Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Readers' Weird Creature Encounters 2

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Strickler) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:27:52 PDT

Here are a few more reader submissions that relate to encounters with strange animals...possibly cryptids or other beings:

THE DOVER DEMON?

I saw this creature crossing the street (Rte. 18) in Abington, MA in 1970 while I was driving home from work. It stopped, looked at me, and then scurried off up an embankment. It climbed up the side of a storage building onto the roof, and watched me watch it for a small amount of time, then ran along the roof and out of my sight. I later told my wife and some friends about it, and they all decided I was not in my right mind or was making up a story (not in my nature). Last week my wife brought a book home from the library which described the creature and other sightings in Dover. She now believes my story - after 39 yrs of disbelief. I'm not sure what this creature was. I described it as a "purple monkey" kind of thing, but the color I saw was most likely a result of the type of night lighting in the area. I am not broadly given to paranormal sightings or the existence of many cryptozoological creatures, but I know that I saw this or something like this. Walt

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SOUTH CHINA SEA ENCOUNTER

Hello there Lon,

It came to interest me about how you can send in your own story about a close encounter or possibly something unusual.

So I have a story my mother told me a long time ago about encountering a creature (which of course I was really skeptical about) when she was roughly 25-26 years old. (Now 55)

She recently told me the story again and it was still the same way she told me when I was 15-16 which then made me believe, what if it was true? And if it is true, What was it?

When my mother was still living in Vietnam, she was very poor like every working Vietnamese citizen there. People worked hard to try to earn money or at the very least get enough food to survive the rough lifestyle of Vietnam. Back then, My mother told me it was a very shady place to live. People died easily because of starvation or health problems occurred which killed many hard working people. Another way many people died was how citizens were forced to go to different areas of Vietnam to work. My mother was soon one of the many who had to be forced to go elsewhere.

That very same night when she was soon to leave, her brother managed to tell her about a boat that was to be used to escape Vietnam and head away from there. At least a dozen people (including my Mother and Uncle) got on a boat and headed out from Hà Tiên towards Thailand.

That night, when the dozen escaped, they celebrated and rejoiced by drinking and eating on the boat through the first night. Through the 2nd or 3rd day, their engine broke and was now traveling where the water took them. Through the 4th day of being on water, they barely had any supplies and soon the group began to think they would all die with little water and food.

My mother doesn't know what day this was during the 1 week of being out at sea before reaching Thailand but this is when the encounter with the creature occurred.

My mother also didn't tell me what time of day it was, but it was bright enough to be able to see the creature in the water. (during mid day?)

As the boat was still moving through the force of the water, my mother noticed a very big creature close to the boat. She described the creature to be "gray" in color and also very big. She told me that the creature must of been much bigger than the boat they were in considering it was right beside them.

Also, my mother explained to me that the creature didn't move at all when my mother looked at the body of the creature, it just stayed in the shallow water. Surprisingly, I asked her if she saw a face, tail or anything else that could define it. But she told me that her friend grabbed her and told her not to look in case something bad were to occur. Another interesting detail my mother told me was that she felt, if the creature were to move, even it's tail if it did have one, she thought the boat would definitely flip or possibly destroy the boat. I asked my Mom what you thought it could have been and the first thing that came up in her mind was "Fish".

But I know in my own conscience, it couldn't have been a fish. So I also asked her if the body of the creature was smooth, and she responded, "Yes". After the next couple days, the dozen managed to make it to Thailand and never saw that creature again.

So in my own thoughts, I had to rule it out that it was no fish, and if somehow in the world, if it is a fish, it's definitely a unique one with a smooth gray body and no scales.

Also, if my mother did see its entire body, there was definitely no top fins on the creature which almost wants me to rule out it was no shark, but it could of been a bit deeper to not reveal its top fin?

I'm also not too sure what creatures lurk in the South China Sea and if they even have any big sea creatures.

I wanted to come up with a possibility it was a whale or shark but to get so close to a boat, wouldn't the creatures get scared? Also it stood still in the water for a while, I don't exactly know if sharks have the tendency to do that. Whales on the other hand, maybe? Even for a Fish, Definitely no way it could be one.

