EVALUATING THE ELF CHIMP OF FLORIDA - GLOWING GREEN AND VERY MEAN!

 

Is this what the elf chimp looked like? (created by me using Magic Studio)

My previous ShukerNature blog article was devoted to fictional green pigs (click here to read it), so now, continuing this colourful theme, the current one presented here is devoted to a (supposedly) factual green chimpanzee.

As regular readers of my blog, books, and articles will know well by now, I've always been attracted to the more unusual, little-known cryptids, and never more so than when they appear to be confined to a single source, and with no apparent follow-ups either. So it was that when, many years ago, I read about the subject of this blog article of mine in just one solitary book and nowhere else, its details stayed in my memory, to fascinate but also frustrate me in equal measure. For in spite of having searched several times down through the years for additional information in other publications and widely online, I've never been able to uncover any further details. Consequently, I've decided to present here in article form on ShukerNature the scant details that I do have concerning what I have dubbed – for reasons explained later – the elf chimp of Florida, in the hope that my article might induce readers who may know more about this very curious cryptid to post their valuable information here.

My original – and only – source of information (not counting, obviously, the numerous paraphrased versions of it that have subsequently appeared in print and online) is John A. Keel's classic book Strange Creatures From Time and Space (USA 1970/UK 1976). A verbatim version of it later appeared in a revised edition of this book, published in 1994 and retitled The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings.

 

My American 1970 paperback, UK 1976 paperback, and American revised, retitled 1994 paperback of the Keel-authored books noted above (© John A. Keel estate/Fawcett Gold Medal Books/Sphere Books/Doubleday Books – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

In both editions of Keel's book, the relevant excerpt appears as Case #15 within the Florida-themed section of a chapter entitled 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon', and reads as follows:

"There's a terrible smell around here. Can't you smell it?" the girl complained. She was one of four teenagers parked in a Lovers' Lane near Elfers, [western] Florida, in January 1967. As the others took deep breaths "an animal about the size of a large chimpanzee" sprang onto the hood [bonnet] of the car.

"Then we panicked!" the driver later told investigator Joan Whritenour. "The thing looked like a big chimp, but it was greenish [Keel's italics] in color, with glowing green eyes. I started the motor and the thing jumped off and ran back into the woods. We tore like blazes back to the dance we were supposed to be attending."

A police officer from New Port Richey later visited the site and found a sticky green substance which remains unidentified.

The investigator named in Keel's account was ufologist Joan Whritenour (who edited the ufological periodical Saucer Scoop). In 1967 she co-authored with famous mysteries researcher/writer Brad Steiger a book entitled Flying Saucers Are Hostile, followed a year later by a second UFO-themed book, Allende Letters. As I've never been a ufological researcher, however, I've never owned a copy of either of these works, nor any issues of Saucer Scoop, so I have no idea whether they contain any mention of this case (although it's more cryptozoology-based than UFO-themed anyway). Consequently, could any ShukerNature readers who do own any or all of these publications please check through them and let me know? Thanks very much! Sadly, neither Steiger nor Whritenour are still alive, otherwise I'd have contacted them to request further details regarding the 1967 Elfers incident.

Keel himself provided no primary source for his above account's information, nor, as seen, did he attempt to assign any kind of identifying moniker to the green chimp (or chimp-like entity). Consequently, in order to make it more readily identifiable to and referable by future researchers, I have chosen to dub this creature the elf chimp – because it was seen near Elfers, and because the traditional elf-associated colour just so happens to be green.

 

The elf chimp was said to be greenish and to possess glowing green eyes (created by me using Magic Studio)

As a lifelong science-fiction movie buff (click here to visit my film review blog, Shuker In MovieLand), when I read about the creature's green colouration and the police officer's discovery of an unidentifiable sticky green substance at the site where the teenagers' encountered it I readily recalled how such a substance, frequently some kind of deadly radioactive spillage and/or of extraterrestrial origin, is a staple ingredient of sci fi-themed B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s. However, I personally doubt that anything so (melo)dramatic was the identity of the green gloop in this reputedly real-life incident.

Shifting my attention to more prosaic possibilities, I recalled the many reported cases down through the years of so-called luminous owls, spied widely around the world, but especially in Europe, North America, and Australia – all regions that just so happen to harbour the pallid-plumaged barn owl Tyto alba. Said to glow with intense brightness, sightings of mystery luminous owls have been discounted by some scientists as observations of normal barn owls that have inadvertently brushed against bioluminescent fungi such as the honey fungus Armillaria mellea (which are sticky to the touch, enhancing their adhesive capabilities) when perching in trees, with these glowing fungi and their spores becoming attached to their feathers. Comparable fungi, including Armillaria once again, also occur on the ground.

However, as swiftly pointed out by skeptics of this proposed solution, the total luminescence exhibited by a colony of such fungi in situ is still nowhere near as intense as has been reported for a fair few luminous owls. This in turns means that even if barn owls did find themselves with some glowing fungal spores attached to their plumage after having perched upon branches bearing them, the combined glow yielded by these spores would obviously be less still than the total glow emitted by the complete colony of bioluminescent fungi on those branches.

