Winged Manta Ray Shaped Cryptid - Near Ashton, WV

Lon Strickler of Phantoms and Monsters received the following email in reference to his post The Mothman Cometh:

“Hi Lon, thanks for responding so quickly. Here are my drawings and report. Chris Holly reported my story pretty much verbatim, so I will repeat it here for you in a slightly different form.

Date: Dec. 3, 2004

Time:6:00 - 7:00pm

Weather Conditions: clear and already dark. Moon hadn’t risen yet

Location: Traveling south on Rt.2 in WV from Point Pleasant to Huntington WV. Near Ashton WV (see map)

A friend and I were traveling on Rt. 2 towards Huntington WV. I was on my way to set up my booth for an art show and my mind was occupied with the booth set up and show logistics. We had just gone over the railroad tracks outside of Ashton WV and were on a long straight stretch of road. There was distant oncoming traffic and the headlights were on. There were no cars behind us in sight. I was in the passenger seat and my friend was driving. I noticed a sudden movement in the sky over the Ohio River to my right in front of the car. It was a greyish, smooth, winged shape. the shape swooped in a figure 8 in front of the windshield and then was suddenly gone to the left of us. It didn’t fly out of sight, it was just gone. This happened very quickly, but as I am a visual artist, it was impressed into my memory banks!



Size: Bigger than the car. The wingspread was wider than the 2 lane road we were on. The wings seemed to stretch wider somehow as it did the figure 8 swoop. It was never more than 25 feet away from us as it flew towards the windshield. We thought it was going to crash into the windshield! At one point during the swoop it was only about 5 feet off of the pavement.

Color: Grey, translucent like a jellyfish. As it banked and swooped I could see many angles of it and somehow it looked more transparent as it turned some parts to us. I immediately thought it was like a manta ray. The body was flattish like a manta ray or a bat. The wings were long and smooth and sort of pointed at the tip. I saw no texture or roughness on it, only smooth surface.

Characteristics: Only body and wings- no head, eyes, tail, or feet. It did not look humanoid in any way. On the other hand, it wasn’t a bird either. It moved more like something in the ocean would move - Did not flap the wings like a bird, or flutter them like a bat, but stretched them instead. My friend (who alas passed away a year ago) said to him the wings looked ragged like there were pieces coming off of them.



He also said he got a good look at the underneath and it looked grey and smooth. This absolutely was not a machine! It was articulated like a living creature and seemed like something organic.

As I look back on this sighting, I wonder if it was something playing with us - It happened so quickly that the only scary part was when we thought it was going to crash into the windshield. It was so beautiful and strange! It reminded me of a sea creature more than anything else, maybe our air is like water to them.

The only other time in my life I have ever seen anything remotely similar was in 2000 in Clay Co. WV, driving along a one lane road along the Elk River (a river was present in both instance -I just realized) In that case, I was alone and for about a mile as I drove, I kept noticing a shimmer in front of the car about 15 feet ahead of the car. This was late morning in the summer. It preceeded the car at the same distance for several minutes, then I noticed a shadow on the road too, large and shaped sort of like a bird. I looked up out of the windshield and there was a large crow flying above me. But what I first saw in front of the car was not a shadow, it was a disturbance in the air in front of my car that looked like a heat mirage sort of but was very close. This was a curvy country road right by the river. I had never seen heat mirages on that road before or since. At the time I thought that it was just sort of weird, then very close to that time I had a very lucid dream that I was in my car flying over the river right near the place where I saw the shadow.

As an artist, my mind is open to many possibilities and explanations - I think the unseen world is just a small vibrational frequency away. As a child I was fascinated by fairies and nature spirits and spent a lot of time alone outdoors.”

NOTE: though there have been several variations in describing the ‘Mothman’, this particular description is unique and most likely represents another cryptid or non-terrestrial entity. As well as the Mothman sightings, the area along the Ohio River (southern Ohio and southwest West Virginia) has had a large number of other paranormal events including UFOs, large apparitions and hauntings, native and folklore based creatures, etc…Lon

Lon Strickler is the author of Phantoms & Monsters: Cryptid Encounters a collection of personal cryptid encounter reports submitted by regular people who felt compelled to find answers about their unexplained experience.

Source Credit(s): (Permission Granted) Phantoms and Monsters http://naturalplane.blogspot.com/2010/08/winged-manta-ray-shaped-cryptid-near.html

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

If you enjoyed this post please comment, Like ♥ and share! Also follow on http://twitter.com/cryptidfans and http://www.facebook.com/CryptidChronicles

Discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures at Cryptid Chronicles and please vote in our Cryptid Art Tournament!

