What is there not to love about this report from KSAX-TV News? A reporter is dispatched to take a look at a mysterious bit of road kill found by a local woman. Pictures of the hairless creature sparked an intense Facebook debate as to what the creature could be.

The local who found the questionable carrion pointed out what looked like human features on the beast and wondered aloud about secret government testing on animals.

Our favorite moment of the clip? A little girl who is shown a photo of the beast during a “man on the street” segment. He answers, “I think it’s a dog.” When pressed for reasons why? “Because it is.”

From the mouth of babes…

[KSAX] via Scott Johnson

Artists careers are often divided into periods. Picasso had his blue period. Dr. Dove had his horned period. In the early 20th century, Dr. W. Franklin Dove spent his days as the preeminent unicorn maker on the eastern seaboard. He likely wasn’t the type of man you expect:

Understand that Dove was no crackpot scientist. Dove was a biologist at the University of Maine who studied animal production in the early 20^thcentury. He had all the right collaborators and the right publications. Dove was a serious scientist.

Dove’s goal was to prove that horns developed separately from the skull and later fuse to it rather than growing as part of the skull. He conducted his experiments by removing horn buds from young animals and transplanting them elsewhere. As an example, Dove removed a growing bull’s hornbuds and transplanted them to the center of its forehead. It was a success. The bull was featured in an issue of Popular Science as a “modern unicorn.” The bull’s nervous system adapted to include its newfound appendage. Dr. Mark Blumberg details the ways it used its horn:

“Franklin Dove’s unicorn acquired, according to its creator, a ‘peculiar power.’ This bull used his single horn ‘as a prow to pass under fences and barriers in his path, or as a forward thrusting bayonet in his attacks,’” writes Blumberg.

Neuro-plasticity ftw!

[Scientific American]

Like a tale from a science-fiction horror story, young Mao Xiping, from Gezhai, China, was checking her vegetables when she noticed a strange, hairless creature gnawing at her vegetables. Believing it was a rabbit, she approached it. However, she wasn’t prepared for the terrifying site that awaited her. Sitting there, in her vegetables, was a creature with an ‘alien face.’ It was thin, almost skeletal, with little fur and large bulbous eyes.

It looked something like this:

However, this terrifying creature was not an alien creature. After feeding it cucumbers and peachers, Mao discovered that the poor, terrified creature was not a rabbit, or an extraterrestrial on his way back home. He was found to be a very sick Slow Lorris, once Mao took him to local scientists. However, because Mao and her terrified neighbours hadn’t seen a slow lorris before, yet alone one this emaciated, it truly was alien to them. He had little hair, and a visable skeletal frame, something that was literally out of the villagers world. This just goes to show how strange the things from our own world can be, and leads us to think, what could be out there?

Source[UPI]

The Bounty
io9 will be offering a $2000 bounty for the best photographic or video evidence of a genuine cryptid. In August, we will invite our panel of experts, including zoologists, the team behind excellent cryptid blog Cryptomundo, cryptid expert Loren Coleman, and a photoshop analyst, to judge which pictures are the most authentic. We’ll give the bounty to the one that they judge to be the most mysterious yet authentic creature.

Don’t have a cryptid photo or video? We still want to hear your stories.
Help your fellow cryptid hunters this summer by telling them where you saw cryptids, or heard about them showing up. You can post your stories in our Cryptid Summer Forum, or put your sightings upon our community cryptid map here.

While the bounty is out, throughout June and July, we will post updates on the best photos we’ve gotten, and ask you to vote on which ones you think are most likely to be authentic.

Something For The Fakers, Too
Want to give us your best fake picture of a cryptid? Well, start your engines. In July, we’ll ask for your most awesome fake images of cryptids, and readers can vote on the best ones. If yours wins, we’ll give you some free books and DVDs.

[io9]

Special guest Dr. Karen Stollznow helps the gang plan a heist for a sacred Yeti paw. Brian and Justin get enormous glee from watching Andrew get corrected. The ethics of eating canned whale meat is debated. We also find out how ready and willing we are to be corrupted by the dark side.

Then a super secret plan (shhhh!) is hatched to get prominent skeptics tripped out on psychoactives so we can see what happens when they have their own double rainbow experience.

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Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings072110.mp3

Dr. Karen Stollznow’s website

Find out which of the three used to wear a Spider-Man costume under his clothes and which ones just wore ladies underwear. Listen to them describe their plans to capture a sea beast, fight alligators and find proof of Son of Hogzilla. Also, it becomes painfully obvious that when Justin, Brian and Andrew are a dying alien civilization’s last chance for survival, it’s better to die screaming in the night then hope to see another tomorrow.

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Download url: http://itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings062910.mp3

Weird Things Live: Hunting the Night Creeper from Andrew Mayne on Vimeo.

Last Monday night in front of a live internet audience we set out to solve the mystery of the Night Creeper. Ghost? Frogman? Or something else? Although we’re pretty sure we figured it out, we haven’t definitively proved our theory. The mystery continues…

Running time 55 minutes.

