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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
Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??
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