 

Honey fungus Armillaria mellea, depicted in a vintage illustration from English naturalist/illustrator James Sowerby's Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms, 1789-1781 (public domain)

Consequently, I consider it highly unlikely that even if it had climbed trees bearing glowing fungi and rolled on the ground where glowing fungi were growing, the elf chimp encountered by the teenagers could have appeared greenish.

No details concerning the nature of the woods from which it had emerged and back into which it had fled were included in Keel's account, but I am wondering whether it contained any kind of large pool, pond, ravine, lake, stream, or some other body of freshwater. For if so, this might explain not only the elf chimp's colour but also its vile smell. Such bodies of freshwater in Florida and in many other localities around the world all too regularly experience, especially during the summer months, the detrimental phenomenon of algal blooms.

An algal bloom is defined as a rapid growth of microscopic true algae or of cyanobacteria in water, which often results in a coloured scum appearing on the water surface. In marine bodies of water, these blooms are often red in colour, are caused by true algae, and some are known as red tides (but green ones also occur, depending upon the algal species involved), whereas in freshwater they are frequently bright green or bluish-green, and are caused by autotrophic gram-negative bacteria correctly referred to as cyanobacteria but which on account of their superficially alga-like outward appearance are popularly albeit inaccurately dubbed blue-green algae.

 

A bright green example of a severe freshwater algal bloom (public domain)

Algal blooms result when algae or cyanobacteria multiply quickly in waterways with an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus (often caused by fertilizer having been dumped into them), particularly when the water is warm and the weather is calm. Moreover, they can have harmful effects upon the health of humans and other animals if water containing a bloom is touched, swum in, swallowed, or when airborne droplets are inhaled. They also emit a foul, putrid smell that can irritate, and they clog the gills of fishes swimming in water polluted by them.

Florida's freshwater bodies are particularly prone to algal blooms – indeed, in summer 2023 a toxic cyanobacterial bloom was covering roughly half of Lake Okeechobee, Florida's largest inland lake (click here to access a news report concerning this disturbing turn of events). In short, if the elf chimp had entered a body of freshwater containing a cyanobacterial bloom, whether deliberately or accidentally, it could well appear greenish in colour, with the severe irritation to its skin conceivably explaining its belligerent behaviour, and the stench emitted by the cyanobacterial bloom's scum even explaining this creature's awful stink as noted by the teenagers.

On the negative side of any explanation involving algal blooms is that the encounter took place in January, whereas these blooms are most prominent during the warm, sunny summer months. Furthermore, if the body of water where an algal bloom might potentially develop is ensconced within a dark secluded forest with little sunlight penetrating through the trees, this is far from ideal for a bloom's development, as the latter requires plenty of sunlight to stimulate its growth via photosynthesis. And if the sticky green substance found at the site near Elfers by the police officer were indeed from an algal bloom (or from glowing fungi for that matter), why could it not be identified? Algal blooms (and glowing fungi) were already familiar phenomena, scientifically speaking, back then.

 

Artistic representation of the Florida skunk ape (© William M. Rebsamen)

Also needing to be considered is whether, in spite of its eyewitnesses' likening it to, or even directly identifying it as, a chimpanzee, the creature really was a chimp. An absconded exotic pet or an escapee/release from a private collection or menagerie certainly offer plausible explanations for why such a creature might be existing in a woodland near Elfier. However, there is also the intriguing possibility that it may be something truly cryptozoological – possibly a juvenile bigfoot, or, more specifically, a Florida skunk ape.

The reason that I proffer this option for consideration is that in the very same Florida-themed section of his book's 'Creatures from the Black Lagoon' chapter, Keel included as Case #14 another encounter with a hairy green-eyed green-glowing foetid creature of unidentified nature, but much larger than the elf chimp and more suggestive of a typical bigfoot entity. Again, he provided no source for his information, but here is how he described the encounter:

A young woman was changing a tire on a lonely stretch of highway outside Brooksville, [western] Florida, on Wednesday night, November 30, 1966, when she heard a noise in the bushes and became aware of a most unpleasant odor. Then a huge thing with large green eye and an eerie greenish glow on one side of its hairy torso stood up beside the road and studied her. She was terrified. The creature walked off into the woods when another car came along and stopped.

Worth noting here is that Brooksville and Elfers exist in adjacent counties within western Florida, with Brooksville a mere 38.7 miles north of Elfers.

 

Map showing the proximity of Elfers to Brookesville, both situated in western Florida (© Google Maps – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Partial but not full-body contact with an cyanobacterial bloom could explain why only part of the torso of the Brooksville beast was glowing green – as an adult (judging from its huge size), the creature would be more experienced and wary about immersing in bloom-polluted water than a juvenile would be. Of course, as with the elf chimp case, the time of year in which this encounter occurred is outside the peak time for algal blooms, but some can exist all year long. Alternatively, had one side of its thorax simply brushed against some glowing fungi in the undergrowth?

Green glowing eyes have often been reported in bigfoot sightings (so too have red glowing eyes – click here for more insights into red eye-glow). This suggests that whatever the species responsible, a tapetum lucidum, i.e. a light-reflecting cell layer, is present at the back of each eye, behind the retina, as is commonplace in nocturnal mammals, assisting these creatures to see in dim light (by reflecting incoming light back out again through the retina, thus causing the reported glow or eyeshine).

