orang Pendek
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Bigfoot. Yeti. Skunk Ape. These names evoke images of giant mythical bipedal apes, relegated primarily to the stuff of fantasy for the majority of the population. But could there actually be an unknown bipedal primate living in the jungles of Sumatra, Indonesia… One whose stories have garnered attention from National Geographic and other international organizations.This creature goes by the name of Orang Pendek, and while it may not be as well known, or large, as it’s Bigfoot brethren, this creature is not the stuff of legend to those who have seen it. To many researchers and eyewitnesses alike, the Orang Pendek is a strange phenomenon.
The Orang Pendek, or “little person” in Indonesian, is described as a bipedal, hairy, ape-like creature that has human dominant features. Alex Schlegel, a cognitive neuroscientist who participated in a four year camera trapping project seeking the creature, provided some more context on the name Orang Pendek:
“Orang Pendek in Indonesia just means short person. It's like Orangutan actually means forest person. And I am an Orang. I'm an American person so Orang is an interesting word and at least the concept of of apes versus humans. They assign this SAME NAME TO ALL OF Orang so it gives you an idea maybe a spectrum along which Indonesian conception we all lie.”
Descriptions of the creature have ranged from 2 ½ feet, all the way to 5 feet when bi-pedal. The lowest height range correlates closely to a male Gibbon, while the tallest height range correlates to a standing male Orangutan.
It is described as having a short, square neck, a broad chest and shoulders, long arms, and a stocky well muscled upper torso. It’s short dark hair covers its body while a longer head of hair sometimes referred to as a “mane”, drapes around its face. The face is human-like with a few noticeable differences, such as a heavy set brow, flat nose, no chin, large or long canine teeth, and a reclining forehead. Many skeptics discount Orang Pendek sightings as misidentified Orangutan’s even though Orangutan’s are only found in northern Indonesia and not in the areas that Orang Pendek is commonly sighted.
Most reports of the Orang Pendek describe it as walking on two legs with an erect posture. It swings its arms in a manner very similar to that of a human. However, one report recounted by anthropologist Gregory Forth in his book Images of the Wildman in Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Perspective, tells of a colonial Dutch officer in the 20th century who witnessed the creature dropping to its hands and feet to flee. Another account from the same time period tells of the creature steadying itself by using its hands to hold onto foliage as it walked through the jungle. These accounts seem to bolster the theory that the Orang Pendek is simply a misidentified known primate who is not primarily bipedal. However, The physical evidence gathered for the Orang Pendek, tells a different story.
A variety of footprints were gathered in the early twentieth century when local’s stories of the Orang Pendek were gaining attention from Dutch colonizers. The Orang Pendek’s feet are described as short and wide and resemble a human with a narrow rounded heel. Many have now been explained as sun bear footprints. Sun bears are the smallest of the bear family and can be found from southern China down through Indonesia. When a sun bear leaves a footprint without claw marks, it is commonly misinterpreted as evidence of Organ Pendek’s existence. Some footprint casts however show a large toe angled away from the foot. This feature can not be attributed to a sun bear. To this day, researchers continue to explore the jungles gathering footprints that might belong to the Orang Pendek.
Dally Sandradiputra, an Indonesian cryptozoologist who tirelessly searches for the existence of undiscovered creatures in Indonesia, has found hair samples as well.
“We collect some hairs and send to Copenhagen university, and he found DNA.. some with monkey and human.. Half a monkey half a human.”
Most sightings of the creature originate from farmers who claim to have seen the creature stealing their food.
Alex Schlegel: “A lot of the stories of sightings a Orang Pendek would would happen around farmlands and especially farmers who owned land right on the edge of the forest. They would.
There would be stories of you know sighting or independent can seeing it coming into the farm and stealing food and then retreating back into the forest. But a very strange and interesting part of a lot of these stories was the effect it had on the farmers that would report these sightings so these are all. So it's a very patriarchal society. So these are men who are head of their family and. Pillars of their community. Middle age. They're very respectable people but they would report just being terrified. They they wouldn't go back to that part of their farm because they were so scared of seeing it again. So that's that doesn't really mesh I think with the sense that this is a person just telling a story that this is these are people that express genuine fear and they're not really people that are going to tell a tall tale and risk losing their reputation. They seem to be genuinely affected by whatever experience they had. “
Sightings of Orang Pendek are not just a recent phenomenon. The Orang Pendek has a long, well documented history.
