Zhong, aka people of the forest or jungle people. But American soldiers in the Vietnam War called them rockades, usually described as four to six feet tall and strongly built, with long limbs and protruding stomachs. Covered in reddish brown hair, they were said to live in troops or groups rather than hanging out alone like we usually hear about Bigfoot doing. Their habitat was said to be confined to remote areas of the Vietnam jungle, mostly away from people. But guess where U.S. soldiers went during the Vietnam War? And since these alleged creatures weren’t used to being around humans, they didn’t realize how nuts we are and weren’t afraid of us.

It’s said that these rock apes didn’t shy away from human contact, and U.S. troops say they learned this firsthand during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from about 1955 to 1975. The war was officially between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but it involved communism and the Cold War was going on, so it basically turned into a proxy war for the superpowers, with the Soviet Union supporting North Vietnam and the United States supporting South Vietnam. And you’ll hear me refer to the Vietcong in some of these stories.

The Vietcong, or VC, was a South Vietnamese common front that fought under the direction of North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and the United States. So in the 1960s, U.S. troops began to go into the central highlands area of Vietnam, and some of these areas were pretty remote, just like the areas where the rock ape was rumored to be. And wouldn’t you know it, the reports from U.S. soldiers soon started coming in. One of the hot spots for rock ape activity was around Dongden Mountain, which is 2,900 feet above sea level and provides a great vantage point of the area, including the city of Da Nang, which is about five miles southeast of the mountain.

Strategically important area, as they say. Author, historian, and YouTuber Mark Felton told that in 1966, the Third Marines had erected a divisional outpost, landing zone, and radio relay station on the mountain. The Marines also reported attacks by unidentified animals who threw rocks into the compound, even injuring some Marines, and it happened on multiple occasions. The first recon battalion association online describes an incident that occurred in 1966, when a Marine unit reported to their captain that they had spotted movement in the brush, which they assumed was being caused by the enemy Vietcong.

The captain told his unit over the radio not to fire. Not long after, the unit reported back that they were actually surrounded by hairy bipedal humanoid creatures. The captain told the unit that rather than firing on the creatures, they should instead throw rocks. But that didn’t go so great because the creatures began throwing rocks back at them. They say at this point, the Marines guessed that there were hundreds of these creatures. The Marines then started using their bayonets on the creatures, and the captain heard an epic battle over the radio. When the dust cleared, they found injured but not dead Marines, and also allegedly the bodies of several rock apes.

This became known as the Battle of Dongden, and it sort of spurs the legend of this creature, if you will. At least for stories from US troops during the Vietnam War. The Marines started calling them rock apes, and the name stuck. They also started calling this location Monkey Mountain. More from Monkey Mountain in just a moment. Another Marine named Graham Webster submitted his rock ape story to the New York Times, and it got published. Here’s what he said. The mountain about which Karl Marlantis writes in his novel Matterhorn seems to be the rock pile that overlooked the Aesha Valley and was a dominant summit for artillery fire in that portion of the western end of the DMZ in 1966 and 1967.

How do I know? I was the Marine who did all the daily sitrep operational maps and overlays for the 4th Marine Regiment at that time in the DMZ area. The rock pile became infamous when the native rock apes living in caves there attacked the Marines stationed at the top of the mountain. The Marines, of course, returned fire, and the following morning called in their daily body count. I included a count of the dead apes in the morning sitrep briefing. Hell, everything was against us. Even the bloody apes. I found another story online from an anonymous veteran who describes his rock ape encounter that took place around 1967 or 1968.

I was in Vietnam 1967 to 68 near a fire base called the rock pile. One night we heard what we believed to be invaders coming through the minefield. A Marine next to me said that they were rock apes and he then threw a rock in the direction of the intruders only to have it thrown back. He again threw it back but this time the rock got bigger and every time he threw the rock got bigger until it was almost bowling ball size. Quite the game. Due to darkness, we could not tell how many apes were there but later that night one managed to step on mine.

All accounts I have read as far as ape humanistic look agrees with what I personally saw. It is not a myth. Another story tells that in 1968, Company M of the 3rd Battalion 5th Marines reported that apes would get above them and throw rocks at them. Robert Wood, Daley Baird III also had a rock ape story that took place in 1968. He documented some of his time in Vietnam in a diary that’s posted online. Here’s a little of what I could find about Baird. Baird was a member of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion 1st Marine Division.

