Also from 1922, two human-like figures sporting wings were allegedly observed emerging from a large, circular, unexplained aircraft as it hovered above an isolated farm in Nebraska. The creatures moved away from the craft, completely unconcerned with any possible earthbound onlookers, then casually flew away.
Also from Nebraska that same year, a Mr. William S. Lamb claimed that, while on a hunting trip near Hubbell, Nebraska at 5 a.m. on Feb. 22, he heard a strange, high-pitched sound above him and saw a “magnificent flying creature” as it descended from the sky and landed “just like an airplane.” He was then shocked to see the ‘airplane’ take off walking across the snow. The figure was at least 8 feet tall, Lamb claimed. Bravely, he decided to follow the trail of large footprints the avian anomaly left in the deep snow but soon found himself exhausted and had to give up. The case is kept on file in the U. S. Air Force archives under ‘UFO.’
On January 19, 1926, in the south-eastern foothills of China, the Xiaon Te Dam collapsed. Over 40 billion gallons of water rushed down onto the unwitting inhabitants of the valley below. Entire villages were destroyed, crushed and swept away by the man-made deluge. Over 15,000 people, mostly poor farmers, lost their lives that fateful day, but what concerns us here is the news that soon followed from the site of the tragedy.
Almost overnight, in the surviving communities beneath what was left of the Xiaon Te, rumors began to circulate of a large, black ‘Man-Dragon’ that was seen by several frightened villagers as it hovered over the dam in the days before its collapse. Many survivors of the disaster confirmed that the entity not only appeared above the doomed structure, but showed itself to many of the victims beforehand as well, perhaps as a warning or portent of imminent doom.
Interestingly, another giant, black, bird-like figure was allegedly seen in Russia sixty years later as it flew over the Chernobyl nuclear power plant just before it exploded; and returned, once again in the same tragic context, in the summer of 1999, this time to Moscow. Two older witnesses had seen large, dark, winged inhumanoid figures flying through the skies just moments before a mysterious apartment complex explosion which killed more than one hundred people.
Legends of ‘flying men’ are well known in the Soviet Union as well. For years, hunters of the Sikhote Mountains near Vladivostok claimed to have seen footprints resembling bare human feet which abruptly ended in mid-stride, as if the ‘man’ had just took to the air and flew away. Nothing else could explain it.
In a 1947, book by Russian writer, V.K. Arsenyev, the author claimed to have actually caught a fleeting glimpse of the creature responsible for making such enigmatic prints on July 11, 1908. He writes:
“The rain stopped, the temperature of the air remained low and the mist appeared over the water. It was then that I saw the mark on the path that was very similar to a man’s footprint. My dog Alpha bristled up, snarled, and then something rushed about nearby trampling among the bushes. However, it didn’t go away, but stopped nearby, standing stock-still. We had been standing like that for some minutes. Then I stooped, picked up a stone and threw it towards the unknown animal.
Then something happened that was quite unexpected. I heard the beating of wings. Something large and dark emerged from the fog and flew over the river. A moment later it disappeared in the dense mist. My dog, badly frightened, pressed itself to my feet. After supper, I told the Udehe-men about this incident. They broke into a vivid story about a man who could fly in the air. Hunters often saw his tracks, tracks that appeared suddenly and vanished suddenly, in such a way that they could only be possible if the “man” alighted on the ground, then took off again into the air.’
And, of course, there could be no ‘flying men’ without ‘flying women.’ A woman from the Pavoldar region in Indonesia claimed to see a winged, female entity in 1936. She noticed that the thing wore dark clothing before it vanished into the night.
Seram, Indonesia has the legends of the Orang-Bati, the ‘flying man,’ said to stand over five feet tall and have red skin, black, bat-like wings and a long tail. In the Center for Fortean Zoology 2004 Yearbook, Richard Freeman wrote concerning these creatures:
“In June 1986, tropical agriculturalist, Tyson Hughes, visited the island and collected detailed reports of a giant bat-like creature said to inhabit its forests. The Orang-Bati emit mournful wails and the native folk go in fear of them. The literal translation means ‘flying man.’ They are rumored to roost in extinct volcanoes and at night fly out across the forest to coastal villages and abduct children.”
