On the 15th of May, 2001, the first of many reports about a mysterious creature known as a ‘man-monkey’, who was attacking people as they slept on their roofs during the insanely-hot summer months in Dehli. These attacks caused one death and at least 35 injuries as people were injured by the assailant or in the panic to escape from him. The effects of these attacks were so severe that in one suburb of Delhi ordered its police officers to shoot-on-sight at the creature.Described as ‘short, dark and hairy, with human legs and an ape-like face’, the monkey-man of Dehli sounds as if he could infact be a pre-historic human, such as a Neanderthal.

What adds mystery to the assailant is his apparent ability to survive leaps that would kill a normal human being, and his ability to cover long distances in a short amount of time. Because of this, he inspires terror into all that see him, causing a man to die as he jumped from the roof as his house in an attempt to save himself.

The police on the night of these first attacks, received 29 ‘distress calls’ from the eastern and north-eastern areas of Dehli. Patrols were stepped up, and police were tasked to investigate the mysterious happenings. However, this wasn’t the last sighthing of the Monkey-man, as he is still being sighted today, becoming something of a legend amongst the people of New Dehli.

[Wikipedia]

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) Said to prowl the dry air above the deserts of the American Southwest, these winged creatures appear to propel themselves using jets of flame that light up the night sky.

b.) During the 1980s, two American carnival owners spent countless hours trying to hunt and capture this legendary 8-foot-tall avian monster.

c.) Usually sighted in the vicinity of swamps and rivers, this African pterosaur-like beast is known for sinking boats and attacking locals.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP…

The correct answer is c.)

The Kongamato, which Wikipedia promised me translates to “breaker of boats” in some unspecified African tongue, is a big Pterodactyl with a correspondingly sizable ‘tude. According to Frank Mellan, an early 20th century author who penned several volumes recounting his African travels, the creature is usually described by natives as either red or black, with a wingspan the size of a grown man. It was Mellan who attested to the animal’s boat-breaking acumen, and it was Mellan who helped local Kaonde tribesmen identify the Kongamato as a Pterodactyl (by shoving a dinosaur picture book in their faces and having them flip through it as if it were a binder of mug shots). While an engineer reported seeing a few weird flying things, and an injured man at a Zambian hospital claimed he was attacked by a giant bird, neither encounter occurred on boats that got broken, so either Wikipedia is wrong or “breaker” is African slang for “ignorer.” And if you thought titmice were disappointing, how about the Kongamato? It’s neither a giant ape-sized tomato nor a red, tomato-sized ape.

Statement a.) described ass-blasters, which represent director and co-writer Ben Maddock’s effort to thoroughly scrape the bottom of the Tremors barrel, put wings on the scrapings and then give the resulting monstrosities the power of fart propulsion. Also, these latest evolutions of the classic Graboids have infrared sight. In his largely positive review of “Tremors 3: Back to Perfection,” BET’s James Hill enthusiastically described the movie as “the third best of the series,” a phrase that could also be applied to “Superman III,” the one where superman gets so drunk that he fights himself to the death in junkyard.

Statement b.) described Big Bird, who, in the 1985 feature “Follow that Bird,” was relentlessly hunted by the Sleaze brothers (played by SCTV alums Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty), who wanted to add the hulking mutation to their traveling sideshow. In the end, Big Bird’s friends help him escape after the Sleaze brothers trip over Muppets and fall into Fraggle Rock, where they’re promptly raped to death.

There’s no shortage of explanations for the demise of the newspaper industry. Could one more be the complete lack of face to face confrontation with paranormal creatures like zombies?

We at Weird Things lament the days when a brassy gal like Inez Wallace would leap feet first into adventure and track down an actual zombie and find out the supernatural and scientific explanations.

Check out these excerpts from her May 3rd, 1942 column in the Milwaukee Sentinel:

Although I rode a short distance each day into the mountains, I had practically given up hope of ever seeing a Zombie.

Then, one sultry afternoon, I was riding slowly toward Haiti’s capital when I saw HIM. Or, perhaps, I should say IT.

He was standing at a spot where a cane and a cocoa plantation met – just standing.