Check out our photos of the scene on Flickr.

As we prepare for tomorrow’s live hunt for what is known as the “Night Creeper”, we thought we’d share with you some photos from a recent reconnaissance of the area. Our first nighttime recon resulted in Justin and I getting stopped by the police FYI. It appears we’re not the only ones paying attention to the weird reports coming from the area.

What stood out most to us is the fact that this area forms a triangle with two other hotspots of unusual activity and they both have large bodies of water nearby that lead straight to the Everglades – a wild environment filled with cryptid and unusual phenomena.

On Monday night’s live show (9PM EST) we plan to go into a tunnel that’s the main access point between the wetlands and the area of interest. We’re not assuming it’s a cryptid or some other creature that’s been sighted. We just find it very interesting.

During our daylight investigation we found signs that something was living underneath there or at least spent some time there. The above photo shows a very large fish head that was dragged 10 feet above the bank into a dark corner. A raccoon or Gollum? We hope to find out.

Cryptomundo tells the beautiful love story of actress Maria Bello (you might remember her from THAT scene in A History Of Violence) and her new fiance Bryn Mooser, one that was cemented by a mutual interest in the search for cryptids.

Other common interests? Politics and Africa.

[Cryptomundo]

Many mistaken cryptids are actually just fugly animals with a bad case of the mange. So what does that have to do with our planet’s current case of global warming driving and increase in sightings of potential Yetis, Bigfoots and Chupacabra?

Everything.

LiveScience spoke to Mike Bowdenchuck, state director for Texas Wildlife Services, who explained why mysterious, hairless animals are more common in Texas and the southwest than other areas:

“Down here, animals don’t die of mange, because the temperatures are warm enough,” Bowdenchuck said. Rather, the animals live with mange.

“Mange is very common in colder areas, in fact wolves are getting it in Montana right now, and in North Dakota foxes get it,” he said, noting a big difference: “Up there it’s fatal, so you never see animals with the severe cases that we see in the southern climates, because they don’t live long enough for the mites to get that bad to cause the hair to fall off. They die of hypothermia first.”

Animals that have lost their fur are more vulnerable to the cold, so in warmer climates they live longer (and be more likely to be seen). Thus one might conclude that sightings of hairless animals will become more common as the climate warms. The extended forecast calls for more non-Bigfoot, non-Yeti, and non-chupacabra mangy monster sightings.

Why wasn’t this the poster for An Inconvenient Truth?

[Live Science]

All manner of sycophantic websites and pot-stirring gossip rags have run “fun” features about celebrities’ pets. With headlines like “Hollywood goes to the Dogs!” “Hollywood is the Cat’s Meow!” and “Hollywood: No One Here Likes Rabbits!” these articles beg the question: what are these stars trying to hide? I mean, if you bank three mil a year, and then you go out and buy some kind of $500,000 purebred something or other that looks like a bat and can fit on a sandwich, I’m willing to believe that it’s your only pet. But if you bank 15 mil a year and buy that dog, it’s a cover for something far more extravagant. Today, Weird Things is blowing the lid off the biggest story since yesterday when Corey Haim died: Cryptozoology and the Stars

After filming “The Mothman Prophecies” in 2001, Richard Gere allegedly became obsessed with the film’s titular mystery beastie. When his Craigslist ad seeking “The Legendary Mothman” failed to turn up anything more than nine imposters, three middle-aged vigilantes and one historically insignificant mothman, Gere resigned himself to searching for “The World’s Most Moth-like Man,” who he plans to transform into the Legendary Mothman using chemicals. While Pedro Veranza, the world’s most moth-like man, has been imprisoned in Gere’s second-largest bathroom for over two years, the actor’s Craigslist postings indicate that he’s still “Seeking Chemials [sic].”

The editors of Carrie Fischer’s recent memoir, “Wishful Drinking,” supposedly excised a controversial chapter in which the “Star Wars” actress described a decade-long addiction to exotic intoxicants including Bigfoot dander, Martian extract and Phoenicus Lite, “this awful beer from Atlantis that tasted like piss, but reminded me of my college years.”

Before washing up on a Long Island beach, the so-called “Montauk Monster” was named Reggie and belonged to a now-devastated Sean William Scott. A friend of Scott reports that he got a call from the actor during which a weeping Sean William both recounted the tragedy and lashed out at the Internet response: “We were out on my boat together, and the little guy must have gotten over excited. It all happened so fast. I turned around for, like, two seconds… and then I heard a splash…” an inconsolable Scott went on to say, “Montauk Monster!? How about Montauk Friend? How about Montauk Best Friend? These [expletive deleted] bloggers… these [expletive deleted]s are the monsters!”

