Forth, who spent more than four years conducting ethnographic fieldwork on Flores over the course of numerous field trips spanning several decades, collected descriptions and reports from more than a hundred informants, including both general accounts and eyewitness testimonies. The book, his first directed to a general audience, considers whether these indigenous accounts might represent encounters with a surviving non-sapiens hominin, possibly related to Homo floresiensis, the diminutive fossil species discovered in western Flores in 2003 and popularly nicknamed "the hobbit." After learning of the Lio ape-men in 2003, Forth continued his research on the subject through 2018.
The work is organized into four parts. The first, tracing what people say about ape-men as natural or supernatural beings, opens with a chapter introducing Flores Island's geography and unique fauna, including the Komodo dragon and the world's largest rat, before turning to Lio descriptions of the lai ho'a. Forth documents these creatures as Lio understand them: small-bodied bipedal hominoids standing approximately one meter tall, possessing hairy bodies, lacking tools, fire, clothing, or language, and inhabiting remote highland forests. He distinguishes the ape-men from indigenous spirits in Lio thought, pointing out that unlike bodiless supernatural entities, the lai ho'a are described as mortal creatures with physical bodies that reproduce, die, and can be observed by multiple people simultaneously. The author addresses how the ape-men occupy an ambiguous cognitive space, portrayed as like humans and yet not like them, fitting some categorical expectations but not others. He also shows how imported supernatural figures from Javanese popular culture, especially television elves called "kurcaci" and "tuyul," have become conflated with indigenous ape-man concepts in recent decades.
The second part explores myths and legends featuring ape-men. Forth recounts origin stories that describe the creatures as descended from humans who were expelled from communities for antisocial behavior, as well as narratives about ancestors burning caves to exterminate hominoid populations that had been stealing crops and livestock. These myths have parallels in other regions of Flores, including the "ebu gogo" tradition of the Nagé region, where similar creatures are described as having been driven to extinction centuries ago.
Part three contains eyewitness accounts, which Forth presents as the evidentiary core of the book. These range from what he deems to be questionable reports that may reflect misidentified monkeys or dreamlike experiences to what the author considers compelling testimonies. Among the latter are accounts of dead specimens observed by road construction workers in the 1970s, sightings by multiple witnesses of living creatures in highland areas, and a 2017 report from a woman who claimed to have seen a lai ho'a crossing a stream. Forth acknowledges that the least plausible sightings suggest encounters with more familiar creatures, and that many reports concern sightings either after nightfall or in darkened caves where visibility was limited. However, one report describes a lai ho'a struck and killed by a truck, and this and other sightings took place in daylight. Forth evaluates these accounts against psychological research on memory and eyewitness reliability, noting that witnesses who reported emotional disturbance or fear during their encounters tend to provide more consistent and detailed descriptions. He also includes a chapter on extraterritorial sightings, describing reports from outside Lio territory, including observations by two educated Ngadha men who independently recounted seeing a small naked humanlike figure near the Ebu Lobo volcano in 1975, and a 1982 encounter on the neighboring island of Sumbawa in which British anthropologist Michael Hitchcock reported seeing a group of small bipedal primates that stood upright and behaved unlike any monkeys he had previously encountered in Indonesia. Throughout his fieldwork, Forth notes that he never encountered anyone among the Lio who did not consider the lai ho'a to be real.
In the final part of the book, Forth addresses questions of interpretation and credibility. For example, he compares Lio descriptions of ape-men with paleoanthropological reconstructions of Homo floresiensis, noting correspondences in estimated height, facial features, bipedal locomotion, possible climbing ability, and habitat preferences. Forth emphasizes the australopithecine-like and even chimpanzee-like qualities of Homo floresiensis, including its primitive wrist structure and long feet, and questions assumptions often attached to its placement in the genus Homo. He notes that the presumed extinction date of fifty to sixty thousand years ago is inferred from a single site, and that given the rarity of fossilization and subsequent discovery, the last known fossil almost certainly does not represent the last surviving member of that species. He considers alternative explanations for the ape-man accounts, including the possibility that sightings represent misidentified monkeys, exotic apes transported to Flores, short-statured human populations such as Negrito groups known elsewhere in Southeast Asia, or purely imaginary beings. He also references evidence from Red Deer cave in China suggesting possible late survival of archaic hominins alongside modern humans.
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