The Ri

While doing field work in New Ireland, and island province of Papua New Guinea, University of Virginia cultural
anthropologist Roy Wagner heard strange stories of creatures which even his best-educated informants assured him
"really exist." In fact, they appeared regularly in the ocean just off New Ireland's central southern coasts. Called "ri"
(pronounced ree), the creatures had generally human features down to their genital area; the lower truck had no legs and
ended in a pair of lateral fins. Natives compared the creatures, which they said were air-breathing mammals.

In November 1979, from the central coastal village of Ramat, Wagner saw what a native told him was a ri in Pamat Bay.
Several hundred yards away he wrote, "something large (was) swimming at the surface in a broad arc toward the shore.
We watched as it came closer, and the best view I got was a long, dark body swimming at the surface horizontally.
Suddenly, a sawfish jumped immediately in front of it (the range was close enough that I could identify the facial
projection), and the dark object submerged and did not reappear."

Wagner interviewed a number of Barok-speaking islanders who said they had eaten ri flesh. They did not consider ri to
be intelligent beings like humans. The ri communicated by whistling and fed on fish. Wagner was certain that his
informants were not confusing ri with dugongs ("sea cows"). "For a Barok man to identify the corpse of a ri washed up on
a beach or caught in a net as that of a dugong," he wrote, "would be as unlikely as for an American hunter to bring home
a deer on his front bumper and try to convince his neighbors it is a bear." He added that New Ireland's people were
equally familar with dolphins.

His formal report, published in the first issue of Cryptozoology, the journal of the newly formed International Society of
Cyptozoology (ISC), created something of a sensation. In the summer of 1983, Wagner, ISC secretary J. Richard
Greenwell, and two other men traveled to New Ireland, interviewed witnesses, and saw a ri themselves. It happened on
the afternoon of July 5, from the village of Nokon on Elizabeth Bay some 40 miles south of Ramat. At 10-minute intervals
the creature, clearly feeding, would surface for a few seconds, making good sightings, much less decent photographs,
virtually impossible. It appeared to be five to seven feet long, skinny, and possessed of a mammalian tail. Attempts to
capture a specimen using a net met with technical problems and had to be abandoned. Expedition member had other,
though briefer, sightings of what appeared to be the same animal.

They returned convinced that the ri was some kind of unusual animal, not a known animal to which the local imagination
had assigned fantastic properties. Still, they noted the "villages further north in central New Ireland regard the dugong as
the Ri as the same animal." Other islanders, however, insisted that they were different. The investigators were inclined to
agree. The ri stayed underwater for as long as 10 minutes, while the zoological literature indicated that a submerged
dugong comes up for air every one or two minutes. Marine biologist Paul Anderson, a specialist in dugongs, provided
Greenwell with a film of surfacing dugongs, but Greenwell thought that neither the creature's shapes nor its actions
resembled those of the animal he and his associated had seen.

Bibliography: Clark, Jerome. (1993). Unexplained!. Washington, D.C.: Visible Ink Press.