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June 1764. A young woman tending cattle in the Mercoire Forest near Langogne saw a beast come at her. "Like a wolf, yet not a wolf." Her herd defended her.

September 12, 1952. Flatwoods, West Virginia. Three boys watched a bright object cross the evening sky and seem to come down on a hillside farm. Kathleen May led a group up the hill, among them a 17-year-old National Guardsman and the family dog. Near the top, a red light pulsed. They walked into a foul-smelling mist.

April 1934. A London surgeon was on the north shore of Loch Ness. Robert Kenneth Wilson said he noticed a considerable commotion on the surface, perhaps two or three hundred yards out. Then something broke the surface. A small head. A slender neck, swan-like, rising about three feet above the loch. He made four exposures. By then the object had completely disappeared.

November 15, 1966. Close to midnight. Two young couples from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, were in the TNT area, an old wartime munitions works north of town. Near the old power plant, they saw something. It was shaped like a man, six or seven feet tall, with wings. Its red eyes were six inches apart. They drove away fast. It followed, gliding over their car at about 100 miles an hour.

October 20, 1967. Early afternoon on Bluff Creek, deep in the Six Rivers National Forest of northern California. Two former rodeo riders from Yakima, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, round an overturned tree on horseback. Across the creek, something is standing. The horses spook. Patterson grabs his rented 16 mm camera and runs.

April 21, 1977. Dover, Massachusetts. A quiet, wealthy town about 15 miles southwest of Boston. Bill Bartlett, 17, was driving north on Farm Street at about 10:30 p.m. His headlights caught something on a low stone wall. A small, hairless body. A huge melon-shaped head. Two glowing orange eyes.

January 1909. Fresh snow lay across South Jersey. Then the tracks appeared. Hoof-like prints went over fences, across backyards and up onto rooftops, and stopped in the middle of open fields.

September 1921. A British party climbs toward a high Himalayan pass in bright moonlight, near Mount Everest. In the snow they read the night's traffic. Hares. Foxes. And one mark like a human foot.

June 29, 1988. Browntown Road, through Scape Ore Swamp outside Bishopville, South Carolina. Seventeen-year-old Christopher Davis was driving home from a night shift at McDonald's when a tire went flat. He changed it. Then he saw something coming out of the trees, kicking up dust as it ran.

July 1969. Greer Island, on the shore of Lake Worth at the edge of Fort Worth, Texas. Couples parked there after dark.

Spring 1933. A couple were driving along the north shore of Loch Ness, near Abriachan Pier. The water was flat calm. Then it wasn't.

October 1933. Major William Henry Langley and his wife were sailing in Haro Strait off Chatham Island, near Victoria, British Columbia. First came the sound. A grunt and a snort, accompanied by a huge hiss. Then they saw a huge dome of back, greenish brown, serrated along the top. Langley had been whaling. This was no whale.

November 1951. High on the Nepal-Tibet watershed, three men come down from the Menlung La onto a glacier. In the snow lies a line of footprints. Large. Fresh. Leading down the ice.

July 1924. Mount St. Helens. Five gold prospectors had spent days hearing whistles and booming thumps in the dark around their log cabin. Then two of them saw it. A hairy creature, seven feet tall, standing by a pine tree. They opened fire.

July 11, 1972. Late afternoon on the rural edge of Louisiana, Missouri. Terry Harrison, 8, and his brother Wally, 5, were playing in the yard. Terry screamed.

Fall 1989. About 1:30 in the morning. Lorianne Endrizzi was driving home from work along Bray Road, outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Something was kneeling at the side of the road. It had pointed ears and long claws. It held what it was eating palms up. Its eyes glowed.

September 2000. A Bigfoot expedition is camped in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest of southern Washington. For several nights the team has broadcast a recorded scream into the dark. At about 3:00 AM, two of them leave fruit beside a rainwater puddle near Skookum Meadow. By morning, three of the six apples are gone.

December 1968. A farm near Rollingstone, Minnesota. A refrigerated trailer holds a glass-topped coffin, and inside the coffin is a block of ice. For three days two naturalists lean over it. Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans see a hairy, barrel-chested male about 6 ft tall. One eye dangles from its socket. The glass cracks, and out comes the stench of rotting flesh.