Natives also insisted that the creatures were simian in appearance and to regularly hear the creature’s mournful cries as they fly through the night searching for prey. Over in the UK, a mysterious winged inhumanoid was said to have attacked a local woman on three separate occasions in 1938.
In ‘Memoirs of a Monster Hunter,’ my friend and fellow Fortean author Nick Redfern tells of a day in Littlefield, Texas, 2001, when a knock came at the door. It was an elderly couple, life-long residents of the town, who had a very strange story to tell concerning events that had happened there back in the mid-1940s when they were teenagers. Nick writes:
“...The first incident occurred in the early months of 1946, at an old, large house that, until the early 1960s, had existed on the edge of town, and where two aged and eccentric sisters lived in absolute seclusion. On one occasion in the dead of night; a group of local kids scaring themselves stupid by walking around the old, dark building had seen two, 8-foot-tall, humanoid creatures climb stealthily out of the building’s cellar. Not only were the creatures 8-foot-tall, but they were also gray of skin, had large, leathery wings, and glowing red eyes. In other words, they weren’t local folk.
The monstrous pair apparently turned sharply as they surfaced from their underground lair and stared intently at the kids, then broke into a hopping-style run, opened their immense wings, and soared majestically into the starlit sky. One interesting observation was that the limbs of the creatures looked almost hollow against the background of the full moon that loomed overhead.
Perhaps even weirder was the fact that, as the kids exited the area at what was an unsurprisingly high speed, two of them caught sight of the elderly sisters, grinning maniacally at them out of a downstairs window of the house. The couple also informed me that a similar creature, if not one of the original two, was seen several months later by a terrified motorist standing in the middle of the local highway in the early hours of the morning while issuing a woeful moan.’
All of the witnesses to the events, the couple told Redfern, had died at surprisingly young ages from ‘a variety of seemingly unlikely accidents.’
Another bizarre female avian was seen by three U.S. Marines stationed in Da Nang, Vietnam as they stood guarding a bunker one hot summer night in August 1969. As they sat atop the bunker they noticed an eerie, greenish glow in the sky and, looking upward, saw what they first took to be a huge, glowing bat flying straight at them without making a sound. Imagine their horror when, as the noiseless thing approached more closely, they realized that it was a naked female with jet black skin and enormous bat-like wings. Years later, Private Earl Morrison told ufologist, Don Worley:
“We saw what looked like wings, like a bat’s, only it was gigantic compared to what a regular bat would be. After it got close enough so we could see what it was, it looked like a woman. A naked black woman with big wings and a kind of greenish cast to her. She glowed and through off a radiance. Her skin was black, her body was black, the wings were black, everything was black...”
According to Morrison, the winged woman’s arms were so limber that they didn’t appear to have any bones in them.
“She started going over us, and we still didn’t hear anything. She was right above us, and when she got over the top of our heads, she was maybe six or seven feet up... We just froze. We couldn’t believe it, because we had never seen anything like this before in our lives. We watched her go straight over the top of us, and still she didn’t ma
ke any noise flapping her wings.
She blotted out the moon, once that’s how close she was to us. And dark-looked like pitch black then, but we could still define her because she just glowed. Real bright like. And she started going past us straight towards our encampment. As we watched her-she had got about 10 feet or so away from us-we started hearing her wings flap. And it sounded, you know, like regular wings flapping. And she just started flying off and we watched her for quite a while. Her skin looked more like fur; not like feathers. The skin of her wings looked like it was molded on to her hands. The total time we watched her until we lost sight of her must have been between three and four minutes.”
When asked if they could see if the thing had truly been a real, solid woman, Morrison answered, “Definitely! She was a well-developed woman! She was completely naked, but there was a kind of down or fur covering her body. She glowed a greenish color, and even though her skin appeared to be ebony, her hair was straight like a Caucasian’s, rather than curly like a black person’s.”
