Arabian Sand Bears
In the style of George Noory's Coast to Coast AM radio show.
Welcome back constant reader. Today’s essay is something different and out of the ordinary from what I usually publish. I wanted to have a little fun and be creative just to see where it could lead. The following is a radio script of an interview discussing the elusive Arabian Sand Bear Cryptid. I like watching stories like this and decided to create one myself. Leave some feedback in the comments on what you think and if you would like to see more varied works like this from me.
Enjoy.
-Arthur
Arabian Sand Bears of the Middle East.
They are mostly found in desolate regions of Saudi Arabia, but have been spotted as far south as the Fahad desert in Oman. Arab Governments maintain a deny/ambivalent public stance on their existence. When the Bears cause accidents or deaths, mostly to oil workers in remote operations, or Bedouin tribesmen, the deaths are attributed to industrial accidents or simply the harshness of life in the desert. But photos of the unfortunate victims have made it onto the dark corners of the internet — and they show injuries caused by the tearing of flesh by tooth and claw.
Cryptid Tales with Walter Pierce
WP: Good evening and welcome to another episode of Cryptid Tales. I’m your host Walter Pierce, and today we have a special guest with an incredible story to share. Skip Majors, a geoscience expert who has been employed by oil and gas companies in the Middle East and Africa, joins us today to talk about a subject shrouded in mystery and legend. And just to let the audience know, for personal safety and confidentiality purposes, Skip is not my guests real name, but a pseudonym to protect his privacy. What we are discussing is not information for the general public. Or the squeamish.
Skip: Hello, yes thank you for having me.
WP: Tell the audience your professional background and career.
Skip: Well, after obtaining my Master’s degree in Geoscience at Caltech in Pasadena, I was quickly recruited by, let’s just say a well-known oil company most of our audience would be familiar with from their local gas station. I started out doing some entry level field work in Central California, helping speculate for potential drill sites. After a few years of working in the U.S., career opportunities for more remote locations became available and I was sent to the Congo region of Africa. I have a few tales about that experience for another time, but I eventually ended up in Saudi Arabia outside the town of Tabuk, in the western part of the country.
WP: What we’re going to discuss today might make some in the audience laugh. Mysterious creatures in the desert? Possibly supernatural? Surely this is a joke they might say. But today’s topic is the stuff of legend: The Arabian Sand Bear.
Skip: Until I saw one and what they could do, I wouldn’t blame the audience for their skepticism. All I can tell you is that I know what I experienced and saw out there in the desert and let them be the judge.
WP: When did you first hear about the Arabian Sand Bears?
Skip: Well obviously, it wasn’t something mentioned in the welcome brief when I got to the drilling exploration site, or talked about in the company cafeteria. But, subtle hints to something strange and unknown living out in the desert began to drop. First, let me describe the site location to give you an idea of how desolate the work truly was. When I arrived in Tabuk, a company contact picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at a hotel, telling me he’d take me to the work site in the morning.
The drive took us over 3 hours that next morning to reach operations. During the first hour of driving, I saw a few villages and scattered settlements from the road. But by the last hour, there was nothing. Nada. The best comparison would be pictures of the Mars landscape. We were in the middle of nowhere. The only structures as far as the eye could see was the operation. It was very self-contained. Imagine a layout sort of like a small town with all the usual components and that’s what the site resembled. You had personal lodging, a store, a food court, gym, the works. Everything to keep personnel there and available 24/7 during the operation. It even had a landing strip for re-supply if semi-truck deliveries were hindered for some reason.
My office (which was just a nice construction site trailer) was along the edge of the complex of portable buildings, with a decent window facing the endless desert landscape as a view. At first, it was enjoyable to glance out at the desert, very calming. That quickly came to an end, and I eventually kept the curtains closed most of the time.
WP: How long were you out there at the site?
Skip: My contract was supposed to be for 8 months, but due to the increasing incidents, the entire operation was eventually shut down after only 3 months of me being there.
WP: Incidents?
Skip: Yeah. Like I was saying, the presence of the ASB is a hush-hush affair. I wasn’t too happy to learn afterwards that the company heads knew about them in this region and went ahead with explorations. Only one year prior, an entire desert camping tourism group had disappeared. You know the type: glossy advertisement brochures with pictures of happy tourists around desert yurts and a camp fire. Maybe a couple of pack camels in the background. Everyone in a 15-person group just gone on what was supposed to be a simple 4 day/3-night camping trip. The cover story was a sandstorm had quickly disoriented the group and they had all died of dehydration, but this company had three local guides with them. Three experienced men who had lived in the region their entire lives. Satellite phones, GPS trackers, the works.
WP: Have any of the Arab governments tried to find and eradicate the Arabic Sand Bears in the past?
Skip: Oh sure, there have been several attempts over the years, especially when an attack was too big to ignore. The fact that they tend to hunt from underneath the sands make it difficult if not impossible to track them. Not one Sand Bear “den” I guess it could be called, has ever been found. Nor any remains of a dead one. There is almost a supernatural aspect to their existence.