However, as apes and monkeys are almost exclusively diurnal (only the Central and South American douroucoulis aka night or owl monkeys are habitually nocturnal, as well as lower primates such as lemurs and lorises), their eyes do not possess a tapetum – indicating, therefore, that whatever it was, the elf chimp was not a true chimp.

 

A douroucouli depicted in an exquisite vintage illustration from 1894 by John Gerrard Keulemans (public domain)

Having said that: an uncategorised species of ape that has evolved to be nocturnal might be expected, therefore, to have evolved such an adaptation. Again, the douroucoulis provide a precedent here. For although they do not possess a true tapetum, i.e. composed of riboflavin crystals (which nocturnal lemurs have), they do possess an analogous version composed of collagen fibrils, indicating that their nocturnal lifestyle is a secondary adaptation evolved from ancestral species that were diurnal in lifestyle.

In short, glowing green eyeshine at night does not necessarily rule out an ape identity for the bigfoot. Equally, however, those who favour a bear as this famous cryptid's true identity point to the fact that bears' eyes do possess a true tapetum and shine at night, the precise colour varying from red or orange to yellow or green, depending upon a number of different factors (and thereby making conflicting reports of green eyeshine and red eyeshine for the bigfoot less problematic).

As noted at the beginning of this ShukerNature blog article, I am unaware of any sequel to these cases, or the original source material (newspaper reports?) upon which Keel based his accounts. Does any additional coverage exist, for example, that names the teenagers and/or the police officer, which could therefore enable them to be traced and interviewed if still alive? Gathering further first-hand eyewitness testimony from them might yield new, extremely valuable details. Someone with ready access to the archives of local newspapers for Elfers and Brooksville might uncover such source material, which is why I have prepared this article – as a spur for further research by those better-placed geographically to conduct it than I am, living in Britain. It would certainly be fascinating to know whether the elf chimp and its much larger green-furred Brooksville counterpart were ever reported again, rather than being once-witnessed wonders of the kind all-too-frequently found hidden away in the cryptozoological archives.

 

The elf chimp – mean, green, and seen, but only once? (created by me using Magic Studio)

 

 

UFO-LOGICAL ENCOUNTERS OF THE INSECT KIND?

Computer-generated rendition of what a UFO consisting of a large swarm of glowing insects may look like – image produced specifically for my book Mysteries of Planet Earth (© Tim Brown/Carlton Books)

As long ago as the early 1800s, there had been speculation among various scientists that some unusual lights and other luminous objects seen in the sky may have an entomological explanation. To quote one such believer, German astronomer Dr Johann Elert Bode, commenting in 1823:

Fatuous fires, torches, flaming jets and other luminous phenomena have the same character as falling meteorites, of which they differ only by their dimensions. They may also have their origin in dense and heavy evaporations of the lower layers of the air, evaporations that emit a phosphorescent light and to which the wind impresses them movement and casual forms...Sometimes these phenomena are not meteors, but large swarms of luminous insects, who fly often at night.

Even the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Prof. Carl Jung had considered such a prospect, noting in 1961: "I must confess that in reading the numerous UFO relations I also came up with the idea that the characteristic behaviour of UFOs resembles especially that of certain insects".

Dr Johann Elert Bode (left) and Prof. Carl Gustav Jung (right) (Wikipedia/public domain)

Moreover, during the 1960s and 1970s, amateur scientist Norton T. Novitt, a scientific illustrator from Denver, in Colorado, USA, attracted attention from ufologists and entomologists alike by virtue of his own interest in the possibility that certain UFO sightings featured insect swarms that had somehow been rendered luminous. This idea stemmed from a sighting that he had made one day of two glowing winged ants in flight, their apparent luminosity actually constituting reflected sunlight. Some species of ant grow wings and engage in mass nuptial flights at certain times of the year, and as these mating swarms can contain several million insects, they often attain a very considerable size - large enough to resemble glowing orbs in the sky if there is sufficient sunlight to bounce back to earth from the swarms. Even so, luminous UFO sightings made at night could not be explained by this theory - or could they?

As described by Robert Chapman in his book Unidentified Flying Objects (1968), Novitt wondered whether it was conceivable that flying ants could generate their own luminosity (i.e. as distinct from merely reflecting rays of sunlight). To pursue this piquant line of speculation, he attached some winged ants to a ping-pong ball, which in turn was connected by a thin wire to a static generator placed in a darkened room - and sure enough, when the generator was set in motion, the ants' bodies began to glow brightly. Although certainly interesting, such an experiment may appear rather futile at first, because in the natural world (as Chapman drily commented in his own coverage of Novitt's researches) ants are not normally attached to generators!