One of a select few trained to parachute out of perfectly good flying airplanes as he says. He participated in 19 long range combat patrols and 13 underwater dive searches. He was awarded 5 personal and 6 unit decorations for service. He later went on to graduate from Old Dominion University with honors in 1975. And Baird also talked about the rock apes. He made a diary entry for the week of May 8 to 14, 1968 when he was at the observation post at Dong Den aka Monkey Mountain. At night we started hearing noises at the edges of the barbed wire.

Could be rats, might be VC. Pancho, a Mexican-American corporal who was with me in the defensive bunker, decided to walk up to the communications bunker at the top of the hill. Well, off he went and I visually followed him as far as I could see him. Then I was alone, on top of a mountain in a foreign land. Isn’t this basically how every horror movie starts? Splitting up is not recommended. An eternity seemed to pass before I saw movement on the trail and recognized Pancho coming back. About 100 feet from the bunker, he stopped and bent over slightly, seeming to look at something.

All of a sudden, his M16 cracked off a small burst of fire and he ran like hell back to the bunker. According to what Baird said, it sounded like Pancho was laughing too hard to talk. So Baird told the lieutenant that it was him that took the shot because he thought he heard something outside the wire. The lieutenant chewed Baird out and got off the radio. When Pancho got control of himself, he told me that he had been walking back to the bunker when he noticed a bush that hadn’t been there before. He’d been over to see it better and it snorted at him and he fired.

What he had encountered was the ubiquitous rock ape of Vietnam. I would come to learn that they were nearly everywhere and quite fearless. That is what we had heard near the wire that night. I’m glad Pancho thought it was funny because I think I would have been terrified. There was another report encounter in 1968 that took place just a month after Baird’s story. Sergeant Gary Lenderer from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division gave an account that occurred in June 1968 on a travel channel show called In Search of Monsters. Here’s what Lenderer said. Second morning of our patrol, we were set up on a hillside.

Behind us was a big patch of brush about 12 foot high. It was right after daylight. Two of our guys were eating. The other four were pulling security. And all of a sudden, we heard this commotion in the brush behind us. We all grabbed our weapons and turned around to face it. And suddenly the brush parted, and this creature stepped through this wall of brush. It was approximately 10 to 15 feet away uphill from us. It had its left arm grabbing a hold of the brush he had come through. And he looked down at us. And, ah, we froze.

We didn’t know what it was. It didn’t make a sound. It just stood and cocked its head a couple times as it was looking at us. Never changed the expression on its face at all. And guess how Lenderer described the creature. Between 5 foot 10 and 6 feet tall, long arms, face and hands had no hair on them. I remember the intelligence in the eyes was incredible. It was so human-like, it was unbelievable. We got to watch it for 7 to 10 seconds before it suddenly just turned around and walked back through the brush and disappeared.

And to this day, we have no idea what that was. Come on, Sergeant. You went on a TV show called Rock Ape of Vietnam. We all know what you saw. And if I saw something like that on YouTube, I’d hit the like button. Because it’s one of the easiest and most effective ways to support a YouTube channel. But Craig Jorgensen also wrote about Lenderer’s experience in his book Very Crazy G.I. Strange but True Stories of the Vietnam War. He documented the following exchange between the soldiers when they saw the creature. What the hell is that? Someone called out from behind Lenderer.

It’s a rock ape. Said another team member. Another team member disagreed. No, it ain’t. I’ve seen rock apes. And that sure as hell isn’t a rock ape. It’s an orangutan, isn’t it? Lenderer asked while the others kept their eyes glued on the strange creature. Well, if it is, then he can’t read a map. There are no orangutans in Vietnam. Then the creature lost interest and walked off. Just sort of does whatever it wants. I recommend Jorgensen’s book, by the way. Wild stories and very interesting. And the stories of this creature continued during the Vietnam War.

Mark Felton described a story in 1969 when the patrol from Company D, 1st Battalion 502nd Regiment, was resting and having lunch on a ridge 10 miles south of Hue City. They encountered eight rock apes on a trail and initially mistook them for North Vietnamese army fighters so the Americans opened fire on them. And if opening fire on rock apes wasn’t wild enough, according to Felton, the alpha male rock ape repeatedly charged the U.S. soldiers. They say the male rock ape was giving the rest of the rock ape troop a chance to get away.