Inside sources report that actress Zooey Deschanel recently a purchased a Chupacabra with the intention of entering the beast in dog fighting competitions. Upon discovering that even illegal dog fighting has some rules, the actress quickly packed the creature into a large wooden crate. She then moved the crate in front of her couch and covered it with a table cloth, upon which she positioned two bowls of M&Ms and a coffee table book about trains. When guests ask about the smell, Deschanel allegedly replies, “It’s nothing. Have some M&Ms. And look at these trains!”

In David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the Brundlefly’s last horrific mutation was actually played by a deformed swamp monster owned by actor Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum reportedly told members of the crew that he bought the creature to “punch when I’m frustrated.” The actor then offered, “Go ahead. Try it! It’s like punching a girl in her brain!”

In the Michael Crichton book Congo and movie by the same name, he describes a race of super-apes almost on par with man in intelligence. Like much of Crichton’s work, he based this on science speculation. For thousands of years there have been stories of ape-men that fell outside our conventional definitions of humans, gorillas, chimps and orangutan.

In 500 BC, Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian explorer described this encounter off the Western coast of Africa:

At the terminus of Hanno’s voyage the explorer found an island heavily populated with what were described as hirsute and savage people. Attempts to capture the males failed, but three of the females were taken. These were so vicious they were killed, and their skins preserved for transport home to Carthage.

The name the intrepreters gave for them was “gorillae”. 2,000 years later explorers would use that word to describe modern day gorillas. But were they gorillas? Hanno described finding these “savage people” in a place far from where gorillas are known to inhabit (the historical version of the story is in Greek and not Hanno’s native Punic, suggesting it’s been repeatedly rewritten). Taking it at face value, it could be that Hanno found an isolated group of gorillas that went extinct. But if it was a distinct population of gorillas on that island, it’s very likely it was a unique species of gorilla with its own behaviors and characteristics (gorillas are now divided into two distinct species with two subspecies each).

By 1847, after the gorilla had been discovered by the West, we had a clearer picture of the major ape species: Humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutan. But since then stories of other species have persisted.

The 19th Century French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu described a species of ape whose behavior doesn’t quite describe what we know about chimpanzees or gorillas.

This ape, whose singular cry distinguishes at once from all its cougeners in these wilds, is remarkable, as bearing a closer resemblance to man than any other ape yet known. It is very rare and I was able to obtain but one specimen of it. The face is bare and black. the forehead is higher than any other ape, and the cranial capacity greater by measurement. The eyes are wider apart than any other ape. The nose is flat. The cheek bones are high and prominent, and the cheek sunken and lank. The sides of the face are covered with a growth of straight hair, which meeting under the chin like the human whiskers, gives the face a remarkably human look. The arms reach below the knee. The ears are very larger, and are more nearly like the human ear than those of other apes.

Saying that it was a “gorilla” or a “chimpanzee” isn’t as helpful of a classification as we might think. Natural history museums are filled with interesting specimens that push the boundaries of gorilla and chimpanzee taxonomy, but are still within those boundaries. A skull and a DNA test can tell us something about how a creature lived, but not the whole picture. A modern day Dane and a pygmy bushmen look about as different as you could imagine, but genetically they’re the same species.

Science encounters a lost race of apes
The idea that of a living chimpanzee or gorilla species with much different physical and behavioral traits (like the gorillas in Congo) got a big boost from the scientific community when credible reports began emerging from the Congo of a large ape that displayed both chimp and gorilla like behavior.

Shelley Williams PhD, a specialist in primate behavior had this encounter with the “Bili Apes” in the Congo: From Wikipedia

“We could hear them in the trees, about 10 m away, and four suddenly came rushing through the brush towards me. If this had been a mock charge they would have been screaming to intimidate us. These guys were quiet, and they were huge. They were coming in for the kill – but as soon as they saw my face they stopped and disappeared.”

Williams continues:

“The unique characteristics they exhibit just don’t fit into the other groups of apes,” says Williams. The apes, she argues, could be a new species unknown to science, a new subspecies of chimpanzee, or a hybrid of the gorilla and the chimp. “At the very least, we have a unique, isolated chimp culture that’s unlike any that’s been studied,”.

Genetically, evidence indicates the Bili Apes are identical with known chimpanzees. But there’s more to physiology and behavior than what’s encoded in the genes. While there are conflicting reports about the physical traits of the Bili Apes, the consensus is that they are larger than common chimps and much bolder.

Presently they are threatened by bush meat hunters and gold miners who are encroaching into their habitat.

Conclusion
With the verification that there is indeed a Bili Ape that has its own distinct behavior and appearance, it’s a reasonable hypothesis that there have been other species and sub-species of chimpanzee and gorilla in historic times with their own particular behavior and physiology that have since gone extinct.

That some of these were smart or closer to humans in behavior is not an unreasonable speculation. Given the friction that exists today between humans in the region and other humans as well as primates, it’s not hard to imagine their extinction being at least human influenced.