Winged ants swarming for nuptial flight (© fir0002/flagstaffotos.com.au/Wikipedia – GFDL 1.2 licence)

However, it just so happens that nuptial flights of winged ants often take to the air shortly after thunderstorms - weather conditions that give rise to very strong atmospheric electrical fields. Under such conditions, it is quite likely that the swarms would indeed glow, and with a light strong enough to be easily observable at night. In addition, swarming winged ants may even create their own static electricity by rubbing together while in flight. So perhaps some UFO reports on record were inspired by swarms of flying ants after all. In a similar vein, moreover, Novitt also suggested that certain UFOs may be floating masses of gossamer (spider silk) carried aloft by the wind that sparkle and glow with static electricity, thereby echoing theories regarding the phenomenon of angel hair.

Dr Leonard Loeb, a former professor of physics at the University of California, has opined that Novitt's theories are: "interesting, original, and perhaps true". Loeb estimated that a fully-loaded swarm of 30 million flying ants could flicker intermittently for periods of more than a second in unfavourable conditions, or up to nearly a minute in favourable environments.

Spruce budworm moth and caterpillar (© Natural Rsources Canada, reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only)

A few UFOs may have involved swarms of moths. In a paper published by the journal Applied Optics in 1978, insect behaviouralists Drs Philip Callahan and R.W. Mankin from the U.S.A. provided independent support for Novitt's findings by revealing that light can be generated by placing specimens of North America's spruce budworm moth Choristoneura fumiferana in electrical fields. This discovery confirmed that during those weather conditions when the air is heavily charged with electricity, insects are capable of emitting light.

Of course, the amount emitted by each insect would be minute, but as migrating swarms of spruce budworm moths can measure up to 60 miles long and 15 miles wide, the total amount of light emitted per swarm would be of very appreciable magnitude - more than enough, surely, to mimic a glowing UFO. And as Callahan and Mankin pointed out, it is noticeable that a number of UFO sightings of this latter type that they have analysed occurred at times when mass migrations of this moth species would be expected. In February 1979, a short coverage of their findings was published by the scientific journal Nature, in which it was mentioned that the then-current UFO wave in Uintah Basin, Utah, USA, might be due to swarms of flying insects emitting a corona discharge, i.e. an electrical discharge caused by the ionisation of the air surrounding their electrically-charged bodies when in flight.

This ShukerNature blog article is adapted from my book Mysteries of Planet Earth: An Encyclopedia of the Inexplicable.

EVEN MORE SKY BEASTS - RETURN OF THE LIVING UFOS?

Artistic representation of sky beasts (Tim Morris)

In previous ShukerNature blog posts (click here and here), I have examined the remarkable theory put forward independently by several ufologists down through the decades that at least some UFOs may actually be undiscovered flying organisms – sky beasts. That is, highly specialised life forms adapted for an exclusively aerial existence amid the atmosphere encircling our planet, and thereby occupying a fundamental ecological niche that would otherwise be inexplicably ignored by the normally highly-productive nature of evolutionary radiation. And in those posts of mine, I have presented various reports that may relate to such organisms.

On 14 January 2013, I received another such report, which was sent to me by veteran American UFO investigator and eyewitness Ben Garfield after he had read my previous above-noted posts. Moreover, Ben has very kindly granted me permission to document it in ShukerNature, so here it is:

"I've been researching ufos for nearly 40 years now since my first sighting back in 74...What I saw on May 3rd 2010 [at McHenry, Illinois] has me convinced there are living things that fly in our skies that we are not being told about....I've read thousands of reports and found many that were very similar to what I saw...Some of these date back to the wave of 1947...While I was sitting in the shade waiting to do my afternoon chores...I live on a hobby farm...I was looking at clouds forming towards the west....A small reflection caught my eye...This was in the upper section of the cloud which was at 8500 feet + or -....I focused on that point of light and saw several objects that were diving in and out of a cloud...They would dive out in a slight arc then a reflection of the sun was made...As soon as the reflection occurred they would zig zag or stairstep climb back in...I don't know how many for sure there were but at least three or four...At first I thought they were giant birds but later ruled that out because birds don't fly vertical that high and that fast ......I would like a response because you seem like someone that will listen to what I have to say.....From all of the reports that I have read I am starting to see a pattern to their behavior....These objects were forming a semi circle going counter clockwise.....They reacted to the sun's reflection....These were not birds nor airplanes."

Ben has also supplied an account of his above sighting to http://worldufophotosandnews.org, which can be accessed here.

After I emailed Ben concerning it, I received a further response from him on 21 January 2013, which included the following additional information relevant to his sighting:

"What I have found in many similar reports is they do this circling manoeuver to signal others from afar to join in...shortly after, all depart at high speed... Paul Hill, Scientist and author of Unconventional Flying Objects....Read section II Performance...A must read, Takes five minutes....But he thinks they're scout ships.....I think different."

Paul Hill was a well-respected NASA scientist when he experienced a UFO sighting during the early 1950s. This prompted him to undertake three decades of research into their physical properties, propulsion, dynamics, etc, by the end of which he confirmed that despite many claims to the contrary, they did not defy the laws of physics as we currently know them, but acted entirely within their known boundaries. As Ben, notes, however, Hill believed UFOs to be the product of technology rather than nature (for a useful online synopsis of Hill's UFO-related work and beliefs, click here). So where does that leave Ben's sighting?

