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Somewhere in the farthest reaches of the Gobi Desert lives a creature so terrifying the
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very mention of its name can turn the scarlet cheeks of a Mongolian nomad, white.
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This giant of the underground lives deep under the sand, only to emerge now and again to
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spray its human victims with a deadly poison.
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Its venom is so powerful it corrodes metal.
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Its skin is so toxic if it brushes up against a human you first hear a howl, followed by
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a deathly silence.
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As a Mongolian Prime Minister once warned, death is instant, and there's nothing anyone
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can do to help.
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This is the story of one of the world's greatest mysteries, a nightmarish tale you
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can hear being told from one end of the Gobi Desert to the other.
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The Mongolian death worm, aka, “olgoi-khorkhoi”, is something to be feared and respected.
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When those wandering nomads see waves of sand created by the worm, there is only one thing
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to do: get away, fast.
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Still today western men on expeditions can be found in the yurts of nomads sitting around
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the fire, telling them stories about those unlucky people that came upon this worm and
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didn't get away.
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The death worm is a terrifying thing, make no mistake.
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By all accounts, it doesn't come up often.
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It kills seemingly only when threatened, but sightings of it are numerous.
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For that reason, those western-led expeditions have tried on a few occasions to unearth the
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truth about this monster of mystery.
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The last one wasn't even that long ago.
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We'll get around to that later.
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The first mention of the death worm was after an American paleontologist named Roy Chapman
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Andrews went over to that desolate part of the world in the 1920s.
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Back home he wrote the book, “On the Trail of Ancient Man”, and that's where we first
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heard of the deadly worm.
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In the book, Andrews writes that he never saw one himself, but in certain areas of that
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hostile desert locals and officials would regularly talk about a terrible thing that
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lives under the sand and occasionally kills animals and their owners.
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This naturally caused quite a stir in the West.
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People were fascinated by the possibility that some freak animal might exist that had
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heretofore never been mentioned in any science books.
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In a second book called, “The New Conquest of Central Asia”, Andrews mentioned the
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beast again, saying, “It is reported to live in the most arid, sandy regions of the
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western Gobi.”
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What really piqued the interest of western scientists and the public alike was the fact
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the Mongolian Prime Minister at the time, Jalkhanz Khutagt Sodnomyn Damdinbazar, said
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it existed.
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With a name like that he deserves to be heard.
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This is what he said about the death worm.
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“It is shaped like a sausage about two feet long, has no head nor leg and it is so poisonous
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that merely to touch it means instant death.
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It lives in the most desolate parts of the Gobi Desert.”
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This was another thing that fascinated foreigners: the desert itself.
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At the time, parts of the Gobi were new territory for westerners.
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It was a hostile place and some of the locals could also be hostile.
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In the early 20th century, it was a part of the Earth that conjured up monsters in the
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minds of westerners.
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The desert itself is a giant, covering 500,000 square miles (1,295,000 km2) and spanning
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much of China and Mongolia.
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It was the great unknown, an enigma, especially at its wildest west where the huge sand deserts
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can be found.
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That's the area where the death worm lived.
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Hardly anything was written about this place in a European language in the early 20th century.
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The only people besides the nomadic peoples that had been there were a handful of intrepid
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travelers.
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They talked about their journeys, but they were far from large-scale mapping expeditions.
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Then in 1923 something amazing happened when a crew from the American Museum of Natural
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History arrived in the Gobi Desert.
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They discovered the first dinosaur eggs, or at least they were the first team to find
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dinosaur eggs and have them recognized as that by the scientific community.
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So, when three years later a man said that a giant death worm reportedly lives in the
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sand, for some people it wasn't hard to believe.
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We should say the American writer that reported this was not sold on the existence of the
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worm, but that didn't stop more westerners arriving looking for the thing in the decades
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to come.
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As you'll see, there have been quite a few western-led investigations since Andrew's
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feet grazed the Mongolian sands.
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The name olgoi-khorkhoi can be translated as, “large intestine worm.”
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That might sound like something you flush down the toilet bowl, but if you saw the thing
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in your bathroom, you'd be the one trying to get down the bowl.
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It looks rather like the worm that appeared in the Dune novels, but the Mongolian death
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worm doesn't have many of those worms' characteristics.
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According to the Mongolians that talk about the worm, it is not only deadly to touch,
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but it can kill from a distance by spitting venom at a person.
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If that isn't bad enough, it also has the uncanny ability to electrocute things.
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The good news is that it hibernates most of the year and can be seen mostly in the months
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of June and July, especially during rainfall.
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When it eats, it often chooses a wild plant known as “goyo.
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The worm might also chow down on a camel and if it does it may well lay eggs in its intestines.
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If there are no camels nearby, a rodent or even a human will do.
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Ok, so now let's dig a little deeper and see what happened on those other expeditions
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to find the worm.
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First, you have to know the word, “cryptid.”
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A cryptid is an animal that science hasn't yet said is real.
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Cryptozoologists are the people that go looking for such animals.
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These mysterious entities can be found in just about every culture.
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In the U.S. you've got Big Foot and myriad other cryptids from state to state.
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In Scotland, they have the Loch Ness Monster, and in Australia, they have the man-eating
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Yowie.
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One of the reasons such frightening entities came into existence was not some troll from
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history just making things up.
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Most of the time it was down to people or animals going missing.
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On some occasions, the dead person would have been ripped apart as if by an incredibly strong
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wild beast.
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The first mention of a monster near Loch Ness dates back to the sixth century AD, when some
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unfortunate guy went swimming and seemed to have been eaten by a beastie in the water.
