Pinatubo Monster - A Volcano Lake Serpent?

In 2002, reports came out of the Philippines from Filipino villagers which told of five “huge, black creatures” swimming in the Tikis River, near the former mining village of Buhawen, scaring the  Aeta families, who claimed that the large serpent-like creatures were making life dreadful for the locals.

The very first sighting of a Pinatubo Monster was the previous November when a young boy playing in the river noticed what he initially thought were logs floating in the water. Once he approached it to play with it, the serpent-like creature showed its true form, which caught the boy by surprise and thus, he gave out a loud shriek. This scream attracted other Aetas but when they got to the boy, the creature had swam away, bothered by the screaming.
 
But in January 12, 2003 there were a multitude of eyewitness accounts of seeing the serpent-like creature in the river basin.

Filipino villagers then appealed for scientists to help explain the large unidentified creatures seen in the Tikis river. Five of the mysterious black creatures have been spotted in the river in Bhawen since November. This baffled the Aeta tribe who live there because there is no account of such creatures in their oral history.

Dubbed the Pinatubo Monsters, they are believed to be 7ft long and 3ft wide. Children have been ordered not to bathe in the river and fishing has also been banned in case the creatures are dangerous. They have never been seen in full form, but the elongated outlines could be seen when the wind blows over the river and ripples are made in the water. They never produced any sound at daytime or night.

Joel Serrano, a village councilman, told The Philippine Daily Inquirer: “We don’t know if they are fishes or snakes or eels because they never show their heads or tails.” He is also worried what effect the ban on fishing will have on the village, adding: “Frogs are our only source of protein.”Villager Alfredo Banos said: “The children are afraid. When they come here to view those creatures, they wonder what those things really are. We don’t have answers to their questions.”

The strange creatures were also seen swimming in the river below Labuan, which is enclosed by tall, thick bushes. Since the monsters’ heads and tails were not seen, no one could venture what these locally named “Pinatubo Monsters” could be.

The call of the councilmen was answered by the Bureau of Fisheries & Aquatic Resources (BFAR) regional director, Remedios Ongtangco. Ongtangco chose 43 year-old Nelson Bien — who had already rescued the residents of Luzon’s Nueva Ecija province from an extraordinary 12-foot long eel — for the job.

Bien, who served as the chief of the fisheries resources management division of the BFAR in Central Luzon, arrived in Labuan less than a week later.  Upon his arrival, the community’s tribal leaders immediately escorted the scientist to the Tikis River. After a cursory glance through a pair of binoculars, through which, according to most reports, he saw nothing, Bien wasted no time in concluding that — based soley upon the Aetas’ accounts — the phenomenon in question was most likely a school of the relatively common fish known as tilapia, who had probably congregated in groups of 500 or more.

The accounts all seem to end on this note, giving skeptics yet another excuse to practice their patented condescending smirk, but only a blithering fool would assume that an entire community — who have for generations lived on the banks of the Tikis and whose primary sources of nourishment came from the River — would confuse a school of relatively small (not to mention well known) pan fish for a quintet of 7-foot long, 3-feet wide, inky black, serpentine creatures.

Some researchers have suggested that the creatures may be a mutation spawned by the massive mercury levels said to be in the river. Whatever the origin of these beasts actually turns out to be, the fact remains that the Aeta villagers continue to fear the serpentine monsters of the Tikis River.

Interestingly enough, Lake Pinatubo was formed after Mount Pinatubo erupted on June 15, 1991. Mount Pinatubo being located near the boundaries of Pampanga, Tarlac and Zambales provinces in the Philippines offer a summit crater lake that is the deepest lake in the country at 800 m (2,600 ft) deep.

Did the eruption have anything to do with the reports of huge, serpent-like creatures seen after it’s wake, or does the fact that they were seen near a former mining village where mercury levels could be so high as to have created a mutation be relevant?

On September 24, 2008, Destination Truth aired an episode where Josh Gates and company searched for the Pinatubo Monster and discovered that changes in the river and lake may have changed the schooling habits and ecology for any creatures in the lake.

Whatever these creatures are, it has been made clear by the Aeta that these animals are unlike any eel, fish or snake that they are familiar with, and as far as we know, no other scientists have since volunteered to go further investigate.

Source Credit(s): unknown-creatures.com/pinatubo-monster.html, ananova.com/news/story/sm_494687.html, americanmonsters.com/site/2009/12/pinatubo-monsters-philippine-islands, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Pinatubo

Pinatubo Monsters illustration © 2012, Syfy, Destination Truth

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The Beast of Bladenboro

In 1954, a savage killer kept a small North Carolina town in a grip of terror. He left big tracks, a bloody trail and a hair-raising legend. Was it a bear? A vampire-cat? To this day, the creature remains a mystery

Bladenboro is a small community surrounded by pine forests and swamps at the southeastern edge of the North Carolina piedmont. It was also the setting for the greatest monster flap North carolina has ever seen.

On December 29, 1953 a local farmer reported a large, cat-like creature had attacked one of his dogs and dragged it into the underbrush. On New Year’s Eve two more dog carcasses, reportedly completely drained of blood, were found. The next day, two more dogs were attacked. Something was hunting animals in Bladenboro.

The two butchers at the Dublin IGA grocery store are a little confused about what exactly “the Beast of Bladenboro” was. A Revolutionary War tale, one says. The other jokes that he knows what it is: His daddy.

Just up N.C. 410, in Bladenboro, a man with a graying five o’clock shadow pays the gas station attendant for a bottle of Sun-Drop. He notices someone not from around town and strikes up a conversation.

“Yeah,” he says of the beast, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it is.”

These folks shouldn’t feel too bad. To this day, nobody really knows what, in 1954, went around killing dogs, goats, hogs and small cows in the most unusual way – breaking their jaws, crushing their heads flat and sucking the blood from their bodies, according to local newspaper reports.

It was downright gruesome. Women and children stayed locked in their homes. Men dared not walk outside without some kind of firearm. Big-game hunters from around the country infiltrated Bladenboro, a town about 60 miles west of Wilmington.

The Beast of Bladenboro was big news then, but today, the story is buried in clumsy rolls of microfiche. Local headlines only give sensational clues: “Mysterious Beast is Still At Large,” “Vampire Tendencies Found In Bladenboro’s ‘Monster,’” and “Guns, Dogs Circle Blood-Lusty Beast.”

Only a few people who experienced the fear are still kicking around Bladenboro. Ask the people at Town Hall if they know anybody who was around when the beast roamed, and you’ll get a pretty good chuckle. But you’ll also get a file of newspaper stories kept in the town vault. And Delane Jackson, town manager, will direct you to Tater Shaw, a man who saw the carnage first-hand.