I was hoping I could get some answers on what it may of or could of been. If you guys get this, hopefully you guys can fill me in with anything that is related to this.

Appreciate it. - Johnny

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UNKNOWN FLYING ENTITY

Thanks for the daily email updates. I had an encounter that I did make a report on but have never received any inquiries. Since your readers send you their experiences maybe there is a chance someone has seen something similar.

The encounter occurred on July 6, 2005 at about 11:30 pm. I had a long day in San Diego then afterward going to the beach at Del Mar, CA for some surf fishing. I arrived at my home in San Marcos about 11:00 pm. After cleaning my fish and showering, I was very tired. I went out to my carport for a smoke and a look at the night sky. I looked north, thinking about a recent UFO sighting and wondering what it's all about. In the distance, at a couple hundred feet, I saw a faintly visible moving object that flitted from side to side. Whatever it was, it reflected light from the streetlights. It's side to side movement was so quick, I couldn't tell if it was one object or two. The object then zipped directly over my neighbors house across the street. By this time, I was certain I'd never seen anything like it. It continued to move side to side, in a space of approximately 50 feet. It then stopped and I observed it more clearly.

It may have had big "eyes" and wing-like appendages, and was probably 2 to 3 feet in width. It remained still and I could see wavering reflections from it's "wings" which were not beating like a birds, but showed shimmering reflections from the streetlights. I felt the hair on my head rise all the way down my back to my ankles! It appeared to be looking at me, as I smoked my cigarette. I felt threatened, and said out loud, "I see you!" Then it went from stationary to out of sight, right over my head in an instant. I came out from under my covered carport, and turned to follow it's movement. Immediately, it zipped into view directly above my head, obviously studying me! I could see really weird large and intensely dark "eyes". It seemed surprised by my looking right at it. It didn't like being seen. My apprehension rose even higher. It turned away and disappeared like a shot.

It had a birdlike shape, but was thicker. My impression was of reflections of the streetlights on wing-like appendages, and big dark eyes!

It wasn't a bird, bat or any familiar nocturnal creature. It's movements did not seem explicable in comparison to any creature that fly's by beating it's wings. The hills and mountains are so rugged and inaccessible near my home, that anything could remain hidden and make night time forays at will. I read about "thunderbirds" but I'm not sure if this was one of these.

Thanks for the help! HR

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POSSIBLE MOTHMAN

I was driving back to my home in Grove City, Ohio at about 9 pm on February 22nd when I saw something very strange. I had just made a turn off RT104 onto Borror Rd. and was driving around a sharp turn when I saw something brown on the side of the road. I first assumed it was a deer since I have seen several on this road before but as I got closer it was too big to be a deer. The best I can describe this object it that it looked like a big piece of brown shag carpet about 6 to 7 feet tall and about 10 feet wide. As I came close to passing this object on the side of the road it folded up like the rug was being folded in half. I flinched and swerved out of the way because as it folded I thought it was lunging toward me and coming after me. I just sped up and kept driving home.

I did not tell anyone what I had seen for a few days because I was so baffled and didn't want to believe that I saw what I did. After replaying the sighting over and over in my head I decided to tell my wife and we started looking up on the internet, things that might match what I saw. The closest thing we could come up with is the Mothman except I didn't see any glowing eyes, but if the eyes were reflective I would probably not have seen them because the creature was facing the road and not my headlights. Anyway this was the strangest thing I have ever seen. Brian P.

Phantoms & Monsters: Cryptid Encounters

The Official Cryptid Field Guide (Secret Saturdays (Unnumbered))

Werewolves: Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena

Encounters: With the Strange and Unexplained

Just the Facts?: Village Panics Over Bigfoot Prints -- The Ghost of Stump Lake -- Uri Geller...Psychic Spy?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Strickler) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:30:57 PDT

Village in panic over Bigfoot prints

About 200 Bigfoot-like footprints have been discovered near Kampung Kepis Baru, Kuala Pilah, causing panic among villagers, reported Harian Metro.

Adnan Pungut, 48, claimed he discovered the footprints when he was clearing rubbish and wood at his rubber estate at 3pm on Saturday.