Thank you!

Your Chronicler,
Sydney C. Squidney
cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com

The Creature Of
Tagua Tagua Lagoon

The legend of this creature is little known, even for residents of San Vicente in the country’s 6th region, but this discovery returns a piece of their history to them. The horrible creature in the etching that accompanies this article is the little-known Monster of Tagua Tagua lagoon, a legendary creature that not even the residents of San Vicente, in Chile’s 6th region, have ever heard of.

The indescribably horrifying creature was relegated to oblivion for over 2 centuries until two Spanish researchers discovered the drawing among thousands of documents in the Madrid National Library. Thus, the anonymous etching made in Chile in 1784 became the poster for the exposition “Monsters and Other Imaginary Beings” that took place in the Spanish capital to great popular acclaim.

The winged, two-tailed figure with scales and a human face had a well-deserved presence among nearly 200 images, just as unreal, belonging to such artists as Goya, Durero, Ribera, Brueghel, Holbein, Picart and Kircher. Plates extracted from classics of literature and scientific texts—largely from the 15th and 18th centuries, were also on exhibit.
 
Under the drawing of the monster, a true bibliographic jewel, it can be read that it appeared in early 1784 at the farm of Don Próspero Elso and that “it did great damage, eating all manner of animals and drinking from the lagoon, until 100 men stealthily ambushed it with firearms and caught it alive.”
 
The description is very detailed: “It measures three and a half rods long and its tail is bigger than its body. It legs are nearly a quarter [rod] but its claws are much larger. Its mane reaches the ground so that it entangles around its feet. The upper tail…helps it to catch its prey. The teeth are some 30 cm long and the mouth is as wide as its face. Its horns are a rod and a half long and very well-turned, and finally, it ears are are three quarters of a rod long.
 
Even more curious: an address — Calle de Carretas No.8 — is given for those interested in seeing it.
 
The spectacular Madrid exposition, unprecedented in Europe, featured cyclops, dwarves, giants, two headed or six-fingered creatures, hermaphrodites, lion-men, bearded or multi-breasted women. However, the organizers of this exhibit — Javier Moscoso, a professor with the University of Murcia, and Antonio Lafuente, fellow of the Superior Center for Scientific Research — believe that “the presence of horns is one of the definite signs of monstrosity. Our selection has been based, on the one hand, by the richness of the image and by the historical importance, on the other.
 
To some residents of San Vicente de Tagua Tagua, the legend that gave rise to the monster was possibly a reflection of the fears, nightmares and anguish felt at the time. After all, this wasn’t the first time that the existence of fantastic creatures in the area was suspected, and sometimes quite rightly. That was where the Inca Empire came to an end, and in recent decades the remains of 14 mammoths from 11,000 years ago were discovered, making the place one of the richest sites in America for modern archaeology. However, no one imagined that the most recent discovery would be an item forgotten thousands of kilometers away, in Madrid’s National Library.
 
San Vicente residents recall that the Tagua Tagua Lagoon — drained in the 1930s — was notorious for its “chivines”: floating islands formed by a dense and firm network of roots, so resilient that they could bear the weight of a horse. Deceived by the large size of some of these “chivines”, cattle would climb onto them to graze, realizing only too late that the floating island had been taken away by the current without any hope of escape. That’s how the legend emerged among natives and Spaniards about a monster that dragged cattle into the lake. Armed groups of hunters were even organized to capture it.
 
Originally featured in La Tercera (Santiago de Chile) 1-13-2 p.18
 
Translation (c) 2005, Scott Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Liliana Núñez.
mitológicos del territorio nacional.

Source Credit(s): Copyright © Scott Corrales INEXPLICATA - The Journal of Hispanic UfologyArchivos Forteanos de Latinoamérica6-9-5 http://rense.com/general66/tagua.htm Copyright Jeff Rense © rense.com

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

Please post your comments!

Discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures at Cryptid Chronicles and please vote in our Cryptid Tournament!

If you enjoyed this post please comment, Like ❤ and share! Also follow on twitter @cryptidfans and now on http://www.facebook.com/CryptidChronicles

Thank you!

Your Chronicler,
Sydney C. Squidney
cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com

The Roc - Old World Thunderbird

Seven hundred years ago, Arab traders told of a bird so huge it could lift elephants into the sky.