The fluid movement of the thing’s arms also suggested to Morrison that they may have been boneless. “Earl is a reliable observer,” Worley stated, “and he swears this event is true.” It is interesting to note that the Java-Vietnam region has legends which speak of a bat-like creature called the ‘Ahool,’ which many cryptozoologists feel might actually turn out one day to be the world’s only example of a winged primate.
In Brazil in the early 1950s a couple’s evening stroll near their seaside home in Pelotas was interrupted by two fast-moving shadows flying overhead at an altitude of about 30 feet. At first, they thought the objects were large birds, but when the creatures made a rapid vertical descent and landed not far away, they were astonished to see that they were men standing about six feet tall.
On discovering that they were being watched, the ‘birdmen’ squatted down low to the ground as if trying to hide in plain sight, after which the thoroughly frightened couple wasted no time in vacating the area. And who could blame them? According to many eyewitnesses, sightings of this nature are almost always accompanied by feelings of overwhelming terror.
In 1952, Sinclair Taylor, a young American soldier on guard duty while stationed at Camp Okubu on the outskirts of Kyoto, Japan, also thought the object he was viewing was a large bird of some sort; until it got closer and he saw that it had the body of a winged man who appeared to be around seven feet tall with a wingspan of roughly the same distance.
The mysterious ‘man’ paused in his flight, hovering above Sinclair in a threatening manner, who immediately raised his rifle and fired, emptying his carbine into the creature which fell swiftly to the ground. He immediately searched the spot where the thing had gone down; only to find nothing there. The thing had vanished! When he nervously reported the incident to his superiors he was told that another guard had reported a similar experience the previous year. No explanation as to the nature of the vanishing flying humanoid was offered.
In 1953 in Houston, Texas, three witnesses were relaxing on their front porch when the uneventful night was rudely interrupted by a sizeable shadow streaking across the lawn. Looking up, the trio were amazed to see a man-like figure with wings like a bat’s as it descended from the sky and settled onto the branch of a stately old pecan tree.
The entity stood there, swaying on the tree-limb, for over half a minute allowing the witnesses to get a good look at him. The thing was dressed in darkly-colored, gray or black, tight-fitting clothing, one witness; a miss Hilda Walker, claimed, complete with a long cape and quarter-length boots. It was also enveloped in a “halo of light.”
After 15 minutes or so the light began to fade out and the strange figure “just melted away.” Shortly afterwards they claimed to hear a “loud swoosh” from across the street, and saw a flash of white light immediately followed by a torpedo-shaped object as it shot upward into the night sky and disappeared over the Northeastern horizon. “I could see him plain and could see he had big wings folded at his shoulders,” Walker said. “There was a dim gray light all around him.”
A ‘scaly, glowing humanoid’ was seen on October 20, 1954, in Parravicino d’Erba, Italy. Renzo Pugina, 37, saw the weird entity one evening as he was putting his car into the garage. It was standing close to a tree just a few feet away and flashing some sort of light at Pugina, which he claimed partially paralyzed him. In a monumental feat of courage, the witness broke free of the paralysis and rushed at the strange figure, which rose into the air and flew away, leaving only an oily spot on the ground and a dumbfounded witness in its wake.
A winged weirdo was seen in Hythe, in Kent (UK) on November 16, 1963 by four teenagers walking home from a late-night party. The sighting was presaged by the appearance of a strange flying light in the sky. As they stood watching, the light floated down slowly, appearing to land behind some nearby trees in Sandling Park.
Then, much to their horror, a dark, shambling figure emerged from the woods where the UFO had landed. 17-year-old John Flaxton, later told police “...I felt cold all over.” Another witness, 18-year-old, Mervyn Hutchinson said, “...it didn’t seem to have any head. There were huge wings on its back; like bat wings.” The entire group fled in terror as the creature approached.
Five days later, on the 21st, another teen, Keith Croucher, seventeen, claimed to see an unusual aerial craft one night floating over a football field in that same park.