What did this creature look like you ask?

His face was neither the bronze of the Jamaican Negro nor the ebony black of the Haitian I had come to know in these mountains. The color was a sickly gray – like fresh Russian caviar and his skin, drawn tight over his bones, resemble old parchment.

There could only be one conclusion!

The thing before me was a ZOMBIE!

Read on for all the exhilarating details: The Milwaukee Sentinel – Google News Archive Search

This comes from The Metro.co.uk:

The young teenagers were playing by the waterfront in a Panama lake near Cerro Azul when the bald beast emerged from a cave behind a waterfall. They started screaming as it shuffled out “as if to attack them”.

Locals told Panama news the monster was like “Gollum from Lord of the Rings”…

But in a “desperate bid to defend themselves” four children grabbed rocks from the beach and hurled them at the beast.

After offing the beast, the children threw the body in the water and confessed to their parents what they’d seen. The carcass of crazy creature was later found picked apart by buzzards. Like, really, picked apart considering only bleached bones remain of what looks to be a completely intact, if waterfall dwelling, Gollum.

We might never get to examine this anomaly in a laboratory but at least those Central American youths had the times of their lives beating a rare creature to death before carelessly tossing it into a lake.

Hat tip to the one and only Brian Brushwood for this link.

By 1901, when the Australian colonies federated, the British Empire had shifted its focus from grand expedition and cryptid scavenger hunts to international treaties and the prolonged security of its infrastructure. The veil of mystery, which had once encircled Australia’s coasts and settled upon its interior like a half-opaque fog, was lifted; regional governments were installed and the population began to increase. The bunyip’s roaring call was drowned out by metallic pounding and ANFO ignition from prospering mines, and the creature returned to its home in Aboriginal Dreamtime mythology, which itself was slipping away like vapor as the indigenous people were slowly absorbed into modernity.

Around the same time, amid the economic depression of the 1890s, Australia became host to a growing population of swagmen, or “swaggies” – itinerant workers roving the countryside in search of manual labor. First appearing during the gold rush of the 1850s, swaggies remained a gruff, tattered fixture of Australia’s social landscape through the 1930s. Often taking to the swamps to live unencumbered, solitary lives between jobs, swaggies were frequently mistaken for bunyips. In the evening especially, with the sky fading from a tentative orange to an assertive purple, swaggies bathing among the reeds, their ragged silhouettes stuttered and blurred by splashing water and waving plant fronds, inhabited the bunyip’s form – and maybe always had.

Meanwhile, as Australia was mapped, its animals catalogued and its wilderness demystified, people began to notice that fur seals, usually confined to the southern river systems, frequently swam upstream during floods and subsequently found themselves trapped in the interior swamps. Before long, their similarity to the supposed bunyip – the dog-like face, furry body and barking vocalizations – was recognized.

Reality tends to inure itself to unexplained creatures. Cryptids burrow down into newsprint, gambol through songs and hibernate in dreams until something fundamental, the burden of proof maybe, gets twisted around, so that Bigfoot and Nessie and the Mothman are all living, breathing entities, cavorting the globe, waiting for a piece of definitive contrary evidence to wipe them away. Meanwhile, the bunyip is waiting to exist. After more than a century without a major sighting, what was once bunyip debunking has grown up into bunyip explaining and the creature, though alive and well in stories, has been sucked off the Earth like water drained out of a swamp.

For the Aborigines, a nomadic civilization with a rich creation mythology built largely upon storied creatures, the bunyip legend was a sensible way of explaining minor frightening unfamiliarities in an otherwise familiar world. For the British, the impulsive belief in the rarely seen animal represented just another potential conquest begging to have men and resources hurled at it, as had been done (unsuccessfully) with the legendary African Eden, Timbuktu, and (eventually successfully) with the storied Northwest Passage (to colonial Britain, the lack of supporting evidence was less a quiet caution meant to regulate enthusiasm than a booming challenge meant to incite it).