European’s became particularly enthralled by the Orang Pendek in the 20th century and brought stories from Indonesia to the rest of the world, capturing the imaginations, and skepticism, of curious minds the world over. Various sightings during this period were documented and can be found recounted in Gregory Forth’s Anthropological book.
In 1910 a Dutch man wrote about two separate encounters with a bipedal ape in the Barisan Mountains near Mount Sugirik. He witnessed a group crossing his path. They were short-legged and had broad shoulders. They walked like a human but their faces were distinctly different. Afterwards he recorded a separate sighting that happened 4 days afterwards in the same region where he witnessed a group of 25 members of the same species. He wrote that what he witnessed was definitely not an Orangutan.
De Santy, another colonial officer, recorded an account in 1925 from a Banyuasin fisherman who told him that he had encountered a dead Orang Pendek. Gregory Forth recounts De Santy’s report in his book: “Although the size of a child of about ten years, the creature was evidently mature for she had humanlike breasts. The body was covered in hair about 20 centimetres in length, while the head hair, roughly the length of a forearm, was much longer. The hands, feet and nails were like a human’s, but the middle finger extended well beyond the others; also the heel of the small foot was much more pointed. The creature had ‘long eyebrows’ and lacked a cleft in the upper lip. In the previous night, before discovering the body, the informant had heard a sound like a human weeping. From its condition, particularly an abnormally swollen belly, the man inferred that the creature had died during a failed attempt to give birth.”
The most well known report from this time comes from a Dutch timber prospector stationed in Palembang named J. van Herwaarden. Herwaarden was out hunting pigs in October of 1924 when he stumbled upon a lone female creature standing on a log. The creature stood about 5 feet tall, and was covered in short black hair. When the creature realized it was not alone, it turned to look at Herwaarden. He noticed the face had little to no hair, and resembled a human and not a monkey or apes. Similar to other accounts, the creature had much longer hair on its head that reached down to the waist. The creature fled soon after noticing Herwaarden. Before fleeing, the creature made a “hu hu” sound that was echoed by other creatures hidden in the jungle. It then fled on two feet while making a hissing noise.
But could these stories somehow be based on a real creature, even if the truth has become distorted over time?
Alex Schlegel shared more folklore he had heard while in Indonesia:
One of the one of the most common aspects of this story that most people seem to be aware of is this, this claim that Orang Pendek walks with its feet facing backwards. So that it fools you if you're trying to follow its tracks. That would be the most common reaction that we would get when we would tell people what we were doing. They would say oh you know they would pantomime with their hands. The foot going backwards.
And then there was one more that I had only ever heard actually from Sahar our guide. And I don't know where this story came from but he said that there's a story that there's only ever two Orang Pendek at a time.
There's always a male and a female and they they circle around Summatra on opposite sides of Sumatra that they'd never meet until one of them is about to die and they'll come together and mates and then that that offspring will then replace the one that dies and don't be two again.
Orang Pendek fervor was at an all time high in the early 20th century, with Dutch colonizers traipsing through the forest hoping to be the first to bring back the body of an Orang Pendek.
But all that was ever captured were sun bears that were unfortunate enough to be mistaken for the mysterious biped. In 1932 the body of a supposed Orang Pendek was delivered to the national zoology museum in Bogor, Java. Hungry to claim reward money posted for evidence of Orang Pendek’s existence, a group of men altered the body of a langur monkey to appear more human. Even today, evidence of the Orang Pendek encourages those hungry to earn an extra dollar. Dally Sandradiputra, Indonesian cryptozoologist, had this to say on the matter:
“One thing you have to do, in gudujungu, everyone knows the Orang Pendek story. They always same story… [cut] Too many people know about Orang Pendek, same story, same description.. It’s like, you know, when we do interview with local people in Gudujungu, we have to pay some money, do you know what I mean…. [cut] Now it’s like a business. If you look for Orang Pendek, you have to pay some dollars.”
