Raising to Earth the Olgoi-Khorkhoi: The Story of the Mongolian Death Worm and the Real Life Indiana Jones who Brought it to the World

 The nomadic herders who live in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia call the creature Olgoi-Khorkoi and have known about its existence for generations.  Olgoi-Khorkhoi means “Intestine Worm” because of the cryptid’s blood red color.  It is said that the Olgoi-Khorkhoi can grow upwards of seven feet in length and that it rises from beneath the sands of the desert in a flash to spray its unsuspecting victims, both human and animal, with a corrosive acidic venom that kills them almost instantly and turns everything it touches the color yellow.

For over a thousand years, until the twentieth century in fact, the existence of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi in the sands of the Gobi Desert was virtually unknown outside of Mongolia.  But a chance meeting between a famed American paleontologist named Roy Chapman Andrews and the Prime Minister of Mongolia in 1922 at a dinner party in the capital city of Ulaan-Bataar, while Andrews was visiting Mongolia for research on his groundbreaking book about human origins entitled On the Trail of Ancient Man brought knowledge of the creature’s existence to the western world for the first time.

Roy Chapman Andrews is one of the most famous explorers, adventurers and naturalists in all of American history.  Some have said that it was Roy Chapman Andrews who was, at least in part, the real life inspiration behind the Hollywood character of Indiana Jones.  During his lifetime Roy Chapman Andrews led countless exploratory expeditions all around the world, most notably in the far east, where he did pioneering work in the study of prehistory by finding the world’s first fossilized dinosaur egg.   In addition to his worldwide research Andrews also served as the Director of the American Museum of Natural History for nearly three decades until his death at the age of seventy-six in 1960.

It was at the aforementioned dinner party in Mongolia, being held in Andrews’ honor, where he had his first fateful meeting with the then Mongolian Prime Minister Dandinbazzar.  Dandinbazzar is a near legendary figure in the annals of Mongolian history, second in renown among Mongols perhaps, to only Genghis Khan himself.  

Roy Chapman Andrews in Mongolia

Prior to the end of World War Two and the onset of the Cold War which led to a communist takeover of Mongolia by the Soviet Union, Dandinbazzar worked tirelessly for his nation’s independence from all foreign influence and for peaceful cooperation among all the various nomadic tribes that made up the population of Mongolia.  Also, in addition to being his nation’s most well known statesman and politician, Dandinbazzar was a Buddhist monk known for his piety, honesty and asceticism.  He had grown up among the vast windswept sandy dunes  of the Gobi Desert--the same desolate expanse that was (and still is) purported to be the home of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi, a terrifying creature that Dandinbazzar himself reported that he was all too familiar with.

The Prime Minister kept Roy Chapman Andrews enthralled for the whole night with firsthand eyewitness accounts of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi.  In his book, first published near the end of 1922 not long after the dinner party with the Prime Minister of Mongolia, Andrews reported the terrifying giant worm that Dandinbazzar described thus, “It is shaped like a sausage, has no head nor leg, and is so poisonous that merely to touch it means instant death.  It lives in the most desolate parts of the Gobi Desert.”

Andrews’ published reports of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi were the first tales of such a creature that had been reported on in the west, and when the English speaking world first heard about the existence of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi, the creature was almost instantaneously rechristened in the western media as the Mongolian Death Worm.

The Charge to confirm the existence of the Mongolian Death Worm was led, at first, by none other than Roy Chapman Andrews himself, who in the following decade personally led two expeditions to some of the most inhospitable parts of the Gobi Desert to search for irrefutable proof of Olgoi-Khorkhoi’s existence.

Following his expeditions in search of the Mongolian Death Worm, Andrews wrote another book in 1932 which he had originally intended to be a sequel to his earlier work on human origins, but in his latter work in addition to his own fossil hunting, Andrews wrote extensively about the Olgoi-Khorkhoi.  Though neither of the expeditions ever found physical proof of the Mongolian Death Worm’s existence, Andrews did emphatically state after speaking to countless eyewitnesses in the Gobi Desert region that, “It (Mongolian Death Worm) is reported to live in the most arid and sandy regions of the western Gobi.”

The western Gobi would have been a particularly desolate and inhospitable region of the Gobi Desert, one that is rarely visited by humans, and an area that Andrews’ expeditions almost assuredly did not explore due to the life-threatening dangers involved.

