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Or, 'WW1 German Mad Scientist puts insane brain into skull of killer dog, hilarity ensues.' Even better? This is supposed to have really happened.

I recently got my hands on the book UFOs of the First World War, which covers the phantom airships of the 19th century down to WW1. It also covers some of the odder rumors of the war, like '500,000 Russian Cossacks are sent to England to fight on the Western Front' and 'Lady Sopwith, female ace, saves Allied pilots from certain death again and again'. It left me curious about other unusual WW1 stories.

I went looking and I found a doozy. Here it is: mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/09…

More here along with plenty of other stories, like the infamous 'U-boat versus sea serpent' story and the Rock Apes of the Vietnamese War: mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/06…

Long story short, during and after the Battle of Mons, British and French soldiers hear ghastly howls at night and start finding the bodies of mangled men, their throat torn as by fearsome fangs. In 1919 an article shows up in an Oklahoma newspaper about how during the war, a German scientist named Dr. Gottlieb Hochmuller created a 'terror weapon' to fight the Allies. He searched for the most vicious madman he could find in Germany and surgically implanted his brain into a Russian Wolfhound(!) before turning his creation loose on the British and French. Of course in best insane monster fashion it turned on the Germans and started killing them too.

I can actually see someone at the time trying that experiment -- this is when a Stalinist tied breeding humans with apes to produce what would basically have been Communist Uruk-hai (it didn't work, in case that needed to be said), and some really creepy things were being attempted with 'gland implants' in the USA. But even I know better than to think it would work. Even Mysterious Universe was skeptical with this one, stating that it's more likely that feral and/or rabid dogs were attacking the men.

The fact that the whole account came from just one guy doesn't help matters.

Still it'd make a great Call of Cthulhu adventure, wouldn't it? Or even a modern direct to DVD B-movie. Just make the Hellhound bulletproof and immortal for, uh, reasons and have some careless gteedy artifact hunter turn it loose from an abandoned and buried section of trenches and there you go."From the Mists of Mons it came, filled with hatred for humanity. Not Man nor Dog, it is -- MANHOUND!"