some comments on the creature in the dump
To all:
The initial relation of "The Creature of the Dump", or the supposedly related ingots of French Indochina, to the Mongolian Death Worm, especially where attacks of such creatures are supposed to have harmed legions of soldiers, seems very much to be expected. However, in reading the story of the creature in the dump, a much different perception seemed to suggest itself.
The description of the creature is of something that burrows, and is about 2 inches in diameter, and almost up to a foot long, brown in color, with what looks like fine baby hair, and, supposedly, astonishingly blue eyes with incredibly white eyeballs. Since it's described as slow moving and sunning itself, it can also be assumed to be cold-blooded. In fact, all these descriptions add up to a kind of caterpillar!
The long and rounded shape and leathery, brownish skin lend to that idea. The size and its living underground could come from it being an anomalous variant. There could be many who might be led to believe that the baby hair and blue eyes would make it impossible to be a caterpillar, but, even there, the description can still fit. It is possible, for example, that what was described as "fine hair" might actually be the thin, sometimes even feathery spines that many breeds of caterpillars have all over their bodies. The "blue eyes", and the fact that they suddenly appeared can be explained by there being two spots on the creatures skin, which suddenly appeared when folds on the creature's body shifted to uncover them. Many caterpillar types also have spots on their skin, just behind their head, to give enemies the impression that they are larger than they really are, and to unnerve them with the impression that they are being watched closely. The fact that the creature is described as "looking toward the sun" all the while it was being watched can also be explained by this. No creature, it seems, would be able to stand staring at the sun for that long. And, especially considering that the creature seems to live a large part of its life underground, the idea of its being able to stand looking at the sun for a long time is even more undermined.
That this creature is some form of strange caterpillar species seems eminently likely. This would not be so unreasonable, since, if memory serves, the Fortean Times web site itself had a news article, a few months back, about a particularly large breed of caterpillar being found in some English fields, in the last year.
It's almost tempting to suggest that this may be an immature form of the creature called the "Mothman". That creature was certainly said to have some preference for the underground munitions depots in Point Pleasant.
To be sure, there being some connection between the creature in the dump and some unusual creatures from Asia is not unlikely, either. The dump mentioned was in Oregon, on the western coast of the United States, one of the first spots a ship from Asia would hit would be the west coast of the United States. It is possible that something could have been transported here.
And that some kind of variant of caterpillar, with poisonous spines, could be the source of the Mongolian Death Worm stories is not unlikely, either.
Another point seems eminently reasonable to bring out, namely, that the creature of the dump is reported in Oregon. If one looked, one would find that Oregon almost outdoes any other state in unusual manifestations. The famous "Oregon Vortex", where even gravity and laws of perspective seem not to work correctly, is situated there; it's not unlikely that numerous Sasquatch reports have come from there; the enigmatic crook D. B. Cooper supposedly parachuted from a plane, carrying a fortune, over Oregon; and Oregon is one of the states most afflicted by chemtrails.
Rather tangentially, too, is an episode of a Canadian produced series built around monsters of various types. It may have been called "Monsters"; it was by the makers of the series, "The Dark Side". In this episode, an American squad of soldiers infiltrates an underground headquarters of Viet Cong, during the Viet Nam War, wiping out the battalion there. They then learn of some kind of curse, of some "evil let loose" that, supposedly, lives in the soil. The outgrowth is that the corpses of dead Viet Cong burrow out of the sides of the underground bunker, and slaughter the soldiers. That no hero was allowed to survive rather brought the episode down, as well as the fact that the enemy turned out to be the oft-used concept of "the living dead", but the entire mise en scene rather reminded me of the story of the ingots and their supposed decimation of entire French army units.
Julian Penrod
