This week at Mysterious Universe, Nick Redfern posted a short piece on Puerto Rico’s long-overlooked hirsute hominid stories, which is to say very little. However, the information available about this unusual and evasive species is scanty at best. For the most part, the stories of the island may be gleaned through conversations with residents and study into the island’s various legends.
Bigfoot-like bipedal apes, known as comecogollos (roughly translated as “one who eats edible plants’ hearts”), are said to decimate guinea (a tiny, sweet form of banana tree) harvests by swallowing the tree’s top half.
The sap discovered in the tree’s trunk, rather than the guineas, is what the monster is chasing, according to eyewitnesses. Characterized by witnesses as a bipedal creature with a rapid stride, this creature is described as hirsute and short. The El Yunque National Rainforest has seen an uptick in UFO sightings.
This famous cryptid has been well-kept in cryptzoological lore, although I doubt many people outside of Puerto Rico are aware of its existence. Quite a few Puerto Ricans have never heard of the storey.
My time there was spent investigating the island’s many reports of UFOs, Chupacabras, the Moca Vampire, and other unusual monsters, as I had previously said. The storey of the comegollos is among the rarest and most insubstantial of all of them. According to what little information is available, much of it has come from local scholars writing in Spanish-language media.
The picture above was given as photographic proof by one of the researchers involved in this investigation. In order to further explain my doubts about the legitimacy of this Comecogollos shot, I have paired it with another photograph.
The height of the “monster” in the El Yunque National Rainforest seen in the photograph above is at odds with the proportions reported by witnesses. This monster would have to be between 40 and 60 feet tall if this picture is accurate, as can be shown by using the tower image [left inset above] for size. This tower is around 60 feet tall. So, we have a fair idea of the average height of the surrounding plants. It is possible to see some of the trees near the tower on the mountain in the Comecogollos photograph. To be sure, locations visible from this tower appear in the Comecogollos photograph, which leads me to believe that it was taken from this vantage point.
Images of Sasquatch jutting more than 100 feet over a slope covered with pine trees remind me of this picture in many aspects. If you want to see anything, all you have to do is look at a snapshot and imagine what you want to see in the fuzzy blobs of light and shade.
It’s difficult to believe the mythology of the Comecogollos is much more than a lovely folktale, one of many surrounding the enigmatic El Yunque Rainforest. There’s absolutely no evidence to support the narrative.