The first major colonial bunyip coup occurred in 1821 when explorer Hamilton Hume discovered a mysterious skeleton in a small lake. Hume attested that the remains were similar to those of a hippopotamus, but clearly belonged to a previously undiscovered animal. With bunyip mania sweeping Australia, it’s easy to understand why the anonymous bones were immediately attributed to the elusive aquatic predator, thereby, kick-starting a rash of reports and sightings that would wear on well into the 1890s.

As the Britons fumbled through swamps and creek beds, chasing after every mysterious sound and interviewing Aborigines about suspected bunyip lairs, the contested biology of the animal slowly began to coalesce into the generally agreed upon, though wholly arbitrary, physiology of the modern bunyip – a dog’s head and clawed seal flippers attached to a shaggy, furred body. The British were also eager to disregard accounts of the bunyip’s ferociousness, discounting them as merely a byproduct of the Aborigines superstitious nature. Faith in the bunyip’s docility only strengthened as hunters continued to return alive (though empty-handed) from their expeditions.

In the end, the reasoned, scientific British relationship with the bunyip wasn’t all that different from the supposedly savage, paranoid Aborigine one – the creature became a catch-all scapegoat for any unexplained aspect of the natural world, be it sound or bone or whispered legend. One of the more revealing bunyip fiascos of the mid 1800s occurred in the swamps of Greta, a marshy area of Victoria where residents repeatedly reported hearing strange noises. After multiple fruitless sweeps of the wetlands, the swamps were simply drained, after which, the noises stopped. The conclusion reached by the settlement – The bunyip relocated. Or it died. Either way, it was clearly real. And stealthy as all hell.

Friday: Bunyips today

For decades, the Nain Rouge leap-frogged one disaster to the next, always arriving in time to pre-empt tragedy with some goggle-eyed nose thumbing before evaporating into the high drone of an emergency broadcast signal, and for decades, from one disaster to the next, Detroit marshaled and rallied and summoned hope up out of the ashes and bones of the city’s past. In July of 1967, everything changed.

What should have a been a routine raid on an illegal bar turned into a five day riot that ended with the deployment of National Guard and U.S. Army troops. Fueled by festering racial tensions that were only exacerbated when the Detroit police, a source of friction to begin with, started making mass arrests, the riot surprised the entire country – urban living statistics coming out of Detroit portrayed it as a diverse, racially integrated wonderland. (Ultimately, the fault didn’t lie in the numbers, but in rampant, unquantified everyday prejudice, including frequent racially based mistreatment of consumers by local merchants.) In the wake of the confrontation, which was supposedly preceded by several chortling visits from the hyperactive Nain Rouge, even the most adept statistician couldn’t argue with the 43 deaths, 467 reported injuries, 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 immolated buildings.

Like a wounded, shell-shocked Veteran, the city never fully recovered. The crime rate skyrocketed in the 1970s and the town’s social fabric unraveled. Through much of the decline, the cheeky red gnome didn’t issue so much as a somber Bronx cheer.
For more than two and half centuries, the Nain Rouge seemed conjoined to the city, genetically tethered to it by a thin band of fiction, sharing whatever municipal organ secretes narrative dopamine in the wake of urban injury. But it’s hard to define the identity, the personhood, of a city. It lives in constant symbiosis with its citizens and the culture they mold and consume and re-mold, defining the place as it, in turn, defines them. The Nain Rouge was an identifying aspect of Detroit since its founding, a lodestone of a socio-cultural foundation that many believe to have crumbled in 1967.

After the riots, local and state government banded together to form a committee meant to revitalize – to redefine – the city. In defiance of history, they called the group “New Detroit.” In the last three decades, only a single Nain Rouge sighting has been reported.

On July, 30, 1763, during Pontiac’s Rebellion, amid all the fort sieges and small pox blankets, the Nain Rouge was supposedly sighted dancing and cavorting along the banks of the Detroit River, following alongside Capt. James Dalyell’s boat. The next day, Dalyell and his men were ambushed by Pontiac’s troops, who killed 20 Brits and wounded 34 others, causing the river to run red with blood.