August 1978. A wooded lot two miles west of Minerva, Ohio. Behind the Cayton house lay an old strip mine and a gravel pit. Over several nights, the family and their friends reported a hairy, upright creature about 7 feet tall. It stood at the lit kitchen window for close to ten minutes. It appeared beside two large cats near the old chicken coop. Rocks hit the roof. A deputy arrived to a strong ammonia-sulphur stench.

The River Ness. The province of the Picts, traditionally AD 565. Columba and his monks reach the water and find locals burying a man. A monster seized him as he swam. Columba sends his companion Lugne Mocumin into the river to fetch a boat from the far bank. The beast rises from the bottom of the stream. It gives an awful roar and darts after him, mouth wide open. Then the saint raises his hand.

Canóvanas, Puerto Rico. The second week of August 1995. Livestock had been dying across the island, and nobody knew why. Madelyne Tolentino was at her mother's house when she looked out of the window.

6 August 1848. The South Atlantic, somewhere between the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. The sky is dark and cloudy. A long swell runs under the frigate HMS Daedalus, homeward bound from the East Indies.

Lake Van, eastern Turkey. 1997. Ünal Kozak was 26, a teaching assistant at Yüzüncü Yıl University. Since 1995, locals had been reporting something in the water. He interviewed about 1,000 of them. Then he waited at the spots where most sightings had been reported. He said he saw it three times. And he filmed it.

September 1931. A remote hill farm called Doarlish Cashen, near Dalby on the Isle of Man. The Irving family began to hear something in the walls. First noises. Then animal imitations. Then words.

July 1937. Naden Harbour whaling station, on the north coast of Graham Island. Flensers cut open a sperm whale caught off Langara Island. Inside its stomach lay something none of them could name. A sinuous body about 10 feet long. A head said to resemble that of a large dog, with features of a horse and the turn down nose of a camel. Animal-like vertebrae. A reptilian appearance.

23 April 1960. Loch Ness. Aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale was on the last morning of a six-day watch, alone on a road high above Foyers Bay. Then he saw it. Through binoculars, a long oval hump lay on the water. A distinct mahogany colour. A huge dark blotch on its flank, "like the dapple on a cow."

September 1941. A sunny afternoon at a cabin above the Fraser River, near Ruby Creek, British Columbia. Jeannie Chapman's eldest boy ran inside. He said a cow was coming down out of the woods.

Van Meter, Iowa. September 1903. For five nights, something moved across the rooftops of Main Street. The witnesses described a creature at least eight feet tall. Half human, half animal. Enormous bat-like wings. A horn-like growth on its head that gave off a dazzling light.

Sunday, 4 August 1577. A violent storm breaks over Suffolk during morning service. Rain, lightning, thunder. In the church at Bungay, the congregation sees something run down the body of the church. "A dog as they might discerne it, of a black colour." It passes between two kneeling worshippers. Both die. Another man is left "shrunk up, as it were a peece of lether scorched in a hot fire."

July 1974. The summer pasture at Machermo, high in Nepal's Khumbu below Gokyo. A young Sherpa woman named Lhakpa Domani Sherpa was herding yaks. Then something came up behind her.

Easter, 1976. Two sisters were playing among the gravestones of an old church in Mawnan, Cornwall. June Melling was 12. Vicky was 9. A strange sound made them look up. Above the church tower, a large winged creature was hovering. A man, covered in feathers, with two large wings.

30 November 1861. The French Navy dispatch steamer Alecton was bound from Toulon to Cayenne, some forty leagues from Tenerife. Around two in the afternoon, something brownish red lay floating at the surface. It was a gigantic squid. Eighteen feet from head to tail, by the commander's estimate. Eight arms. Eyes the size of a plate.

A Sunday in April 1890. Two ranchers were riding home from the Huachuca Mountains across the open desert of Arizona Territory. There they found it. A winged monster, like a huge alligator, with an extremely elongated tail and wings the Tombstone Epitaph put at about 160 feet tip to tip. It was exhausted. It could fly only a short distance at a time. The men gave chase on horseback for several miles and opened fire with their Winchesters.

