In the years of the Vietnam War, strange reports began filtering back from American troops who had encountered “Vietnam’s Bigfoot”.
In the 1960s, the United States was focusing its attention on the tiny country of Vietnam. Divided after World War 2 into the communist-supported north and the US-backed south, Vietnam had already undergone decades of warfare to free itself from French colonial rule and then to try to unify the country. In August 1964, two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin claimed they were attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats, and President Lyndon Johnson responded by launching air strikes against Vietnamese targets and by landing US Marines to occupy strategic points. These initial deployments continued to grow until, at their peak, American armed forces in Vietnam numbered over half a million, and some 3 million troops had seen duty there by the time the US withdrew in 1972.
The Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army soldiers were, however, not the only opponents that the US faced. The terrain itself was an enemy, with areas of steep mountains, dense impenetrable jungles, flooded rice paddies, impassable rivers, pouring rain, and unbearable heat. Much of Vietnam was barely populated and largely unexplored, especially the central highlands area which crossed the border into Cambodia. This rugged terrain was where the Vietnamese guerrillas often withdrew, and it fell upon the Americans to pursue them.
But not long after the Americans arrived, stories began to filter back about odd sightings in the jungle. Troops in the field began reporting large reddish-colored apes that lurked outside of their base camps. While descriptions varied, most accounts put them as around six feet tall with long reddish fur, sometimes with long arms, and they were said to be ground-dwelling and walked on two legs. Such reports might have been dismissed as just excitable and scared men in an unfamiliar country who had simply seen an Orangutan, except for one thing—although the country had a variety of small monkeys, there are no Orangutans in Vietnam, or any other great ape. The largest known primate is the White-Cheeked Gibbon, which stands about three feet tall and is black or blonde in color.
Some of the reports were frightening. One patrol reported finding the bodies of a group of soldiers who had apparently been torn apart by some powerful animal. Many accounts claimed that the ape-creature had attacked them, or had thrown large rocks at them (leading to the name that was most commonly applied to them by the troops—“Rock Apes”). One American radio listening post near Da Nang, atop a steep hill, encountered so many of the creatures that the location was dubbed “Monkey Mountain”. Some Vietnamese prisoners apparently told their captors that the NVA and VC had also run into the creatures. The central highlands in Vietnam were remote and barely explored, and during the years of war the fierce ethnic hill tribes had managed to keep everyone, including the Vietnamese and French, away. But as the fighting grew to surround them, these villagers began to tell the Americans stories of “forest people” that lived in the highlands, which they called moi or batutut or ujit.
Some enterprising investigators have uncovered reports of “man-apes” from French missionaries dating all the way back to the 1820s. An anthropologist named Paul D’Enjoy even claimed in an 1895 book to have captured one of the beasts, describing it as a “race of men with tails”. He did not bring back anything of the alleged captured wild man alive or dead, though, and his account was derided by other anthropologists. There were also some sightings from French soldiers during the colonial war that followed the Second World War.
Is it possible that there is a large species of primate in the remote Vietnamese jungles that has not yet been discovered by science? Well, in 2019 biologists found a population of Vietnamese Mouse-Deer which had not been seen for over 30 years and was believed to have gone extinct. And it wasn’t until 2017 that a new species of Orangutan was confirmed in the Tapanuli region of Sumatra, demonstrating that such animals can indeed go unrecorded in the dense mountain forests.
There is a small outside chance that the Rock Ape creature, which appears to be similar to an Orangutan, might actually be a relict population, since Orangutans did once exist in Vietnam. According to the fossil record the Vietnamese species Pongo hooijeri (known only from a couple of teeth) went extinct during the Pleistocene, some 120,000 years ago. But it is not completely impossible that some small remnant remains. Some of the behaviors which have been reported for Rock Apes, such as rock-throwing, stick-waving, and family groups which are defended by a charging male, are known elements of great ape behavior, particularly African Chimpanzees and Gorillas.
But, I nevertheless remain skeptical. Rock Ape reports have the same issues as all the other varied Bigfoot and Yeti reports—lots of stories, but no concrete evidence. Nearly all the early reports from the French describe them as having tails (something no great ape has), but most of the later reports from the Americans say they were tailless and bipedal. This was less than ten years after “Bigfoot” first became a media sensation in the US, and it is certainly reasonable to postulate that the American reports were tainted by all of the previous publicity given to “hairy man-apes”. During the war years virtually everybody had an assault rifle, and there are indeed reports which claim to have shot one or to have seen a corpse after a firefight. But apparently nobody brought any bodies or a piece of body back to a military firebase—which would have ended the puzzle immediately.
On several occasions since the war, the Vietnamese have sent scientific expeditions into the highlands to search for the reported creatures, but other than a few unidentified “footprints”, they have come up empty.
Hidden History 
oh well, guess I’ll keep looking 😆. That’s one I hadn’t heard Lenny!