“I immediately informed the others because I was scared. I told the other villagers and all of us went back to the area.

“We found 200 footprints that were about the same size and tried to follow them,” he was quoted as saying.

“Based on the footprints, we can assume that the creature has two legs and weighs more than 100kg,” he said.

According to Adnan, further checks by villagers found that the creature could be headed towards a nearby forest.

The report stated that the villagers decided not to pursue the creature as they were afraid.

“We will let the authorities handle it as the animal could be endangered,” Adnan said. - TheStar

The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates

The World's Weirdest Places

Alien animals: A Worldwide Investigation - lake Monsters, Giant Birds & Birdmen, Black dogs, Mystery pumas, Bigfoot

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Uri Geller...Psychic Spy?

We may know him for spoon bending antics and for his lengthy friendship with pop star Michael Jackson but showbiz psychic Uri Geller has seemingly had a lengthy second career as a secret agent for Mossad and the CIA, albeit one that was more Austin Powers than James Bond.

Geller was at the Sheffield Doc Fest this week for the premiere of Vikram Jayanti’s The Secret Life Of Uri Geller – Psychic Spy?, a new film that offers compelling evidence of his involvement in the shadowy world of espionage.

“Uri has a controversial reputation. A lot of people think he is a fraud, a lot of people think he is a trickster and makes things up but at the same time he has a huge following and a history of doing things that nobody can explain,” Jayanti says of his Zelig-like subject.

Speaking to The Independent, Geller acknowledged alarm when he first saw Jayanti’s documentary.

“I was worried and I am still concerned,” Geller said of the way the documentary outs him as a spy. “I didn’t realise that Vikram was going to do such a thorough job of tying all the loose ends…making that the little hints I dropped throughout my career were real.”

When he signed up for the doc, the psychic didn’t realise quite how diligently Jayanti would track down his old spy masters. Nonetheless, he is happy that the doc is showing “a serious side” to him. “Some countries think I am a freak, bizarre, an eccentric,” he sighs.

On camera and in interview, Geller still remains coy about his espionage activities. Nonetheless, the psychic acknowledges that his handlers once asked him to use telepathy to stop a pig’s heart. He refused, knowing that if he had succeeded, the next target would almost certainly have been a human.

“I tried to execute missions that were positive,” Geller claims. “I said ‘no’ to dark things.”

Jayanti didn’t rely on Geller’s own cryptic testimony. Instead, he spoke to the high-level officials involved in recruiting and using him. These include scientists from The Stanford Research Institute as well as senior CIA operatives. Among the interviewees with first hand knowledge of Geller’s psychic spying activities are former CIA officer Kit Green, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell (the sixth man to walk on the moon), physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, and retired US army colonel John Alexander (of The Men Who Stared At Goats fame). A Brit, Nick Pope, once the British Government’s UFO boffin, also puts in an appearance. We also learn about Geller's stint as a psychic bodyguard for Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo.

The doc leaves a question mark in its title but provides so much background evidence that we are left in little doubt that even its most outlandish assertions are rooted in truth. Whether or not Geller had psychic powers, US security forces were certainly prepared to take a very hefty wager on him.

It is inferred that Geller attempted to use his psychic powers to disable radar during the “raid on Entebbe,” when Israeli commandos stormed a hijacked plane.

The spoon bender also used his mind powers to try erase the contents of floppy discs being carried back to Russia by Soviet diplomats in Mexico and to convince a Russian minister to sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty. (Geller is pictured alongside the minister flanked by a youthful and grinning US Vice-President Al Gore.)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears in the doc, testifying to his many years of friendship with Geller.

Jayanti’s thesis is that Geller was recruited as the US security forces were caught up in “psychic arms race” with their Soviet rivals, who were almost certainly bluffing about the strength of their own psychic warriors.

“When Jimmy Carter was elected President, one of the first things he did was to have Uri Geller give him a four hour briefing on the Soviet psychic threat. America didn’t want a psychic gap and Uri was the go-to guy about these things,” Jayanti said. “Sometimes, you wonder whether Uri’s entire public career has actually been a front for his shadow world activities.”

