The police are maintaining a studied silence because they are quite simply unable to explain the phenomenon. But doctors who examined the victims say ``some people had actually gone through a traumatic experience''.
In their report submitted to the police on May 7, the Institute doctors say that in six of the 55 cases examined there was no psychological causation. ``There seems no motive for these persons to harm themselves.''
A doctor on the panel says the patients were examined on several dimensions such as ``substance or sleep-related phenomenon''. According to the report, most cases can be attributed to hysteria as 35 persons had suffered from definite psychological causation and 14 from probable psychological causation.
The panel of about 15 doctors, headed by Dr. Nimesh G. Desai, had also examined half-a-dozen persons from neighbouring Noida and Ghaziabad, which together had reported about 70 cases, just as many as in Delhi.
In the first case, the victim had actually suffered inexplicable injuries. But most later instances of monkeyman attacks were found to be cases of self-inflicted injuries.
What has perplexed doctors is that in as many as five cases the ``monkeyman'' had simultaneously been sighted by several persons. In all these cases, the eyewitness account was corroborated by family members. One instance is that of Kushal Pal and his son in Thakuran village of Noida. They maintain that they not only saw the ``mysterious creature'' but even grappled and fought with it ``till it disappeared''.
Overall the report states that due to over-involvement of the media some people were encouraged to come out with bizarre gripping accounts of the strange creature though they had seen none.
Also the report states that the accounts of the victims were not consistent and one particular figure or thing could not be blamed for the episode. Contending that people were largely susceptible to rumours, the report notes that in many cases the victims had modified their statements as per their convenience.
Investigations by a team of GTB Hospital doctors headed by Dr. D.K. Srivastava, focusing primarily on physical injuries, have also veered round to the same conclusion. Though initially the doctors at the instance of the police had stated that the injuries were mostly superficial and it all seemed a case of mass delusion, they later changed their opinion as the investigations proved otherwise.
The findings have caused some discomfiture to the police, who after announcing a reward of Rs.50,000 for information on the mysterious figure, have gone about trying to portray it as a case of hysteria.
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Indian Doctors Perplexed By
NEW DELHI, The monkeyman mystery that shook Delhi not long ago refuses to die. Its ghost continues to haunt the Delhi police who are finding it extremely difficult to exorcise it. And with independent investigations by doctors of Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital and Institute of Human Behaviour and Applied Sciences and scientists of Central Forensic Science Laboratory not pointing to mass hysteria alone, the police are still battling with the mysterious figure.
Some Monkey Man Encounter Stories[Original headline: Monkeyman's ghost haunts the police]
The Hindu, Madras / India | Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar - June 14 2001
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