Tepuis Lost World Cryptid Expeditions

The Islands in the Sky

The tepuis of Venezuela’s Gran Sabana are among the oldest exposed rock formations on Earth, table mountains of Precambrian sandstone rising as much as a thousand metres above the surrounding savannah. Roraima, the most famous, sits at the meeting point of Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil and was first climbed by the British botanist Everard im Thurn in 1884. His account of the summit — a stone landscape of pillars, lakes, and unfamiliar plants, isolated from the lowland forest by sheer cliffs — reached London just in time to inspire Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World. Doyle’s fictional plateau hosted dinosaurs and ape-men. The real tepuis have produced something less spectacular but more tantalizing: a steady record, across more than a century of expeditions, of encounters that have not fitted comfortably into zoology.

Each tepui summit functions as a biological island. Endemism rates are extraordinary; species of carnivorous plant, frog, and rodent occur on a single mountain and nowhere else in the world. The Pemón people, who guide most expeditions, have always treated the summits as the dwelling places of the mawari — non-physical or semi-physical beings who must be addressed with respect and avoided after dark. This combination of genuine biological mystery and indigenous spiritual geography has made the tepuis a recurring focus of cryptozoological interest.

Im Thurn, Tate, and the Early Reports

Im Thurn’s 1884 ascent recorded no large animals on the Roraima summit but described “great lizards” glimpsed at the cliff edges by his Pemón porters. A more substantial set of accounts emerged from the 1927–1928 Tate expedition, organised by the American Museum of Natural History under the botanist George H. H. Tate. Tate’s field notes, archived at the museum, mention nocturnal “barking” calls of unknown origin on Mount Auyán-tepui, large eyeshine reflected in the beam of a hand torch at distances exceeding the range of any known summit fauna, and a single morning observation of “what may be a primate” on a ledge below camp — an entry he later struck through with the word “improbable.”

The Czech-Venezuelan explorer Aleksandar Laime, who lived at the foot of Auyán-tepui from 1955 until his death in 1994 and who acted as guide for many of the early scientific expeditions to Angel Falls, accumulated a private dossier of what he termed “unexplained presences.” His daughter, the artist Heidi Laime, has published selected passages in which her father describes both auditory phenomena — chanting heard from above the cliffs in still air — and a single visual encounter in 1972 with a tall, pale figure observed at twilight near the summit lake. Laime considered the matter unresolved and refused to publicise it during his lifetime.

The Auyán-tepui Glow Reports

A distinct strand of accounts from Auyán-tepui involves luminous phenomena distinct from electrical storms. In 1986, a five-member Venezuelan-American climbing party reported an orange globe, roughly the size of a large dog, that paced their camp for several minutes before drifting silently over the cliff edge. The party included two professional geologists who described the object as “moving against the prevailing wind” and as casting no detectable heat. Their report, published the following year in the Caracas magazine Tribuna Verde, generated brief national coverage and inspired a 1989 expedition specifically equipped for UAP documentation, which returned without comparable observations.

Pemón guides have long associated such lights with the mawari and have generally declined to spend nights on the summit. The anthropologist David M. Thomas, who lived among the Pemón of the Kavanayén area in the 1970s, recorded multiple accounts in which guides described glowing forms emerging from the summit lakes and descending the cliffs at night. The accounts were unanimous in framing the lights as conscious entities rather than as natural phenomena, though Thomas was careful to note that this framing did not constitute evidence of consciousness.

The Cerro de la Neblina Mystery

The southernmost major tepui, Cerro de la Neblina, sits on the Brazilian border and was the site of a 1984–1987 multinational scientific expedition that produced the largest body of new biological discoveries in modern Venezuelan history. Among the formal scientific publications, several team members later spoke of unrecorded encounters. The herpetologist Charles W. Myers reported, in a 1992 interview, having heard “a sound like a child crying” from a side canyon at dawn; he considered, and rejected, every avian and mammalian explanation he could devise. The botanist Ghillean Prance noted in his memoir that two indigenous Yanomami members of the support team withdrew from a particular plateau section after discovering large prints they identified as those of a “mountain person” — a being not corresponding to any species recognised in Yanomami zoological terminology.

The 1989 publication “The Botany of the Cerro de la Neblina” remains the definitive scientific record. The unrecorded encounters circulate, instead, through interviews and second-hand accounts, joining a body of testimony that is as serious in its provenance as it is impossible to subject to standard zoological scrutiny. The term cryptid is used here cautiously; some of these reports may reflect known species observed under disorienting conditions, others misidentified atmospheric phenomena, and a residual fraction may correspond to genuine novelties yet to be described.

What the Mountains Hold

Modern tepui expeditions, including the 2008–2012 BBC-led “Lost Land of the Jaguar” surveys and ongoing Venezuelan Smithsonian collaborations, continue to discover species new to science with each visit. The summits remain difficult of access, weather-bound, and bureaucratically complicated since the political crises of the 2010s. Whatever else lives on those plateaus — and the question is genuinely open — is likely to be encountered first not by cryptozoologists but by the small parties of biologists, climbers, and Pemón guides who continue to make the ascent.

For the moment, the tepuis hold their secrets in cloud. The mawari, by Pemón account, prefer it that way.

Sources

• im Thurn, E. F. Among the Indians of Guiana. London: Kegan Paul, 1883.
• Tate, G. H. H. Field notes, AMNH archives, 1927–1928.
• Brewer-Carías, C. Roraima. Caracas: Editorial Oscar Todtmann, 1987.
• Thomas, D. J. Order Without Government: The Society of the Pemón. University of Illinois Press, 1982.