In the Kontum Province of Vietnam, near the borders with Laos and Cambodia, there were a surprisingly large number of bizarre reports from U.S. troops on patrols. They claimed to have seen a strange, not-quite-human but not-quite-ape creature that the locals call Nguoi Rung, or “the people of the Forest.”
In other words: Bigfoot.
Gary Linderer was on a six-man long-range reconnaissance patrol with the 101st Airborne Division when he deployed to South Vietnam. While struggling through some underbrush one day, he ran into “deep-set eyes on a prominent brow… five feet tall, with long muscular arms.” The creature “walked upright with broad shoulders and a heavy torso.”
His battle buddies told him he just saw a rock ape, but Linderer had seen Rock Apes before. They were in the wrong part of the world for a Rock Ape, and Rock Apes weren’t that big. This was no Rock Ape.
Like the Yeti in the Himalayas and the Sasquatch sightings all over North America, the Nguoi Rung is an oft-told tale in the area of Southeast Asia, but despite the endless sightings and folklore attached to the semi-mythical creature, there’s no concrete evidence it exists.
But Gary Linderer wasn’t the only witness, either. Army Sgt. Thomas Jenkins reported that his platoon was attacked by these apes, and they were throwing stones.
Toward the end of the war, Viet Cong and NVA soldiers reported so many sightings of the reddish-brown hair-covered Nguoi Rung that the North Vietnamese communist party secretariat ordered scientists to investigate.
Dr. Vo Quy, a respected ornithologist and environmental researcher from Hanoi, discovered what he believed to be a Nguoi Rung footprint on the forest floor and made a cast of it. The cast was wider than a human foot and too big for any known ape.
In 1982, another Vietnamese scientist, Tran Hong Viet, discovered more footprints, which led zoologist John MacKinnon to investigate the region. MacKinnon called the area a “tiny, pristine corner of the world unknown to modern science.”
In 1969, MacKinnon discovered manlike footprints in the jungles of Borneo, which the locals called Batatut. While much of the evidence surrounding the existence of these apes is anecdotal, MacKinnon, known for his discovery of new mammal species in Vietnam, believes there is a possibility that the existence of a previously unknown ape species is real.
The account of Nguoi Rung meeting American GIs in Vietnam was first published in Kregg P.J. Jorgenson’s Very Crazy, GI: Strange But True Stories of the Vietnam War.
Though there were many sightings on both sides, with varying degrees of hostility, none reported that the Bigfoot-like creatures joined the fighting or that they were communist sympathizers.