Venezuela. The forests south-west of Lake Maracaibo. A Swiss oil geologist named François de Loys is camped on a tributary of the Tarra River. Two large creatures approach. At first he takes them for bears. Then he sees them clearly. Hairy. Tailless. Ape-like. They howl, tear at branches and advance on the party. The men open fire. The female falls.

Spring 1983. Near South Molton, on the edge of Exmoor, a farmer counted his dead sheep. Throat wounds. By one account over 100 animals in three months. The story reached the national papers. The Daily Express offered a reward for footage. Then Devon police asked for help, and a team of Royal Marines snipers was sent from Lympstone to hunt the killer.

1891. Ben Macdui, the second-highest mountain in the British Isles. Norman Collie is coming down from the summit cairn. He is alone, in mist. Then he hears it. A crunch. Then another. Something is walking after him, taking steps three or four times the length of his own.

March 3, 1972. About 1:00 a.m. on an icy road outside Loveland, Ohio. Officer Ray Shockey saw something at the roadside and took it for a dog. Then it stood up. Three or four feet tall. Leathery skin. A face like a frog or a lizard. Its eyes caught his headlights. It climbed the guardrail and went down toward the Little Miami River.

Urquhart Bay, Loch Ness. August 1972. Two boats sat on the dark water off Temple Pier. One carried a sonar. The other lowered a camera and strobe into the depths, firing every 45 seconds or so.

September 3, 1978. Around 6 p.m. Some twenty relatives had gathered at the Kawaji family house on the shore of Lake Ikeda for a Buddhist memorial service. Two boys were playing catch by the water. Then they saw it.

Noon on a clear day in 1944. A young American serviceman named Duane Neil Hodgkinson was walking a jungle trail west of Finschhafen, New Guinea. A grassy clearing. A thrashing in the brush. Something large ran six to ten steps and rose into the air.

Summer 1924. Toba Inlet, on the British Columbia coast. Albert Ostman, a prospector born in Sweden, was asleep in his sleeping bag. Then something picked him up. For about three hours he was carried through the dark. Uphill, downhill, then at a trot. At dawn he heard chatter. Four figures stood around him, covered in hair. An old man, an old lady and two young ones.

July 1, 1937. About one in the afternoon. On a plantation six miles downstream from Newport, Arkansas, Bramlett Bateman watched something rise from a deep eddy of the White River. It was grey. It was smooth. It had the skin of an elephant. It stayed there for some five minutes.

July 1884. A train climbs the Fraser Canyon above Yale, British Columbia. Engineer Ned Austin sees what looks like a man asleep beside the track. He signals for the brakes. The figure springs up, gives a sharp quick bark and scrambles up the rock bluff. After five minutes of perilous climbing, the crew has it cornered on a ledge.

May 1971. A rented frame house just outside Fouke, Arkansas. The Ford family had lived there less than a week. Late at night, Elizabeth Ford lay asleep on a couch in the front room. She saw the curtain move. Then a hand came through the screen window. It was covered in heavy hair. It had claws. Its eyes looked like coals of fire.

July 5, 1977. Around noon on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain. Sandra Mansi watched the water stir like a school of fish. Then a head broke the surface. Then a neck. Then a back.

25 April 1977. The Japanese trawler Zuiyō Maru was fishing for mackerel off the east coast of New Zealand's South Island. Its net brought up the huge, rotting carcass of an animal nobody on board could identify. About 10 metres long. A small head on a long neck. Four large, reddish fins. A smell unlike any fish.

7 December 1905. Morning, off the northeast coast of Brazil. Two naturalists stand on the deck of the Earl of Crawford's steam yacht Valhalla. Edmund Meade-Waldo and Michael John Nicoll are Fellows of the Zoological Society of London. Then they see something that does not fit.

20 July 1970. About 8 pm. A truck moves along a road near the Rokunohara Dam, at the foot of Mount Hiba in Hiroshima Prefecture. Something comes out onto the road. It walks on two legs. It is gorilla-like, about the size of a calf. It notices the driver. Then it slowly goes back into the forest.