So if there was a race of super-apes, chances are we killed them. It’s the Planet of the Apes in reverse…

Bili Ape – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From myth to reality – meet the chimps who eat lions

It’s been less than 20 years since the first report of an elusive blood-drinking monster referred to by local Puerto Rican farmers as El Chupacabra, and already the creature has become a cryptozoological stalwart, amassing news clippings from a growing number of disparate nations and settling its grotesque body down into an ever-deepening pop cultural niche. Certainly, the creature’s speedy rise to cryptid infamy is attributable to the Internet and globalized media. More than that, though, El Chupacabra is a result of the modern age encroaching upon an agricultural working class that, for the first time, found their dogmatic perception of nature challenged.

El Chupacabra’s legend didn’t start with a reported sighting, but rather with the discovery of several exsanguinated goat carcasses that bore what appeared to be a distinctive, three-holed puncture wound. Local farmers, whose inherited knowledge of area wildlife functions at an almost genetic level, understandably panicked at the sight of this wholly unfamiliar, and seemingly effortless, brutality. Especially given that Puerto Rico is an island, making the natural or forced migration of distant land mammals virtually impossible, it’s understandable that people succumbed to a kind of fearful origami, folding their terror into a fantastical shape that seemed primed for tri-toothed goat sucking – El Chupacabra, a spined monster, about the size of a large dog, that looks at once mammalian and reptilian. Supernatural-obsessed fringe media outlets in North America began obsessing over the beast and, within months, the number of alleged sightings skyrocketed.

What the Puerto Rican farmers didn’t know was that the panther, a cunning predator, had recently been illegally imported and introduced into the country’s biosphere. Meanwhile, industrial expansion, human population growth and construction had had a devastating effect on the eco-systems of Mexico and the American Southwest. Many coyotes and wild dogs lost their homes and found natural food sources dwindling. Often, malnutrition and mange caused these animals to lose their fur, develop hideous scabs and become increasingly desperate and vicious. Alternative prey, like farm animals, became a necessity for the newly displaced coyote population. These sick, desperate and grotesque-looking animals, in feeding themselves, nourished the Chupacabra legend, and despite the indisputable fact that a majority of sighted Chupacabras shared notable physical similarities with diseased coyotes, the media frenzy continued.
Eventually, the UFO-obsessed paranormal community embraced El Chupacabra, and employed it in their indefatigable search for truth.

Wednesday: El Chupacabra and E.T.

Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

A lake isn’t a lake without a lake monster. Or, so it would seem. With more than 250 serpentine leviathans of varying size and ferocity trolling the dark reefs and hidden inlets of lakes worldwide, these arcane monstrosities are to inland bodies of standing water what Zagat ratings are to classy restaurants, providing immediate validation by way of an instantly identifiable symbol – a dark, long-necked silhouette asserting a mysterious vigilance in the dying warmth of deep orange light squeezed from a setting sun.

Sometimes more mascots than monsters, these aquatic behemoths are often as much unwitting chamber of commerce employees as they are enduring mysteries of cryptozoology. While Nessie, the stalwart cover girl of lake monster commercialization, may be the most ubiquitous of these creatures, North America has its own heavy-weight lacusine cryptid, with an equally cloying nickname – Champ.

For a supposed Mezozoic-era reptile hidden deep within the black, icy craw of Lake Champlain, Champ has become a surprisingly active community member in the various cities and towns that hug the shores surrounding the 125-mile-long body of water. His solemn reptilian visage adorns a variety of commercial signage, his wooden doppelganger smiles confidently from the courthouse lawn in Port Henry, New York, and his mere existence is lauded via fly balls and grounders by the Vermont Lake Monsters, Vermont’s only minor league baseball affiliate. Since the first reported sighting in the early 1870s, everyone from research scientists to P.T. Barnum have felt the scaly allure of this North American legend. As the world amasses an ever-growing role call of lake monsters to shout from dockside tea-shirt stands and minor league baseball stadiums, it seems appropriate to take one such monster, America’s own Champ, and look at the lake, legends and lives that, in just the right light and from enough of a distance, almost look like a giant, aquatic serpent posed stoically against the horizon.

The legend of Champ, or, at least, the legend that became the legend of Champ, actually pre-dates the first sighting by centuries. Both the Iriquois and Abenaki tribes, who lived beside the dark, glacier-wrought lake before it bore the name of French explorer Samuel De Champlain, traditionally submitted offerings to an entity that they claimed was hidden beneath the lake’s still, black waters. Still, most of the polytheistic native cultures had water spirits or other aquatic deities that they ritually attempted to placate and satisfy in order to ensure full harvests and good health. The Iriquois, who supplicated a being in Lake Champlain (then called Lake Ondakina), also made offerings to the nearby Niagara falls, annually pitching a white canoe, filled with fruits, vegetables and a virgin, over the roaring cataract and onto the foam-addled rockbed below. Researching America’s many lake monsters reveals that almost every one can be traced back to a Native American legend that, more often than not, was boorishly literalized through the polarizing lens of European culture, turning a tale like that of Champ from a story about the living soul of the water into a story about a giant friggin’ lake snake.

