For roughly six weeks in the summer of 2001, something ran the rooftops of East Delhi. Witnesses — ultimately more than 350 of them across official reports — described a four-foot, monkey-like figure with metallic claws, sometimes a helmet, sometimes glowing red eyes, that scratched sleepers on the city's hot-season rooftop beds and leapt building gaps no person could clear. The injuries were real and treated in hospitals; two deaths occurred when panicked residents fell from roofs; the Delhi police formed a task force, issued a sketch, and offered a reward.
No Monkey Man was ever caught, photographed, or conclusively explained. The official post-mortems settled on mass hysteria seeded by real monkey encounters — Delhi's rhesus population is bold — with copycat assaults folded in. The wound-pattern analyses were never unanimous.
The archive files the case as its cleanest modern example of a flap: a discrete window, a dense witness cluster, physical injuries, official response, and an ending as abrupt and total as the beginning. Whatever it was stopped. That, too, is data.