The western Gobi Desert

Also, there may be a very valid reason why both of Roy Chapman Andrews expeditions and all subsequent expeditions to the Gobi Desert in search of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi, have come up empty handed.  Mongolian folklore and local eyewitness accounts state that Olgoi-Khorkhoi live deep under the sand dunes of the desert and that the creature hibernates for most of the winter, and rises only during the particularly warm and dry summer months to spray its unsuspecting victims with its venomous acid.

Knowledge of the Death Worm, and images of Olgoi-Khorkhoi are deeply embedded in Mongolian culture and folklore and have been for nearly a thousand years.  In 1932 Roy Chapman Andrews wrote that, “Were not the belief in its existence so firm and general in Mongolia I would dismiss it as a myth.  I report it here with the hope that future explorers of the Gobi may have better success than we had in raising to earth the Olgoi-Khorkhoi.”

Since the fall of the Mongol Empire during the late medieval period, and due to their use of the Cyrillic alphabet and a difficult spoken language that is known to few outsiders, Mongolia for many centuries remained largely cut off from the western world.  Add to all those linguistic and cultural barriers the communist takeover of Mongolia by a Soviet-backed puppet regime at the end of World War Two and it’s easy to see how reports and sightings of the Mongolian Death Worm--which had been regularly seen by nomads living in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia since the 11th century--could have been largely lost to history and to the rest of the world.

It would take the work of an enterprising Russian author and amateur scientist named Ivan Mackerle (1943-2013) and the end of the Cold War in conjunction with Roy Chapman Andrews pioneering work from the 1920’s and 30’s to finally bring more information about the Mongolian Death Worm to light at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Mackerle, a prolific author who was able to fluently read and write Mongolian in the cyrillic alphabet, spent years studying the folklore and literature of Mongolia starting in the late 1980’s even while such a course of study was frowned upon by Soviet authorities.  Mackerle found information about a Soviet expedition that had been launched in 1954, in the footsteps of Andrews earlier American expedition from the 1920's, to try and locate proof of Olgoi-Khorkhoi’s existence.  Just like Andrews’ search for the Mongolian Death Worm, apparently Soviet efforts in the 1950’s were no more fruitful in finding physical proof of the creature’s existence, but they did record hundreds of eyewitness accounts from  people that Soviet authorities had interviewed.

Ancient Mongol Text possibly depicting Olgoi-Khorkhoi

Ivan Mackerle, after reading anything in the Soviet Union about the Mongolian Death Worm that he could get his hands on, began to study ancient Mongolian texts and folklore in an attempt to find any firsthand reference to the Olgoi-Khorkhoi.  In 1987, after years of research, Mackerle found an illuminating passage in an ancient Mongol text called the Altajn Tsoondakh Govd which dealt with the legends and folklore of the Gobi Desert.  This text said, “Another, more dangerous animal also lives in the Gobi--the Olgoi-Khorkhoi.  It resembles an intestine filled with blood and it travels underground.  Its movements can be detected from above via the movement of the waves of sand that it displaces.”

Mackerle, who purportedly was a huge fan of the science-fiction novel Dune, a book which prominently features giant worm creatures that closely resemble the Olgoi-Khorkhoi, followed in the footsteps of Roy Chapman Andrews, and after the fall of the Soviet Union launched two scientific expeditions of his own deep into the Gobi Desert of Mongolia in search of the infamous death worm.

Ivan Mackerle and his team used every method from sonar technology to heavy equipment designed to disturb the sand itself and flush out he hibernating Olgoi-Khorkhoi, but he like all of his predecessors, came up empty when it came to finding physical evidence of the Mongolian Death Worm’s existence.  

Ivan Mackerle ca. 2009

To this day most people in Mongolia believe in the existence of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi, but many westerners say that the creature was simply the brainchild, or more aptly the obsession of one man--Roy Chapman Andrews, a brilliant scientist in own right, who may simply have fallen victim to the allure of a Prime Minister's terrifying tales of a giant Mongolian Death Worm deep beneath the sands of the Gobi Desert, or maybe, as Andrews himself wrote over ninety years ago, we’re all just waiting for some future explorer to have better luck discovering irrefutable evidence proving the existence of the Olgoi-Khorkhoi.