The Roc, also known as Rukh, is the Old World version of the thunderbird.  Rocs derive from ancient Arabic and Persian legends. These spectacular avian giants were said to be eagle-like and subsist primarily on elephants, which they would kill by flying to a great height then dropping the unfortunate creature to crash to its death on the rocks below and then carried it away to their nests.



Sailors said it lived on an island off the southern coast of Africa and it is mentioned in both Marco Polo’s Book of Travels and in the Arabian collection of folktales called One Thousand and One Arabian Nights as the mythological bird of Arabia.

Marco Polo describes rocs living in Madagascar, and envoys from Madagascar allegedly presented the great Kubla Khan of Cathay with a Roc feather that was 90 spans long (about 67 feet.)

In Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, the genie refers to a roc’s egg as his master:

“[The princess told Aladdin that] her pleasure in the [palace built by the genie] was spoiled for the want of a roc’s egg hanging from the dome. ‘If that is all,’ replied Aladdin, ‘you shall soon be happy.’ He left her and rubbed the lamp, and when the genie appeared commanded him to bring a roc’s egg. The genie gave such a loud and terrible shriek that the hall shook. ‘Wretch!’ he cried, ‘is it not enough that I have done everything for you, but you must command me to bring my master and hang him up in the midst of this dome? You and your wife and your palace deserve to be burnt to ashes …’”

In The Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, Sinbad uses a roc to escape a desert island, and later describes a roc carrying off both a rhinoceros and an elephant:

“I had before me one of the legs of the bird, which was as big as the trunk of a tree. I tied myself strongly to it with the cloth that went round my turban, in hopes that when the roc flew away next morning she would carry me with her out of this desert island.”

“The rhinoceros fights with the elephant, runs his horn into him, and carries him off upon his head; but the blood of the elephant running into his eyes and making him blind, he falls to the ground, and then, strange to relate, the roc comes and carries them both away in her claws to be food for her young ones.”

Sinbad hitching a ride on the legendary Roc

In The Fifth Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, a roc couple avenge the death of their child by destroying Sinbad’s ship:

“… we found an egg of a roc … The merchants whom I had taken on board my ship … broke the egg with hatchets, and … pulled out the young roc piece by piece, and roasted it. … Scarcely had they made an end of their feast, when there appeared in the air, at a considerable distance from us, two great clouds. … it was the cock and hen roc that belonged to the young one … [They] approached with a frightful noise, … [and] carried between their talons stones, or rather rocks, of a monstrous size. When they came directly over my ship, they hovered, and one of them let fall a stone … so exactly upon the middle of the ship that it split into a thousand pieces.”

Relation of the roc to the constellation Cygnus:

“The origin of the representation as bird of these stars is Greek. It is thought that the original figure of the mesopotámica tradition had taken the name of Urakhga, prototype of the Rukh Arab, more known in the West like the great “Roc”, a fiction personage inspired by the merchants of Bagdad, the story of Sinbad the Sailor, content in Thousands and the One Nights.”

In fact a giant ostrich-like bird called the Aepyornis maximus or elephant bird once lived on the island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa. This gigantic bird may not have become extinct until the sixteenth century, and it is said to have been the largest bird that ever lived - believed to have been 3 metres (10 ft) tall and weighing close to half a ton – 400 kilograms (880 lb). But while huge like the roc, this bird was not able to fly, however, its large eggs probably helped fuel the legend of the mythical Roc.


Aepyornis maximus

H.G.Wells wrote a short story called Aepyornis Island in which a marooned sailor hatches an Aepyornis egg and lives with the bird, far larger than any recorded in history, for several years.

Remains of Aepyornis adults and eggs have been found; in some cases the eggs have a circumference of over 1 meter (3.3 ft) and a length up to 34 centimetres (13 in). The egg volume is about 160 times greater than a chicken egg.

It is widely believed that the extinction of Aepyornis was an effect of human activity. The birds were initially widespread, occurring from the northern to the southern tip of Madagascar. One theory states that humans hunted the elephant birds to extinction in a very short time for such a large landmass. There is indeed evidence that they were killed. However, their eggs may have been the most vulnerable point in their life cycle. A recent archaeological study found fragments of eggshells among the remains of human fires, suggesting that the eggs regularly provided meals for entire families.



Aepyornis is not the only giant bird to give rise to legends. The Maori people have long told of a giant eagle that once lived in New Zealand. Evidence such as bones and talons have proved the giant bird, now called Haast’s eagle, was more than a myth. And unlike Aepyornis, it could fly. It had a wingspan of nearly three meters (10 feet) and preyed on moas, large flightless birds related to ostriches. Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) lived until about AD 1500-recent enough to possibly have been encountered by Maori ancestors.