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When something can't easily be explained, humans throughout history have been known
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to make things up.
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For example, there are cases in Europe when serial killers were convicted of being werewolves.
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We don't need to tell you that they weren't, but because authorities back then didn't
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understand the psychopathology of serial killing, especially when it involved eating flesh,
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some people were found guilty of “crimes of lycanthropy.”
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It's the same with monsters.
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Sometimes they were blamed for the mass killing of sheep, or stealing children out of the
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fog, or mutilating camels in the Gobi Desert.
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The question is, is the death worm something else in disguise?
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Let us now introduce a man named Ivan Mackerle.
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He was a Czech cryptozoologist who went around the world looking for mysterious monsters.
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He once visited Scotland and spent some time looking for Nessie, and another time he went
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to Madagascar in search of the elephant bird.
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The thing he was really interested in, though, what you could call an obsession of his, was
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the Mongolian death worm.
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Twice in the 90s and once in the early 2000s he took a team out to the Gobi to search for
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the thing.
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He had a few theories about the worm.
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For one thing, he said it was only about as thick as a man's arm and only around half
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a meter long.
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He said it was blood-red in color, had no eyes, no mouth, and no nostrils.
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He also believed the worm could deliver an electric shock, and he said it was indeed
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venomous, but that was because it often fed on the poisonous varieties of the goyo plant.
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Did he find it, though?
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Well, he came up empty-handed after his first two trips, and then on his third and last
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trip, he was told by a Buddhist monk to go home or else his life was at risk.
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That night he had a crazy dream about the death worm and when he woke up his back was
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covered with large boils filled with blood.
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Still, he never found the worm.
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It wasn't through lack of trying, though.
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Mackerle's expeditions involved serious work, including interviewing a lot of people
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and even blowing up parts of the desert so they could investigate the depths.
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Other times he scanned the desert from a plane using a camera.
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He found nothing, but according to his friends, he had a lot of fun trying.
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In 2005, the British Centre for Fortean Zoology followed in his footsteps.
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Instead of blowing up parts of the desert, they flooded parts and also damned streams,
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hoping they could flush the thing out from where it was hiding.
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Alas, they also went back home having never seen a death worm.
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Richard Freeman, who led the expedition, said he interviewed scores of locals who claimed
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they'd seen the worm.
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He talked to a park ranger who said he'd seen it no less than three times.
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That night the ranger invited Freeman to sleep in his guest Yurt, the place where the ranger's
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wife told him about the time she'd seen the worm just three years prior.
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Another guy Freeman talked to claimed he'd killed a death worm in 1972 by throwing a
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rock at it.
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As the story goes, some Russians took the dead worm back to Russia, and now it's lost
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somewhere in the basement of a Russian museum.
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If it is, we wish they'd take it out and for everyone to see.
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Freeman went as far as to speak to local governors, who also talked about sightings of the death
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worm.
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In fact, in the interview we watched, Freeman talked for over an hour about many people
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who'd told him they'd seen the death worm, but Freeman himself didn't get so lucky
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to see one for himself.
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Does he think the death worm exists?
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Not really, or if it does, it's not quite what the locals describe.
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“They're terrified of it,” said Freeman, but he also explained that as far as human
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deaths are concerned it's always a friend of a friend's cousin who was killed.
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Those who actually claim to have seen it have only ever said they saw the worm killing a
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mouse.
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So much for a deadly monster...
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Then the Americans got in on the act a little later.
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In 2007, the TV Show Destination Truth went in search of the worm, and yet again the damn
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thing remained elusive.
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Still, there are many people in Mongolia that will tell you the thing is real and they've
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seen it with their own eyes.
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After the U.S. TV crew went out there some journalists from New Zealand arrived in the
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Gobi Desert.
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They didn't manage to capture the worm on film, but they interviewed locals who swore
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on the existence of the worm.
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“Because the sightings peaked during the 1950s a lot of these witnesses won't be around
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for much longer, so I felt pretty lucky to get to some of them before they are actually
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dead,” said the lead journalist on that expedition.
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He did say, though, that in the cities people hadn't even heard of the worm and it was
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only when they reached the desert areas that people talked about olgoi-khorkhoi.
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Worms couldn't even survive under the sand.
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We can blame the fact it's called a worm on the English translation.
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The Mongolians never said it was a worm, only that it looked like one.
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That brings to the question of what exactly have the people of the desert been seeing?
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Surely scores of people who saw a worm-like thing weren't all tripping or trolling.
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Well, it's ever so slightly possible that some strange unheard-of creature does live
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under the sand, but what's more likely is the death worm sightings were either of some
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kind of snake or a legless lizard.
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Still, the only venomous snakes in Mongolia are a kind of viper and an adder and are both
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quite small and look nothing like a worm.
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They also wouldn't live under the sand.
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Then there's the Steppe Ribbon Racer snake and that better fits the description, but
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its venom is very mild to humans.
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There's the sand boa, which could possibly be found in the Gobi Desert.
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It looks like the death worm that people have described, and although it's not harmful
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at all to humans, folks around the world fear them just because they look so scary.
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Perhaps people in the past saw a large snake or heard of someone being bitten by a snake
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and over time around the campfire, the story evolved into a giant worm that can generate
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electricity.
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Our conclusion is not all those people were lying about seeing the worm, but as the story
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traveled people's imaginations got the better of them.
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If such a worm exists, one of them would have been captured by now, dead or alive.
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Now you need to watch, “Soldiers Encounter Mysterious Monsters in Vietnam War.”
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Or for more monster madness, “Scientists Find Best Evidence That The Loch Ness Monster
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Actually Exists?”