Buru
BURU The Buru is a large, unknown monitor lizard thought by some to have lived in remote valleys of the Himalayas of Assam, a province in the northeastern corner of lndin. Reported routinely during the 1940s, Burus allegedly looked, in most descriptions, something like twenty-foot aquatic versions of the Komodo dragon. Witnesses who heard them said they emitted hoarse, bellowing calls. In 1948 London’s Daily Mail dispatched the Buru Expedition to the Himalayas with the hope that it would return with physical evidence of the animals. The expedition’s members included such notables as Charles Stonor, a professional zoologist, and Ralph Izzard, a journalist who would later write The HUllt for tbe Bum (1951). Though they failed to uncover any solid evidence for the creatures, they did hear enough testimony of earlier encounters to persuade Bernard Heuvelmans that these unidentified monitors may be only recently extinct. Heuvelmans points out that current sightings describe a similar regional beast, what the natives call a;boor, from the Gir region of India. Other sightings of large, unknown monitor lizards are known in Bhutan, whose king claims to have seen one, as well as in Burma.
Taken from : Cryptozoology A to Z – The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature – Written by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark – Copyright 1999