Two days later, on the 23rd, John McGoldrick and a friend visited Sandling Park looking for clues about the strange reports and allegedly discovered a large area of discolored flora which looked as if something round had landed there. Three bizarre footprints were also found in the area measuring two feet across and nine inches wide.
On the evening of December 11, McGoldrick accompanied a bevy of newspaper reporters back to the site and found the woods there illuminated by an eerie light. Amazingly, not a single one of those present chose to investigate further.
This picture above, taken in New York on September 11th, 2001, is claimed to show the presence of a winged inhumanoid during the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, both of which collapsed killing three-thousand people.
Mothman
By far the most famous and well investigated case of an alleged flying inhumanoid happened in West Virginia in 1966 and ‘67. The creature, which was seen or encountered by multiple independent witnesses, was dubbed, ‘Mothman,’ and even after the passage of 42 years, the case remains one of the most fascinating and enduring cryptozoological/paranormal events of the 20th century. The name alone still makes some people shiver even now.
Many people, in retrospect, consider the terrifying entity to have been a harbinger of doom, for its appearance presaged a terrible disaster which struck in the dead of night just before Christmas, causing the deaths of 46 people. Most researchers cite November 12th, 1966, as the date on which the Mothman phenomenon first appeared in West Virginia but, in truth, a large, winged humanoid creature was seen in Looneyville, West Virginia several decades before the events of the mid-60s.
Also, in 1964, two years before the series of Mothman’ sightings which would eventually become famous took place, a woman and her father were driving down Route 2 along the Ohio River on their way to the Chief Cornstalk Hunting Grounds one night, when a dark, man-like figure stepped out onto the road in front of the car. The woman, who was driving at the time, decelerated as she approached the form, which now stood in the middle of the road, and was horrified by what she saw when it came fully into view in the car’s headlights.
It was larger than a man, the witness claimed, six to seven feet tall and its skin was a dull pewter gray color. Its most shocking feature however was that it had no head, only an empty space between the thing’s shoulders, and two evil-looking, brightly glowing red eyes set into the creature’s chest area.
Suddenly a pair of gigantic, bat-like wings unfurled from the thing’s back. They were so wide that they almost completely covered the entire span of the road; nearly t
wenty feet! The two watched in shock as the horrible avian anomaly then soared straight up into the air without flapping its wings and disappeared into the night sky. “...we were both terrified,” the witness said. “I stepped on the gas and raced out of there. We talked it over and decided not to tell anybody about it. Who would believe us?”
The bizarre series of events which sparked the Mothman craze, to many, began on November 12, 1966, near Clendenin, West Virginia when five cemetery workers digging a grave in a local cemetery saw what they described as a “brown human being with wings” spring from its perch in some nearby trees and swoop down over their heads. Needless to say, they could hardly believe their eyes.
“It was gliding through the trees,” one of the men said. Three days later, around midnight on the evening of Nov.15, two young couples made a wrong turn on a country road in Point Pleasant while driving to a friend’s house. As they traveled past what was called the TNT area, where a complex of old, abandoned bunkers once used to store war materials was located, one of the women, Linda Scarberry, saw two shining red circles, about 2 inches in diameter which seemed to hang in the air. Her mouth dropped open as the glowing eyes started moving towards the car. In the book, ‘Mothman: The Facts Behind the Legend,’ she told author Donnie Sergeant.
“...it was about seven feet tall, it had wings that were visible on its back, the tips of the wings could be seen above its shoulders. The body of it was like a slender, muscular man, and was flesh-colored. Its wings were ashen white in color. The wings looked like angel wings. Its face couldn’t be seen, because the eyes simply hypnotized you when you looked into them. If you looked close to its face, your eyes were just drawn to its eyes.
When we first saw it we had just topped a hill in the TNT area, and when the lights of our car hit it, it looked directly at us, as if it was scared. It had one of its wings caught in a guide-wire near a section of road close to the power plant, and was pulling its wing with both hands, trying to free itself from the wire; I felt sorry for it.”
The Inhumanoids Page 17