The first few reported sightings occurred between 1871 and 1873, around the time that an increasingly industrialized America began seeing mountains and lakes as geological obstacles to be overcome, rather than natural spectacles to be wondered over. As such, the first sighting occurred when a group of men working on laying one of the four railroad lines that carried packed train cars over the water-logged expanses of New York, Vermont and Quebec that compose the lake witnessed a giant snake-like creature in the water. The next encounter was reported after a sight-seeing steamboat either collided with, or was disturbed by the wake from (reports are, at best, sketchy), some sort of underwater beast. The third sighting, made by a child who saw the creature at a distance from the shores of the lake, is worth mentioning in the context of the others because, in the child’s report of the event, he explicitly stated that the animal made “a noise like a steamboat.”

These sightings all underscore a larger point about the changing landscape of America and the development of technology that, in cases like that of the tourist steamboat, allows, and in cases like that of the railroad workers, forces, people to come in contact with formerly unfamiliar natural environments. The third sighting demonstrates this strange dichotomy – as new and exciting technological developments enter the cultural vernacular, so, to, do previously rarified elements of the natural world. In the eyes of a child, the natural thing that astounds him – a sea monster – is described in terms of a corresponding technological development that astounds him – a steamboat. A lot of these folks had only recently been given the opportunity to chuff out into the black center of the lake, borne out by exhalations of pressurized steam, or stare out, between hammer strikes, across a sprawling, adjacent plane of bruise-colored water. A common animal of uncommon size would be monstrous, fantastical and unfamiliar to an observer unaccustomed to the thriving, multifaceted eco-system of the lake. Not to mention, once one person believes that they’ve seen something extraordinary, others follow suit.

With the railroads quickly turning America into a manic stitch-work of spikes and ties, it only made sense for P.T. Barnum to purchase a train and make the most of his profession. “P.T. Barnum’s Traveling World’s Fair, Great Roman Hippodrome and Greatest Show on Earth” was already proving hugely successful for Barnum when he got wind of the increasing number of lake monster sightings coming out of the New York and Vermont areas. Always as much a debunker as a showman, Barnum immediately offered $5,000 for the carcass of Champ, stating that if such a creature existed, he had to have it as part of his fantastical cabinet of allegedly natural curiosities. If the fevered testimony of a dozen amazed eye witnesses wasn’t enough to convince the American Northeast that a reptilian goliath was swimming figure-eights beneath the growing number of railroad trestles, ferries and lighthouse beams that criss-crossed and skirted each other across the surface of Lake Champlain, the winking endorsement of the Prince of Humbugs certainly was. The local obsession that, over the past century, has, ultimately, done more good for the binocular industry than any facet of modern biology, was born.

In the 20th century, after many obsolete steamboats were scrapped and rail lines were torn up or abandoned to make room for highways, other technological advancements, especially the development and production of consumer-grade photography equipment and video cameras, ensured an enduring audience for America’s most notorious sea monster. Champ has been embroiled in photograph doctoring scandals, subjected to state-of-the-art echolocation techniques and even forced to brave the emoticon banner ads and inane talkbacks of YouTube, starring in a highly disputed, recently-removed video in which he darted beneath a fisherman’s boat.

As the legend perpetuated, giving way to the aforementioned statuary, logos and mascotdom, Champ has taken on a kind of mythic status, larger and more indelible than the enigmatic sum of 300 reported sightings. More than just an urban legend or cautionary rejoinder delivered in the name of safe swimming, Champ represents the life-effusing quintessence of a region; he is bound to the lake, but master of its waters, and possessed of eyes that have witnessed the triumphs and tragedies of Champlain’s beaches, inlets and people – people who, in turn, claim to have, in fleeting seconds lost quickly to the white glare of the afternoon sun or the eldritch darkness of evening water, witnessed him.

In this way, Champ has once again become the stuff of Iriquois legend, bestowing fortune upon towns who offer up small tokens, like car wash signs and minor league baseball, in tribute to his enduring existence.

Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

On September 12th, 1952, brothers Edward and Fred May, along with their friend Tommy Hyer, watched a flaming spacecraft streak across the West Virginia sky and crash into the nearby hills.

After running home to tell their mother what they had seen, the boys, along with Ms. May and three other local children, rushed out into the darkness to find the wreckage. After arriving at the top of a hill, the group saw a pulsating red light and, nearby, illuminated by a flashlight they’d brought, a 10-foot tall creature with two bright glowing eyes and a head (or, possibly, cowl) shaped like the ace of spades. The creature made a hissing sound, hovered toward them, and then turned and fled. The group ran screaming from the site and back down the hill into their small town of Flatwoods.