The fake Orang Pendek body in 1932 tainted the scientific community's interest, and while public interest in the creature waned, many villagers continued seeing a creature that matched the Orang Pendek’s description…
In 2003, an incredible discovery was made on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Fossils from a previously undiscovered short hominin species were found in a cave and named homo floresiensis. Homo floresiensis lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, which actually overlaps with modern human beings. Homo sapiens and homo floresiensis lived during the same time, and it is even believed that homo sapiens may be responsible for the extinction of floresiensis. They stood between 3-4 feet in height and used tools to hunt local prey, such as the now extinct pygmy elephants and large rodents. Descriptions of the Orang Pendek have been compared to Homo floresiensis. Is it possible that Homo floresiensis did not go extinct, and what people are witnessing are the remains of a distant human ancestor? Or is it possible that the stories are passed down from a time when they did co-exist alongside humans?
The discovery inspired one professor to reconsider stories he had heard of Orang Pendek while visiting Indonesia, and to wonder, could there be a connection between Homo Florensis and Orang Pendek?
In 2003, when Alex Schlegel was a graduate student, he had the opportunity to participate in a National Geographic funded camera trapping project that aimed to capture evidence of the Orang Pendek. His professor Peter Tse (seh), was inspired by the recent discovery of Homo Florensis fossils in Indonesia.
So the idea that popped into his head at the time is Oh my God what if Homo floresiensis is still alive and Sumatra is just a couple of islands over from Flores Island. So it seems like. It's a possibility at least Homo floresiensis. The fossil records we have of it are from around 12000 years ago which is not that long evolutionarily.
So he ended up applying for some funding. This was through. I believe it was a National Geographic expedition so a branch of the organization that that funds research and in particular we were in I guess one of their high risk high reward categories of funding.
None of our backgrounds are at all related to or OrangPendek or primatology, but Peter is a very very interesting and interested and curious man and he's he's had a lot of experiences and not afraid to try new things. So we're all cognitive neuroscientists by training.
So we started the project in the summer of 2005 headed out there. I believe that beginning of September and off and on we were running the project until 2009 when money ran out and we were all distracted by getting back to our regular lives.
We had 60 cameras which seems like a lot but if whenever we looked at the covers on a map it was just basically a pin drop in the forest. And so at that in that sense our chances of our success was always just a matter of probability and probably fairly low probability given the resources that we had.
They operate by a combination of looking for something that's hotter than the surrounding and moving so they had a an infrared sensor and the motion sensor in them. Anytime. Both of them are activated it would just take a photo but that would mean that often we would come at the month and we would have 500 photos of rain.
Often we would get actually photos of poachers bird poachers walk through the forest and collect birds but never any, any never any photo that we thought might be of an Orang Pendek unless it was hiding back there in the rain.
But all of the false positives.
We did get photos of pig tailed macaques. We might have actually gotten a couple of photos of a. Think of it. But there. Their Siamangs are let's call it lesser apes. They're not one of the great apes. There are orangutans which are a great ape on Sumatra but not anywhere around the part of the island. We were on I guess the thinking is that something like 70000 thousand years ago there was this super volcano explosion in around what's now Lake Toba and something about that wiped out all the or anything population on the southern half of Sumatra. So you only find orangutans in the northern half now.
We actually saw. Footprints on a couple different occasions that matched with some of the footprints that we've seen casts of and. I. What we we didn't have the equipment or training to actually make casts of it so it's basically impossible to take a photo of these but being there the footprints are very interesting. They.
In some ways so I could believe that these were maybe just Sun bear footprints because they had resemblance to sunbear footprints but there were also things that were different. A big difference was that the the big toe indentation was it was a divergent toe. So like you imagine dogs or cats all of their paws they're like you call it fingers would be along a line. But the big toe on these footprints would be more it was more like a thumb. So it diverged from the other ones. Which was interesting. Anyway so we saw those footprints on a couple different occasions at one point we could actually track a little bit. I tracked some back through the woods where we saw that they were going over this dirt bank. There was this what looked like a hand indentation. I could even put my hand in there and I could see that there were five fingers and roughly the size of line. And so we could trace something having moved through there. But it's hard yeah.