WP: Supernatural? Interesting. Was there any religious importance to the locals?
Skip: There was a significant group of the workers who worshipped the Bears as a sort of deity of the desert. Mostly the older ones who still clung to the old ways. They would put on elaborate rituals before starting their shift on the rigs. The younger workers would sort of scoff at this, but after it became much more dangerous at the site, they started the rituals as well. It did seem to ward off attacks at drilling sites where they were performed, so take that as you will.
WP: What type of rituals did they do?
Skip: They (the local workers) had these little wooden figurines made from local trees that they would bury around the rigs before starting their shift. Usually they would put at least five of the carvings in the sand in a circle pattern around the rig. Almost like a protective ring of some sort. A designated holy man in the crew would offer a chanted prayer to appease the Sand Bears. Like I said, it had some effect, as the rig teams that did this were mostly unaffected by the attacks. Mostly being the key word. It didn’t shield them from everything.
WP: Besides physical attacks, were there anything else that the Bears did?
Skip: This is just my theory, but it seemed that certain areas in the desert had importance to the Bears. Other operations south of where we were didn’t have issues with the Bears, or at least, none that they acknowledged.
WP: Back to your time with the oil exploration project – Tell us about the first incident you personally witnessed.
Skip: Sure. So, as I said before, my office was along the edge of the compound and the window faced a few of the drill rig sites only a mile or so from the trailer. My work schedule wasn’t set in stone- no 9-5 timesheets, so I would usually make a schedule that kept me out of the day’s heat for the most part. One night around 9pm, I noticed a commotion out the window coming from rig 6. This one was directly in my line of sight out the window. It looked as if mini explosions of sand were occurring all over the rig and lots of panicked shouts in Arabic from the local workers could be heard. I first thought someone had thrown an errant lit cigarette into some blasting caps. (That’s something I forgot to mention. Safety concerns were loose around a few rigs with the workers. OSHA would have a heart attack if they were on the site.) Soon, a Toyota Hilux truck came barreling into the site, stopping in front of the first aid module. I ran to it to see if I could help since I am a certified EMT. It was quickly apparent that nothing could be done for the injured workers. Well, what was left of them. Three bodies were in the back of the truck. All of them looked like they had been mauled to death, possibly like a shark attack. This was not injuries caused from a rig blow-off or heavy equipment failure. I tried asking the (live) workers what had happened to them but all they kept repeating was “Aldubu Alramliu” which means Sand Bear. My Arabic is not the best, so I figured this was a phrase for a rig accident until Amir, an assistant that helped me with the survey data, explained what, exactly they were describing.
WP: Did you believe him?
Skip: At the time, of course not. When you travel as much as I have for work to these far-flung locations for work, you get used to hearing local superstitions and exaggerated tales that are beyond belief. But once these attacks began happening on a regular basis….
WP: They became more frequent? Like, daily?
Skip: Not at first. After this incident, it was another 2-3 weeks before another one happened. One that was closer to the site.
WP: Another rig attack?
Skip: Not at a rig this time. The compound auto center. A few workers were doing an oil change underneath a truck, directly on the sand and then disappeared. The only reason it was noticed so quickly was that another worker went into the garage to grab a tool and heard the swooshing sound of sand and a yelp from his co-workers. Simply gone. Only evidence left behind was a small splash of blood on the truck’s undercarriage.
WP: What did management do about this growing threat? If anything?
Skip: Security patrols were increased and a policy of having a “battle buddy” in tow where ever one went was put in place. Laughable now to think they believed this would have any effect against a predator that mainly hunts from underneath the sands. But, like many organizations facing a problem, they had to do something. Or at least look like they were doing something. The workers were getting scared and more than a few began leaving the site on some of the supply trucks that arrived every couple of days. This was entirely against policy (to simply walk, or run, off the job) so I guess you could say they were really escaping the situation while they could.
WP: How did you continue to focus on work with this happening?
Skip: As I said earlier, the idea of a pack of bears, desert sand bears at that, stalking the barren landscape snatching up oil company workers like the worms out of Frank Herbert’s Dune, or the Tremors movie monsters was entirely ridiculous to me at first. Worst case was that it had to be a wolf pack that had become crazed by hunger to the point where they attacked humans. My work assignments kept me busy in the office, crunching the data brought in from the field and plotting potential spots to drill. It wasn’t until I saw one with my own eyes that I realized it wasn’t all Bedouin fairytales.
WP: Tell us what you saw.
Skip: That same window in my office that I used to enjoy looking out of into the desert expanse revealed the unsettling truth. It was another late night crunching the data sets, racing to meet the deadlines for the next day when I happened to glance up and look out the window. I didn’t see anything usual at first, just the desert expanse lit by a full moon. Then I noticed a peculiar spot on the sand that appeared to be…moving. Slowly at first, then a distinct swirling pattern formed. Soon there were several spots I could see where the swirling was happening. Then one by one, the Bears began to emerge from the sand. At first, I could see the heads beginning to crown like the desert was giving birth to these abominations. But it was the eyes that I cannot erase from my memory. A green glow, almost like smoldering orbs like embers from a hellish fire revealed themselves as they came out of the ground. The bodies were large, bigger than a Polar Bear by my estimates.