After 9/11, Geller was apparently “re-activated” as a psychic spy.

The key formative event in Geller’s youth appears to have been his near-death experience while fighting for the Israeli army during the Six Day War. He came face to face with a Jordanian soldier and shot him to save his own life.

“Out of the entire war, that one incident, that split second of killing another human being, left me scarred and I definitely have recurring nightmares about that. I learned to live with it,” Geller tells me. “When I woke up in hospital in Jerusalem, I realised what I had committed…that soldier is embedded in my soul now. He is like my brother. That is the way I feel. Although these recurring nightmares are such that he comes and grabs me and says what did you do to me, I still feel his soul is in my soul.”

Although Geller is coy about how he helped the Mossad, he had one revealing anecdote about Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan in a restaurant.

“He (Dayan) was an avid collector of archaeological items, very ancient ones, four, five six thousand years old. They’re all around Israel. When he met me and saw my powers, the first question he asked me, after the serious questions of military use and all that…was ‘Uri, do you think you can find for me some archaeological artefacts with your powers.’ I said, ‘You know, Moshe, I’ve never done it but let’s try!’”

This led to various late night trips when Geller would take Dayan with him as he went dousing for ancient relics. “I found quite a few things for him. He loved it. He used to collect them in his garden.”

Spying for the CIA is one thing, football another. In Sheffield, Geller belatedly offered his apologies to the Scottish people for using his psychic powers from a helicopter above Wembley to try to make the ball move before Gary McAllister took his fateful, missed penalty against England during the Euro 1996 tournament. He acknowledged that was one occasion when he had most definitely crossed ethical lines.

“I then realised after I got hate letters, hundreds and hundreds from Scotland, that it was absolutely and utterly unethical,” Geller confessed. “Guess what, I bought a Scottish island. I made up with Scotland. I am an owner of a Scottish island. That, to me, means I am partially Scottish.” - Independent

ESP & Psychic Spies

The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a "Psychic Spy" for the U.S. Military

Tell Me What You See: Remote Viewing Cases from the World's Premier Psychic Spy

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Documentary suggests UFO folklore was deliberately fabricated under a U.S. psychological warfare program

Delving into the shadowy hinterland of delusion, deception and paranoia that fuels UFO mythology, this tantalizing British-made documentary has just had its world premiere at the tenth annual Doc/Fest in the northern English city of Sheffield. Mirage Men features testimony from true believers, close-encounter witnesses, airline pilots and highway patrolmen. But it is chiefly concerned with a more prosaic and earthbound conspiracy, which suggests that much key UFO folklore was deliberately fabricated by U.S. military insiders to discredit extraterrestrial investigators as unhinged cranks, thus deflecting attention from their own covert projects.

Never less than engaging and generally good fun, Mirage Men touches on some accidentally topical material, including the ethics of NSA snooping and secret unmanned drone aircraft. The evergreen theme, eccentric personalities and bizarre anecdotes here are strong enough to guarantee further festival slots following the documentary's Sheffield debut. After that, television seems to be the most obvious platform, though the juicy subject matter and high-end production values may well attract niche theatrical business.

Mirage Men is distilled from the 2010 book of the same name Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by the British author Mark Pilkington, who is also involved here as writer, producer and onscreen talking head. The film’s focus is narrower, concentrating on the U.S., specifically a handful of well-known figures and events in UFO circles. One pivotal player in both the book and film is Richard Doty, a former counterintelligence officer with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), who claims to have spent decades deliberately spreading disinformation about extraterrestrials: “weapons of mass deception,” as one interviewee memorably puts it. Another is ufologist and author William Moore, whose books include The Roswell Incident / by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore and The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility

Doty and Moore initially seem plausible enough on camera, though they share a shadowy past. Both admit to feeding false information to Paul Bennewitz, a World War II veteran and electronics expert living alongside a USAF base in New Mexico. According to Doty, the NSA targeted Bennewitz in the early 1980s as a useful idiot in their black propaganda wars, beaming fake extraterrestrial messages into his house and planting bogus spaceship evidence on a nearby mountain range. Convinced he had uncovered an alien invasion plot, Bennewitz turned into a deranged version of Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Blu-ray] wrote warning letters to President Reagan, developed paranoid psychosis and was briefly institutionalized. Mission accomplished.

