The Caucasus is the heartland of the Almasty, the Caucasian wild man: a creature some two metres tall covered in reddish hair which, by the accounts of mountain villagers, comes down to the sheepfolds and takes livestock. In the 1960s Professor Boris Porshnev collected testimony here for the Academy of Sciences and examined the case of Zana, a woman who lived in an Abkhaz village in the nineteenth century and whom locals held to be a captured Almasty. Her descendants were traced into the twentieth century; genetic analysis in 2015 found ordinary African ancestry.

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Lake Khaiyr

Lake Khayyr is a small, landlocked thermokarst lake situated within the subarctic tundra of the Ust-Yansky District in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Russia, located in the lower basin of the Omoloy River north of the Arctic Circle. In 1964–1965, this remote northern water body gained nationwide prominence when Soviet periodicals reported sightings of the "Khayyr Monster" ("Khayyr Beast")—an alleged relict aquatic reptile sporting an elongated neck and dorsal crest, transforming the lake into the Soviet Union's counterpart to the Loch Ness myth.