In 1805, three years after the legislature of the Northwest Territory officially incorporated Detroit, multiple Nain Rouge sightings were allegedly reported. Then, on June 11, 1805, a stable fire burned the entire city to the ground.
These stories of the jaunty, smirking red gnome share a commonality that Nain Rouge tales, if recounted by a responsible author, all contain – “supposedly,” “allegedly” and the lack of even cursory information about the witness(es). This trend continues on through the decades as the swarthy dwarf makes appearance after non-specific appearance, with each visitation followed by a citywide tragedy. In short, it starts to feel less like the Nain Rouge is predicting disaster and more like disasters are predicting new Nain Rouge stories. Each person who, from the banks of a bloody river or the ashes of the city, declares that they saw the Nain Rouge adds a swath of flesh to the skeletal fairytale that crossed the Atlantic, until finally, the growing populace of a burgeoning metropolis has constructed a living monster to press into civil service.

For media reporting on a local tragedy, Nain Rouge sightings become diverting fluff pieces that can get snuck in between death tolls and damage-to-dollar conversions. They’re (marginally) topical and so thoroughly entangled with the city’s history, the reports almost validate the depth and severity of the human suffering that has taken place; after all, if the event weren’t a true and utter disaster, the Nain Rouge would not have appeared.

For the people, the Nain Rouge’s disaster-presaging existence and appearances can create communal comfort through the assurance that the events were unavoidable and that the city is on a path – chaos doesn’t reign, and Detroit survived every prior visitation of the creature with the fortitude and confidence to face him again. The Nain Rouge belongs to the city, and until the day he doesn’t arrive to smile and laugh and mock its defeats and misfortune, Detroit remains intact.

Friday: The Nain Rouge today

While families and merchants kept their distance from the sandy, devil-beleaguered expanse of New Jersey forest known as the Pine Barrens, deserting soldiers, runaway slaves, moonshiners and fugitives adopted the land as sort of a misanthrope’s Eden.

Along with the motley assortment of local outcasts and reprobates, the American Revolution found rogue British loyalists, known as Pine Robbers, taking up residence in the Barrens and banding together with other social malcontents to conduct violent, fiery raids on surrounding towns.

To civilians, the criminal element alone was enough of a reason to avoid the shadowy bowers and acidic sands of the area, but law enforcement wasn’t discouraged that easily.

Cue the Jersey Devil.

Once the criminals and recluses began to understand the enduring power the folktale still held over New Jersey, they began to actively propagate the legend, spreading horror stories about bizarre disappearances, grisly murders and repeated devil sightings whenever they encountered outsiders. As the image of the devil became clearer, and its existence realer, to the people of New Jersey, its wings and hooves manifesting out of the fir needles and sand like some hysteric collective fever dream, the odd patchwork of wanted outlaws and undesired tramps also began to solidify into its own insular community, surviving on fish and the sale of sphagnum moss and pine cones. Among regular society, these bucolic, devil-guarded misfits became known derogatorily as “Pineys,” a moniker they soon came to embrace and, like the stories of their unholy protector, whisper proudly out into the American air.

In the early 20th century, after years of spreading tales of the Jersey Devil, the Pineys themselves became a fixture of New Jersey lore. Dr. Henry Goddard used the genealogy of a Piney family as the basis for a massive eugenics study, concluding that the Pine Barrens’ checkered history had led to a genetic line of feeble-minded idiots, proving that (according to Goddard) idiocy is, in fact, a hereditary trait. Using the study, which, after being published in book form, became immensely popular among the public, Goddard campaigned for the forced isolation of people shown to have the supposed idiot gene.
Eugenics would go on to die an ignoble death, regarded as a misguided pseudoscience, while, among the fir trees and cedar water marshes of the Pine Barrens, the Jersey Devil still stalked and snorted and flexed his leathery wings.

Friday: The devil today

In this column, we look at two pop-cultural interpretations of ubiquitous Weird legends as portrayed by two narrative television programs… like how Sam Malone on Cheers and Al Swearengen on Deadwood both manipulated the politics of an entire town from behind the counter of a bar. But with monsters. Enjoy.

This week:
“Bigfoot is blurry.”

