Disappearances in Indonesia

An Unknowncountry.com reader, Alan Lamers, working on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia reports that many people are disappearing in the jungle, apparently due to a very unusual form of abduction that takes place if they wear certain colors. Some are returned, but generally with no memory of what happened to them.

His report follows:

I am on an island called Sulawesi in Indonesia. To be exact, I a writing this from the city of Makassar also known as Ujung Pandang Sulawesi Selatan (South Sulawesi).

I started running across this story about 3 years ago when I went to a small village in the district of Sandu Batu in South Sulawesi. I was told not to bring any clothing with yellow in it or any other bright colors to wear in the jungle. Only Black or White. Black was the most preferred. I had to ask why. They said that people who wear these bright colors will disappear.

I thought it was some kind of cultural taboo that had a harsh punishment if broken, so I complied of course. We got to the village and everyone wore black. The villagers verified that people do indeed disappear but this village would not say why. When we got there, rested, met with the leaders of the village, about 10 of us proceeded to go into the jungle to witness illegal logging that was occurring there and the villagers wanted to show us the damage.

One of my friends, who is a Bugis-Makassar, didn’t listen or understand the warning and wore yellow socks. We did our tour and returned. He was strangely quiet. That night he became extremely ill. I had never seen a person projectile vomit that hard. He had an extreme fever also. We nursed him and about a day later he returned to his healthy self. Then he told us what happened.

He said something had bitten him on his right legs calf and then his thigh. He showed us the marks. They were huge scratches. He said he could not see what was attacking him. He said he did not want to tell us what happened because he was embarrassed. The villagers stood around us with these knowing looks while we looked at the marks.

I asked them what it was. They did ant to say, but they said he was very lucky. Usually people disappear. I was stunned. It was not a taboo. It was a serious threat.

I just came back from the city of Palopo last night. I went there to visit a friend. Then I heard this story from her. Her cousin and four others went for a three day hike in the mountains about an hour out of town. When they did not return she began to worry. after about a week things got very serious.

She hired a search party with her own money, you have to understand she is poor so the cost to her was enormous. I know it was a few months ago because she would send me notes apologizing for not having the money to pay me her monthly loan payment. I found out it was because of the search party. Anyway I digress, she spent a month in the mountains searching for her cousin and his friends. They found only her brother.

He was severely emaciated but was still alive. He was also traumatized. He was also alone. The families of the missing men forced her and her family to continue searching for the four missing people. They have never been found. Not a trace. Not even a body. They just disappeared.

The brother has no memory as to what happened. He does not know how they got separated. He was so traumatized by what happened he did not speak for two months. I questioned him a bit but I stopped for now because he was returning to his previous state.

I asked my friend what she thought happened. She said it was the Jin. Jin is Arabic for demon. She said many many people have disappeared in the mountains because of the Jin. I asked my engineer friend who I worked with about this early today. He said it happens often and reminded me of Wala Wala the village we had gone to. Entire cultures have developed around this problem. They wear only black because they believe this allows them to travel through the jungle undetectable by whatever it is that takes these people. At first I thought perhaps it was a python. The largest snake ever caught was python. It was caught in Sulawesi. I was immediately corrected. Snakes are not a problem to grown adults they said. That theory died on the spot.

There is something taking these people Whitley. Something terrible and evil in Sulawesi. The people of Sulawesi have come to terms with it and have tried to adapt themselves to deal with whatever it is. It has gone on long enough to bend culture. I will continue to investigate what this is. It is one of the strangest and most dangerous true stories I have ever come across. Could it be extraterrestrials? Maybe but who? It would be easy for extraterrestrials to hunt human beings here because villages are so remote. I go by foot to many of them.There are few roads in some areas. Also 85% are Muslim and therefore people are not allowed to talk about this sort of thing and the religion treats this circumstance as nonsense because it does not fit into doctrine and is in constant competition with Animism. People are embarrassed to talk about it. This is a wild world Whitley.

Indonesia is one of the most volatile geographical areas in the world. The energy produced allows all sorts of entities to exist. Spirits are rampant here because of this. There word for Spirit is Hantu. I have experienced Hantu many times while here in Indonesia but that is another story.

Our correspondent provides this follow-up to his continuing investigation:

After a bit of a talk with some people who got the young man who had survived the hike in the jungle to talk, I interviewed and recorded the information as best as I could.

I found out he kept seeing what the Bugis call Jin Kurcaci. It means little demon people. These things do what is called "penculikan" or abduction. No one knows why they do this. But sometimes the people come back after a bit. The people or creatures who do this have a small nose and their eyes are small and black, but their mouths are very broad and when they smile it is very large compared to the rest of their face. He could not remember the color of their skin. I asked for a picture to be drawn. He managed a crude happy face with a nose consisting of a single line and a huge grimace. The boy was the only one who could see them out of the five.He kept seeing a lot of them but when he would try to show the others one of the four who disappeared could see them.

He also saw a strange animal he could not recognize. These animals are the size of a horse with huge antlers. He said he saw herds of them. He could not understand where they came from or why there were so many. They not an animal indigenous to the area. There is no such known animal that big in Sulawesi.

Apparently this is a widespread problem. The reason why I say I recorded the conversation as best as I could what I mean is that the batteries in the recorder which were just changed before I arrived went dead during the interview. This has happened before to me. So did the battery in my keyboard which is also new. I will be going home in a week but am stopping in Java first to see if this anomaly is occurring there. I keep getting told it happens a lot. I mean a lot. I did a search "Orang Hilang" or "disappearing person" and a lot of stories showed up. But the stories are in Bahasa. I plan on translating as many as I can because I have first hand experience.

Unknowncountry will continue to follow this story, and provide updates in this section of the website.

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