The Flatwoods Monster has gone on to be featured in books, television shows and video games. The creature has been identified as everything from an extra-terrestrial visitor to a cousin of fellow WV-based cyptid, The Mothman, to a startled barn owl. The story has been thoroughly debunked by skeptics, who, along with the barn owl explanation, cite that residents across three states (West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland) reported meteor sightings that night, and say that the red light was almost certainly one of the many aircraft hazard beacons that dot the West Virginia countryside.

What the debunkers fail to address is why a group of seven people would mistake three separate common objects and occurrences for a spaceship crash and an enormous hissing monster. Could Hollywood’s commie-as-martian mania, a 19th century Thunderbird encounter, and the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane have something to do with it? Tear Up the Town says, “yeah, you know…it’s possible.”

The 1950s marked a strange era in America’s history. General social conservatism and a newly vigilant focus on family values existed alongside new and revolutionary cultural institutions, such as Playboy magazine, the Kinsey reports and the Beat Generation. At the same time, with tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets growing, pop culture was occupied in constructing sensationalist cold war narratives and allegories. And what better way to fictionalize one of America’s largest cultural concerns than by combining it with another? 1951 saw the theatrical release of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing From Another World, which both delivered 90 minutes of cold war paranoia in the form of vintage 1947 Roswell hysteria. Additionally, as Hollywood released film after film in which Mars, the red planet, stood in for the Soviet red menace, Entertaining Comics (previously Educational Comics) was busy taking advantage of the fact that the comic industry, unlike Hollywood, had yet to come under any industry content regulations, allowing EC to produce a plethora of kid-targeted grotesque, gratuitously violent and overtly sexual horror and sci-fi comic books (including Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, Two-Fisted Tales and Shock SuspenStories) without official recourse.

Six of the seven witnesses to the Flatwoods Monster were under the age of 18, and, as a result, were inundated not only with news stories about very real Earthly terrors, but also with sensationalist movies and extreme comics that placed monsters and aliens alongside Soviet nukes and communist infiltration of the government in the cultural rogues gallery. Meanwhile, Ms. May, the one adult witness, was at once aware of the broader socio-political fears that were sweeping the nation, in an understandably heightened state of anxiety, and in the position of sole responsibility for not just her two children, but also four others. These elements alone show how easily a meteor could become a plummeting saucer and how an aircraft hazard beacon might appear as an extra-terrestrial road flare, but a barn owl as an unearthly creature?

The 50s were also a transformative time for West Virginia. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, miners and their families had been flocking to the region’s prosperous coal mines, pushing the state’s annual population growth well above the national average. Unfortunately, with the standardization of mechanical mining equipment, fewer human workers were needed (remember, John Henry was supposedly a West Virginia native) and, after peaking at just over 2 million residents in 1950, West Virginia’s population began to steadily decline.

The same boom that had vastly increased West Virginia’s general population over the prior half-century had concordantly introduced a growing population of the mentally ill, many of whom were housed in the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane (later re-named Weston State Hospital). Opened in 1864 with the capacity to house 250 patients, the asylum underwent massive growth over an 80 year period and, by the 1950s, housed more than 2,400 epileptics, drug addicts and myriad other so-called “uneducable mental defectives.” The asylum is also just over 30 miles from Flatwoods. After a revealing piece in the Charleston Gazette in 1949, which portrayed the hospital as a nightmarish, unsanitary, over-crowded hell, already rampant rumors about the asylum’s conditions, treatments and patients were embraced as facts. These confirmations added to the discomfort of families in the area who already couldn’t help but construct dread speculations about deranged escapees. Living in Flatwoods in the early ‘50s, it would be difficult to venture out into the darkened forests and hills without some underlying sense of dread at the knowledge that just a bit farther out into the woods, in an isolated, ever-expanding compound packed to overflowing with mistreated mental patients, experimental surgeries, some using ice picks and electricity, were being performed in dirty operating rooms.

Even more to the point, in the same way that stories and rumors spread about the asylum, Appalachian folktales and legends dispersed and persisted throughout the state. West Virginia, like all of Appalachia, has always occupied a certain cultural niche because, while it’s geographically poised to adopt social and cultural trends along with the rest of the country, its population remains somewhat insular. In part, this insularity is a result of the mountainous terrain, which makes travel outside of major thoroughfares difficult, but, mostly, it’s a result of the state’s lack of industrial diversity. With coal as the area’s only major viable resource, the pre-‘90s population primarily consisted of semi-migrant blue-collar communities whose search for local identity led them to retain, and revel in, the rich cultural history of the mountaineers who first traversed West Virginia’s rocky terrain and discovered the valuable coal reserves beneath it. While much of the extant Appalachian lore is based around stories of these pioneer characters, herbal remedies and general folk wisdom, a proliferation of Cherokee Indian mythology, including thunderbird legends, is vital to the tradition’s underlying framework.

