This will be the world’s largest dam if it is ever built. The locale and political issues makes it seem doubtful, but the Three Gorges Dam also got built over problems just as daunting.

That design is well along suggests that it may well get build. That the energy will initially flow to rich markets is inevitable, but diversion later is also inevitable as new African markets open up.

Major development is brewing up around the Congo Basin and now includes a huge six billion barrel oil reserve on Lake Albert.

The one can encourage the other and the area is so huge that it can contain wars, political upheaval and an ongoing insurgency besides.

Grand Inga Dam to light up Africa
14 May 2009
Khanyi Magubane

I have written several posts on the more impressive eyewitness reports describing large aquatic reptiles. Most of these were gathered in the early twentieth century and war and other upheavals ended public curiosity by the forties. Little has been seen since and few are matching the apparent quality of these earlier articles. It is very much as if these eyewitnesses felt a driving need to describe events as carefully and as personally as possible for the benefit of posterity.

I got my education regarding such reports reading old mining reports, and then a very few reports on the Sasquatch. What came through were attempts by skilled practical men who knew their environment to properly describe the local context. They usually got it more or less right when we dealt with mining reports. The several historic published reports of the Sasquatch have since been repeatedly confirmed by thousands of separate independent reports. That tells me that they were getting it right also.

With our reports on dawn age reptiles, the story is no different except for the sparse recent observations as yet. This is a direct result of decolonization in the later half of the twentieth century where a large body of foreign observers largely left the scene and it became difficult to report events at all.

Today the pendulum has swung back and the Internet is helping locals become observers. What is still missing is good journalism and sites like BFRO set up to collect specific eyewitness reports. Google BFRO for an example of how it should be done.

I have already explained why these reptiles can be still extant. They are aquatic and rely on water immersion to control body temperature. That means that they stick to swamps and related rivers. The sea going version may also be around but obviously having no pressing need to spend time on the surface at all.

Their present populations are likely at low ebb, but that merely reflects the present paucity of swamps. We are missing most of the Saharan swamps and those of the Outback. Both these would have compared to the Congo. We are also missing the coastal swamps caused by the Northern Ice age that circled the continents.

Another characteristic of these animals is their nocturnal nature. It we want to see them, it has to be at night through the predawn when they are most active. After that these animals den up to avoid the discomfort of overheating caused by activity in the daytime. That may mean sunning themselves where they cannot be disturbed. However lack of any but rare observation mitigates against that.

My key point here is that the phenomena is global and the critter assemblage is dawn age aquatic reptile believed to be extinct except for the crocodile since the emergence of dinosaurs able to leave their swamps. The evidence is sufficient to suggests that they are not extinct.

If you have been following my posts on the apparent reports on the existence of dawn age reptiles scattered around the globe, you know that my principle conjecture is that all such critters are members of the specific ecological niche formed by swamplands. The moment that your thinking goes there, all the limited data and the actual nature of the animals falls cleanly into place. They all are aquatic in nature yet retain the ability to travel extensively on land. They are also likely most active at night in order to avoid been overheated.

The vegetarians can spend their days browsing underwater and maintaining an ambient unchanging temperature, only rarely emerging to get at choice food. The carnivores simply fetch up against a group of drowsing crocodiles in the dark and seize a likely meal before dragging it underwater to a lair.

I now have a number of compelling eyewitness reports for both the Amazon and the Congo in particular and other similar locales to both support the core conjecture but also to support the conjecture that a wide range of such critters are extant today.

The probability associated with the existence of a whole family of dawn age reptiles is no longer zero, and I can assure you, I never thought that I would write such words. In fact the niche is globally pervasive and the ecology so inimical to human penetration that it is avoided by even primitive hunter gatherers. We always had easier game out on the open plains and in the ocean shallows.

That now brings up another issue. A previous post on the Antarctic ice core, established that every 100,000 years or so we swing by Sirius and get bathed in ultraviolet radiation for a thousand years or so. The effect of this is to essentially melt out a large part of the ice caps and add perhaps another couple of hundred feet of sea level. The temperature will rise several degrees on average and that surplus must migrate north.

Far more importantly huge amounts of water will find its way into the atmosphere introducing enough rain to establish tropical conditions almost to the poles themselves. It also means a massive expansion of Amazon tropical rainforest like conditions far to the north. The Mississippi valley, the Sahara, the Outback, the Middle East will all become saturated swamplands fully able to support their own populations of crocodiles.

Mankind will simply migrate up into the hills to avoid the worst while managing tropical agriculture.

The point that this addresses is that this cycle has been in place for millions of years and nicely explains the world wide extent of these critters, while we live in a world in which their particular niche while not small is also limited to tropics and coastal swamps. It is in fact at its lowest ebb for the moment.

It is noteworthy, that before the Pleistocene nonconformity mankind was principally operating on coastal lowlands and in constant confrontation with crocodiles at the least and a whole range of rather large carnivores. The moment you left those lowlands, it in fact got much worse. The size alone made it no contest to confront a saber tooth, a mega lion, or a cave bear. Entering swamps holding hungry theropods and crocodiles was a non starter. I am certain mankind was able to wring out refugia for their safety but the confrontation would never have let up. Once the crustal shift occurred, those populations were shattered and in extremis everywhere opening up the uplands to human occupation.