“Vampire lust”

Shaw lives in a nursing home not too far from Town Hall. On a recent October morning, the 87-year-old man, with his perfectly combed hair and neat long-sleeved gray shirt, sits in the commons area, people using walkers and canes clunking all around him.

“You want to know about the beast?” he says, throwing his hand up as if to shoe away someone. “Oh, you don’t want to talk about that. I’ve told that story before.”

It takes a little encouragement, but before long, he guides his electric wheelchair down the long, waxed linoleum corridor toward his room. You know you’ve reached it when you see a plaque on the door, “Tater’s Place” burnt into the wood.

Inside, bright family portraits and black-and-white World War II navy photos hang on the wall. Shaw glides over to a small table and pulls out a three-ring binder with typed pages out of the drawer. Years ago, a friend of his wrote a screenplay about the beast and based a character on Shaw. He seems quite proud of that.

Then, after shutting the book, Shaw gets comfortable in his wheelchair and says, “It started out one morning.”

Shaw, then the 35-year-old owner of a gas station, had heard about a goat killed on a fellow’s farm out on the edge of town. He’d been told there was something mighty odd about how it died. Curious, he decided to go see for himself.

“His head was flat as a fritter,” he says. “It had a great big ol’ track … It was weird.”

Shaw spreads four fingers of his right hand and places them on his left palm, simulating the size of the paw. Then he looks up and says the beast killed small cows, too, and “two or three” hogs.

Those details are missing from newspaper accounts of the time, though the Wilmington Morning Star (what is now the Star-News) and the Wilmington News, as well as others, thrived off the story for a good part of January 1954.

The stories start Jan. 4, 1954, with the deaths of three dogs, their “skulls crushed in and chewed.” There’s no mention of a goat, but then there’s a lot about this beast that is only uncovered with time.

People were already getting distressed enough to cause Police Chief Roy Fores to go out hunting for the killer with three coonhounds. The “dogs refused to follow the trail.”

Maybe they were smarter than their master. The next day, the chief released a chilling detail. Fores called it the “vampire aspect of the animal.”

The story in the Morning Star on Jan. 5 began, “This nervous town chewed its collective nails today, dreading the pitch of night that might bring a return visit by a mystery killer-beast with vampire lust… (Fores) said a dog found killed last night ‘was opened up today. And there wasn’t more than two or three drops of blood in him.’ In all three cases, the victims’ bottom lip had been broken open and his jawbone smashed back.”

People gettin’ crazy

Shaw remembers the fear. “Everybody was scared,” Shaw said. “Everybody, near ‘bout, that had a gun was carrying it.”

Irrationality began to set in. Locals claimed to have seen the beast, described it, then retracted their statements.

Another resident got trigger happy. He heard his dogs barking one night, looked through a window and saw a shadow. Grabbing his shotgun, he rushed outside, blasting away. On closer inspection, he found his child’s bicycle “crumpled to the ground with the tires in shreds and the seat ripped with buckshot.”

Witness accounts of the beast conflicted. Some said it was about 90 pounds, others said 100 or even 150 pounds. Some claimed it was black, or brown, or tabby, or just “dark in color.” Most people agreed it was a cat, but one veterinarian said it could be a big dog.

The sound is about the only thing people halfway agreed on. They described it as like either a baby or a woman crying, only louder and blood curdling.

“Anyhow, it was getting so bad, it was getting in the newspapers and the radio,” Shaw said. “There came hunters from all over, I mean big hunters.”

At the height of the hunt, according to newspaper accounts, 1,000 men armed with pistols, shotguns and rifles divided into posses and combed about 400 acres of swamp. Some were fraternity boys from UNC Chapel Hill looking for a good time; others were professional hunters accustomed to killing lions and tigers.

Bladenboro only had about 1,000 residents at the time. It only has about 1,700 now. You’d think that if anything was out there, somebody would’ve stepped on it.

Many of these hunters would stop by Shaw’s gas station on their way to the Green Swamp and brag about how they were the ones who were going to kill the beast. Those same men usually stopped back by after the hunt – and always empty-handed.

A friend of Shaw’s, Jabe Frink, also owned a gas station during this time. Frink lives in a brick house just a couple miles from the nursing home. He’s 82 and doesn’t mind talking about beast at all. Frink remembers one group of hunters who brought trained “bear dogs” to turn loose in the swamp. “They said they gonna ‘catch that vampire,’ but they never did,” he said.

Mostly, Frink remembers how terrified everyone was. “It kept snowballing and snowballing. It got so nobody would walk out on the street at night,” he said. “There was a dog that scared that lady on her porch, though.”

Frink is referring to a 21-year-old mother named Mrs. C.E. Kinlaw. She apparently walked out onto her front porch at about 7:30 p.m. January 6, 1954. She was minding her own business when she looked up and saw the “beast” stalking toward her. It was only about 20 feet away, she told the Morning Star.

Kinlaw screamed and ran into the house. Her husband, Charles Kinlaw, grabbed his shotgun and ran outside but only found cat-like paw prints all around his yard.

Everyone’s worst fears seemed to be confirmed. The beast had shown interest in a human.

Not long after that, S.W. Garrett, an experienced hunter from Wilmington, warned women and children to stay indoors. Residents were also advised to keep dogs, “whose nighttime howling reportedly grows more piteous nightly,” locked up indoors.

By Jan. 6, the victim count was up to at least six dogs including one that was dragged into the swamp,never seen again. The next day, the count jumped to seven.

As victims multiplied, town officials became more desperate.

Chief Fores considered tying a few dogs up in the woods as bait but Mayor W.G. Fussell called off.

The mayor may not have had his heart into the project anyway. His day job was owner of a local movie theater and he found a way to capitalize on the beast.

Fussell distributed flyers announcing: “Now you can see the cat. We’ve got him on our screen! And in Technicolor too! The Big Cat, all day Saturday, January 9.”

The day the movie ran, Fussell made another announcement — the hunt was off. The Morning Star headline that day read, “Vampire Beast Wins Battle of Bladenboro.”

The reason for the halt was safety, Fussell said. With so many hunters in the swamp, someone was liable to mistake a man for a beast.

Then, on Jan. 13, it seemed the mystery had come to an end just as quickly as it began. On that day a bobcat was caught in a steel trap, then finished off with a bullet to the brain.

Still, no one was certain this bobcat was the beast, not even Mayor Fussell.