Giant Haast’s eagle attacking New Zealand moa

The Aepyornis elephant bird was not a moa, but the other flightless giant island-living birds had members in its family which were taller than the elephant bird at 7 ft (2 metres) to the middle of the back and 13 ft (4 metres) to the head (twice the height of a tall man).

New Zealand was even more isolated than Madagascar and had no land mammals except bats. The first Polynesians arrived in New Zealand around the 10th century, becoming the Maori. The dominant life-forms were the giant land birds that lived in the fringes of the semi-tropical forests and on the grasslands and which the Maoris called ‘Moas’. Encountering the huge birds, the Maoris made legends of the giant moa, calling it the Poua-Kai and describing it as a huge bird of terrific size and strength which, in a great battle, destroyed half the warriors of a powerful tribe with its terrible rending talons and thrusting beak Moas were huge ratite ‘running birds’ like the Elephant Bird, but they inhabited the grasslands and forest-fringe in extraordinary numbers and variety. Scientists later gave them the family name Dinornithidae, ‘terrible birds’. The aggressive Polynesian invaders became a Moa-hunting culture and for the moa, which had had no predators in 100 million years, the effect was devastating.

By the time Europeans discovered the islands in 1770, the giant moas had been hunted to extinction; their official extinction date is given as 1773. Europeans did not learn of the moa’s existence until bones were discovered in the 1830s.

With only one natural predator large enough to tackle them, the Haast’s Eagle, they were the dominant terrestrial species on the islands.

INTERTWINED TALES

Is it possible the legendary Roc was based on a combination of the very real Elephant Bird and Giant Haast’s Eagles that actually existed? Many Cryptozoologists do believe the mythical bird could have been based upon actual sightings of these giant birds.

That Roc feather mentioned earlier was later suggested by Marco Polo’s translator, Sir Henry Yule, to be a frond of a Raphia palm that the Great Khan was conned by. Raphia palms grow up to 16 m tall and are remarkable for their compound pinnate leaves, the longest in the plant kingdom; leaves of R. regalis up to 25.11 m long and 3 m wide are known.  If you were alive back in this age of wonder, you too may have experienced bewildered awe of anyone who first saw them.

Source Credit(s): www-v1.amnh.org/exhibitions/mythiccreatures/air/strike.php, monsters.monstrous.com/roc.htm, ennex.com/~Roc/name/index.asp, messybeast.com/extinct/moa.htm, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aepyornis, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffia_palm

Roc top illustration (with permission) © Gonzalo Ordóñez Arias genzoman.deviantart.com

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

Please post your comments!

Discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures at Cryptid Chronicles and please vote in our Cryptid Tournament!

If you enjoyed this post please comment, Like ❤ and share! Also follow on twitter @cryptidfans and now on http://www.facebook.com/CryptidChronicles

Thank you!

Your Chronicler,
Sydney C. Squidney
cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com

A little treat for Cryptid Chronicles fans! My good friend Ken Gerhard, an American cryptozoologist and REAL monster hunter, has given me permission to provide this illustrated teaser to you guys from his new, long-awaited book about the flying humanoid phenomenon which will be published next year. Ken is also the author of the books Big Bird: Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters and Monsters of Texas. This particular sketch was done by a San Antonio artist named John Houston. Can you guess what this winged creature could be?

Please post your comments!

Stay tuned for more Cryptozoology news and discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures at Cryptid Chronicles and let us know what Cryptid you most believe in/find plausible!!

Learn more about unknown winged creatures! Please comment, Like ❤ and share! Thank you!

Your Chronicler,
Sydney C. Squidney
cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com

Follow on twitter @cryptidfans

Night-Ravens - Or What’s In A Name?

What, if anything, is a mysterious winged creature known as the night-raven?

The answer to this question depends upon whether you are investigating it from an ornithological, cryptozoological, or zoomythological standpoint - because three entirely different creatures all share this same intriguing name.

In Norway, the nattravn (‘night-raven’) is simply a name given to the European nightjar Caprimulgus europaeus or goatsucker. End of story.

Conversely, the night-raven that appears in English literature is a much more diffuse subject. It was a certain William Shakespeare who penned the following tantalising lines: “The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;” (3 King Henry VI, V.vi.47), and “I had as lief have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it.” (Much Ado About Nothing, II.iii.81). Equally, in his The Faerie Queene (II.vii.23), Edmund Spenser wrote: “And after him the owles and night ravens flew, the hateful messengers of heavy tidings,”. And according to John Lyly in his play Sappho and Phaon (1584), the owl’s shriek and the night-raven’s croak were fatal. But what is the night-raven, this ill-omened bird that appears in such esteemed works of literature yet is singularly absent from any comparably notable ornithological tome?