To the Cherokee (and many other tribal nations), the thunderbird has rich, nuanced religious and cultural implications. To the colonists, and in prevailing Appalachian lore, they’re really just regarded as giant flesh-eating birds of varying species, including owls (often dubbed “Bighoot”). They are, in fact, such a prevalent part of Appalachian lore, that beginning in the 1800s, a rash of Thunderbird sightings were reported around the United States, including a series of incidents in 1895 involving a giant avian creature consuming both livestock and humans over a weeklong period in Addison, West Virginia, less than 30 miles from Flatwoods. Flatwoods residents, then, would not only be pre-disposed to hearing legends about fearsome, man-eating birds simply through the extensive oral tradition of the Appalachian region, but would also be doubly aware, and perhaps subconsciously wary, of the creatures, given the existence of an exceedingly horrific local account dating back less than 60 years before the encounter with the alleged Flatwoods Monster.

Given all of this dissonant input, from Hollywood’s equation of the red scare with an alien menace to local fears of escaped mental patients and giant birds, it makes sense that a child of Appalachia who sees what he interprets as a spaceship could then read a nearby barn owl (the shape of the Flatwoods Monster’s head, the sound the creature made and its erratic towards-then-away movement are all consistent with this species), which already bears a sinister connotation, and it’s elongated shadow as the creature from the ship.
A final note: I understand that it might read as contradictory that this piece suggests that these children are both at the forefront of American pop culture, enabling them to see a meteor as a space ship, but also shut-in, out-of-touch hillbillies who rely on folk legends to interpret the world around them, so an owl becomes a monster. Really, it’s the co-existence of these two factors, which is the result of the gradual culture and population shift that began mid-century in West Virginia, that allows the Flatwoods Monster to exist.

These children, due to equal parts chronology and geography, belonged to one of the only generations given the opportunity to subconsciously fuse, in a manner both thematic and terrifyingly physical, rarified traditional American folklore with the all-consuming technocentric xenophobia of the atom age.

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

Previously, this week, on Weird Things.

• A few tips for the novice Bigfoot hunter.

• Could the Son of Sam, a UFO investigating Air Force base and the birth of popular science fiction have helped create the Dover Demon?

• Michael Jackson may be dead, but his ghost is on a world tour.

• What happens, when myriad ghosts, have chosen to haunt a house, stop beings polite and start getting real? They say some really kooky stuff, that’s what.

• Rhode Island has never had a Bigfoot sighting, but that might be about to change.

Enjoy the weekend, as always, send weird photos, stories, sounds and happenings to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail.

photo credit: Josh Lowe | Thrash Magazine

Along with the islands of Hawaii, Rhode Island is the only American state to never officially recorded a Bigfoot sighting. Ever.

Ken DeCosta , founder and director of Rhode Island Society for the Examination of Unusual Phenomena, chalks it up to geography. Non-existant are the dense forests of Pennsylvania or Oregon that seem to breed sightings. If you’re looking for the King of Cryptids in the Biggest Little State in the Union, you might want to get comfortable.

“Catch up on some of your reading,” adds DeCosta.

But past experiences don’t alway portend future results, which is why Ken is excited about a new lead. A story from a middle-aged housewife that could very well break Rhode Island’s streak of futility. DeCosta recalls speaking with the woman, who was reluctant to tell her tale to even her husband for fear she’d look crazy.

In September of 2003, the then 44-year-old mother of two drove up Tower Hill Road when a bipedal, hairy, 6-foot beast walked in front of her car. After locking eyes with the creature and getting a good look at it’s ape-like facial features, the massive beast slammed it’s hands into the hood of her vehicle, leaving a few dents.

So this summer, DeCosta and his gang are going to head out to Tower Hill Road and stake out the scene. It most likely will be fruitless so RISE UP also plans to investigate a few other Tower Hill phenomenon including phantom hitchhikers and an intensely creepy specter of a dead little boy’s bicycle reported by passing motorists.

But maybe, just maybe, that woman was right. And maybe, just maybe, Ken and his team can catch a glimpse.

Hear that Hawaii?

Bart Cutino found big foot.

For a fleeting 2007 moment in Naches, WA he and the one of the legendary wood apes locked eyes. He describes the encounter to The Monterey Herald…

“About 20 to 25 seconds later, it stepped out from behind the tree and dropped on all fours, knees on the ground, arms extended and did this little head rotation in my direction,” Cutino says. “At that point I knew what it was, and it was surreal. It wasn’t scary. I just couldn’t believe it was happening.”

He says the Sasquatch propped itself momentarily onto its right shoulder and inched itself forward, at which point Cutino began snapping his fingers, trying to get the attention of a colleague who was 30 yards away, near a truck containing recording equipment.

Read the rest of the encounter AFTER THE JUMP!

“Every time I snapped my fingers, this thing would make a full-body, convulsive-type movement — very agile, very animalistic — and it would pause-freeze every time I stopped snapping my fingers,” Cutino says. “Then it rotated back onto its right shoulder, put a hand up next to its face, and splayed out the hand so I could clearly see all five digits on the hand.”