Many rich threads are woven into this colorful patchwork story: Apache folk myth, Cold War paranoia, macabre animal mutilations, top-secret stealth bombers and even an early experiment with fracking. Pilkington and his fellow directors maintain an admirably unsensational but agreeably playful tone, punctuating artfully eerie shots of the New Mexico desert with kitschy clips from vintage science-fiction thrillers.

Mirage Men takes a fascinating excursion into a twilight zone of wild conspiracies, obsessive believers and psychological double agents, even if the claims and counterclaims it stirs up never quite harden into solid investigative journalism. The open-ended finale is also disappointingly flat, leaving only the impression that USAF insider Doty is as slippery and deluded as any tinfoil-hatted UFO conspiracy nut. But Pilkington and his fellow filmmakers know their audience well. As with all paranormal myths, nobody really wants conclusive proof that little green men were fakes all along. The Truth is still out there. - Hollywood Reporter

Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds

Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Blu-ray]

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The Ghost of Stump Lake

Wisconsin Widow's Strange Experience With an Unearthly Thing

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sentinel - 20 December 1896

Deerfield, Wis., Dec. 19, 1896 A ghost story told by Widow Olson of Stump lake is more difficult of solution than any yet published. Mrs. Olson and her 14-year-old son were living on the south shore of Stump lake, which, before the mill dam at the lower end was washed out, was about three miles long by one mile wide except at about midway from end to end where it narrowed down to a neck only about a half mile across. It was on the south side of this neck that Widow Olson lived. One day a boy came up and asked the way to a farmer living on the opposite shore of the lake. The widow directed him the way by land, but as this was about three miles, suggested that her son might take him across in his boat and save him a long walk. The stranger accepted and the two started for the landing. Young Olson took his position at the oars and invited the stranger to a seat at the stern. The strange boy took the seat as indicated but instead of facing the oarsman turned his back to him and sat motionless without uttering a word all the way across. Young Olson made some commonplace remarks but his passenger took no notice of them. His strange behavior made Olson observe him more closely and the more he looked at him the more did he appear unlike a human. His attention was first attracted by the stranger’s ears, which were abnormally large, reaching almost to the top of his head, where they came to nearly a point or sharp angle and were covered with a fine downy hair. His head was small and angular, something like that of a dog and covered with short, black curly hair that hugged the skin tightly. The hands were small, shriveled and covered with hair similar to that on his ears. Young Olson was now becoming almost frightened out of his wits at being alone in the boat with such an unearthly looking being and rowed with all his might. On arriving at the opposite landing he got out of the boat hastily to let out his uncongenial passenger. The stranger arose to leave the boat, but instead of facing about to walk out, he backed out and carefully kept his face from view. Olson, who was now thoroughly frightened, rowed back quickly and ran for the house to tell his mother of his strange passenger. As he was telling his mother, she turned around to look at her boy to see if he were joking or was in earnest. As she looked around she saw the very same lad her son had rowed across running up a little hill close to the house quick as a flash chasing her sheep ahead of him. Mother and son both made after him, but on arriving at the crest of the hill no body was to be seen while the sheep stood down the slope a little way huddled together looking frightened as if recently chased by a wolf or dog. There was nothing within eighty rods that the stranger could have hid behind. Why they did not notice his strange appearance before starting in the boat, how he got back so quickly and where he disappeared to was more than the frightened widow and son have been able to account for and they firmly believe there are still a few left of the old-time elf family. - Haunted Wisconsin

Ghost Stories of Wisconsin

Wisconsin's Ghosts

Is This The Face Of Rick Dyer's Bigfoot?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Strickler) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:59:08 PDT

Video - Bigfoot Body

The publisher of the video posted: 'Bigfoot data pulled from a short phone video'

This video was supposedly taken by an individual who was allowed to observe the remains.

Is this the Bigfoot that was promised by Ricky D? Or did he find a 500 lb gnome or dwarf?