“I just hope this is it,” he told the Morning Star. “If not, I just hope the other one starts down the road and keeps going.”

At home, Frink opens a drawer by his recliner and pulls out three square black-and-white photos. One shows his business partner, Bunny Prevatt, squatting over the cat at their gas station. Another shows Prevatt with a man named Blanco Duvall, holding the beast up by its front legs. The cat’s head only comes up to the man’s waist.

The last photo shows a crowd of people lined up to gawk at the outstretched feline.

“Cars were lined up around the block wanting to see the bobcat,” Frink said.

Seems the beast had the last laugh, though. That cat was barely cold in the grave when another headline ran: “Bladenboro ‘Beast’ Returns from Hiding.”

“I saw the hog,” Frink said. “That was about the last thing that happened.”

So what was the Beast of Bladenboro?

In 2008, the History Channel television series Monster Quest performed an analysis concerning these attacks, which were beginning to happen again, and concluded that the attacker might have been a cougar.

But what about the possibility of the beast being a Lynx? Or a lynx hybrid? The above illustration by Gary Longordo was based on specific features described by local eyewitnesses. Although their range once extended down into the northern portions of the United States, Canadian lynx have only been confirmed in Maine, Montana, Idaho and Washington, but could it be possible that if they show up in the continental U.S. at all, that one could have traveled out farther in search of food? They are twice the size of the southwestern bobcat and can get up to 40lbs.

Whatever the Beast of Bladenboro was, the story lives on as a time when all eyes focused on a usually quiet little town. So far, no one has been able to find any definitive evidence about the existence of the Beast of Bladenboro. Most attacks do not seem consistent with known area predators, so what could be lurking out in North Carolina’s swamps?

Source Credit(s): northcarolinaghosts.com/piedmont/beastofbladenboro.php, © Amy Hotz starnewsonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061029/NEWS/61027007/1051&tc=ar

Top Illustration: A rendering of the beast of Bladenboro © Gary Longordo
Bottom Illustration:John James Audubon (New York, 1785-1851) New York Lynx Canadensis…Canada Lynx, plate XVI, from [The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,] 1845-1848

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Sydney C. Squidney
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Calls From The Deep

It is almost certain that unseen creatures still lurk in the deep and dark oceans, creatures which are strange and fascinating. In the previously published article Tuning in to a deep sea monster posted at CNN, Marine Biologist Phil Lobel states that the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones in 1997, nicknamed “The Bloop” by researchers, is most likely to be biological in origin.

The unexplainable sound was detected by NOAA hydrophones several times during the summer of 1997, originating off the South American southwest coast at about 50° S 100° W (a remote point in the south Pacific Ocean west of the southern tip of South America). Each time that it was captured the ultra-low frequency sound rose rapidly in frequency over about one minute, and had sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors from over 3,000 miles away.


Listen to “The Bloop” here Coordinates: 50° 0′ 0″ S, 100° 0′ 0″ W

The sound shares many characteristics with those emanated from biological creatures, in fact it fits those parameters so closely that a large number of researchers are convinced that its origin is animal. But in order for an aquatic animal to emit a sound that can travel over 3,000 miles through Earth’s noisy oceans, scientists say that it would need an incredibly large noise-making apparatus, one much bigger than that of the blue whale, which have been recorded as the loudest animal in the world.


Theories abound as to the source of the Bloop. If it is the vocalization of a living organism, it is one which makes its home in the dark, cold depths of the ocean. Some have suggested that giant squids could be responsible for the sound, but that is unlikely considering that no known species of cephalopod have the gas-filled sac necessary to reach such great volumes. Indeed science has not recorded any animals– living or extinct– with nearly enough size to house the organs needed to produce the level of output demonstrated by the Bloop… so unless this mystery creature uses some unknown mechanism to generate sound, it is presumed to be an incredibly massive organism.

Upsweep, Julia, Slow Down, & Train

The Bloop is not the only mysterious sound heard in the ocean. In May 1997, hydrophones picked up the “Slowdown” sound. Over the course of about 7 minutes, it slowly dropped in pitch, rather like the sound of an aeroplane flying past. Its origin has been only loosely pinned down: it seems to have originated from somewhere off the west coast of South America, and could be heard from 2000 kilometres away.

Listen to “Slowdown” here Coordinate: 15° 0′ 0″ S, 115° 0′ 0″ W

The equatorial autonomous hydrophone arrays have also recorded a “long train of narrow-band upsweeping sounds of several seconds duration each.” They were heard across the entire Pacific Ocean. Although the sounds are said to be seasonal, they have been diminishing since 1991. Named “Upsweep”, this sound still remains unexplained.


Listen to “Upsweep” here Coordinates: 54° 0′ 0″ S, 140° 0′ 0″ W

On March 1, 1999, NOAA microphones tune in on a strange moan-like sound. Lasting about fifteen seconds, the sound originated from the equatorial Pacific Ocean. They named it “Julia”, its source has remained unknown.


Listen to the “Julia” sound here Coordinates: 15° 0′ 0″ S, 98° 0′ 0″ W

The same year as the Slow Down recording, once again the equatorial microphones picked up an anomalous sound. on March 5, 1997 on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array, the recording of a rising strange sound was captured. Known as the “Train“, the sound has not been heard since.


Listen to “Train” here

Whistle

July 7, 1997 another strange sound was heard in the Pacific Ocean. Although just a bit north from the equatorial recordings, this sound is just as mysterious. Lasting for about one minute the strange recording was dubbed the “Whistle”.


Listen to “Whistle” here Coordinates: 8° 0′ 0″ N, 110° 0′ 0″ W

We’ve yet to identify the sources of these mysterious sounds undulating from the depths of the Pacific. Of course, that doesn’t mean that these sounds are from some Kraken-like creature. Some explanations of the sounds being something geological are plausible, however, the NOAA admits that these sounds are unlike anything they’ve ever recorded. No volcanic, seismic or known animal sound has ever matched the powerful groans that were heard in a radius of five thousand kilometers.

An unknown animal just may have uttered these sounds while lingering at an unusually shallow depth. Unless researchers encounter the sound again, there is little chance that we’ll have any explanation more concrete than scientific speculation. But given their unusual properties and strong indications of a large biological origin, it makes for a compelling mystery.

Just remember that the Ocean makes up 70% of this planet and yet 95% of it remains unexplored.

