The Panama Creature of Cerro Azul

Cerro Azul means "Blue Hill". It is a mountainous area of Panamá province, east of Panama City, on the edge of Chagres National Park. At a spot called the Chorro de Cerro Azul, water falls in front of a cave. Saturday, 12 September 2009. Four teenage boys from Cerro Azul were playing there. Most reports give their ages as 14 to 16. None of them has ever been named.

According to the first Telemetro report, they suddenly saw a creature coming out of the cave behind the water. Its appearance frightened them. Then it began to climb over the stones towards one of the boys. They threw rocks and sticks until it was dead. They threw the body into the water and ran.

Other versions followed. In one, the animal emerged from the waters of the Chorro itself. One boy told Telemetro Reporta: "I was in the river and I felt something grabbing my legs." France 24 heard that the boys fled and came back with their parents to find it dead.

The boys photographed the body on a rock and gave the pictures to Telemetro cameraman José Casis. They aired around 15 September and spread fast. White skin, "very similar to a seal but with strange facial features". A wide belly. A narrow chest. Very long, slender arms. Long, curved claws. Viewers saw E.T., Gollum, or another Montauk Monster. At first, no authority commented.

Four days after the encounter, staff from ANAM, Panama's Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente, recovered the body for a biopsy and a necropsy. The result was a male brown-throated sloth, Bradypus variegatus, a common local species. Melquiades Ramos of ANAM's Department of Protected Areas estimated it had been underwater for about two days. "The sloth had severe signs of trauma on its body, as shown in the necropsy," he said. André Sena Maia, a veterinarian at Niterói Zoo in Rio de Janeiro, explained that "water accelerates the loss of fur and gives the dead animal smooth and almost glowing skin." Bacterial gases had bloated the body. ANAM buried the remains.

Darren Naish, writing on Tetrapod Zoology on 18 September, identified a three-toed sloth from the photographs alone. Naish pointed to the short face, the narrow chest and the long curved claws, and called the boys' story "almost definitely bogus". France 24 called it "presumably a hoax". Others proposed an albino sloth, a dolphin, a pit bull terrier, a fetus, a mutation and an alien.

Yet one detail sits on the boys' side. The necropsy found severe trauma, just as a beating would leave. A dead sloth does not, on its own, prove that nothing happened at the waterfall.

Loren Coleman covered it on Cryptomundo as "The Blue Hill Horror". On 29 March 2011, Destination Truth aired an episode in which Josh Gates and his team travelled to Panama to look into the new cryptid. Today the Panama Creature stands beside the Montauk Monster, a globster from the hills.