Lake Iliamna and Its Monsters
Alaska's largest lake, where bush pilots have reported dark bodies over thirty feet long moving below the surface since the 1940s. The Dena'ina knew of them long before and warned against going onto the water alone. Unlike most lake monsters this one has a plausible explanation — belugas or giant sturgeon coming up from the sea — but no specimen has ever been landed.
The Almasty of Kabardino-Balkaria
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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