I am not a ufologist, and naturally I am aware that there are a number of unusual and/rare meteorological and astronomical phenomena that can create aerial light flashes, examples of which are documented in the relevant volumes within William Corliss's excellent and highly prolific 'Sourcebook Project' series. However, as a zoologist I am certainly intrigued by the ostensibly animate, active nature of movement exhibited by the objects observed by Ben.

Has anyone else sighted objects similar to these? If so, I'd be interested to receive details here, or any pertinent thoughts as to their possible nature or identity.

For an extensive coverage of the sky beast theory of UFOs, check out my book Dr Shuker's Casebook (CFZ Press: Bideford, 2008).

MY TOP TEN STRANGEST ALIENS - CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE BIZARRE KIND!

West Virginia's bizarre 'Vegetable Man' entity (John A. Short, Alien Encounters, August 1997)

Exobiology - the study of life on other worlds, featuring speculation upon the morphological forms that such life may take, based upon their worlds' environmental constraints - has always fascinated me. So here, just for a change from considering cryptozoological topics and other subjects appertaining to life on our own planet, here is a look at what else may be sharing our universe and even visiting us from time to time...

The Gray or Grey may well be the most familiar form of alleged alien visitor on record, but it is by no means the only one. As revealed in Patrick Huyghe's invaluable Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (1997) and elsewhere, ETs apparently come in all shapes and sizes, yet most receive far less attention from researchers than the Gray. Consequently, here in no particular order is my personal top ten of the strangest alleged extraterrestrial life forms reported, all of which are truly alien - in every sense of the word!

UNIPODAL ALIEN ROBOTS?

One of the least humanoid categories of ETs ever reported must surely be the astonishing version reputedly encountered by Brazilian bus driver Antonio La Rubia at 2.20 am one morning in September 1977 while driving to work in Paciencia, Rio de Janeiro. After spying a huge hat-shaped vessel exceeding 200 ft in diameter hovering above a football field, La Rubia was abruptly immobilised by a beam of blue light, and then saw three decidedly futuristic robotic entities, who transported him inside the vessel. Here, he was subjected not only to the customary alien examination but also to a slide show of sorts, before being somewhat rudely ejected back into the street again, after which the craft disappeared.

Sketch by Antonio La Rubia of one of the unipodal entities that he claims to have encountered (APRO Bulletin)

This scenario may be a common one to ufologists, but La Rubia's abductors were decidedly uncommon in appearance. Each was about 4 ft tall, excluding the vertical antenna on top of a featureless head shaped like a rugby ball standing erect on its tip, and equipped with a horizontal belt of blue mirror-like structures encircling its diameter. Beneath its head, which had no neck, was a sturdy ovoid body covered in scales resembling dull aluminium. It also had a waist-high belt bearing a series of hooks holding syringe-like objects, plus two arm-like appendages that curved downwards but terminated in a point, lacking hands. Its body was borne upon a tall, slim, central pedestal, with a circular base at its tip.

 

THE DISEMBODIED BRAINS AT PALOS VERDES

Bodiless brains are not the most appetising of sights at the best of times, and certainly not when they float towards you and begin communicating telepathically as you sit in your car on a lonely Californian road at 2 am in the morning! Nevertheless, this bizarre scenario was supposedly experienced by two men in their early 20s, known pseudonymously as John Hodges and Peter Rodriguez, sometime in August 1971 at Palos Verdes Estates, California.

While walking towards their car, they had seen a diffuse white beam close by, and once inside the car their headlights had revealed two grotesque brain-resembling entities hovering in the air outside. Both were blue in colour, but whereas one was only the size of a softball, the other was about 18 in high, and bore a large bright red spot on its surface.

The two men lost no time in driving away, and Hodges took Rodriguez home, but in the classic abduction tradition, after reaching his own home Hodges discovered that he had mysteriously 'lost' two hours. Later, he recalled experiencing a dream-like state while in his car, during which he seemed to be in a room containing not only the larger of the two levitating brains but also several tall, grey, six-fingered, humanoid (yet non-human) entities. The brain informed him that Earth was being monitored because of its nuclear power; the humanoid entities claimed that they were from Zeta Reticulii, and that the brains were translators. They also voiced a number of prophecies, but these proved to be inaccurate.

THE CRAZY CRITTER OF BALD MOUNTAIN

This was the name applied by the local media to the incredible beast confronted by several shocked motorists during the evening of 17 November 1974 on Bald Mountain, situated approximately 20 miles east of Chehalis, in Washington State, USA. Three nights earlier, and only about 5 miles away, a UFO of the unidentified fiery object kind plummeted to earth, but this had attracted little publicity - until Seattle grocer Ernest Smith saw the 'crazy critter'.

According to Smith's description, cited in Jim Brandon's book Weird America (1978):

"...it was horse-sized, covered with scales and standing on four rubbery legs with suckers like octopus tentacles. Its head was football-shaped with an antenna sticking up...The thing gave off this green, iridescent light."

That glow was also spied by Mr and Mrs Roger Ramsbaugh from Tacoma, as they were driving by, and when they went closer to investigate, they were confronted with the same weird wonder, complete with antenna and suckered legs, that Smith had seen earlier.

