Professor Võ Quý's người rừng footprint cast, Central Highlands, 1974

1974. Vietnam is still at war. In the Central Highlands, in the region north of Kontum, soldiers of the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong have been reporting encounters with something in the forest.

Their descriptions blend into one figure. Five to eight feet tall. Reddish-brown matted hair. It walks upright. Dark, deep-set eyes sit under prominent brows, and its arms are long and muscular. Locally it has a name. Người rừng. The forest people.

The sightings became so frequent that the North Vietnamese party secretariat ordered scientists into the region while the war was still going on. The request is tied to General Hoàng Minh Thảo, who had commanded the Central Highlands Front from 1967. He asked for a scientific survey of the natives north of Kontum. What did they know of the người rừng?

Three scientists went in. Professor Võ Quý, an ornithologist from Hanoi University. Professor Lê Vũ Khôi, a mammal zoologist from the same university. Professor Hoàng Xuân Chinh of the Institute of Archaeology in Hanoi.

They never found a người rừng. But on the forest floor, Võ Quý found a footprint. He made a cast of the impression.

It was wider than a human footprint. It was too big for an ape. Vietnamese academics analyzed and studied it. The expedition came home with the cast, and with two elephants captured for the local circuses. No measurements of the cast have been published. No photograph of it has surfaced. Where it is kept today, no source says.

The search did not end there. From 1977 a state programme, the Comprehensive Survey of the Central Highlands Territory, carried it further. In 1979 Trần Hồng Việt was formally assigned to người rừng research. Early in the 1982 rainy season, on the wet Ngọc Vin pass, he found footprints of his own. He photographed them and cast them in borrowed plaster. "Such a beautiful footprint," he said, "very large, with long toes."

On 7 April 1982, Decision 65-HĐBT, signed under General Võ Nguyên Giáp, created a protected forest in the Chư Mom Ray and Ngọc Vin mountains. It banned hunting of the large-bodied ape "suspected to be 'forest people'". In 2021 Trần Hồng Việt, his son Trần Hồng Hải and Jeff Meldrum published "Research on Wildmen in Vietnam". They described possibly two forms and suggested the creatures are probably endangered.

No official body has ever concluded that the creature exists. Even the 1982 decree hedged between a large ape and a wildman. No hoax claim has been aimed at the Võ Quý cast, but nothing written in 1974 has surfaced either. The English account traces back to one retelling, likely Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark's Cryptozoology A to Z. Later versions blur the Central Highlands with John MacKinnon's work in Vũ Quang and his tracks from Borneo. American soldiers told their own stories of "rock apes", gathered in Kregg P.J. Jorgenson's Very Crazy, G.I. Online retellings now call it the Bigfoot of the Vietnam War.