NOTE: I'm waiting for follow-ups & see what response the 'Best Bigfoot Tracker in the World' has. I'll link to 'whatever' comes of this...Lon

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Readers' Weird Creature Encounters

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Strickler) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:07:03 PDT

The following reader submissions relate to encounters with strange animals...possibly cryptids or other beings:

STALKED IN ARIZONA

Hi - I was wondering if you could give me your thoughts? My fiancee and I live in the mountains of Arizona and we went night fishing at an old fish hatchery, now privately owned ponds, tonight. We were there for a couple of minutes when we started to hear something rustling around at the pond next to us. At first I thought it was just an elk (we'd been there a couple of days before and there were tracks in the mud on the shore) but my fiancee was worried that it might be something else so he made a fire to try and scare it away. After a while the rustling stopped and we relaxed.

Not long later we heard a huge splash from the other pond. We thought that maybe a mountain lion or bear had jumped in trying to get some of the fish, as unrealistic as that seemed, but we never heard any more splashing and it was very unlikely that there was a fish the size of a full grown man in the pond next door. We didn't hear anything after that for a long time until suddenly there was another huge splash in our pond, but I couldn't see where it had come from or what had made it.

I was starting to get creeped out and the fire was dying out and I wanted to leave but my fiancee wanted to stay and fish some more. We could hear some more rustling in the reeds near us and suddenly my fiancee just started packing things up and dousing the fire and told me that he was ready to leave. We had left the car up by the highway by the gate and walked all the way down the dirt road, through the meadow, and past some other ponds to get to where we were fishing...so we still had a ways to walk before we would hop the fence and be back at the car. Every couple of seconds he would look behind us and then start walking faster. He told me that he thought there was a bear by the ponds and kept looking back and getting more panicked and walking faster. I was too chicken to look back at what he was obviously looking for.

By the time we were almost back to the car I was practically jogging to keep up with him and he was making comments like "once we get over the gate we'll be fine." When we finally did make it to the car he kept looking back over the meadow and acting antsy until we were driving back home. When I asked him if he'd seen the bear he replied "I don't know what that was, but it wasn't a bear." He proceeded to tell me about the animal he'd seen and that had looked right at him while he stood on the edge of the pond. He described it as being as big as a bear, but looking like a half dog, half crocodile mutation of some kind. He said it looked scaly and that they had looked at each other right at the same moment and the creature had almost all black eyes. He also said that he felt like he was being studied by it, like it was very very smart.

We were a little ways away from the ponds when he started looking back and walking faster. He said that first he saw the thing sitting on the top of the hill by the pond looking at us. This freaked him out so he started walking faster. When he looked again it had come down the hill and was still looking at us, making him walk even faster and tell me the bogus lie about the bear (he knew very well what a chicken I am and that I wouldn't look back). When he looked again, it was in the field, still far away, but still following us. The next time he said it was on the road behind us, walking like a cat does when stalking it's prey. This was when he started making comments about getting over the gate and freaking out over the lantern because it was starting to dim (he's a scout and I guess the theory is that if you have light with you it will keep most everything away).

I've never seen him so freaked out before and I didn't know if I should think that he was just seeing things? But he swears up and down that he saw whatever it was. So we came home and looked up "giant alligator dog sightings" and came across the Doyarchu. The descriptions of it sound amazingly accurate to what he told me on the drive home and we kinda freaked ourselves out wondering if the second splash in our pond would have been it's mate. I do believe that he saw something tonight, he's also sworn that he's never going back out there again.

After my parents laughed at us they suggested that we go back in the morning and look for tracks, but he flat out told me no! I know that this probably sounds like just a crazy story, doyarchus are supposedly mythical creatures from Ireland, as I understand it. I just don't know how to explain what he swears he saw and felt like was going to eat us. MN

NOTE: Here's a piece I posted earlier - The Irish Crocodile. Lon

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FLYING RAY-SHAPED BEING - CHARLOTTE, NC

Lon - One evening in 2010 around dusk, with a fair amount of twilight still in the sky, I stood out in my well-lit driveway waiting to be picked up to go eat dinner. As I stood looking around, watching the sky as airplanes flew in and out of the Charlotte, NC airport (30ish miles away), something caught my eye that was much, much lower in the sky than the airplanes I had been watching. Flying directly over my head, was a translucent/transparent manta-ray shaped figure whose speed and size would suggest an extremely low altitude, maybe a little higher than a telephone pole, and maybe an 8ft wingspan. This manta-ray flew and moved in a fashion that suggested to me that it was a living creature as opposed to an aircraft. I could see directly through it but was easily able to see its shape/figure. I watched it fly directly overhead in a straight path for maybe 10 seconds, then it completely disappeared, long before it flew out of sight.