Such reports as these soon attracted the attention of the local authorities, headed by Lewis County Sheriff William Wister, but some accounts claim that he was instructed by airforce and NASA officials not to continue his investigations, and his own team of county officials was replaced by what Brandon refers to as "a special NASA team, including a heavily armed military unit wearing uniforms with no insignia". Sounds familiar?

The green-glowing Crazy Critter (Tim Morris)

As for the crazy critter itself: this episode reminds me of a storyline greatly favoured by newspaper cartoonists (and as also imagined by Malcolm Smith in Bunyips and Bigfoots, (1996), in which the captain of a flying saucer is angrily reprimanding one of his crew members: "You fool! You know darned well that you should always keep the ship's mascot on a leash when you take it for a walk!".

THE FLYING SAUCER FAIRIES

Some researchers deem ETs to be fairies or other Little People who, keeping abreast of modern times, have traded in their traditional image of dancing merrily in elfin glades and hollow hills in favour of a more technologically-compatible lifestyle, flitting through the skies aboard flying saucers sporting a nifty turn of speed. Judging from the following incident, documented by Alfred Budden (Fortean Times, summer 1988), they may well have a point!

Standing in her garden at Rowley Regis, near Birmingham in the West Midlands, on the morning of 4 January 1979 after waving her husband off to work, Jean Hingley saw a large orange sphere hovering close to their garage's roof and emanating an appreciable amount of heat. As she watched, it turned white and floated nearer, hovering over her back garden.

Suddenly, she was shocked to see that her pet dog, Hobo, standing by her, had become paralysed (happily, he later recovered) - and was even more shocked when three small fairy-like beings quite literally, and audibly, 'buzzed' by her and into her house through the doorway. According to Budden's account, Hingley claimed that her unwonted (and unwanted!) visitors were each:

...about 3.5 ft tall, and dressed in a silvery tunic with six silver buttons down the front. They had large eyes like 'black diamonds' with a glittering lustre, set into wide white faces with no nose to speak of and a simple line for the mouth. Their heads were covered by transparent helmets like 'goldfish bowls', surmounted by small lights. Their limbs were silvery-green, ending in simple tapering points with no apparent hands or feet. They had large oval 'wings' which looked as if they were made of thin, transparent paper covered with dozens of glittering multi-coloured dots, like 'braille dots'. Each 'being' was surrounded by a halo, and numerous very thin streamers hung down from their shoulders. They hovered and flew about the room with their 'arms' clasped in front of their chests, while their 'legs' hung down stiffly. Their wings didn't flap like those of birds, but seemed to be for display and merely fluttered gently or occasionally folded inwards like a concertina. Their expression - "like a dead person's face" - never changed during the encounter, which lasted for about an hour.

During that hour, these 'space-age fairies' occasionally spoke to Hingley, but always in unison, and via a guttural, masculine voice. Often, however, when she attempted to speak with them, they would emit a very thin laser-like beam from their helmets' lights, directed onto her brow, which dazzled and paralysed her, and produced an intense burning sensation at first. They behaved in a mischievous manner, shaking her Christmas tree and jumping up and down on the sofa, but showed great curiosity about her newspapers, cassettes, and a picture of Jesus, and they often picked up small objects or simply touched them. Oddly, however, whenever they found themselves unable to do something, such as drinking water from a glass or answering certain questions, they chose to disable Hingley with their beam.

Drawing of one of the alien fairy entities that visited Jean Hingley (artist unknown)

Eventually, a very loud electronic beeping noise resounded from her back garden, and when Hingley looked she could see an orange-glowing craft there, oval in shape and about 8 ft long, with two luminescent portholes and an external antenna bearing a series of spokes arranged in a wheel-like shape. The space-fairies floated out of her house, each carrying a mince pie(!), and into their craft, which promptly took off, emitting as it did so a blue light from its antenna. As soon as they had gone, however, Hingley became convulsed with pain, and remained in a very distressed state for a number of hours, before becoming well enough to call her husband, a neighbour, and the police. Moreover, the burning mark left upon on her forehead by the entities' beam remained there for several months.

It is possible, as speculated by Budden, that this exceedingly bizarre encounter was really a hallucination, triggered somehow by the UFO, but the UFO was no hallucination - because her human visitors could clearly see a peculiar impression in the snow covering her back garden's lawn that closely resembled a tank's caterpillar track, about 8 ft long and symmetrical. In addition, several electrical gadgets in her house had stopped working, as if affected by an intense magnetic field, and the cassettes handled by the entities were now useless.

THE FLATWOODS MONSTER

For inducing sheer terror in its eyewitnesses, few ETs have matched the fearsome reputation of the 'Flatwoods monster', famously encountered by a party of children and adults while investigating a UFO report on 12 September 1952 at Flatwoods, West Virginia.

Likened by some of its eyewitnesses, a group of youngsters, to a meteor, the UFO had landed on top of a hill near Flatwoods, and some of them set off in its direction, to see if they could find it. Along the way, they were joined by a matron called Kathleen May (or Hill, in some accounts), her two sons, and a teenage National Guardsman, Gene Lemon.