If you believed the footprints that we had seen that had that divergent Toe then. It so it's like Australopithecus Afarensis is an animal that's also brought up as in when thinking about Orang Pendek because it was also one of these very early hominids that were hominids that. Was smaller. That was still kind of ape like but starting to evolve some of the traits that we associate with ourselves now. You know it was bipedal but it also it's its feet were like our feet so it didn't have that divergent tone. So it wouldn't be a national credit I guess but I don't think anybody would seriously say it would be. It would also I guess wouldn't. Yeah I wouldn't be a homo floresiensis because of the same thing almost residences was basically a human cousin. They probably looked quite a bit like us. They didn't have fur covering their skin on it. It could be. Somehow related to orangutans so maybe that. So for instance one story I could see myself believing would be that supervolcano explosion and Toba didn't just wipe out the population in southern Sumatra. But it created an isolated population that somehow survived. But. Survived documentation as well. That seems like again just speculating it seems like it could be a reasonable explanation.
Alex and his team aren’t the only westerners to have spent time searching for the creature. Another adventurous pair spent 15 years seeking evidence of the Orang Pendek.
Debbie Martyr, a British journalist writing a travel piece on Indonesia, heard reports of the Orang Pendek, and decided it would make an interesting addition to the article she was writing. After hearing so many different reports of the creature from locals Debbie started to wonder whether the Orang Pendek could be a real creature. More and more, she found herself drawn to the search…
While in Indonesia Debbie crossed paths with Jeremy Holden, a naturalist and photographer. We had a chance to speak with Jeremy and he had this to say about Debbie’s initial interest in the creature.
I think she contacted David Attenborough at one point who knew about the story and said yes. I mean, that could well be something in this. But no one was really interested to go and look for it. And people said, you know, if you want to find out about this, then really you need to go there yourself. So she did.
But I had never heard of Orang Pendek when I arrived in Sumatra in 1994. And I remember rather smugly telling them that it was clearly a forest or a myth. You know, a local myth that almost every culture had a similar kind of story. I mean, even in England. Going back to like the green man, you have this this notion of people that came or that live in the wild. And that's what I thought Orang Pendek was. But that was wrong.
Intrigued by her dedication, Jeremy decided to join Debbie on a trip into the jungle to look for evidence of he Orang Pendek. What they found, would forever change the course of his life.
And she had a very, very good tracker. And we did seem to be every day going out. He was finding footprints. We were following them. So I suggested that maybe it would be better if we did find some or that animals maybe we'd split up and did a kind of a pincer movement. We left camp as usual in six o'clock in the morning and within an hour we'd located what the guide said with a rhythm, with an orange pen that he would be mobbed by monkeys. So we sent him round to try and get behind where the monkeys were. And Debbie and I sat, really, anybody can do it. It's amazing because the terrain was not very friendly, but we just tacked on a lot of jungle slope. I was sitting maybe two or three meters for me to Debbie. And yeah, the time I was I was very skeptical. And I honestly didn't believe there was anything to add to this story. But suddenly Debbie said some shit and burst into tears. And it took a while for her to actually be able to tell me that she had just seen this animal walk across the the opposite slope.
Jeremy hadn’t seen anything on this trip, but his curiosity had been fueled by what Debbie saw. They had been finding footprints in the area for the past few days, and now Debbie had seen something so startling that it caused her to burst out into tears. The following day, Debbie fell ill and was unable to return to the jungle... So Jeremey and their guide returned alone to the same area that Debbie had first witnessed the creature...
So we set up about five o'clock in the morning to try and get up to the forest as early as we could. And as I came walking up quite, quite a state slope. But I noticed this very, very fresh footprints, which I felt was a human footprint. I called the guide over and said, you know, you told me that nobody makes up to you because there's there's no available water. So how come this is absolutely first footprint? And he said, no, no, no, that's on Indic footprint. And the other thing was, although Debbie had seen the animal, I I didn't I was Twitter when she saw it, but I didn't see it.