Source(s): © Alan Bellows 23 April 2006 damninteresting.com/the-call-of-the-bloop, newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.500-13-more-things-the-bloop.html, ghosttheory.com/2012/02/28/strange-recordings-from-the-deep

Top Photo: South Pacific Ocean, 11 March 2009. Photo copyright Guo Chuan
Second Photo: The ROV Little Hercules hovers over the seafloor, shedding light on previously unseen terrain. Cutting edge technology like Little Hercules facilitates exploration and research in the deep-sea. Image courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, INDEX-SATAL 2010 oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/10index/logs/july12/media/rov_seafloor.html

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On The Track of The Gbahali

This interesting case about cryptids being reported in Liberia was shared by Loren Coleman over at Cryptomundo in which one of his readers, John-Mark Shephard, writes and offers these insights:

“I am an American working in Liberia, West Africa with an international relief and development organization. I have always had a bit of an interest in cryptozoology, and enjoy your website.

Liberia is covered in dense rainforest and has a low population density. Because of its long civil war (now over), it has been almost totally neglected by biologists and other scientists.

In my work in northwestern Liberia I have been hearing reports about several animals which may be of interest to you. Most notable is a large amphibious reptile known in the Bandi language as the “gbahali”.

It is described as being like a crocodile or monitor lizard, but much larger (up to 25 or 30 ft long). It has an armored back with three rows of serrations running down it, a powerful tail, and a short snout with many large teeth. It is known to be an ambush predator, carrying its prey underwater to drown before coming on shore to eat it.

I talked to a number of eyewitnesses who have seen this creature in recent years. I traveled to a village deep in the forest where fishermen used to actually catch these animals. They would use nets and shotguns to kill them, before butchering them and selling the meat in local markets such as in the large town of Massambolahun. They told me that they used to have a skull of the animal in the village, but it was destroyed along with everything else when rebels set fire to the village. When I showed the villagers a picture of a Postosuchus taken off the internet, they all agreed that that is how the head and body of the gbahali looks, although the legs are semi-erect like a crocodile.”

Postosuchus illustration from Wikipedia

Could an extinct species of crocodile have survived, could it be a surviving remnant descended from the first crocodile-like reptiles to live in West Africa that has evolved to shares many features with known living crocodiles like the Nile crocodile or is the creature that natives are seeing even a member of the genus Crocodylus? There are several extinct crocodiles known to have inhabited the region, but the Postosuchus was an rauisuchian, and while it was a close relative of crocodiles, I don’t know if any ever roamed Africa. (Any dinosaur people reading this, please feel free to educate me/send me an ask!) It would be interesting to know since my research found that rauisuchians developed an erect stance independently of, and different from that of dinosaurs, by means of having the femur vertical and angling the acetabulum ventrally, rather than having an angled neck or curve in the femur. This has been referred to as the pillar-erect posture. The erect gait indicates that these animals were clearly active, agile predators, with locomotor superiority over the kannemeyeriid dicynodonts and abundant rhynchosaurs on which they fed. They were successful animals, the largest with skulls up to a meter or more in length, and continued right until the end of the Triassic, when, along with many other large archosaurs, they were killed off by the end Triassic extinction event.

The First Crocodiles

Before the first true crocodiles emerged on the prehistoric scene, there were the phytosaurs (“plant lizards”): archosaurs that looked very much like crocodiles, except that their nostrils were positioned on the tops of their heads rather than the tips of their snouts. You might guess from their name that phytosaurs were vegetarians, but in fact they subsisted on fish and marine organisms in freshwater lakes and rivers worldwide. Among the most noteworthy phytosaurs were Rutiodon and Mystriosuchus.

Later Crocodiles

By the start of the Jurassic period (about 200 million years ago), crocodiles had mostly abandoned their terrestrial lifestyles. This is when we begin to see the marine adaptations that characterize modern crocodiles and alligators: Long bodies, splayed limbs, and narrow, flat, tooth-studded snouts with powerful jaws (a necessary innovation, since crocodiles feasted on dinosaurs and other animals that ventured too close to the water). There was still room for innovation, though: for example, paleontologists believe that Stomatosuchus subsisted on plankton and krill, like a modern grey whale.

Today’s crocodiles and alligators are little changed from their prehistoric ancestors, a telling clue that these reptiles were (and remain) extremely well adapted to their environment.

John-Mark Shephard went on to say:

“The river in which these creatures are said to live is very remote, passing through large areas of unihabited forest. They are said to mainly be seen during the rainy season, when they travel upstream to look for food. They are greatly feared by the local population, because they have been known to kill people.

As recently as this November 2007, someone was attacked and killed by a large unknown animal near a village called Gelema, on that river. The United Nations police went to investigate, and found out that only the man’s head and a few body parts were left on the river bank. In this same village, the town meeting house was built according to the length of a gbahali that was killed there in years gone by.

I know this might sound sensational, like a bad monster movie or something. I have lived in Liberia and have heard my share of tall tales about dwarfs and jinns and so forth. However, there is nothing fantastic or supernatural in the accounts I have been hearing. To them this is just another kind of water animal, albeit a very large and dangerous one! I talked to at least three people in different villages who have had encounters with these animals.”

The civil war has been over in Liberia since 2003. The country is in the process of rebuilding and is fairly stable now. But could these creatures really be living there? Rare pygmy hippos are surviving hidden in Liberia’s forests against all the odds, despite two civil wars that have ravaged their habitat. According to British scientists, the creatures, which are almost never seen in the wild, were spotted in Liberia’ Sapo National Park using special camera traps.

The West African country is one of the last refuges of the endangered pygmy hippopotamus but conservationists had feared recent forest destruction and poaching might have wiped them out.

“We were delighted to discover that a population still persists there, but remain highly concerned for the species, which continues to face significant threats from poaching and habitat degradation,” Collen said in a statement.

The animals — whose closest living relatives, besides the common hippopotamus, are whales — hide themselves away in the rapidly shrinking Upper Guinean forest ecosystem.

The forest has been hit by unsustainable logging and mining operations, which were especially devastating during the civil wars. When considering that only 10 percent of the original Upper Guinean forest is left, of which Liberia accounts for about 40 percent, it’s disconcerting to realise both the rarely seen, endangered pygmy hippo and this “Gbahli” could be wiped out before their habitats can recover. We may never discover what the Gbahali really is.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rauisuchia, dinosaurs.about.com/od/typesofdinosaurs/a/crocodilians.htm, cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/gbahali/, dalje.com/en-lifestyle/liberias-pygmy-hippos-survive-two-civil-wars/130504

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

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Atmospheric Beasts and the Crawfordsville Monster

Atmospheric beasts are the strangest of the flying monsters from cryptozoology. According to eyewitness reports, they are things that seem like living creatures, but they break all the usual rules that we apply to living things. They fly without the need for wings and their bodies are only semi-solid, often partially invisible to boot. Many atmospheric beast sightings were originally classified as really unusual UFO reports (in the sense of UFOs being defined as supposed alien spacecraft or machines of some other sort, not in the technical sense of being unidentified flying objects). Noted Bigfoot author Ivan T. Sanderson devoted an entire book to the theory that many UFOs are actually extremely low density animals native to the clouds.