September 1975. Off Pendennis Point, at the mouth of Falmouth harbour, a local woman named Mrs Scott and her friend Mr Riley saw something rise from the water. A humped animal. A long, bristled neck. Stumpy horns. It dived for a few seconds and came back up with a conger eel in its jaws. Mrs Scott said she would never forget "the face on that thing" as long as she lived.

August 1817. Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts. Something long and dark moved through the calm water off Cape Ann. Ship masters, merchants and a ship carpenter watched it play in circles, sink straight down and rise again two hundred yards away. One said its head was shaped like a sea turtle's. Another saw bunches along its back.

1968. A summer drive along Highway 97, beside Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. Art Folden and his wife saw something large and lifelike moving on the calm water. Folden pulled over and raised his home movie camera.

30 July 1915. Off the south coast of Ireland, the German submarine U-28 sent the British steamer SS Iberian to the bottom. She went down stern first, her hull almost vertical. About 25 seconds later, something exploded beneath the surface. Wreckage burst out of the sea.

Crawfordsville, Indiana. September 1891. About two in the morning. Two icemen, Marshall McIntyre and Bill Gray, were harnessing their wagon when they looked up. Something hung in the sky, three or four hundred feet above them. It was pure white, about eighteen feet long, and it moved by means of several pairs of side fins. No head. No tail. Just one great flaming eye, and a wheezing, plaintive sound from a mouth they could not see.

30 July 1953. High on the Sordonnokh Plateau in Yakutia, geologist Viktor Tverdokhlebov and Boris Bashkatov watched over Lake Vorota. Something was swimming on the water. Quite close. A dark-grey body rose just slightly above the surface. Two symmetrical light patches stood out, like an animal's eyes. Something like a stick stuck out of its body. A fin, perhaps.

August 27, 1958. Morning on Bluff Creek Road, a timber road being cut into the Six Rivers National Forest of northern California. Bulldozer operator Jerry Crew found footprints around his machine. Big and manlike. Almost 16 inches long. Pressed deeply into the graded dirt.

July 22, 1933. A hot afternoon on the south-east shore of Loch Ness. George Spicer and his wife were driving their open Austin from Dores towards Foyers. Then something came out of the bracken on their left.

July 2008. Ditch Plains beach, Montauk. Jenna Hewitt and three friends found something on the sand they could not name. It was bloated, hairless and sunbaked. Where a snout should be, it had what looked like a beak. "We were kind of amazed, shocked and amazed," Hewitt said.

August 1962. A small motorboat on northern Lake Manitoba, near the mouth of the Waterhen River. Two men on a fishing trip. Richard "Dick" Vincent and John Konefell, both television men. About 300 yards ahead, something long and black moved through the water. Snake-like. A hump in the middle. No head visible.

Sunday 12 November 1933. Around noon. Hugh Gray, a worker at the British Aluminium Company's works at Foyers, took his usual walk after church to where the river enters Loch Ness. The loch was like a mill pond. The sun was shining brightly. Then an object of considerable dimensions rose out of the water, not very far from where he stood. He raised his box camera and took five exposures. Only one showed anything.

Memorial Day, 1982. Love Point, at the northern tip of Kent Island, Maryland. Robert and Karen Frew had guests at their waterfront home on the Chesapeake Bay. Swimmers were in the water.

November 2005. Kampung Mawai, in the Kota Tinggi district of southern Johor. Three workers were clearing ground for a fish pond on the edge of a forest reserve. Then they saw a family. Two adults and a youngster, on a riverbank. The workers gave chase and lost them.

1 May 1983. Lake Tele, deep in the swamps of northern Congo. At approximately 2:30 PM, zoologist Marcellin Agnagna and his guides from the village of Boha saw something in the water. A wide back. A long neck. A small head that turned from side to side, almost as if it was watching them.

Lawndale, Illinois. Monday, 25 July 1977. About 8:30 in the evening. Three boys were playing hide-and-seek in a backyard near Kickapoo Creek. Two large black birds came in from the south. They swooped at Travis Goodwin, who ran and jumped into a plastic swimming pool. Then one went for 10-year-old Marlon Lowe.