The creature stood up, went down again, then stood again before Cutino made a decision to run in the opposite direction, toward his friend with the recording equipment. By the time his colleague got the complicated recording equipment set up and directed, the Sasquatch was gone, Cutino says.

According to measurements after the fact, Cutino believes he saw a creature that was 7 feet tall and weighed up to 575 pounds. Based on the curious hand gesture, we’re assuming this particular Bigfoot was also well versed in the number of championships won by the Dallas Cowboys.

Cutino embraces the skeptic community vetting his and other Bigfoot hunters research. This way hoaxes and scam artists can be weeded out of the evidence pile in favor of documented and verifiable encounters. He’s also confident that with the rise in handheld recording technology, we’ll likely see more visual evidence within the next few years.

We were saddened today to find out from Cryptomundo that Chris Davis, the originator of the South Carolina Lizard Man legend was shot to death at his home in a drug related incident.

According to Davis’ reports: on June 29, 1988 he was changing a flat tire at 2 AM on his way home from work, when he was attacked by a seven foot tall, humanoid, bipedal lizard creature. In Davis’ account he was able to start the car and drive away while the lizard man clung to the top, eventually falling off when Davis swerved the car from side to side.

This is how the American crypto-classic Lizard Man was born. The question now is will the story live on without its central character?

Bobby Clarke, a ferry boat driver from Manitoba, took this Bigfoot footage in 2005. The short film, taken with an out of focus camcorder created lots of media buzz and lead to a Bigfoot investigation by now defunct news program “A Current Affair”. Cryptomundo recounts the incident and reviews the tape. Do you think it’s really worth a second look?

Above is a stabilized version of the latest purported video of Champ the Monster of Lake Champlain. Compare that to the video of a common fresh water otter below, and the mystery of Lake Champlain starts to unravel. Check out the updated investigation on Cryptomundo.com, complete with enhanced videos of the sighting.

photo credit: Tom Scholes

The Loch Ness Monster and other dino-cryptids have captivated the imaginations and hopes of millions of people all over the world. It would be really cool if dinosaurs were still alive today. But how much truth is there to this claim? Are there really prehistoric giants currently roaming the earth or have they all gone the way of the fossils above? Benjamin Radford, renowned paranormal investigator tackles this very question in a Live Science article.

“Champ” the Lake Champlain monster is back bothering residents of Burlington, Vermont. The above image is a screen shot from the latest Lake Champlain monster video of a mysterious dinosaur like creature crossing the water. Alas we could not post it here because they took away the embed code, but Cryptomundo has a great write up on analyzing this latest video, as well as studying the history of the Lake Champlain Monster.

Since the dawn of civilization man has been asking the big questions: Why are we here? How did we come to be here? Is there a god? Is Bigfoot an alien?

Chris Noel, Bigfoot enthusiast, author and investigator may not be able to shed much light on the first three, but in an interview with the Tampa Examiner he tackles the big question of Bigfoot’s origins.

-For more great drawings and caricatures by Nick Worthey, check out his website.

photo credit: Loren Javier

Something is amiss in Siberia once again. The wild leek crop, that is a staple food of the Shor people of the Siberian tundra, is being gobbled up by an unknown creature. The cryptid takes only leek plants and leaves only numerous, large, mammalian footprints.

This is the same region that Cryptozoologist Igor Burtsev mounted his failed expedition to search for yetis sighted near Azasskaya Cave. Weirdthings reported on that back in March. Fourteen more sightings of a big-foot like creature with reddish brown fur have been reported in the region. Maybe Burtsev should try stuffing his tent with leeks and let the Yetis come to him next time around.

Nessie sightings have been on the decline in recent years and kilt clad investigators seeking desperately to try dinosaur haggis for the first time have turned up nothing in the placid Scottish Loch. In light of Nessie’s waning glory, a new cryptid has emerged to Champion the waterways of the North Atlantic in its stead: The Channel Creature.

This video of the Channel Creature, reportedly taken off the shore of scenic Dover, has the crypto world abuzz. Many seem to think that Nessie’s salt water counterpart is the exact same Scottish Plesiosaur we already know and love. Speculation abounds that this sighting lends credence to the theory that Loch Ness has a secret underwater tunnel leading to the sea. Some even speculate that Nessie was moved to the ocean by concerned extraterrestrials . We say it’s foolish to assume the two are the same creature, it’s a big ocean out there and there is room for more than one water bound dinosaur in the UK’s lexicon of cryptids.

Or more likely still: the same mundane visual illusions that create pixelated, dark blobs in grainy videos taken at Loch Ness, are the same visual illusions that create pixelated, dark blobs in grainy videos taken on the shores of Dover.

The latest news from cryptozoology.com links to an article from a local Trinidad newspaper. Apparently a one horned beast washed ashore on the island of Cedros and excited locals claimed that it was anything from a Narwhal to a Unicorn. The local Government Counselor’s explanation for what the creature was is far less exciting.

Link to the article.