CFZ expedition orang pendek sighting near Lake Gunung Tujuh

The orang pendek is the "short man" of Sumatra, a small ape said to walk on two legs like a man. Debbie Martyr had gathered reports for years. In 2001 Adam Davies and Andrew Sanderson cast a footprint near Danau Gunung Tujuh.

September 2009. Davies returned, leading a team with three members of the Centre for Fortean Zoology: zoologist Richard Freeman, Dr Chris Clark and Dave Archer. Forest ranger Sahar Didmus and a second guide, Donny, joined them. On 8 September they began searching the jungle around Lake Gunung Tujuh, the Lake of Seven Peaks, in Kerinci Seblat National Park.

Davies heard it first. A large animal, coming towards the group. Dave Archer and Sahar Didmus saw it, squatting in a tree about 100 feet away, for a few seconds through branches and vines. Broad-shouldered, with a large head. Black skin. Dark brown hair, with a line of darker fur along the spine. Archer compared the coat to a mountain gorilla's. In size it matched an adult male chimpanzee. It looked "almost chimpanzee-like."

Then it moved. Sahar watched it jump down from the tree and walk away on its hind legs. Davies's first bulletin said it hid behind a tree, then moved off quickly on two legs through the jungle. Chris Clark later wrote that the animal seemed alarmed by a tiger nearby.

Sahar was shaken to the point of sobbing, and Davies comforted the guide. Davies later reported holding a sworn affidavit from Sahar. Archer had a camera, but no picture was taken. Karl Shuker said the chance slipped away while Archer looked for a better vantage point, and that humidity had drained the video batteries. Clark's version was different. Archer chose to keep watching rather than take a poor shot.

The team photographed several sets of tracks. Each print was 6 to 7 inches long, with a narrow heel, a wider front and a well-separated big toe. Freeman said they matched no known local animal. Hair came from a tree near the tracks. Rattan beside it looked chewed, and Davies stored a piece in ethanol, hoping to recover cells from the animal's mouth. Freeman proposed a name, Pongo martyri, after Debbie Martyr, should the samples prove to be a new species. Loren Coleman called that premature.

August 2010. Danish zoologist Lars Thomas presented early results at the annual CFZ conference. In November came the outcome. The DNA, worked on by Copenhagen University colleague Tom Gilbert, "was most similar to that of humans". The structure of the hairs "compared more closely with that of apes (specifically, the orang utans)." Gilbert "has categorically denied" contamination. The CFZ called the result inconclusive but supportive, and Freeman argued that orangutans have been extinct in western Sumatra since the 1880s.

Sceptics saw simpler answers. A Cryptomundo commenter suggested an orangutan. A critic writing as The Highland Tiger accepted the hairs as orangutan, called the human-like DNA result "more than likely through contamination", and cited IUCN reports of orangutan sightings into the 1960s. Karl Shuker offered a third reading. Both results could be right, "IF the orang pendek is in fact a hominid with ape-structured hair."

No photograph of the animal exists. No official body investigated, and no hoax has been alleged. Archer gave a filmed interview to Graham Inglis of the CFZ, posted on 30 September 2009. Freeman published Orang-pendek: Sumatra's Forgotten Ape in 2011, and the CFZ returned to Sumatra in 2011, 2013 and 2022. The animal Archer and Sahar saw remains unidentified.