South Park, Episode 1×03, “Volcano”

The Six Million Dollar Man, Episodes 3×16 and 3×17, “The Secret of Bigfoot”

Bigfoot has always occupied a unique place in the pantheon of American cryptids. And I use “American” very deliberately here to suggest that, while sasquatches and yetis and abominable snowmen are found (and feared) the world over, Bigfoot is a specifically American cultural institution. Even the name “Bigfoot,” a simple, almost cute, descriptive moniker, suggests what ultimately seems to be the larger mystery that Americans wrestle with when they ponder the elusive, hirsute giant. It isn’t “Is he fact or fiction?,” but rather “Is he friend or foe?”

Both South Park and The Six Million Dollar man mused upon this question. One employed the query in revealing larger truths about pop culture’s grip on folklore. The other simply provided an answer… a weird, ridiculous answer.

In the first-season episode “Volcano,” Stan’s uncle takes the boys on a hunting trip while, simultaneously, the titular volcano threatens to destroy South Park. Cartman is mocked for telling the legend of Scuzzlebutt, a terrifying basket-weaving creature with a celery arm and a Patrick Duffy leg, and Stan’s masculinity is questioned when he refuses to kill any animals. In the end, the volcano erupts, and, though the town manages to save itself, Stan, Kyle and Cartman are rescued by the real Scuzzlebutt, who weaves a basket to carry them safely over the lava. Upon reaching safety, Stan immediately attempts to prove his manliness by shooting Scuzzlebutt in the head, which only ends up making everyone mad.

Meanwhile, back in the ‘70s, in the epic two-part episode “The Secret of Bigfoot,” Steve Austin links the disappearance of two scientists to Bigfoot. After tracking the creature down and trying to communicate with him, only to be violently rebuffed, The Six Million Dollar Man fights the creature, which takes flight after Austin tears off its arm. Austin then pursues the monster to a cave, where Bigfoot is revealed to be an intelligent android built by aliens to guard their mountain base.

Though created more than two decades apart, both of these storylines engage with the uniquely American consideration (maybe even hope) that Bigfoot is a benign, gentle creature, perhaps more human than animal. Scuzzlebutt (an obvious Bigfoot analog) is revealed to be a magnanimous craftsman who puts himself in danger to save the children. During Steve Austin’s initial encounter with the beast, Austin tries repeatedly to talk not just at the creature, but with it. How can we use these distinctly American narratives to uncover how Bigfoot has been sculpted into a national icon?

The Six Million Dollar Man two-part episode is interesting as an artifact from the beginning of America’s pop cultural fixation on Bigfoot. From the discovery of a giant footprint to the first sighting of the creature ambling through the woods (a clear homage to the infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage), the show’s portrayal of Bigfoot (up until the sensationalist, ratings-hungry robot reveal) hinges on his starkly uneven elusiveness-to-size ratio and the taxonomical theory that he is a missing evolutionary link between primates and man. While it seems obvious to regard the latter point, evolutionary kinship, as the root of the country’s fixation, it’s important to consider that Bigfoot-like creatures are a globally reported phenomenon, but few others are afforded the same national affection (or adorable nickname) as Bigfoot. Even the alien robot version of Bigfoot was portrayed as a misunderstood, intelligent alien robot. While it’s true that his bipedal posture and supposedly humanoid face lend Bigfoot a bit more hugability than, say, the horse-headed, bat-winged Jersey Devil, there’s a huge leap being made from possible threat to anonymous creature to probable friend.

So, what’s aiding Americans’ minds in making this jump? Well, on television, the Jersey Devil is going to be an anonymous puppet or special effect. Bigfoot, on the other hand, because of this supposed evolutionary kinship, can be played by a human. Everyone who watched The Six Million Dollar Man, for example, saw the creature as portrayed by a Muhammad Ali, and that image was branded into the cultural consciousness. To oversimplify: America sees Muhammad Ali as Bigfoot, America loves Muhammad Ali, ergo, etc. And that’s just one portrayal on one show. Bigfoot was a fixture of narrative TV in the ‘70s; the more people see a monster personified, the less they see the monster.

