What happened
The olgoi-khorkhoi – Mongolian for “intestine worm” – is, according to the nomads of the Gobi Desert, a thick, dark red creature up to 1.5 meters long that lives in the sand, comes to the surface in the hottest months and kills from a distance by spitting venom or delivering an electric shock. In the West it was described in 1926 by American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, who had heard of it from Mongolian officials but did not believe in its existence. Ivan Mackerle, a Czech engineer and cryptozoologist from Prague, had dreamed of this expedition since childhood. Right after the fall of communism, in 1990, he set off with a small team on an eight-week search, and in 1992 he returned to the Gobi again. Inspired by Frank Herbert's “Dune,” he even built a motorized “thumper” meant to lure the worm out with rhythmic pounding, and used small explosive charges.
Witnesses
Ivan Mackerle and members of his team, who spoke with Gobi nomads; they did not see the animal themselves.
Explanations and hypotheses
None of the expeditions – neither Mackerle's nor later ones, such as Richard Freeman's 2005 expedition for the Centre for Fortean Zoology – found the animal. Freeman considered the stories of deadly powers to be legend and attributed the sightings themselves to an unknown species of amphisbaenian, a legless burrowing reptile. Others point to sand boas, which occur in the Gobi. Electric shocks have no counterpart in any land animal, which suggests a folkloric source for part of the stories.
Unexplained There is no convincing explanation.
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