19 July 1986. Twilight in a remote valley of eastern Tibet, not far from the Mekong. Reinhold Messner was walking alone. Then came a whistle. An upright figure darted between the junipers, stopped, and turned to look at him. Covered in hair. Over seven feet tall. Arms hanging almost to its knees.

December 29, 1953. Clarkton, North Carolina. A creature described as "sleek, black, about 5 ft long" killed a dog. Two days later the killings reached Bladenboro, a farming and lumber town of about 800 people. Johnny Vause found his two dogs "torn into ribbons and crushed." More dogs died, night after night. An autopsy found almost no blood. The papers called it a vampire.

1963. The Honey Island Swamp, on the lower Pearl River outside Slidell, Louisiana. Harlan Ford, an FAA air traffic controller who had taken up wildlife photography, was deep in the swamp with his friend Billy Mills. Ford took the figure ahead of them for a bear. Then it turned around.

June 10, 1982. The Mill Creek watershed in the Blue Mountains, east of Walla Walla, Washington. Paul Freeman, a U.S. Forest Service watershed patrolman, reported a creature standing upright on two legs. Covered in reddish-brown hair. Nearly 8 feet tall. A strong, foul odor. It walked away from him, stopping to look back, then went up over a hill and disappeared.

July 6, 1734. A mission ship works north along the west coast of Greenland, in the Davis Strait. Then something breaks the surface. A creature rises so high that its head reaches above the main-top. It has a long, sharp snout. It spouts water like a whale. Its skin is hard and wrinkled, its lower part formed like a snake. When it dives, it casts itself backwards and lifts its tail a whole ship-length from its body.

September 16, 2007. Evening in the Allegheny National Forest. A Bushnell trail camera strapped to a tree over deer bait fired its invisible flash. Bears came first. An adult bear and cubs at the salt lick. Then, at 20:32, something else. A thin, dark, furry animal on all fours, its face pressed to the ground.

Sumatra. September 1994. British journalist Debbie Martyr had been out in the forests of Kerinci Seblat National Park for four months, on the trail of a creature known as the orang pendek. Then she saw it herself.

April 25, 1973. About 10 p.m. in Enfield, a village of some 750 people in southern Illinois. Henry McDaniel heard scratching at his door. He picked up a gun and a flashlight, thinking it might be a bear. What he saw instead had three legs, a short body, two little short arms and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half feet tall. It was grayish.

Sumatra. October 1923. J. van Herwaarden was hunting wild pig on Poeloe Rimau, in the Palembang region. A slight movement in a lone tree caught his eye. Clinging to a branch was a dark, hairy creature. Human-like. He identified it by a local name. Sedapa. The orang pendek, the "short person".

5 January 1934. About 1 a.m. A moonlit night on the road beside Loch Ness. Arthur Grant, a 21-year-old veterinary student, was riding his motorcycle toward Abriachan. Then he was almost on it. A small head on a long neck turned in his direction. The animal, taking fright, made two great bounds across the road and plunged into the loch. Grant jumped from his machine and followed it to the water. He found only ripples.

November 24, 1969. Joe Rhodes of Colville spotted footprints at the community garbage dump in Bossburg, a ghost town on the Columbia River just south of the Canadian border. They were very large. Very human. And the right one was deformed.

July 1962. A country lane on the North Downs, not far from Farnham. Ernest Jellett, a waterworks man and keen naturalist, was walking towards the Heathy Park Reservoir. A rabbit came running down the lane towards him. Behind it ran a huge, cat-like animal. It had a sort of round, flat face, a long thin tail and big paws. Jellett shouted. The cat bounded off into the undergrowth.

The Aare Gorge, near Meiringen. A photographer named Balkin framed what looked like a picturesque tree stump. The shutter was pressed. The stump began to move.

Spring 2001. A heat wave lay over Delhi and the power kept cutting out. People slept on their rooftops to escape the heat. Then the reports began. Something was moving across the terraces in the dark. Witnesses described a creature part ape and part man, about four feet tall, covered in thick black hair. Some said it wore a metal helmet. Some said it had metal claws and glowing red eyes. It could leap from roof to roof.

Dawn, 6 September 2007. Zhuo Yongsheng stood on the south slope of Changbai Mountain, filming the sunrise over Tianchi, the crater lake on the border between China and North Korea. Beside him, a tour guide noticed something odd. There was an extra rock in the lake.