Here’s where South Park comes into it – while Scuzzlebutt’s Patrick Duffy leg seems like a silly pop cultural non sequitur, it manages to perfectly articulate this precise point: folklore is no less susceptible to pop culture than music or film. In his story, Cartman characterizes the creature as a bloodthirsty beast that kills people in order to “add pieces to its deformed body.” This quote almost reads like hyperbolized meta-commentary on pop culture itself, and the way it’s constantly assembling and re-assembling its own amorphous form and the form of all of it components, Bigfoot included.

The underlying non-threatening folksiness hinted at by Scuzzlebutt’s celery arm and penchant for basket weaving reveal another constructed trait that Americans have projected onto Bigfoot; If it’s assumed that Bigfoot is, in fact, more human than primate, his humanity is an older version, untouched by technology and the social complexities of the modern world. Given America’s obsession with idealizing an unobtainable past, it makes sense that people would find something attractive and mysterious about this kind of basic humanity, and the way Bigfoot supposedly carries it around inside of him, like he’s the last fluent speaker of some ancient, forgotten language.

The real Bigfoot remains a mystery. In the meantime, the country has stitched together the Bigfoot it loves. It has a Muhammad Ali leg, an idealized past arm and a wealth of the other disparate pieces of our national identity that have been offered up and subsumed in the name of creating a truly American monster.

Matt Finley is a regular Weird Things researcher currently based in Cleveland. His blog can be found here and you can follow him on Twitter at @Finfizzler.

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…

For two warm spring nights in 1977, a monster trolled the quiet streets of Dover, Delaware, haunting passersby with its large, almost-featureless head and glowing, empty stare.

When one considers that none of the witnesses to the so-called “Dover Demon” (dubbed as such by the press) were in direct contact immediately before or after the alleged sightings, and all of their descriptions of the creature varied slightly (orange eyes versus green eyes, etc.), an orchestrated hoax seems unlikely. But a microcosmic case of teenage mass hysteria built around a confused infant moose and a pop cultural zeitgeist that piled a brand-new sensationalist Leonard Nimoy television program onto known UFO tracking at a local airforce base, a rampaging serial killer and an imminent star war?

Many skeptics believe it isn’t a coincidence that all three witnesses (Bill Bartlett, age 17; John Baxter, age 15; and Abby Brabham, age 15) to the spindly, large-eyed, four-foot-tall, melon-headed creature, which was witnessed clambering along Dover roadsides on April 21st and 22nd, 1977, were adolescents; even after disregarding the high school prank theory, some experts believe the Dover Demon, a veritable celebrity among American cryptids, was probably a woefully misidentified baby moose. Others admit the possibility that it could have been the product of a covert genetic engineering experiment. Sure, certain spirit hunters and cryptophiles with a new-age bent believe that the witnesses’ age demographic suggests that the alleged creature was related to a poltergeist, appearing only to those whose hormones and bio-rythyms were in continuous flux, and phrases like “extra-terrestrial” and “inter-dimensional being” have been tossed around, but the same trixy pubescence that collectively robs the witnesses of credibility also helps explain how a demon was born.

Though the Hollywood extra-terrestrial boom that began in 1977 with the May release of Star Wars (followed almost immediately by the November release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) was still a month away when 17-year-old Bill Bartlett saw the bulbous head and shining eyes of an unearthly quadruped reflected in his headlights as he drove home through Dover on April 21st, a cultural obsession with UFOs and the paranormal was already a fixture of American life. Starting with the release of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage in 1967 and the publicized discontinuation of the U.S. Air Force’s UFO research division, Project Blue Book, in 1969, and bolstered by a sudden spike in reported UFO sightings in 1973 (The fact that the government was no longer searching for the truth about flying saucers clearly put the perceived responsibility back into the hands of the public), the culture was in the throes of an obsession.

Meanwhile, New York City, just three hours north of Dover, was caught in a media frenzy as the .44 Caliber Killer, later identified as David Berkowitz, roamed through the city committing a mounting series of violent shootings. More than half of his, as of that time, 11 victims were teenagers, one of whom had been killed on April 17th, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting. With news of the seemingly random killings and the ensuing investigation garnering play-by-play national coverage, it’s not unreasonable to imagine a country of teenagers, suddenly confronted with the truth of their own mortality, feeling, understandably, on edge.

