Col. Remy Van Lierde's giant snake (the Congo snake or Katanga snake)

1959. Colonel Remy Van Lierde commanded the Belgian air base at Kamina, in Katanga, Belgian Congo. The colonel was a Second World War RAF fighter ace, said to be the first Belgian to break the sound barrier.

August 1959, at midday, by one account. It was a sunny day. Van Lierde was flying a helicopter back to Kamina after a mission, over shrub savannah dotted with termite mounds. From about 400 ft, Colonel Gheysen spotted what looked like a large moving tree trunk. Van Lierde turned back and came in low, making several passes so someone aboard could photograph it.

It was a snake. Close to 50 feet long, by Van Lierde's estimate. Dark brown and green, with a white belly. A triangular head about 3 ft long and 2 ft wide. "I could clearly see its head: as big as a horse's, with such powerful jaws!"

Then it rose. The snake lifted its body nearly ten feet into the air and held there, as if poised to strike. "I felt if I got any closer, it would have struck at me," Van Lierde said. "It could have easily eaten a man." The helicopter pulled away.

Only one man aboard carried a camera. According to Bernard Heuvelmans, that was Adjudant Kindt, an Air Force engineer, who took a single frame. Other accounts leave the photographer unnamed, and they disagree on whether three or four men were aboard. Kindt reportedly lent the negative to Heuvelmans and died in a helicopter crash about nine months later. The negative is said to rest in Heuvelmans' archive, now at the Naturéum in Switzerland.

Even the colour is disputed. Kindt noted the animal as reddish, slightly lighter than the termite mounds. Van Lierde said greenish brown to the end.

The frame holds nothing of known size. Everything depends on altitude. In 1962 Ivan Sanderson obtained a print claimed to be the original and sent enlargements to Charles Hapgood, who passed them to a Captain Lorenzo W. Burroughs. Sanderson assumed the photo was taken from 500 ft, used the dark shapes as termite mounds for scale, and arrived at about 200 ft. The crew had estimated about 150 ft. Claims that Burroughs was a CIA analyst come only from weak sources.

Zoologist Ray Tercafs ran a scale analysis for Heuvelmans and got 12 to 14 m long, 43 to 47 cm in diameter. In Les Derniers Dragons d'Afrique (1978), Heuvelmans concluded the animal was probably an exceptionally large African rock python.

Sceptics point to the numbers. The largest credited African rock python measured 9.8 m. Discover, citing Reuters, reported that no herpetologists think a snake this size is alive today. Others argue an animal that large would struggle to move, let alone rear 10 feet. No official inquiry is known, and no confession or retraction has ever surfaced.

In 1980 Van Lierde told the story on ITV in *Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World*, in an episode titled "Dragons, Dinosaurs and Giant Snakes". The photograph had circulated among cryptozoologists since 1962. In 2023 it went viral on TikTok and YouTube, helped by a Joe Rogan Experience clip with Forrest Galante. Fakes followed. The single frame from Katanga endures, and so does the question of its size.