I I still have trouble actually believing in it. So I was thinking, you know, no way you can see the other just plain to see that one mountain would go to another mountain. We find footprints. But we looked around, we found more footprints. That was very clear because of the the actual substrate of the story, which is very dry. But we found a lot of potatoes is being dug up and it's been very freshly beaten. So it was known in oxidization, I was to absolutely wipe a lot of marks of dentition, which shows some kind of marks, very rounded K-9s, which later became important.
And then we found in a line of tracks which were heading directly along the top of the potato right into the forest. So we followed those we found at the edge of the forest where something is broken, open a banana. Eating the paste. But we found some other weak plants that had been pulled up and the roots of religion. And then a ginger had been broken open and the pieces. And so this was going in about 10 meters. This is four different things. Something very special needs. And as we came up to the edge of the forest, we heard some birds mobbing something. So I knew from my my childhood in England that it went for birds behaving in this way that they discovered an eagle or an owl or something that I considered to be a threat. And we heard these these these two birds, clearly, they were mobbing something. And then suddenly there was this enormous roar type sound, which is about only 15 meters from where was standing. And I turned to the guide and said, you know, what the hell was that? And so we began to look very pale and start shaking. I said, we get a bear. He said, no. So why? We were trying to work out what to do. Then I heard the birds slightly moving away. So it was clear that whatever was there, which was moving away from it. So I just said to the guy going follow it down behind it. And I sprinted along the edge of the forest for about 50 meters and then tried to cut cut off the animal to try to get ahead of it. And although I do at the moment, I entered the forest, I saw about maybe 15 meters away of banana palm sway. I knew something was coming. So I just ducked. I ducked down into the undergrowth and got the 7 meters from me. This animal, which was walking very, very fluidly on two legs. It was bipedal, upright, travertine, pale yellowish hair, quite short blocking hair. It was looking backwards towards obviously trying to listen to my guy that was behind me, we've been following it, right?
This place was turned away from me, so I saw the hedge, but I didn't get to see the face, which at the time I was very glad not to see the face.
So I thought so just maybe two, two or three seconds, but very, very close. I didn't make any move. I had a cameraman run by me. I didn't attempt to make a photograph because I was too close to the animals and I saw some. He knows if he hears anything and turns and looks there in the kind of range where it might well attack. And the thing was, the name or UN pendant actually means short person in bolide. So what I was expecting, which was not something as big as what I actually saw, which was in the region of about one and a half meters tall. It was also very, very well-built. So no, there was no neck that the hedge fits very much into the shoulders, which was very, very broad and very I think that's muscle because of the hair. It's not like a chimpanzee. When you see the skin through the hair to have a stake. But I could see that this was an extremely Wabo animal, very long, muscular arms as well. So it's something I would have stood much of a chance against. I have decided to charge. So I kept I kept quiet. I watched it pass. Obviously, I had a actually carnival of sorts of emotions going through my mind. You know, what I'm saying is extremely shocking. It was a little bit frightening.
I was in awe that I really needed to speak to someone and explain what I've seen with my guy. Then turned out and he was motioning that it's going to space come this way. I said, I know, I've seen it. So then we followed it. And had I have followed it immediately. I probably would have got a very good view because it went into an area of forest that was quite open and it would have downslope to us that had I followed it. I would have been of it and had a very, very clear view. So by the time we arrived to it, we had gone through. We followed the footprints, very clear trail where it's gone. And because it is a volcano there, which I mean, we do have a few hundred meters.
And the deep gullies, water running, Scott, is that they're dry, that they're about three metres wide for me to see. And the animal had got across that because it was vocalising on the other side and it being mobbed by another bunch of birds allotted to the Guardian. So it's a really difficult trust to cross it. And if we tried, it would have made a lot of noise.
So I made the executive decision to go back. Joe, get me what we've seen and get her to come. The next day in the hope that the animal would still be there rather than us trying to follow it and staring at us.
