Operation Wandering Souls
Operation Wandering Souls was a tactic that played off the belief of many Vietnamese soldiers during the Vietnam war. We would play audio recordings of these ghostly messages to scare off the Vietnamese soldiers.
The extent of Operation Wandering Souls success is really unknown. But, some soldiers in the platoon said that it worked. As we would play the voices going through a loop it disturbed many of the wildlife.
The forest came alive at when those tapes were playing. Maybe the tapes irritated something that normally would be reclusive to people. Many people of Vietnam, Laos, and northern Borneo, in particular within the Vu Quang Nature Reserve, have many stories of a bipedal, hairy apelike rock ape creature.
Batutut Rock Ape. Or, the Vietnam War bigfoot.
That they called the Batutut, that is very similar to a sasquatch. Known by various names, such as the Batutut, or jungle people.
A very creepy true story about the rock apes of Vietnam. Some think this could be the Orang pendek of Sumatera. The proposed range of the Barmanou covers the Chitral and Karakoram Ranges, between the Pamirs and the Himalaya.
This places the Barmanou between the ranges of two more-famous cryptids, the Almas of Central Asia and the Yeti of the Himalayas.
The Batatut sightings were seen before the Vietnam War.
Regional variants from Laos and Borneo have added to the Batatut mythos for decades, but many more are shared within the Vu Quang Nature Reserve.
The people who live there call the creature Batutut, but also “Ujit,” or “Người rừng,” loosely translated as, jungle people. Rock apes were named because of their supposed propensity for throwing rocks – usually in retaliation, though, after rocks were thrown at them first.
They were also said to toss grenades hurled their way back at the throwers, on occasion.
Much of what troops in Vietnam reported about the Batutut Vietnam Rock Ape doesn’t really match typical orangutan behavior. While orangutans are sometimes social animals, they spend far more time foraging alone.