Kotu, The Gambia. 12 June 1983. At about 8:30 in the morning, 15-year-old Owen Burnham walked onto Bungalow Beach with a brother, a sister and their father. Two local men were trying to cut the head off something enormous that had washed up in the night.

February 2, 2012. A winter morning in East Iceland. At the farm of Hrafnkelsstaðir, Hjörtur Eiríksson Kjerúlf was drinking his coffee when he noticed something moving in the river. Something long and very slender. It was still there when he finished his cup. So he picked up his camera.

December 12, 1964. Stonehaven Bay, Hook Island, in Queensland's Whitsunday Islands. Robert Le Serrec's wife looked down from the boat and saw a strange object on the floor of the lagoon. The shape of a giant tadpole. Smooth. Finless. Perfectly still.

January 1922. From Esquel, in the Andes of Chubut, an American prospector wrote to the director of the Buenos Aires Zoo. Martin Sheffield had followed tracks so deep that only something of ponderous weight could have made them. They led to a lagoon. In the middle of the water, he saw the head of an animal, with a huge neck like that of a swan. The swirls made him think its body must resemble a crocodile's.

March 1970. The Annapurna Sanctuary, Nepal. Don Whillans, deputy leader of Chris Bonington's British Annapurna South Face expedition, had gone ahead to find a site for base camp. He was camped near what is now Machapuchare Base Camp. Then came the odd cries. His Sherpa looked past him and said it plainly. "Yeti coming." Whillans saw only a shadow disappearing behind a ridge.

Lake Tele, northern Congo. Autumn 1981. Aerospace engineer Herman Regusters and his wife Kia had come to the swamp forest in search of the Mokele-mbembe. Then, Kia said, something surfaced. "I saw a large serpent-like head and neck rising out of the water. The head moved side to side."

Saturday, August 19, 1972. Evening at Thetis Lake, just west of Victoria, British Columbia. Robin Flewellyn, 16, and Gordon Pike, 17, said something came out of the water. A silver, scaly humanoid, about five feet high, with sharp points on its head. It chased them from the beach. One of the boys came away with a cut hand.

30 November 1896. Two boys bicycling on Anastasia Island, across the bay from St. Augustine, Florida, came upon something enormous half buried in the sand. Pale pink, almost white. Rubbery, and so hard it could barely be cut. The visible part measured 18 feet. It weighed nearly 5 tons.

August 1969. Loch Morar, the deepest freshwater body in the British Isles. Two local men, Duncan McDonell and William Simpson, were motoring along the loch. It was about 9 pm, and still light. Then something surfaced behind them.

July 1948. Ora Blue and Charley Wilson were fishing a small lake near Churubusco, Indiana. They came back with a story. A massive snapping turtle, its spiked shell the size of a dining table. Its head was as big as a child's. Its body was as big as the boat.

September 1808. After a storm, a fisherman named John Peace was working off Rothiesholm Head in Orkney. He saw seabirds gathering around something lying on the rocks. Up close, it was a very peculiar-looking creature.

June 16, 1964. After 11 PM. Robert Cockrell, a young reporter for the Grafton Sentinel, was driving home along Route 119 beside the Tygart Valley River. His headlights caught something on the grass. A huge white shape, seven to nine feet tall, with slick skin like a seal's. It had no apparent head.

Winter 1960. Two stockmen droving cattle along the west coast of Tasmania came upon something on the sand. It was huge. About 20 feet long, 18 feet wide, shapeless and fibrous and furry. No eyes. No bones they could see. Gill-like slits along its sides, and a very strong smell.

1889. Montana became a state that year. Captain James C. Kerr was taking the steamboat U.S. Grant up Flathead Lake, with cargo and about 100 passengers aboard. Something lay in the water ahead. Kerr took it for a large log.

March 1986. Anthony Wooldridge was running alone through the Garhwal Himalaya, making for Hemkund. No one should have been on those slopes since the previous summer. Then he found tracks. Ten inches long, weaving through the snow from bush to bush.

