I got down to the airport early since I was going to be flying basically along the equator. I knew it would be a hot humid flight. Climbing out of Abidjan, I cleared ATC and took off VFR to Bangui in the Central African Republic. I let the plane continue up until I was at ten thousand. I hoped it would be cooler up here. This was going to be one of the longest flights on the trip at almost four hours. It also was a long hop first over water than over the dark heart of Africa. Joseph Conrad wrote his novel Heart of Darkness and used this part of Africa as a metaphor for the darkness in the human heart. Much of this area is still quite primitive and undeveloped by Western standards. In other words, there were not a lot of landing options in an emergency.
The city of Bangui is on the Ubangi River north of where it joins the Congo River. It is a fairly large city and despite the Disney pictures going through my head, there wasn’t jungle coming right up to the runway as I might have imagined; the runway was surrounded by the city. There were only a couple of planes at the airport. I couldn’t understand a word the ATC guy was saying. I kept transmitting back, “Could you repeat that? Please repeat?” I heard “One Seven” and “cleared.” So I came around north and lined up on Runway 17. I saw a plane taking off down the runway so he’d be gone. I landed and taxied off. A jeep came out and the driver waved at me so I guess they figured out I had no idea and they wanted to keep me out of trouble. The jeep pulled up next to the terminal. After four hours I needed to stretch and pee both badly. I ran into the terminal and found the john.
After, I came out into the terminal. It was mostly empty. I saw a group of white young men in jungle outfits. They saw me and waved. Two of them came over. We introduced ourselves they were from some college science department. “What are you guys researching?” I asked.
“We are looking for the cave of the dinosaurs,” one said.
“You are looking for fossils?” I asked interested that there might be a cave with fossils close by.
“No,” he said excited. “We are looking for the live dinosaurs.”
I’m sure my face must have reflected my skepticism, to put it mildly.
“The Bible makes it clear that God created all animals six thousand year ago. So the dinosaurs must still exist. The only thing that makes sense is if they are hiding deep in the jungles like here in Africa. So we are going to find them.”
How do you even respond to someone like that? The only thing that makes sense is he was an idiot. I had to laugh for I had just been thinking about folks exactly like this just a few days before. Does that ever happen to you? It is scary, you think about somebody or something, and wham, there it is, like your mind got hooked into the Universe in some weird way and pulled it in. Maybe I was responsible for these yahoos wasting their time looking for dinosaurs just so the Universe could prove something to me. Maybe someday I'll understand how this all works.
Once I could say something to the guys without laughing, I excused myself to go gas my plane. Unfortunately, the one guy followed me to try and talk me into flying around the Congo looking for the dinosaurs, dead these 65 million years. I helped the ramp guy fuel the plane and checked the oil adding a few quarts while this guy stood by the plane explaining why it was important to find dinosaurs.
I did the best I could to give these guys the brush off, politely. Lucky for me, the regularly scheduled plane from Kinshasa landed. The ‘researchers’ had to jump on the plane. They refueled while the engines ran. In minutes, the plane was fueled and off they went, back to the US to figure out where those 65 million year old dinosaurs were hiding.
p.s. For those of you shaking your head that I made up such a ridiculous fiction, this actually happened. There was a group from one of these Fundamentalist Bible colleges searching for live dinosaurs in the Congo in order to prove the Bible is literal truth. This is just too good to make up.
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Copyright Rod O'Steele © 2009, 2010