As this amassed company drew nearer, they spied a huge pulsating globe or sphere, about 20 ft in diameter, and one of the eyewitnesses also noticed what he thought to be a pair of animal eyes, staring down at them from the branches of a tree close by. Shining his torch in the direction of these eyes, he and everyone else in the company were horrified to see an enormous figure, standing just beneath the tree's lower branches.

The Flatwoods Monster, based upon an eyewitness's drawing (Taishiro Kiya)

This macabre entity was 10-15 ft tall, and according to Mrs May it seemed to be dressed in a long cloak-like garb with a pointed hood, thus resembling the habit of a monk - but the face that stared out at them from inside the hood was certainly not that of any monk!

Instead, it was round in shape and blood-red in colour, with a pair of bulbous eyes that glowed with an eerie greenish-orange hue. And as the terrified group of UFO-seekers gazed at it, this weird apparition began to float slowly down the hill towards them, hissing!

Needless to say, everyone fled at once, and such was the horror of this experience that a number of the eyewitnesses were hysterical and violently sick for several hours afterwards. During the following day, the local newspaper's editor and a team of other investigators scoured the area where the 'monster' and the giant globe had been encountered, but both had disappeared. However, they did find some odd tracks on the ground, a patch of flattened grass, and a peculiar, irritating odour persisting just above ground level.

MUMMIES FROM SPACE!

Imagine a 5-ft-tall, neck-less, humanoid figure resembling an Egyptian mummy, with grey wrinkled skin of elephantine appearance and texture, a pair of disproportionately long arms whose hands resembled mittens (i.e. with a single thumb but no differentiated fingers), a pair of legs held together like a pedestal and terminating in two bulbous elephant-like feet, and a seemingly eyeless face sporting a pair of pointed retractile ears, a conical nose-like structure, a short slit of a mouth that never opens, and a terrifyingly blank expression.

Multiply this grim-looking apparition by three, then add the domed football-shaped buzzing craft, with two windows, two blue lights, an invisible door, and a highly-illuminated interior, from which they emerged - and the result is the living nightmare experienced by two terrified Mississippi fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, at the Pascagoula River, on the night of 11 October 1973. And their sighting of these sinister entities was only the beginning of their ordeal. For as the two men stood there, prisoners of the combined fear and fascination aroused by their incredible encounter, the 'mummies' floated up to them, seized hold of them, and physically immobilised them before carrying them into their craft.

Pascagoula monster, based upon eyewitness description

Once inside, the mummies subjected their human captives to a close physical examination, after which they returned them to the spot from where they had abducted them, then soared away through the sky inside their blue-lit vessel.

LOOK OUT - IT'S VEGETABLE MAN!

Never trust anyone whose body resembles the green, slender stalk of a plant, and who sucks out your blood through three 7-in-long fingers with needle-like tips and suction cups - that's what I always say! And Jennings Frederick would certainly agree, because he allegedly met just such a being while hunting one day in a West Virginia woodland during July 1968.

According to American paranormal researcher Brad Steiger, Frederick suddenly became aware of what he later described as "...a high-pitched jabbering, much like that of a recording running at exaggerated speed", yet which he could somehow understand, and which was informing him that it came in peace but needed medical assistance.

At the same moment, Frederick saw beside him the extraordinary quasi-botanical entity described above, with a semi-human face, long ears, yellow slanted eyes, and two stick-like arms. Before he had time to be surprised, however, he felt a pricking sensation in one of his hands, as if it had become entangled in some thorns - but when he looked, he discovered to his horror that the entity was draining blood from it, through its own fingers. Moreover, its eyes suddenly changed colour, becoming bright red and yielding a rotating, hypnotic effect that rendered its blood-sucking operation painless.

West Virginia’s Vegetable Man (Tim Morris)

A minute later, Frederick's enforced transfusion was over, and his mesmerising recipient fled, bounding away rapidly up a hill, each leap covering a distance exceeding 25 ft. Unfortunately for Frederick, however, once the entity had disappeared, the pain in his hand reappeared. And as he set off back home, he heard a strange humming sound, which he believed to be the entity's craft, transporting it back from whence it had come.

Frederick was so disturbed by his grotesque experience that he did not speak about it for several months. Some researchers have speculated that it may be a hoax, but those who have spoken to him seemed convinced that his account, albeit highly unusual, is genuine.

FLYING JELLY BAGS AHOY!

Not everyone can claim the dubious honour of having been abducted by a trio of flying jelly bags - an honour that Stig Rydberg and Hans Gustaffson would be more than happy to relinquish if they could somehow relive 20 December 1958 and arrange to be somewhere far away from the Swedish forest that they were driving through on that fateful day.

It was 3 am when they noticed a strange glow and then spotted a mysterious tripodal craft, over 12 ft long, resting nearby on the ground. Just in front of it were four extraordinary entities, each about 3 ft long, blue-grey in colour, and virtually amorphous, with no visible limbs, head, or any other recognisable features.

Likened to jelly bags, they were leaping around their craft at first, but when they somehow perceived the two men, three of these animate blobs swiftly approached them and attached their shapeless forms to them, yielding a powerful suction force as they strove to haul their frightened human hostages back towards their craft. In the ensuing struggle, the men could smell a vile stench emanating from their eerie antagonists, combining the overpowering odour of ether with the nauseating stink of burned sausage.