Basically, guerrilla behavior. Another source said the GIs opened fire not to kill them, but to scare the big apes away, which is reportedly what happened on another marine story that took place in 1970. Here’s how it goes. Rock apes are the real thing. I saw a band of them up on Karli Ridge in Kwang Nam Province in the spring of 1970. It was nightfall and I saw them through a starlight scope, 10 to 15 of them headed away from us up a steep incline. They weren’t VC because they walked as a pack side by side in the jungle and not in a military type line.

They all looked to be very broad bodied and up to five feet tall. And I’m only scratching the surface with U.S. troop sightings of this creature during the Vietnam War. So what’s actually going on here? Well, we can borrow one theory from Bigfoot skeptics. The witnesses are making it all up. But if that’s the case, then it is a lot of U.S. veterans making it up. And they’re presumably making it up independently because I haven’t seen any evidence of an organized effort. But even if some of these stories are made up, it only takes one of these encounters being true for this creature to actually exist.

In any event, I don’t buy the lying theory. I think these soldiers were seeing something. To address that, since these encounters took place in the 1960s and 70s, some accuse these soldiers of taking marijuana or LSD, which might have caused the soldiers to hallucinate and see things. Isn’t that lovely? These guys go risk their lives. They can get accused of doing drugs and seeing non-existent primates. Look, I’m not saying that behavior never happened by our troops in the Vietnam War, but there’s a lot of problems with this theory. First, according to the DEA, hallucinations with marijuana are rare except at high doses.

I think most reasonable people these days probably wouldn’t consider marijuana hallucinations a viable theory. Second, one source says that, while a true psychedelic drug like LSD would certainly have produced the kind of visual hallucinations that could account for rock ape sightings, it was not widely used by other troops in the war. So I don’t know if there’s any real way of verifying that statement other than conducting a survey of Vietnam veterans and hoping that they’re honest about their drug use. So I can only speak for myself here, but if I was an American soldier in the Vietnam War and I knew the Viet Cong could be lurking around pretty much anywhere, I can tell you with some degree of certainty that I would not want to be on LSD.

And if I was on duty using LSD and thought I saw a relative of Bigfoot, I probably wouldn’t go around telling everyone about it. Mainly because I’d be scared people would say I’m crazy or on drugs. But the real nail in the coffin for this theory, and maybe all skeptic theories, is that these creatures were reported well before the Americans arrived in the 1960s. Mark Felton documented that reports date back all the way to the early 1800s, mainly in the Central Highlands area of the country. This is basically the same area where the stories we went over took place.

The earliest report Felton told of was from 1820, when a French ship captain named L. Ray reported a story told to him by a French Jesuit missionary who encountered a race of men with tails in Vietnam. In 1830, another missionary documented similar stories from Cambodia, Vietnam’s next door neighbor. In 1895, anthropologist Paul Dien Joy published an article in which he claimed to have discovered a population of wild men with tails in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, and he even said his party captured one. In 1912, explorer Henry Matry told of his time in Central Highlands and said, He said it mainly stayed deep in the forest and described it pretty much exactly how American soldiers did.

And there were more reports of the creature before the Vietnam War started, up to at least 1947. By the way, if you’re interested in this subject, I very much recommend that you go check out Mark Felton’s video on it. He tells it better than I ever could. But aside from everything we just went over, there have actually been investigations to search for this creature, and there’s been findings that may support its existence. In 1970, during the Vietnam War, the Pedagogic University in Hanoi sent an expedition that found unidentified footprints. One source also said that in 1970, Dr.

John McKinnon, an Oxford-trained British field biologist, found tracks of a similar wild man. Dr. McKinnon reportedly said that he believes the creature is similar to Megan Thropus, and also that it lived in Vietnam’s Vuquan Nature Reserve. Sightings of rock apes by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops were also common enough that a North Vietnam general ordered an expedition in 1974 to try to capture or kill one of the creatures. Professor Vo Qui of Vietnam National University led a North Vietnamese expedition. The expedition found prints that were said to be wider than a human print, but too large to be that of an ape.

In 1982, another Vietnam scientist, Tran Hong Viet of Hanoi’s Pedagogic University, discovered more footprints, and even made a cast of it. One source said the print measured 16 centimeters by 28 centimeters. The length wasn’t extraordinary, but it was much wider than a normal human footprint. And they say these footprints were very similar to the ones found by John McKinnon. So let’s review. We’ve got stories from locals and American soldiers. Yes, some of these stories were anonymous and unverifiable. But we can put a name and a face to some of them. And there are LOTS of stories.