Top Photo: Atmospheric sky jellyfish Bottom Photo: Strange, dragon-like object allegedly photographed from a plane over Tibet.

One of the most famous atmospheric beasts is the Crawfordsville Monster.

The Crawfordsville monster is the name given to an unidentified flying creature that was allegedly sighted in the skies of the small town of Crawfordsville, Indiana in 1891.

Some contemporary cryptid resources list the Crawfordsville monster as being a serpent or dragon, others label it an atmospheric beast.

The story of the Crawfordsville monster was first published in the Indianapolis Journal in September 1891, and was later picked up by the September 10 Issues of the Brooklyn Eagle. It has since become part of local folklore and has been investigated by prominent anomalous phenomena investigator Charles H. Fort.

Much of what is currently recorded about the creature comes from interviews conducted by Vincent P. Gaddis, a journalist working in Crawfordsville, and member of the Fortean Society. Gaddis contends that the monster was a living creature, and not a mechanical UFO.

“All the reports refer to this object as a living thing — in other words, one of the hypothetical atmospheric life forms that would figure in early theories about unidentified flying objects.” Vincent Gaddis

Sightings

There have only been two reported sightings of the Crawfordsville monster, both during the 19th century. The first alleged sighting reportedly occurred at 2AM on 4 September 1891 when the creature was seen circling a local house before flying away to the east, returning some time later and then flying out of sight. It was witnessed by Methodist pastor Reverend G.W. Switzer, his wife, and two men working to hitch a wagon. It was this sighting that was initially reported by the press.

The second alleged sighting occurred on September 6, 1891, when the atmospheric creature reportedly flew over the town and was witnessed by over 100 people.

Appearance

Descriptions of the creature vary, with some accounts suggesting that it had no head, and others describing it as having glowing red eyes and hot breath. Accounts generally agree that it is a large rectangular creature, possibly eel like in appearance, with several undulating fins down the sides of its body. It was estimated to be twenty feet long and eight feet wide. Witnesses at the second appearance described the creature as writhing and squirming, and as producing a wheezing sound, as if it were in pain.

Charles Fort

The case of the Crawfordsville monster was investigated by Charles Fort, who first encountered the story in the September 10, 1891 issue of the Brooklyn Eagle. At first Fort believed witness Switzer to be fictitious, but ultimately Fort came to find him and correspond with him. Fort included references to the creature in his 1931 book Lo!.

For those who believe, atmospheric beasts are very fragile and lightweight creatures who are either native to Earth or are aliens that came from elsewhere. If the latter view is taken, then atmospheric beasts are sometimes thought to have originated in the atmosphere of some other planet, but they can also be thought of as originating in interstellar gas clouds so that they are, in effect, aliens without a native planet, able to “swim” through space. Believers generally consider atmospheric beasts to be non-intelligent, so that even if these creatures did originate somewhere other than earth, they still don’t count as sentient extraterrestrials. They’re just animals.

In various eyewitness accounts, atmospheric beasts can change their density, becoming smaller, harder masses that are usually metallic in color, or they can become larger and cloudlike, even to the point of invisibility. In some reports, they may glow. Atmospheric beasts may roughly resemble whales and are sometimes called air whales or cloud beasts. Believers think that the atmospheric beasts’ normal habitat is high in the air, and they might die if they ever touch the ground. Atmospheric beasts that resemble clouds may engage in behavior that is thought to be impossible for a real cloud, such as squirting a stream of horizontal water at people through “lips” or being far too mobile and animate for witnesses to believe it was just a patch of fog. The more solid kinds of atmospheric beasts may have mouths, eyes, flippers and other features, but these body parts are generally arranged and shaped in a fashion that looks utterly alien, more like an ocean invertebrate’s body plan than any animal we are used to seeing on a daily basis.

It is said that when atmospheric beasts die, they fall to earth as a gelatinous mass that may resemble a green, purple, gray or iridescent jelly that evaporates into nothing within minutes, hours, or, at the longest, a few days. This is supposed to explain a type of anomalous event, pwdre ser, that puzzled scientists for some time before they decided that pwdre ser did not exist. Pwdre ser is Welsh for “rot from the stars.” This phenomena is also known as gelatinous meteorites or star jelly, and reports of it come from around the world, not just from Wales. Gelatinous meteorites are not always connected with the atmospheric beast theory; they are actually easier to find among collections of Forteana that include reports of many different odd things falling from the sky.

Atmospheric beasts, or things that sound like them, are minor characters in the folklore of many regions. They are often given local names. The English variety is often named “Boneless” or “Shapeless” and resembles a small patch of living, animate fog. Unlike fog, it can be felt as a semi-solid mass. One policeman described an encounter with this creature that had supposedly happened while bicycling. The thing felt like a soft blanket and smelled like mildew. After it rubbed against him, it floated away. It was one of the most terrifying experiences he had ever had. He was convinced that the thing was a living creature. In the Shetland Islands, atmospheric beasts are known as “It” and are thought to be “cloud animals” of some sort. Just as the sea has its own life that is often hidden from view, it is thought that the clouds form a vast atmospheric “sea” far above us, and that “It” is merely an animal that is native to the clouds. Those who report being physically touched by atmospheric beasts often say they felt as if they were being licked by an enormously soft tongue.

In the later decades of the twentieth century, the atmospheric beast theory had been almost forgotten. Serious investigators usually stayed away from it. But, today, interest in atmospheric beasts has been growing, mainly because they now seem more plausible after the recent discovery of what might be a related cryptozoological animal: air rods. People have begun to comb through older reports of miscellaneous random unexplained stuff, a place where a few atmospheric beasts often lurk, and they have also re-examined some of the weirdest UFO reports, which sometimes sound a great deal like the witnesses are actually describing atmospheric beasts.
Cloud-like object photographed over Richmond, Virginia.

In October 2011, Brent Swancer posted an article at Cryptomundo regaurding atmospheric beasts:

Tsunamis and Sky Beasts

On March 11, 2011, a huge earthquake occurred off Tohoku Japan, which in turn unleashed a massive tsunami that battered the Japanese coast. The ensuing devastation left thousands dead or homeless, and damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant, leading to one of the worst nuclear disasters the world has seen since Chernobyl.