Thus the Pleistocene Nonconformity allowed mankind to swap out of coastal lowlands that were assuredly malarial crocodile infested swamps of restricted areal extent for continents of climatically stable uplands. A rather good deal you know?

Since I have made the conjecture that this was all put in place by humanity in the first place, it is an obvious extrapolation that they went the extra mile and hunted out the top predators for us.

If you are reading some of this stuff for the first time, I suggest searching the blog for earlier posts on these topics. We have progressed a long way here and are long past initial skepticism which is a bit unfair to a new reader.

Also, we are piecing together an alternate human history that is vastly more compelling than any present explanations that is drawn from the evidence at hand and telling us where to go look for additional evidence. More critically, it is telling us to look.

After all, just how many explorers have penetrated deep swamps in order to run down large critters? The number is in fact shockingly small. It will be difficult today and was almost impossible in the recent past

If you have read my posts on the Burrunjor in Australia and the apparent Apatosaurus in the Congo you will understand that I am sympathetic to the probability of these animals been real.

I got there from been essentially dismissive of these observations to having a deep appreciation for all data however acquired. What led me there was my study of the Sasquatch phenomena. What convinced me was the presence of approximately an unbelievable ten thousand good eye witness reports. By the way, UFO sightings head over 100,000, although they are mostly lights in the sky.

The Sasquatch led me to reformulate my thinking in terms of dealing with eyewitness information and it is covered in the first two chapters of my manuscript ‘Paradigms Shift’. The process also informed my approach regarding all such reports.

First, the reports invariably describe a finite set of observed characteristics that are generally repeated. This largely describes the nature of the likely animal. A Sasquatch, for instance, and it is presently our best observed and reported such animal, is clearly a clever primate at least fifty percent more massive than humanity on average and who is also a nocturnal omnivore. That is a pretty powerful statement.

What I learned then is that it is absolutely necessary to also characterize the environmental niche occupied. The moment that you do that it becomes very clear why we have trouble getting samples or seeing the animal in more congenial surroundings.

In the case of the Sasquatch, it is clear that this primate is specifically adapted to living in woodlands and operating nocturnally when taking down game. This is similar to the niche of the cougar and both animals operate solitary and with similar ranges. In fact if it were not for the fact that our dogs are able to tree cougars, the cougar would be just as mysterious today. In fact the Sasquatch will turn out to be more successful because they do not hunt humans unlike the cougar.

Therefore, it is necessary to isolate the ecological niche. When we did that for our Australian theropod, it became clear that this predator was a swamp dweller that had evolved to hunt crocodiles and was very similar in expected life cycle. That led me directly to a major swamp in Arnhem Land in Australia. And it all fit together.

Then of course, I was drawn back to reports out of the Congo that I saw decades ago and did not take too seriously. I have now dug through some additional reposts from the Congo and I am seeing further reports again suggesting a range of Dawn Age reptiles that we actually recognize. If they are extant at all, the Congo is where they must reside.

What I have learned to appreciate though is that the locales are huge in their own right and are unpopulated by man for some incredibly good reasons. Like, how do you keep hungry crocodiles away? What is also not understood is that the areal extent compares to France and has maintained a Dawn Age swamp rich ecology since then. Add in the simple fact that these water loving reptiles are active hunters at night to avoid overheating in the sun and we have a challenging hunt on our hands.

So, even though it seems hard to believe, it is clearly possible for the chief predators of the crocodiles and their associated kin to be still extant in this particular region. I hope that I have opened a few minds to this phenomenon.

The Eyeball Assumption

One aspect of the hunt for rare and elusive animals needs to be discussed. We have a finite number of trained observers for niches that demand thousands. For that reason alone it will take decades to sort out the many dozens of known witness reports and it will always be easier to simply bad mouth the witness.

Let me share a tale. I grew up on farm land in Midwest Ontario. This land included many open fields as well as a modest river valley cleared but not cultivated, a strip of varying woodland from which all remaining mature trees had been harvested over the past century and an evergreen tree farm. This was a pretty friendly environment for small game at least. At the time, deer had been hunted out.

During the times in which the land was not bound with snow, I was able to spend a couple of hours almost every day not a school day wandering the woods and hedgerows. In the process I identified many birds and every weed native to Ontario listed in the government manual. Over the years I saw plenty of rabbits and groundhogs as might be expected.

When it came to everything else, it was a very different story. Over a decade I saw a fox several times, a deer once, a flock of grouse once when my dog startled them, a possible bob cat once, a swamp hawk once. So in exchange for a couple of thousands of hours of effort and observation, my reward was pretty paltry. I am hardly an unskilled observer either.

Obviously, a walk in the woods does not cut it at all. Additionally we now know that all animals avoid contact. A web cam placed on a game trail pick up a virtual traffic jam once the humans have left.

Our natural assumption that enough folks have seen the ground and would have seen the animals is wrong as hell.

There are dozens of obscure observations of creditable strange animals, including some very famous ones, which need to be meticulously thought out as to habitat and likely behavior. These need then to be set up for camera traps. That is how we will eventually prove up the Sasquatch. Only a remote camera will catch anything with its guard down.

We are now entering a new era in which the web cam will actually sort all this out finally.