And that’s not even taking into account that Dover Air Force Base, which tracked and verified several local UFO sightings throughout the early ‘70s, is located just southeast of the city. Local teenagers who were already exposed to, and demographically poised to take the brunt of, a burgeoning cultural interest in the paranormal would have certainly been aware that within the corporate limits of their hometown existed a government facility that was on record as having monitored unexplained phenomena.

Certainly after the release of Star Wars (and well after the Dover sightings), a rash of alien-themed narrative television shows and films appeared, including Battlestar Galactica, Mork and Mindy, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Alien, etc. (1978 even saw a short-lived television adaptation of Project Blue Book, entitled “Project UFO”). Based on these dates, one might draw the faulty conclusion that the Dover Demon sightings seem to hold more water as legitimate evidence of an undeniably ridiculous looking cryptid stalking The Blue Hen State, given that they occurred before the start of the pop cultural science fiction renaissance, but I would argue that it actually makes more sense, and verges on unsurprising, that sightings like those reported in Dover happened prior to the debut of the above popular entertainments.

Pop culture isn’t a proactive phenomenon. It simply reacts to the wider cultural milieu, absorbing current social, political and scientific thought trends and translating those into the narrative structures that humans seem to require to bring already-present ideas into the sphere of general consciousness. This description, of course, is a gross oversimplication, but the point is that by the time TV and media started addressing instances of paranormal phenomena, the country was already deeply concerned with, and afraid of, all things unearthly.

Next, I’d like to posit that, in assimilating national fears and then reproducing visions of them, pop culture goes through two stages: addressing the fear and answering the fear. For example, in the late ‘60s, supposed Bigfoot footage landed all over the news and the government stopped officially researching UFOs. These and other events (the promise of continued manned space exploration, a sudden spate of books about The Bermuda Triangle, the continuing growth of the new age movement, etc.) led to a growing, unarticulated fear of the paranormal and the supernatural in America. As in every instance of irrational national fear or obsession, the first things the entertainment industry begins to produce are documentaries and dramatizations of actual events. 1975 saw the airing of a made for TV movie called The UFO Incident, which portrayed the supposedly true story of an East Coast couple who, years after a strange experience on a mountain road, discover, through hypnosis, that they were abducted by, and experimented on, by aliens. Even more telling, on April 17th, 1977, just four days before the first Dover Demon sighting (and on the night of the fifth and sixth Berkowitz murders), “In Search Of…”, a Leanord Nimoy-hosted television documentary series that investigated all corners of pseudo-science and sensationalist natural anomalies, ranging from UFOs to Atlantis to The Elephant Man, premiered with an episode about communicating with plants and, more importantly, an opening title sequence that featured a laundry list of topics to come, including extraterrestrials, witchcraft and monsters.

It’s only after a fear is addressed through such documentaries and dramatizations, like those stated above, which simply reduce and collate the most striking and mysterious aspects of the terrorizer in question into a comprehensive consumable piece, that people begin to create answers to the fear by constructing fictions that both put a face to the unknown and present a clear resolution in which, generally, the physical manifestation of our terror is either destroyed or robbed of its power over us. For example, after “realistically” re-enacting the nation’s collective UFO fear in “The UFO Incident,” Close Encounters of the Third Kind presented a fictionalized version of an alien encounter in which the aliens abducting humans and staging high-speed flyovers are reveled to be friendly explorers reaching out to humanity through a simple, delightful tune. Fear momentarily allayed.

The Dover Demon sightings took place in the middle of a cultural shift wherein all of the country’s supernatural curiosity and fear was out in the open, being actively documented and dramatized, but few contemporary fictions had been created to soothe the American psyche. On a spring night, in a quiet town, as the cultural climate around the adolescent witnesses erupted with teen murders, supernatural documentaries, UFO sightings and commercials for film after film about cosmic misadventure, who knows what the hormonal, pubescent mind will do when confronted by something as atypical as a newborn moose, much less some disgusting genetic experiment gone awry. Add Fleetwood Mac’s then-top-selling album Rumours into the mix, and it’s a shock that there wasn’t significant property damage.

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