Almost immediately, a steady progression of images of carnage began to spread out to televisions all over the world. We saw the unstoppable wall of water obliterating all in its path, whole towns leveled, houses and ships thrown about like toys in a bathtub, nuclear reactors spewing ominous clouds of smoke, and unthinkable human suffering. Right there before our eyes was nature’s might laid bare in all its terrible splendor for all to look upon with shock and awe.

In the months after this tragic event, the country scrambled to repair the damage and lockdown nuclear reactors that threatened critical meltdown. As the world looked on with horror, a strange pattern of phenomena also began to emerge from the crisis, mostly hidden from the mainstream media eye. Some people were seeing not only the damage wrought by the tsunami, but also something strange that they could not explain.

The days after the Japanese tsunami disaster saw a deluge of various reports of strange, unexplained objects in the skies above the earthquake stricken areas. These reports of unidentified objects understandably caused quite a bit of buzz among UFO enthusiasts, and speculation abounded across the internet of aliens observing or by some estimates even causing the disaster.

However, were these accounts of anomalous flying objects truly caused by aliens, or did they derive from something else entirely? I find myself wondering, could the flood of UFO reports after the tsunami at least in part have its roots in something more cryptozoological in nature? Is there a biological answer to this strange flap of sightings? It seems to me that it is worth considering that perhaps it is not aliens we should be looking at, but rather what has proven to be one of the more bizarre and little discussed types of flying cryptids.

For centuries, reports have surfaced of strange creatures inhabiting the skies above us. Atmospheric beasts, or atmospheric life-forms, as they are often called, are said to be organisms that live their entire lives floating high in the atmosphere undetected by humans.  These creatures are most often described as having bodies that are semi-solid, or almost insubstantial, with some reports even claiming that they are able to adjust their density from almost immaterial and invisible to more solid, depending on as yet unknown factors.

The appearance of these atmospheric beasts varies wildly. Accounts have variously described them as amorphous and cloud-like behemoths, finned squid-like creatures, floating jellyfish, translucent, vaporous blobs, amoeba-like organisms, and even dragons. The sizes of atmospheric beasts likewise run the gamut from tiny and bird-like, to gargantuan monsters hundreds of feet long.

Although these enigmatic creatures are said to typically lurk too high in the atmosphere or to be too insubstantial to see with the naked eye, there are instances when one might become observable for some reason. Indeed, sightings of atmospheric beasts, although rare, do pop up from time to time. There has been a substantial amount of reports over the years describing unusual flying monsters that do not fit into the typical mold of thunderbirds or other flying cryptids. These atmospheric life forms have even allegedly been photographed on occasion.

In addition, the possibility of these denizens of the sky has caused speculation that they may in fact even be the direct cause of many UFO sightings.  Large ones, it is hypothesized, could be seen and reported as UFOS. There has even been some conjecture that what appear to be artificial lights reported on some UFOs could in reality be a form of bioluminescence.

The idea of these hypothetical atmospheric life forms as an explanation for at least some UFO reports is not new. The famed cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson himself was fascinated by the idea of giant animals swimming through the air above us, and wrote a good deal about them. Among Sanderson’s various hypotheses and musings concerning atmospheric beasts was the notion that many UFO reports may be in fact attributable to these sky dwelling creatures.

Indeed, when one looks at some of the photos taken of mysterious objects in the sky, it is easy to get a sense that we are perhaps looking at something biological in nature rather than artificial.

UFO author Trevor James Constable also noted in his 1975 book The Cosmic Pulse of Life, that the UFO phenomena may well be caused by the presence of some kind of goliath beasts inhabiting the skies. He further speculated that 20^th century radar might disturb such creatures, causing them to become more solid and visible to the naked eye, or to drop down to lower altitudes where they would be more readily sighted.

This bit of speculation leads to the interesting notion that these creatures, if they do indeed exist, may perhaps use some sort of navigation system to maintain their bearings and find their way.  This is not such a far out possibility, as many known organisms utilize such systems. If such atmospheric organisms did in fact use some sort of navigation system, then they would possibly become disoriented when this system was disrupted, much as sonar does to some whales. If this is the case, then it would in turn lead us directly back to the tsunami disaster in Japan.

The thing is that earthquakes and tsunamis influence more than just the Earth and the seas. When the powerful earthquake hit Japan on March 11, it not only jolted the Earth, but also shook the skies above. When earthquakes and tsunamis occur, they generate surface motion that in turn can trigger waves that can shoot up all the way to one of the highest parts of the upper atmosphere, to what is known as the ionosphere. These events are known as seismotravelling ionospheric disturbances.

Recent research done in Japan has shown that the March 11 earthquake generated the largest such atmospheric disturbance ever recorded. It was an estimated three times more powerful than the next largest, which was recorded during the 2004 Sumatran earthquake.  The March 11 disturbance created waves of large amounts of electrically charged particles travelling 720 to 800 kph (450 to 500 mph) that reached up to around 350km (220 miles) above the Earth.

One effect of these disturbances is their ability to disrupt radio and other signals, which is in fact one of the ways scientists use to measure them.  If atmospheric beasts do exist high above us, and if in fact they do use some sort of navigation system that can be disrupted by things such as radar, then what might such a large, earthquake induced atmospheric disturbance do to them?

It should be noted that the March 11 Japanese earthquake and tsunami was not the only such disaster to be accompanied by a rash of sightings of strange things in the sky. The second largest such atmospheric disturbance, the Sumatran earthquake and tsunami of 2004, also was accompanied by a large amount of  UFO sightings. Is there the possibility that the earthquake induced atmospheric waves deriving from these disasters are somehow disrupting sensitive navigation systems of some sort of atmospheric life-form and thus bringing them down from their typical habitats? 

For now we do not know if these creatures exist, so it is hard to say what is going on. One might even marvel at how something as seemingly farfetched as these proposed atmospheric organisms could even fit into our current understanding of biology. Yet the same could have once been said of other unique organisms and ecosystems we have discovered that did not fit into any known model at the time.

There was a time when the idea of thriving organisms in the cold, black, crushing pressure of the deep sea seemed just as weird. Sulphur loving deep sea vent organisms that thrive in an extreme ecosystem almost completely independent of sunlight and photosynthesis seemed at one time just as outlandish and bizarre. Indeed sometimes truth can be as strange as fiction, if not stranger.

