Mystery Monkeys Go Bananas on Interstate

A trio of monkeys threw bananas and crab apples at vehicles on the main interstate highway on the East Coast and were still at large Friday, a Virginia state police spokeswoman said.

The monkeys, described by police as brownish gray, skinny and between 2 and 3 feet tall, were seen by drivers last Sunday along a stretch of Interstate 95 close to the Virginia-North Carolina border.

No one was injured, though several vehicle windows were smeared with fruit.

Virginia state trooper Mike Scott was alerted to the renegade primates when he noticed a vehicle on the shoulder of I-95 north of the small town of Jarratt, Va., around 9:30 a.m. Sunday, according to spokeswoman Corinne Geller.

He saw what looked like a banana smeared on the rear window and when he approached the car, he found the driver with a cell phone in her hand and a strange expression on her face, Geller said.

“You might think I’m crazy, but I think two monkeys threw a banana at my car,” the driver told Scott.

Interstate 95, which stretches from Maine to Florida, is known for high-speed truck traffic and lengthy areas of congestion, not for marauding monkeys.

The driver said she was a paleontologist who takes pictures of primates and she told Scott, “I’m pretty sure those were monkeys about a mile south of here.”

Sure enough, a mile to the south, Scott found two more vehicles pulled to the side of the highway’s northbound lanes, and a small crowd looking into the trees along the side.

They were searching for the monkeys that hit them.

“And just about that time a crab apple comes out of the trees and hits one of the vehicles,” Geller said.

Scott then saw the three miscreants, before they ran across the interstate.

He and another trooper pursued them, as the monkeys swung from tree to tree, she said. But the three split up then and the troopers lost them in the underbrush.

Police suspected the monkeys had escaped from vehicles traveling to the Virginia state fair in Richmond, or to a fair across the state line in Roanoke Rapids, N. C., but no one has reported the monkeys missing.

“They weren’t fierce or anything,” Geller said by telephone. “They just seemed to be having fun throwing their fruit.”