Margate, on the Natal South Coast. Hugh Ballance, a farmer, raised a pair of glasses and looked out to sea. Two whales were fighting a huge white creature. It looked like a polar bear, but of truly mammoth proportions. The fight lasted about three hours. The creature reared fully 20 feet out of the water and struck at the whales with what seemed to be its tail.

Chicago. Friday, 18 October 1974. The early morning hours. A resident of the Northwest Side called police with an unlikely complaint. A kangaroo was standing on his porch. Patrolmen Michael Byrne and Leonard Ciagi found the animal in a dark alley. It was about five feet tall. When they tried to restrain it, it fought back with powerful kicks to the shins, cleared a fence and vanished.

May 14, 1976. Before dawn. A jeep carrying six people from the Shennongjia Forestry District was driving home from a meeting in Shiyan. At the mountain pass of Chunshuya, on the border of Fang County and Shennongjia, the headlights picked out something on the road.

October 25, 1973. Farmland outside Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Around 9 p.m., some 15 people watch a large red object slowly sink toward a pasture.

Old Bowie, Maryland. November 1971. Behind the Edwards house, at night, a group of teenagers heard strange noises. John Hayden later described what was out there. About six feet tall. Hairy. Walking on two feet. It made a high-pitched sound, like a squeal.

Dagestan. December 1941. A military doctor is called to examine a prisoner unlike any he has seen. The man is naked and barefoot. About 180 cm tall. His chest, back and shoulders are covered in shaggy dark brown hair, "much like that of a bear." He does not speak. Vazgen Karapetyan extends his hand and says "Hello." Nothing comes back. Only eyes that are "dull and empty."

Summer 2007. Cuero, Texas. Something was killing Phylis Canion's chickens. The birds were not eaten. Not carried off. Canion said all the blood was drained from them.

1925. The southern glaciers of Kangchenjunga, in the Sikkim Himalaya. About 15,000 ft up, the porters of a photographic expedition pointed across the snow. Something was moving out there.

Autumn 1982. A disused forest track near Togari, in Tasmania's far north-west. A howling gale. Horizontal rain. Hans Naarding of the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service lay asleep in the back of his Landcruiser.

January 1976. The Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Two girls in Harlingen watch a five-foot creature standing in an irrigation canal. A week later, a Brownsville man spends three terrifying minutes eye to eye with something winged, with a face like a bat.

8 July 1875. The barque Pauline was off Cape Roque, Brazil, carrying coal to Zanzibar. Her crew watched three large sperm whales. Then one of them was caught. Two coils of what seemed a huge serpent wrapped its body, head and tail standing 30 feet clear. For about 15 minutes it went on. Then the serpent dragged the whale under, head first.

Murphysboro, Illinois. Late June, 1973. Around midnight, Randy Needham and Judy Johnson sat in a parked car by a boat ramp on the Big Muddy River. A piercing roar came out of the underbrush. Then a tall, pale creature lumbered toward them. About 7 feet tall. White hair caked in mud. Glowing red eyes.

October 1955. Mica Mountain, British Columbia. William Roe was climbing toward an old deserted mine when he saw what he took for a grizzly bear. Then it stepped into the clearing and walked toward him on two legs.

June 9, 1964. A Tuesday night on the Utrup farm, south of Dewey Lake in Cass County, Michigan. Gordon Brown, a 25-year-old seasonal farm worker, saw something between the barn and a shed. The Browns told deputies it stood nine feet tall. It had a black leathery face and eyes that glowed red. "It's no bear," Gordon insisted. "It had a human face."

July 29, 1955. A calm, warm hazy afternoon at Loch Ness. Peter MacNab, a bank manager returning from a holiday in the north with his son, pulled the car up on the road just above Urquhart Castle. He was ready to photograph the castle. Then something moved in the calm water to the left.

2 June 1877. The royal yacht Osborne was steaming along the north coast of Sicily toward Cape Vito. The sea was perfectly smooth. At about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the officer on watch saw a long ridge of fins moving slowly through the water.

Halloween, 1983. A Caltrans road crew was clearing a slide on Highway 1, on the hillside above Stinson Beach in Marin County. Then the flagman saw something in the water. It was swimming toward the cliff.