At this point, this is of course all speculation, but whenever I read something about the apparent spike in UFO sightings following the March 11 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, I find it interesting to speculate on these possible cryptozoological implications. I cannot help but think that in this case, perhaps we don’t need to look at strange, otherworldly explanations for these phenomena, but rather the strange things that we might find right here on our own planet.

It may be worth looking at the possibility of unknown animals that in this instance lurk not within far away, unexplored forests and swamps, or the remote, murky depths of the lakes and oceans of the world, but rather in the vast skies above our heads right at this very moment.

Sources: creativespirits.net/definitions/types-ufos/crawfordsville-monster, newanimal.org/a-beasts.htm, cryptomundo.com/cryptotourism/sky-beasts/

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Cave Demons and Giant Bat-like Creatures

Large bat-like creature sighting in California

Normally, only UFO and extraterrestrial sightings are reported to MUFON but on Saturday, June 5, 2010 an interesting account of a bat-like creature, purported to have been seen near Lodi, California was reported:

MUFON Case 23617
2010-05-14 at 02:45
Lodi, California

“I had taken my dogs for a run early in the morning - about 2:30 on May 14th 2010. I was southeast of Lodi on Live Oak Road where the road to the winery intersects. There are outside lights and I saw something crouched in the road which I thought at first was a coyote eating something. Then it stood up and was about 4 1/2 feet tall so I knew it wasn’t a coyote. It stooped back down and appeared to gather up whatever it had been eating; gave a little hop and soared away over the grapevines in an up down, up down motion. The wings sort of glistened in the light and did not seem to have feathers. I thought it looked like a gigantic bat, but have never heard of a bat that big. The dogs seemed to be frightened and jumped into the car. I was so amazed at what I saw.”

What are they?

According to mainstream science, the world’s biggest bat is the Bismark flying fox, an animal that never gets larger than six feet from wingtip to wingtip. According to cryptozoology, mainstream scientists might be wrong. Many sightings from seemingly reliable people suggest that this might not be the case.

Giant Bat People or Just Giant Bats of Lore?

Sightings of mysterious human-sized bats have been reported in all corners of the world. They are described as having black or gray fur, a monkey-like face, clawed feet and a 10-15 foot wingspan.



In Brazil they are called “bat people.” The rainforests of Java echo the cries of a bat creature called the “Ahool” because of its distinct “a-hool” vocalization.

The island of Java, not very far from the Bismark flying fox’s home of New Guinea, is supposed to harbor this cryptid bat with a twelve-foot wingspan. The Ahool eats fish and has gray fur and a flattened face with huge black eyes, with its head overall looking like a monkey’s head. It is not attributed with supernatural powers, and seems like such a plausible animal that it has drawn the attention of naturalists. If a giant bat lived anywhere, the dense rainforests of Java would be a likely place.

In Vietnam they are known as “night flyers.” These winged humanoids are generally 5 feet tall with eerie feminine features. They are known to swoop down on their victims and attack several times.

Another plausible place for an undiscovered giant bat to live is Cameroon, a country in Africa where scientists have reported seeing a very similar bat. This creature is apparently called the olitiau by locals. It also has a twelve-foot wingspan with thin membranous skin and a monkey-like face, but its fur is pure black. The beings are described as terrifying to look upon, with what looks like a mixture of human or monkey and bat-like features in the face. Long, wild, disheveled, hair around the head, much like a mane, with pitch black fur covering the entirety of it’s body. The body of the fearsome creature stands about the size of a human being upon clawed feet and it’s teeth which can clearly be seen, are razor sharp, pointed daggers. It is regarded with a great deal of superstition and fear. It is not improbable that both of these bats might have monkey-like faces. Bats have a notoriously wide variety of head shapes, and many known species have heads resembling different animals such as foxes, dogs, lemurs or even horses!

Another possible African giant bat is the kongamato, which has also been interpreted as a pterosaur by some people. This creature is not quite so large, has reddish fur, and has a long snout instead of a flattened face. Madagascar, a large island just off the coast of Africa, has tales about a bat called the fangalabolo, with a wingspan larger than 5 feet, bigger than any other bat known to live in Madagascar.

The Guiafairo of Senegal in West Africa is described as a giant bat that is very smelly and often manages to terrify people by making its way indoors. It is hated very much, and its name translates to “the fear that flies by night.” The Guiafairo is mentioned in Karl Shuker’s “The Secret Animals of Senegambia” in the November 1998 issue of Fate Mag where it is described as having a human face and is said to be able to appear behind locked doors.

The mlularuka of Tanzania is perhaps the most tame and ordinary of undiscovered African bats. Like known species of giant bats, it is a fruit-eater and thus is mainly spoken of as a pest to agriculture. It is described as being the size of a dog.

Other giant bat reports sound less plausible and shade off into an area where it is nearly impossible to separate the few facts that might exist from the masses of folklore and the paranormal that these alleged facts are buried in. One such creature is the sasabonsam from Ghana in Africa. Depicted in folklore as a bearded human with bat wings, the one known body (which has sadly disappeared, along with the only photograph of it) was described as being far less human than the legends say. It was an animal like a huge bat, with a twenty-foot wingspan and stiff black-and-white spotted fur. It had huge teeth and heavy ridges over its eyes.

The Indonesian orang-bati is even more mythical. These human/bat monsters live in an extinct volcano on the island of Seram and abduct children. Still, some researchers working in the field of cryptozoology think that a real bat may be hiding behind these fantastical tales.

Giant vampire bat reports are generally kept separate from giant bat reports, mainly because the giant vampire bat is large for a vampire bat, but still medium-sized when compared to bats in general.

In Mexico, an ancient Mayan cult worshiped the “death bat.”

Around 100 B.C., a peculiar religious cult grew up among the Zapotec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico. The cult venerated an anthropomorphic monster with the head of a bat, an animal associated with night, death, and sacrifice. This monster soon found its way into the pantheon of the Quiché, a tribe of Maya who made their home in the jungles of what is now Guatemala. The Quiché identified the bat-deity with their god Zotzilaha Chamalcan, the god of fire.

Popol Vuh, a Mayan sacred book, identifies Zotzilaha as not a god, but a cavern, “The House of Bats”. Zotzilaha was home to a type of bat called camazotz; one of these monsters decapitated the hero Hunahpú. Camazotz has been translated as “death bat” and “snatch bat”. It is recorded in chapter 10 of this book that the Camazotz’s call was similar to eek, eek. A vastly different story appears in Chapter 3. Here a demon called Camalotz, or “Sudden Bloodletter”, clearly a single entity, is identified as one of four animal demons which slew the impious first race of men.