I was very shocked to find other eye-witness accounts of this creature on your site, matching what I saw down to every little detail. What are these things?

Truly an incredibly surreal experience. SS

NOTE: "What are these things?" I ask that same question everyday...and the sightings continue. Lon

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BIG BLACK BIRDS

Lon - I used to live ten miles North of Lake Geneva in the East Troy WI area, and I investigated several reports of UFOs sailing over the rolling farmland and hovering low enough overhead to "hit with a rock", but never ran into any BigBlackBird (BBB) reports there.

However, my brother has had several strange encounters with weird things near his home in Providence, R.I., and one event that affected him the most was a sighting of two giant birds during a dawn fishing trip in Providence's famed Roger Williams Park.

As he was approaching one of the Park's larger interconnected lakes, walking across a tree-studded lawn surrounding a marble music temple, a pair of huge black "crows", with bodies as large as VW bugs, came swooping out of the early morning lake mist, flapping their enormous wings slowly as they swept between the treetops, curving past him thru the swirling fog, then twisting between the large shoreline oaks' intertwining branches and vanishing out over the lake!

They made no sound except the soft whoosh of air over their beating wings; their feathers were jet black, as were what he could see of their eyes; there was no odor. He froze in place as the apparitions flew past, then he rushed down thru the trees to the water's edge and scanned the lake's surface, but the creatures were nowhere to be seen, and never seen there again.

There are many other reports of paranormal activities in and around that Park over the years, including several experienced by my brother. - Wayne

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VANISHING HOMINID

Sir - About three years ago, I had a strange encounter in the length of woods that borders my house. It was winter and I was on one of my routine hikes with my brother. We would periodically stop and rest, listening to the sounds of the forest. We were climbing a steep hill and having a hell of a time with it. Our march was halted when I stepped in a pothole and when I finally dragged my foot out we decided to take a breather. That's when I saw it. We were just standing there, making small talk, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure. I turned and saw a large, lanky creature watching us from atop a hill. The very instant my gaze fixed on it, it began to barrel down the hill at us. I tried to run or even alert my brother, but I couldn't move. I was paralyzed with fear.

I heard my brother asked "what's the matter?"...but I couldn't tell him because I didn't know. I didn't know what I was looking at. I was finally able to break my paralysis and was about to tell him what was happening and then it was gone. Just POOF! Like smoke in the wind. Needless to say I hauled ass out of there. If I was to describe the thing I would say that it was at least 6'1 with some of the longest hair I've ever seen. It had a slim build and was completely nude. It's body was pale with a large patch of hair on it's chest. I never caught sight of it's face or any reproductive parts, but I have the feeling it was male.

Every time I look back on it and try to analyze what it might have been I always come up short. I can't come up with a believable or concrete explanation. I sometimes doubt I saw anything at all. Granted this is not the first strange experience I've had in those woods. The disembodied baby's cry comes to mind. CB (Tennessee)

NOTE: Was it a flesh & blood hominid, an apparition or possibly a miltidimensional being...or maybe something completely different? Not long ago, I received another interesting, but very brief account from a reader in Pennsylvania. She states that she witnessed what looked like a feral human while in vicinity of Tiadaghton State Forest in Lycoming County during the late 1970's. This being was described as only 4 ft. tall with reddish hair all over the body, though sparse on the chest where she noticed what she thought were breasts. The facial features were human in all respects. This hominid stood for a few seconds, made no sound, turned to it's left, took a step and faded away...as if it was walking through a wall of water. The email didn't go into much more detail but she did state that the area did have 'old ghost towns' in it...Lon

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