Many of which predate the Vietnam War by more than a century. Also, we’ve got footprints from both British and Vietnamese scientists. And casts. Did I mention all the stories? I couldn’t include them all here. There’s too many. Based on what we’ve gone over so far, I’d wager that at least some reasonable minds are probably open to the idea of a four to six foot primate to cause Vietnam home. But if this creature does exist, then what is it? Based on the description of the rock apes, some have said they may actually be misidentified orangutans.

Orangutans have proportionally long arms and short legs, and have reddish brown hair covering their bodies. Adult males get up to about 165 pounds and stand 4 feet 6 inches. Pretty close on the description. However, the behavior of rock apes doesn’t really sound like orangutans. Orangutans spend most of their time in trees. Compared to other great apes, they infrequently descend to the ground where they are more cumbersome. And they generally live a more solitary lifestyle than other great apes. As opposed to the rock apes who we mostly hear about on the ground and like to run in troops.

Oh yeah, they say that orangutans probably used to inhabit Vietnam, but we’re not aware of them inhabiting the country right now. So orangutan seems unlikely. Another animal I’ve seen thrown out as a rock ape candidate is the northern white-cheeked gibbon. These animals are native to Vietnam and are said to be generally sociable creatures. But there’s a problem. White-cheeked gibbons are usually about 18 to 25 inches tall and weigh about 15 to 20 pounds. So while a large white-cheeked gibbon might be misidentified for a smaller juvenile rock ape, this wouldn’t explain the sightings of the rock apes that were between 4 to 6 feet tall.

I’ve also seen the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey thrown out as a possible candidate for misidentification, but I think the same logic we applied to the northern white-cheeked gibbon would apply to this animal too. Some also speculate that the rock ape could actually be the orang pen deck, which itself is a cryptid. Maybe the world’s first case of a misidentified cryptid. But the orang pen deck is said to inhabit remote, mountainous forests on the island of Sumatra. They say it’s a ground-dwelling bipedal primate covered in short fur, standing between 2 and a half to 5 feet tall.

The orang pen deck might be our closest candidate yet, but like the rock ape it hasn’t been officially identified either. Maybe it’s just a new primate, with all the characteristics that locals and American soldiers described. 4 to 6 feet tall, reddish brown hair, operates in troops, fearless of humans and can be aggressive, and, of course, loves to throw rocks. Why not? After all, the local people of Vukwa also spoke of a semi-mythical creature they called the forest goat or spindle horn. I’ve seen some say the locals referred to it as some sort of unicorn-like creature.

Sounds to me like they really didn’t believe the locals. Then, Dr. John McKinnon, the British biologist we talked about just a few moments ago, along with 5 Vietnamese scientists, found so much evidence of this creature in the Vukwa Nature Reserve that he formally announced its discovery around 1993. Here it is. It’s called a seola. And if you saw this creature, weren’t familiar with antelopes, and told me that you saw a unicorn in Vietnam, I could buy that description. McKinnon even found a skull of one of these creatures hanging in a villager’s house.

So maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the local stories. But I can hear the skeptics now. We literally found a unicorn. Why don’t we have a rock ape body? Well, the jungle is hot, wet, and full of creepy crawlies. In Jorgensen’s book that we talked about a moment ago, he described that in the high heat of the day, decomposition came swiftly. So things don’t really last that long out there. And even if they did, where these creatures are at, there’s probably no one there to look forward anyways. Look at how long it took for science to formally identify the seola.

Science is cool, but when done properly, it can be a slow and tedious process. That said, some speculate that US Army veteran Frank Hanson had embalmed a nearly complete specimen of an ape man, which has become known as the Minnesota Iceman. It was displayed at shopping malls, state fairs, and carnivals in the United States and Canada in the 1960s and early 1970s. That’s a different project for a different day. I suspect that like with the seola, it’s only a matter of time until we formally identify the rock ape. One conservationist noted that this area still hasn’t been studied, systematically because of warfare and political instability.

So there’s a lot of promise for additional discovery going forward. I’m excited to see what the future holds. So are you convinced that this cryptid exists or do you still need more evidence? And if the rock ape can go this long without being formally discovered by science, then why couldn’t there be an undiscovered primate in North America too? Let me know your thoughts on that down in the comments or in our Discord. By the way, the link to the Discord was apparently broken for weeks, so if you try to join, apologies. It should be fixed by now.

If not, let me know. If you’re a veteran, I want to thank you for serving. And for those of you watching, thank you for your support in these first few episodes. And we’ll see you on the next one. Until then, watch out for the lizard people. [tr:trw].