In the Latin American region, it seems that the ancient belief in the “death bat” survives even to the present day. Several cultures have traditions of bat-demons or winged monsters; for example, legends of the h?ik’al, or Black-man, still circulate among the Zotzil people of Chiapas, Mexico. Perhaps revealingly, the H?ik’al is sometimes referred to as a “neckcutter”. Other bat-demons include the soucouyant of Trinidad and the tin tin of Ecuador.

Yet another similar creature appears in the folklore of rural Peru and Chile. The chonchon is a vampire-type monster; and it is truly bizarre, even for a legendary creature. It is said that after a person’s death, the head will sometimes sprout enormous ears and lift off from the shoulders. This flying head is the Chonchon; its sound, as recorded by Jorge Luis Borges, was like tui-tui-tui. Could the legends of the Chonchon have sprung from the same source as the Camazotz legends?

But what exactly was the basis for the Camazotz legend? Most archaeologists believe that the monster was based on the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), a bat traditionally associated with bloodletting and sacrifice. Another suspect is the false vampire bat (Vampyrum spectrum), due to its large size and habit of attacking prey around the head or neck.

One of the most prominent and commonly mentioned features of the Camazotz is “a nose the shape of a flint knife”, which could be an exaggerated interpretation of the nose-leaf possessed by members of the Phyllostomidae, or leaf-nosed bats. The vampire bat is a relative or member of this group; thus we are once more forced to look at D. rotundus, or its relatives, as suspects.

In 1988, a species of fossil bat related to Desmodus rotundus, but 25 percent larger, was described as D. draculae. It was described on the basis of two specimens from Monagas State, Venezuela. A third specimen from São Paulo State, Brazil, was described in a 1991 article by E. Trajano and M. de Vivo. The Brazilian specimen had not yet been dated when the article was written, but the two biologists suggest a “relatively recent age” for the skeleton. They refer to reports circulating among local natives of large bats which attack cattle and horses; these reports may suggest that the bat still lives. Its recent age and large range suggest that the bat could have co-existed with the Quiché, giving rise to the legends of the Camazotz. Trajano and de Vivo also speculate that D. draculae may have fed on larger prey than did normal-sized vampire bats; possibly even humans?

Several other stories supporting the idea of a large bat-like creature have come out of Latin America in the last century. A 1947 report of a creature presumed to have been a living pterosaur may in fact have been of a large bat. J. Harrison saw five “birds” with a wingspan of about 12 feet. Harrison’s birds were brown, featherless, and beaked.

The next report of a bat-like monster from the area is a story told by a Brazilian couple, the Reals. One night in the early 1950s, they were walking through a forest outside of Pelotas, Brazil, when they saw two large “birds” in a tree, both of which alighted on the ground. Although reported as winged humanoids, the proximity of the sighting area to the Ribeira Valley, where the Brazilian specimen of D. draculae was found, forces one to wonder whether the Reals’ “birds” were actually bats.

In March, 1975, a series of animal mutilations swept the countryside near the Puerto Rican town of Moca, and during the incident a man named Juan Muñiz Feliciano claimed that he was attacked by a large, gray-feathered creature. These bird-like creatures were seen numerous times during the outbreak.

These reports didn’t gain real notoriety until the mid-1970s, when a number of sightings of large birds or bats surfaced in Rio Grande Valley, Texas. The first report came from the town of San Benito, where three people reputedly encounters with a bald-headed creature. But rumors had long circulated among the Mexican inhabitants of the town about a large bird-like creature, believed to make tch-tch-tch sounds.

On New Year’s Day, 1976, two girls near Harlingen watched a large, birdlike creature with a “gorilla-like” face, a bald head, and a short beak. The next day, a number of three-toed tracks were found in the field where the creature had stood. On January 14, Armando Grimaldo said he was attacked by the creature at Raymondville. He said it was black, with a monkey’s face and large eyes. Further reports surfaced from Laredo and Olmito, with a final sighting reported from Eagle Pass on January 21.

The reports cited above, as well as countless others which await careful researchers, support a conclusion that a mysterious winged creature exists in the deserts and jungles of Mesoamerica. The prominence of the bat in Latin American mythology and the discovery of the recently-extinct Desmodus draculae in South America point to the possible identity of the creature as a large, as-of-yet unknown bat, rather than a living pterosaur, as is generally supposed.

New Species or Ancient Beast?

A number of bat species that are just as big or bigger might be out there, waiting for science to formally recognize them.

In this ever changing world, it seems as if mysteries and bizarre creatures are around every dark corner and can be found in deep bodies of murky water. They appear in abandoned buildings, colossal tracks of desolate land, spooky swamps and the vastness of our underground and cliff side cave systems.

The show ” Lost Tapes” ran a program on Animal Planet, that was all about these mysterious winged beings.

The show highlighted famed naturalist , Ivan T. Sanderson who journeyed on an expedition in 1932, to the Rain Forest of Cameroon and found an extraordinarily fearsome entity. The report given by Sanderson stated upon entering a cave, the entire exploring party were swooped down upon, by giant bat-like beings. Ivan’s exact words described them as, “Black as coal with membranous wings and long sharp teeth!”



Other surprising accounts come from soldiers who have been at war, throughout our history. A large number of men have come forward and given testimony to this creature, that comes soaring out, when the sun begins to set in the sky. Maybe it is because the soldiers are exposed to the open of the night, when hunkered down in the fields, that they have had so many sightings.

Although not as common in the United States as other parts of the world, it has been sighted on our soil numerous times. The most widely recorded account belongs to mountaineer Butch Whittaker. The sighting took place in the year 1994, when Butch was out preparing to climb Mt. St. Helens, in the state of Washington. In the broad light of day, the creature soared overhead near the volcano top and even though Butch was in a state of disbelief about what he was seeing, he managed to get several photographs of the winged humanoid, before it completely disappeared. It was later described by Butch as having blood-red eyes, purplish toned skin, wings of a Pterodactyl and the head and face of monkey mixed with the features of a bat. It was immediately dubbed, “Batsquatch.”

On the descriptions of the Cave Demon, ALL who have had an encounter and lived to tell about it, state that it is clearly a bat/something (human or primate) type of creature.

So once again we find our self asking the same question, What are they?

Sources: cryptoflorida.webs.com/apps/blog/show/3948914-large-bat-creature-sighted-in-california, newanimal.org/gbats.htm, kellyskrazynews.blogspot.com/2010/02/cave-demons.html, blueroadrunner.com/camazotz.htm

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