The Lair of the Beasts: Monsters of the Skies
Whenever the subject of monster-hunting is brought up in conversation, there’s always a tendency to think that such things solely revolve around long treks into deep woods in search of Bigfoot and other hairy man-beasts, and expeditions to the shores of places like Loch Ness on quests for long-necked water-beasts.
But that’s not always the case. Sometimes, chasing monsters involves something far simpler: merely looking up.
Yep: we’re talking about giant birds, rumors of still-living pterodactyls, and even sightings of creatures similar to those portrayed in Stan Lee’s Harpies.
No-one can say that the subject of crypto-zoology is a dull one!
Without doubt, the most famous aerial beast that straddles the world of monster-hunting and the genre of on-screen entertainment is surely the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia: a truly sinister, glowing-eyed creature that terrorized the town in the 1960s, and that was immortalized in the 2002 movie starring Richard Gere: The Mothman Prophecies.
But Mothman has its rivals – and they can be found soaring around the skies just about here, there and everywhere.
Britain, for example, is home to the Owlman – a beast eerily similar to the Mothman, and which has for decades reputedly haunted the woods of Mawnan in the ancient county of Cornwall.
Jonathan Downes, who runs the British-based Center for Fortean Zoology (named after Charles Fort – an early 20th century chronicler of all-things-weird) spent years chasing the Owlman and tracking down witnesses to its activities.
Like so many of these monsters of the air, however, the Owlman has remained frustratingly elusive.
Then there’s the bat-winged, gargoyle-type creature seen flying over the English town of Glastonbury (the rumored resting place of King Arthur, no less), late one night in 2000.
Admittedly obsessed by the beast, the witness, a man named Colin Perks, went broke and nearly lost his mind trying to solve the puzzle of the Glastonbury gargoyle – such is the effect that encounters of the truly monstrous kind can have on people when they find themselves plunged into the domain of the beasts.
And let us not forget Popobawa: a creature eerily similar to that described by Perks and whose alleged nocturnal attacks on the populace sent shockwaves all across Zanzibar in 1995.
While there are a number of monster-hunters who have tried to resolve the mystery of what these many and varied winged-things might be, perhaps no-one knows more about the controversy than Ken Gerhard.
A good friend of mine who lives in San Antonio and who fronts the industrial rock band, Bozo Porno Circus, Gerhard is the author of the book Big Bird! Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters, and has traveled extensively in search of countless sky-beasts, including the Thunderbird: a giant bird that features heavily in Native American Indian lore; and even creatures that sound suspiciously like surviving flying dinosaurs: pterosaurs.
Gerhard says: “During the summer of 2003, I became aware of a weird, winged beast that had been spotted mere miles from my home in Texas, and I was instantly swept into an investigation that would take me south to the Mexican border.
“Three decades earlier, Texas’ Rio Grande Valley had been the site of well-publicized events that revolved around a nightmarish creature described as being charcoal black and as tall as a man, with bat-like wings twenty feet across.”
Gerhard admits that “there are no recognized birds, either native to Texas, or indeed anywhere else, that can claim a twenty-foot wingspan. There were, however, such creatures in the distant past: animals that resembled flying dragons ruled the skies for nearly two hundred million years before disappearing into extinction.”
With this latter point in mind, Gerhard asks an intriguing question: “But are they really extinct?”
One monster-pterosaur that would certainly fit the bill was Quetzalcoaltus northropi, a huge creature with a whopping forty-foot wingspan.
Of course, mainstream zoologists and archaeologists scoff at the very idea that in some of the more remote corners of our planet such immense beasts just might still thrive. But try telling that to the countless witnesses to such creatures – and try telling it to Ken Gerhard, too.
So, if pterosaurs do still exist, then where are they hiding? Gerhard has a few ideas:
“It does seem within reason that a group of these animals could populate remote parts of Mexico’s unexplored mountains, or the marshes and jungles of Central America. There are native traditions and ancient engravings in Mexico that support the continued existence of such an animal. And an elderly settler in the Yucatan told an acquaintance of mine that prehistoric-animals could still be found living within its rainforests.”
And, with that in mind, if late one night you find yourself on some lonely stretch of road and hear above you the beating of what sounds like immense wings, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
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