Several identities have been offered, including the nightingale (even though its famously musical, uplifting song hardly corresponds to the night-raven’s hoarse croak of doom), the afore-mentioned European nightjar, the bittern, various species of owl, and even the night heron (curiously, the latter’s scientific name is indeed Nycticorax – ‘night crow’ – although it shares no resemblance with any corvine bird). However, as elucidated by Edward Armstrong in The Folklore of Birds (1958), it is most likely that the night-raven is of mythological rather than ornithological status, deriving from Norse legends in which the raven is identified with Odin who in turn became identified with the Wild Hunt tradition, featuring spectral hunters riding through the sky at night with a pack of howling dogs – which in literature are extensively associated with the night-raven.

Undoubtedly the most fascinating member of the night-raven trio, however, is the mythological nattravnen (‘night-raven’) of southern Sweden. I first learnt of this extraordinary entity from Swedish cryptozoological artist Richard Svensson, whose wonderful illustration of it heads my present blog. On 2 October 2008, in response to a request of mine for information concerning it, I received the following detailed account from Richard, who kindly permitted me to publish it if I so wished, and which I am therefore delighted to do here, for the very first time anywhere:

“Nattravnen is found in the folklore of Sweden’s two southernmost regions, Skåne and Blekinge. It’s not very well known in general Swedish folklore, and it’s not considered a mystery beast per se, like the Lake Storsjö monster, for example. It’s called Nattravnen in Skåne and Leharven in Blekinge. The name “Nattravnen” is said to mean “the night raven”. Leharven is a more dubious name. “Le” is an old word for bodily joint (and I’ll get back to why that’s a part of its name). Nattravnen is seldom described in detail, but it is a bird-like monster, sometimes said to be dark in colour, but without any feathers. It belongs to a special group of monsters called “grimmar”. Grimmar are supernatural animals that cannot be killed by any normal weapons. They are either ghosts of animals or beasts created by sorcery.

“Nattravnen flies around during the night and is said to devour any lonely wanderer on the roads. But the monster was also dangerous in another way. If you looked up just as it passed the moon or when its body was illuminated by the moon rays, you would be able to see the skeleton (and its joints) through the creature’s thin hide. This was a very bad thing and the sight would render you horrible pains. Mostly you would fall terribly ill and vomit blood or get blood in your urine for at least a week.

“There is an old story from Blekinge concerning Lake Halen, where in old times a flying monster lived. This creature is not actually identified as Leharven, but it appears to have many similar traits. According to legend it resembled a vulture, but without any feathers. When returning to the lake it would not perch in a tree, but dive down under the water and disappear. In the 1970’s a local school adopted the creature as their mascot and dubbed it “Halengamen”, “the Halen Vulture”.

“If I’m not totally mistaken this aquatic connection rings a bell concerning the African “Kongamato”. And the feature about getting ill from watching the flying beast also seems familiar, from something in the West Indies, perhaps.

“There’s also a folktale about a giant vulture sweeping down and grabbing an oxen in an area of Blekinge called Jämshög. The name is said to be derived from “Gamshög” =”Vulture’s Peak”, a hill where the creature is said to have been observed seen sitting. This tale is generally considered as a tall-tale, with no real etymological verification to the name of Jämshög. It’s still interesting as a Swedish counterpart of the American “Thunderbird” tales.

“I’ve done two illustrations of Nattravnen, where I’ve chosen to depict it as very pterodactyl-like.”

From a Norwegian goatsucker and a corvid of Odin to a monstrous Swedish neo-pterodactyl - who would ever have guessed that a name as innocuous as ‘night-raven’ could have conjured forth such a dramatic diversity of creatures real and imaginary?

Source Credit(s): © Dr Karl Shuker 11 November 2010 karlshuker.blogspot.com/2010/11/night-ravens-or-whats-in-name.html

Top Illustration: The terrifying nattravnen or night-raven of southern Swedish folklore © Richard Svensson

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

Discover more cryptids and mysterious creatures at Cryptid Chronicles and let us know what Cryptid you most believe in/find plausible!!

If you enjoyed this article please comment, Like ❤ and share! Thank you!

Your Chronicler,
Sydney C. Squidney
cryptidchronicles.tumblr.com