So I specialize really going around Asia, photographing a lot of things that have been photographed before and or that is really my huge failure in that regard as I spend a lot of time kind of trapping in small shops, got some very rare things, a lot of pictures of things for the first time, but have missed getting on in there. So as a photographer, I would like to get photographic evidence.
Jeremy continues to search for photographic evidence to this day, over 20 years later. Whatever he witnessed in the jungle that day, left a huge impact on him. It’s hard to imagine someone who has dedicated their life to photographing wildlife in Asia could misidentify something so spectacular.. After hearing Jeremy’s account, it is hard to deny the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is wildlife yet documented to discover in the thick jungles of Indonesia. In the documentary called Man of the Forest by Banyak film, Debbie Martyr spoke to the film crew and had this to add about the experiences.
I think Jeremy and I most overwhelming reaction when we first saw these animals was how bipedal they are. And it's actually very upsetting. What it is, is that we've been conditioned from birth, that we are people and animals are animals. And then you see an animal like walking like a person, except this animal doesn't look like a person. It walks like an hour. Even if you are going to expect to see that it does.
Produce. Disturbing. It is. It is very disturbing.
Whatever Debbie and Jeremy experienced in the jungles of Indonesia, it left a deep impression on both of them. A commonality between Debbie and Jeremy’s recounting of their experiences is the fear, and disturbing nature of seeing the creature.
Fear is also something that that is a theme from other groups having seen it like Westerners as well. They express this the psychological terror at seeing and I don't know if that's something to do with the uncanny valley the sense of a thing that looks so close to a human but as yet not a human. Maybe some ancient learned emotional response. We have aversion to things that are not quite human.
Since the 2000s, there have been 25 new species of primates discovered. As recently as 2013, a new distinct species of Orangutan was discovered after one had been shot with air rifle pellets and was taken into rescue care. It turned out to be part of an undiscovered Orangutan species called Tapanuli orangutan. Is it so hard to believe that the dense jungles of Sumatra hold undiscovered secrets?
Alex Schlegel: There's been a string of stories of the last 10 to 15 years of discovering you know the first big mammal in areas that we've found in 30 years. It's pretty crazy that. You know there's this large mammal that's a new species that we've never documented. And we discover it now in the 2010s. That gives you a sense of even though we think we know everything about the world right now there's a lot of there's a lot that still undiscovered and unknown because there's a lot of very remote areas in the world and also a lot of.
If the Orang Pendek does exist, it would be the only other bipedal ape on the planet other than humans . It is a horrifying thought to think of how fast we are losing species and the natural environment in Indonesia to logging, poaching, farming, and ever encroaching civilization.
Jeremy Holden: I continue the search on this, actually. It's not frustrating to me that people don't believe because I don't have any doubt.
Myself and Bob and I are really. When I meet people that they adamantly don't believe, it actually gives me a little bit of a thrill to take it. I have seen something that it's unbelievable. There's no other animal you can really take it about. I saw the rise of a snow leopard or a giant panda. There are things you can pay on a tour to go and see, but with each one, you can't say that something a vague sense of personal pride, even though, you know, a lot of people quite believe it. The great frustration is not a person who wants to me. It's the frustration for the animal. While no one believes in it, then he can't do anything to try and protect it. And that was the reason that I continue to look for it is not to validate it for other people, because I be honest, I really didn't care too much about that. My own personal point of view. But I did think this would be a fantastic tool for us to push for the conservation of the rainfall. So often you hear people saying, you know, don't destroy the rainforest because we don't know what's in it. And I thought, you know, they're usually referring to form called maybe the next cure for cancer. But when it's something that we don't, in a sense, it is a case of the human being or any other creature, not necessarily genetically, but in the fact that this mythology that it's a biped, then what else could not be in the rainforest if it can find something like that?
If the Orang Pendek exists and has been able to hide from humans this long, we may be pushing one of our closest ancestors to extinction and never even know it.
So... does the Orang Pendek exist?
Alex Schlegel: It's going to be as bizarre or more bizarre for it not to exist than for it to exist so as as hard as it might be to believe that something like this exists and lives still and has not been documented by Western science in this much and rainforests. My experience has been that I yeah I would be as or more shocked if it ended up having nothing and be nothing other than stories.