WP: Did they have fur like a bear?
Skip: No fur at all. Their skin was smooth and scaly, like a Pangolin. Which makes sense as fur wouldn’t be a helpful thing in the desert climate.
WP: What did you do at that point?
Skip: Honestly, I would probably have stayed frozen in place simply in fear if one of them, the biggest one, had not looked over at the window and saw me.
The eyes revealed an intelligence in them. Feral, ancient, and certainly a brutal form of it, but intelligence all the same.
The company had given out panic buttons to all employees a few days before in case of one being sighted and I realized it was in my hand and punched it. I will note that when I say all employees had one this only included official corporate members, not the locals employed. Immediately, loud speakers across the site began blaring the alarm and the Bears started running into the darkness. After this the attacks started happening several times a week. Always at different rig locations and never the same one twice.
WP: You mentioned the beefed-up defense protocols. That change in security posture doesn’t sound like it made a difference.
Skip: It did and it didn’t, if that makes any sense. My impression of the Bears is they weren’t simply mindless killing machines. They had a cunning about them and understanding of what makes an easy target. While the security force was impressive with the best hardware and equipment money could buy, they still couldn’t always be everywhere. Take the drilling rigs, for example. We had six drill sites operating, but could only fully cover three at a time with security. The Bears understood this and would hit an undefended spot practically at will. Not every attack resulted in a death, but it was enough to put everyone on edge.
WP: What was the final straw or thing that closed the operation?
Skip: Ironically, even after the loss of so much life, it finally took the killing of one of the management personnel to finally make them throw in the towel on the whole endeavor. Apparently, losing nearly 20 local workers was simply chalked up to the cost of doing business in the oil field, but once a middle manager died, that made it unsustainable. You see, that man had family back in the states. Stock options. 401K, etc. People who wouldn’t take company excuses at face value. A local dies and they (the company) can give the family six months of wages and an obligatory “sorry for the loss” note. This manager’s name was Brad, and his death made it clear that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze anymore. The other company men on the site weren’t staying around after that.
WP: How did the manager die? I assume as a part of corporate he wasn’t in the fields around the rig operations, or changing truck oil.
Skip: No, not at all. Brad worked at central command in the middle of the compound. He was attacked while walking at night to the gym facility. We only knew that because of his workout gear that was left on the sand. And the blood splatters on his gym bag…
WP: Wow. So, they shut down the site and evacuated. Any official explanation or reasoning put out publicly?
Skip: From the company’s perspective, that was the easiest part, really. Oil exploration is not a guaranteed thing and I’m sure the audience has heard the term “Wildcatters” used to describe outfits that drill looking for the Black Gold. So, the explanation for the abrupt shutdown was filed under lack of economic viability for the region.
WP: This wasn’t the first encounter with the ASB that the oil industry had, was it?
Skip: After rotating back to operations in Africa, I talked with a fellow geologist and started putting together a much larger picture of the problem that these Arabian Sand Bears present. Not only to the energy industry, but to the Middle East as a whole. Through private research I found that many incidents written off as accidents, conflicts, and even terrorism, could be attributed to encounters with the Bears.
WP: Can you elaborate on any of these incidents?
Skip: A few firefights in Iraq and possibly one or two in Afghanistan were more likely run-ins with ASB packs. One notable time in the Kandahar region, a US Army Forward Operating Base outside of a remote village were in a sustained firefight for over two hours with “An unknown intruding force” as the after-action report stated. But on a now defunct internet forum on Cryptids from 2008, there were a few blog posts from soldiers claiming that it wasn’t enemy Taliban, but something else. What they described as something else described to a T what I saw that night in the desert. More incredible was the tactic of these Afghani Sand Bears that makes me believe there may be different variants within the species. They didn’t attack from under the ground like the Saudi Bears usually did. These ones kept testing the perimeter looking for weak spots on the base to get inside.
WP: Do you have any authentic photos of the ASB?
Skip: No. One thing I forgot to mention was that before we were evacuated in Saudi, all personal electronics were confiscated and wiped of all media to ensure no evidence leaked out.
But I have seen a few photos online.
I can tell our audience that if one wanted to see the actual photos, they would need a Tor browser, as the few images available are on the dark web. I do not recommend searching for these photos, as this would likely put an individual on a few government lists that they would prefer not to be on. Their existence is considered a state secret. One of the biggest issues not discussed that the Middle East has are the Sand Bears. Arab governments don't like to talk about them due to it scaring tourists and business investments, but there are probably 100s of them out there, lurking below the dunes.
WP: Wow. What a harrowing tale. Skip, thank you again for coming on and telling us about your experiences.
Skip: You’re welcome Walter.
WP: I’d like to also thank the folks at home for listening. Tune in next time when Skip will be back on the program to tell us more about adventures during his time in the Congo. Good night.
-End