As to animals taking hits and continuing on, that touches on something that my cousin and I were discussing earlier while sighting in for deer season. His son took a deer during youth season, destroying the heart with a .270. The deer made it 75 yards before falling. 75 yards in an overgrown jungle might as well be a mile and I doubt you’d be able to locate a body even if you were so inclined to look for one, which I’m sure they weren’t. The 5.56 round used by the military in the M16A1 then and the M16A4 now isn’t even designed to be a great killer – it was designed to tumble in the body, leaving a messy wound, with little hydrostatic shock. There are plenty of verified, and in some cases, filmed, stories from Vietnam to Afghanistan of enemies taking several rounds and continuing the fight. Now, if there were verified reports of them shrugging off 7.62 rounds from an M60 or M14 at close range, I’d be impressed. I don’t think I’d ever believe anybody saying they shook of a .50 to the body. Maybe the reason they dropped so many near bases was they had the heavier firepower necessary to stop a largish animal in its tracks? No looking through a jungle to find the body, either.

The show is a bit over the top for me and some of it is forced to fit the program. Nonetheless, it was interesting for other reasons. They even had a former soldier talking about them and some locals.

With so many people occupying remote jungle locations coupled with massive disruption/destruction of habitat it is possible that a normally reclusive primate species could possibly be flushed out and encountered frequenty during that period.

Makes you wonder if a battle took place in the Pacific Northwest would we encounter Bigfoot, as a result?

My only question is, if these “rock apes” were common and many were killed…Where’s the pictures? I am sure that there would be at least one photo, somewhere, of one of these creatures or their carcass. It doesn’t make any sense why there isn’t at least one. Can someone explain that to me, maybe I am a little naive.

THERE WAS A WAR ON. IN A JUNGLE.

The only thing any Westerner in Vietnam cared about was that war. The animals? Whatever. What did any American know, back then, about jungles? (Other than the relatively few biologists working in them.) You could see ANYTHING in that hot steamin’ stinkin’ jungle….or ANY hot steamin’ stinkin’ jungle…as far as those kids (or their superiors) were concerned. A hundred-foot centipede – or a pterosaur – probably would have been greeted with standard-issue jungle-critter reaction. They probably didn’t see anything particularly interesting or unusual about “those damned rock apes” at all. But quite a bit that was annoying, and even dangerous. Like anything – everything – in a jungle can look to someone not used to being there.

It may be possible that no one thought these animals were unusual enough to remark upon. After all, when you’ve seen one orangytang, you’ve seen ‘em all, right?

(Another question the answer to which would interest me: how many servicemen in Indochina saw saola – an animal not confirmed until almost 20 years after the war?)

There have been accounts of Sasquatch, for instance, that describe the animals being shot, sometimes at fairly close range or with large caliber rounds, yet seeming to show no adverse effects and leaving no blood behind. If I remember correctly, there are similar Yowie reports as well.

Now of course I think that the idea of a bulletproof hairy hominid is a bit silly, however the reports do exist and it seems that if we don’t just toss these accounts, then it is worth trying to think about what is going on in these instances.

For example, It could be that the creature wasn’t hit at all or that like sometimes happens with large animals such as bears it was able to only seem to shrug off the shot from a round or hit that was insufficient to imediately take it down.

These sorts of report are sort of an enigma to me, but I suspect that if they are to be believed and the creatures are indeed real, then there is some rational explanation and not necessarily a supernatural cause at work.