During Rydberg's frantic attempts to escape, one of his arms forced itself deep within the body of a blob, yet with no detrimental effect, either to him or to the blob. Nonetheless, his struggle eventually succeeded, and he raced back to the car, where he sounded the horn loudly, which so startled the blobs that they released Gustafsson, and fled back into their vessel, which duly rose up into the sky with a high-pitched noise and sped away. The most bizarre five minutes of the two men's lives were over.

THE TRIPODAL TERROR OF WABASH RIVER VALLEY

It was roughly 9.00 pm on 25 April 1972 near Enfield, in Indiana's Wabash River Valley - the scene of several reports around that time concerning strange lights observed in the sky, and, more recently, of some very peculiar tracks discovered by local war veteran Henry McDaniel in a nearby wood. These tracks each measured 3-5 in across, and contained six toe impressions, with a small hoof-like mark in the centre.

Consequently, when McDaniel's family heard a strange scratching sound on the outside of their home's back door, he cautiously looked out of a window, to find out what manner of animal was responsible. Even so, he did not really expect to see anything more remarkable than a stray dog, a neighbour's cat, or perhaps an inquisitive raccoon. In reality, however, what he did see was so incredible, and alarming, that he immediately grabbed hold of his shotgun and fired four rounds directly at it.

There, no more than 3 ft away from him, was a surrealistic entity, 4-5 ft tall, with a hairy dirty-grey body and disproportionately large head, staring at him through two pink reflective eyes, and standing upright like a human, but on three legs!

The alien 'Jake the Peg' that visited Henry McDaniel (John A. Short, Alien Encounters, August 1997)

Although one of McDaniel's shots hit this tripodal terror, it merely hissed and leapt away along a railway track close by, clearing 75 ft in three huge bounds - but it would be back.

A few days later, at around 3.00 am, McDaniel was woken up by his dogs, who were barking uncontrollably. Carefully opening his door, he looked out, and spied this intergalactic Jake the Peg standing by the railway line, looking at him. Now, however, it made no attempt to approach, and was not seen by McDaniel (or anyone else) again.

THE VENEZUELAN LITTLEFOOTS

It is well known that a number of ufological reports on file concern sightings of shaggy bipedal entities resembling North America's famous mystery man-beast, the bigfoot or sasquatch, in association with alleged UFOs and landed extraterrestrial spacecraft. However, the seemingly invulnerable troll-like category of alien encountered by Gustavo Gonzales and José Ponce while driving their truck from Caracas to Petare, Venezuela, during the early morning of 28 November 1954 could more aptly be referred to as a littlefoot.

Before reaching Petare, they encountered a huge glowing globe, hovering about 6 ft above the ground, which was virtually blocking the entire road ahead. Consequently, the two men got out of their truck to investigate, and as they approached the globe a furry bipedal being appeared, and began to approach them. Standing no more than 3 ft high, it was covered with stiff, bristly hair, and had large clawed hands and feet. Gonzales seized hold of this hirsute 'littlefoot', in order to take it to the police, and was surprised to find that the creature was exceedingly light. He was even more surprised, however, to discover how powerful it was - for with a single push from one of its paws, it effortlessly propelled Gonzales through the air, sending him sprawling onto the ground about 5 yards away.

Reconstruction of one of the Venezuelan littlefoots (Tim Morris)

By now, Ponce was running back down the road, towards the local police station, and as he did so he spied another two of these littlefoots, gathering rocks and carrying them aboard the sphere. The first littlefoot, however, angered by Gonzales's action, began savagely clawing him, but when Gonzales tried to defend himself by stabbing this creature with his knife, the blade made no impression on its body. Suddenly, a fourth littlefoot appeared, emerging from the sphere, and stunned Gonzales with a beam of light, enabling the others to go aboard and depart.

When the police had established that neither Ponce nor Gonzales were drunk, they gave them sedatives, and also confirmed that Gonzales bore a long red scratch on his side. Furthermore, several days later, a medical doctor came forward to announce that he had actually witnessed from a distance the attack upon Gonzales by the littlefoots, but had not intervened because he did not want to be the focus of publicity.

How can such an amazing diversity of alien forms as these – and the many others also on record – be explained? The initial assumption is that if any or all of them are indeed real (a big assumption in itself, of course), they clearly originate from totally different worlds, whether those worlds be planets or dimensions.

However, as Huyghe and other researchers have pointed out, these entities’ morphological differences may owe more to psychology than anatomy. Could it be, for instance, that the image that an alien eyewitness sees is not the true form of the alien in question but rather a false image placed in the eyewitness’s mind by the alien, thereby concealing the latter’s true self? An equally thought-provoking, obverse explanation is that the eyewitness is not seeing the alien as it actually is but rather as the eyewitness subconsciously chooses it to be.

It is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but who knows, perhaps the same is also true of alien morphology.

Head of the sinister 'Vegetable Man' alien (Tim Morris)

 

This ShukerNature blog post is excerpted from my book Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), the chapter in question from which was in turn an expanded, updated version of an original article of mine published in the August 1997 issue of the now-defunct British magazine Alien Encounters and illustrated by John A. Short.