Vietnamese Rock Ape?
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on May 22nd, 2012
The Vietnamese called them the “Nguoi Rung.”
An artist conception of the Nguoi Rung, the Vietnamese name for the Rock Ape.
Cryptomundian GI Jon sends in the following account:
I once worked with an Architect who during the Vietnam War was a construction engineer. He told me a humorous story that I really didn’t give much thought about until recently. He said that one day he was running some food over to some soldiers on the other side of his base with his jeep. He said that he was attacked by what appeared to be a large rabid Orangutan with reddish orange hair that ran up behind the jeep and grabbed onto the spare tire. It was screaming and clawing at him from behind, and the soldiers in the guard towers kept radioing for him to cut the wheels this way and that way to try and throw the ape off the jeep. He would get close to shaking it loose, but it kept hanging on and getting even more vicious. Finally he cut the wheel hard enough to send the ape sprawling onto the road, where one of the guards unloaded his 50-caliber machine gun on it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that Orangutans live in Vietnam, and are native to Indonesia and Malaysia, found only in the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra. If it wasn’t an Orangutan he had an encounter with, what was it?
What do the Cryptomundians think?
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
I think it’s very possible that a cousin of the orangutan exists in Indochina and it may very well be related to the orang pendek as well.
Did the soldiers kill the creature, or did it escape the barrage of bullets? I mean any one with half a brain is going to realize that it’s an unknown creature.
This has happened before, soldiers killing what appeared to be a neanderthal man found in a cave, yet nothing came of it, as if they just walked away and let it rot.
We also have from the book- Real monsters gruesome creatures by Brad Steiger, a report of a man named Boris Porshenev who excavated the grave of what the locals believed to be an Alamasti. one who supposedly was captured, domesticated and lived in the Village Of Tkhine, until her death in the 1880s. But I ask, where is the rest of the story? What happened to the body?
Any place that could cough up the saola after an assortment of wars – there have even been recent kouprey sightings – might be worth another look to make sure we didn’t miss any primates.
I’m Vietnamese and my dad has told stories of these in the mountains in Vietnam. One time I was watching a bigfoot show and he commented “oh we have those, except they’re smaller”. When he talks about them he speaks as if believes they’re real.
He said they killed it, thinking that it was Rabid from the viciousness of the attack with the ape clawing at him barely missing the back of his head, and he was scared to death. I believe he said that it might have been attracted by the food he had in the jeep.
This former Nam soldier also was present at the Cam Ranh Bay AFB ammo dump explosion in 1971, when twenty seven (or so) “Daisy Cutter” BLU-82 15,000 pound bombs exploded, some simultaneously. He was nearly deaf in one ear from all the explosions.