The Inhumanoids

by Barton M Nunnelly

  He had come home to find “some kind of creature” perched in an old eucalyptus tree behind his house. “It was at least five feet tall, had a head like a vulture, and big gray wings. It was so out of scale with the tree that I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, so I got my kids and the neighbors, and we looked at it for about five minutes. It suddenly just glided off without flapping its huge wings, which spread about fifteen feet.”

  King claimed that he was sure it was not a blue heron, or any other bird he had ever heard of. About the same time, another Oakland man, this time a janitor named Minelli, claimed he saw a strange winged creature as he was taking out the garbage one evening. He had looked up and seen the frightful entity perched on the corner of the roof looking down at him “like some fearsome gargoyle.” Minelli described the thing as being much taller than a man, and very broad across its upper torso. “It was such an impossibly monstrous thing,” he said, “I was afraid to say anything about it because everybody would think I was crazy. It must have been a bird, unless it was the Devil himself.

  Another interesting case involving such a creature was reported from Frieburg, Germany in 1978. The avian anomaly in question was later dubbed ‘The Frieburg Shrieker,’ and was credited with saving the lives of 21 miners.

  The encounter began on the morning of September 10 when employees of a local coal mine arrived for work around 7 a.m. and were astounded to find the entrance to the mine shaft blocked by a most terrifying and hideous dark colored figure with huge, outstretched wings.

  Several miners, thinking the winged figure was merely an apparition, attempted an approach hoping to scare the thing away and thereby enter the mine and begin their work. But they were forced to retreat as the hideous creature emitted a series of unbearably piercing shrieks which sounded “like fifty people screaming” or the breaks of a freight-train being applied all at once. The thing offered no harm to any of the witnesses, but merely stood its post at the tunnel’s entrance, barring it from all approach.

  After about an hour the ground beneath the miner’s feet shuddered with the force from a tremendous underground explosion and a huge blast of smoke and flame rumbled from the mouth of the shaft, engulfing the strange entity. When the men were able to return to the shaft they found no sign of the Shrieker. It had vanished like the smoke. They looked at each with grave expressions, realizing the terrible fate that had awaited them all had they been manning their usual posts inside the mine. There would have been no survivors, they were sure. The beast had saved their lives one and all. Despite this, after the event several of the group were reportedly so traumatized that they suffered serious psychiatric disorders.

  1980, a good year for Mothman sightings, finds us on a rural farm just outside St. Louis, Missouri. According to legendary fortean author Brad Steiger, writing in ‘Out of the Dark, The Complete Guide to Beings from Beyond,’ in July of that year, farmer Joe Pierce had surprised a strange creature out behind his barn while it was feasting on one of his prize watermelons.

  “I had worked hard nurturing the melons in that special patch behind the barn, carefully weeding between the rows, seeing that they had plenty of water, and so forth,” Pierce later reported. “I wasn’t like the old-timers who loaded their shotguns with rock salt to sting the behinds of any kids who came by night to steal a couple of melons, but I did keep a watchful eye on those melons.”

  Around 11:00 p.m. one evening, he heard his dog, a faithful Border Collie named Angus, out by the barn, barking and whining toward the melon patch. “I was puzzled by Angus’s whining,” he said, “because he was still a feisty old guy. I thought that maybe one or two of the melon rustlers might be known to Angus; and they were confusing him at his guard duties by calling his name and talking gentle to him.”

  Mighty curious as to who might be in his melon patch, Pierce reportedly grabbed a flashlight and struck out for the barn. As he rounded the corner of the barn he nearly tripped over Angus, who was whining and cowering next to the wall. Pierce knew then that someone had frightened him. Hoping that he had not been hurt by the melon thieves, he knelt down beside the dog and quickly checked him for injuries. There were none, but he hardly had any time to enjoy his relief before he heard movement in the melon patch. Standing up, he quickly pointed the flashlight toward the sounds; and will never forget what he saw.

  “At first it looked like a man with a blanket wrapped around him,” Pierce wrote in his report, “bending over and chomping into a melon. I thought it was too dad-blamed hot for anyone to be covering himself with a blanket, but then I figured he had done it to disguise himself. I yelled at him to get the hell out of my watermelon patch; and then he stood up and I could see that he was a tall man-like creature with dark wings that had been folded around his torso.

  As he stretched himself to his full height of well over six feet, each wing unfolded to a width of what appeared to be seven or eight feet; at least fourteen feet from one wing tip to another.” Pierce was reportedly struck dumb by the sight of the inhumanoid. “My mouth was open,” he said, “but I couldn’t seem to yell or make any sound at all. I dropped the flashlight, and I can remember leaning back against the wall of the barn. I really felt like I was going to pass out. My knees just buckled and I slid down to the ground.”

  The witness must have thought that he was going to die, I’m sure, but much to his relief, the terrifying creature emitted a blood-curdling screech, then flapped his wings and lifted off into the night sky. Pierce later recalled that the wings had made a very sharp leathery flapping sound as it flew away. He had been close to an eagle once as it flapped its wings and took to the air, and this sound was much louder.

  The few people that he confided in regarding the encounter advised him that he’s probably just scared up a large barn owl. “I know that some barn owls can develop some mighty large wing spans,” Pierce stated, “but they don’t stand over six feet tall. And I can’t remember owls ever going after watermelons. This thing was some kind of freak of nature; half-human, half-bird.”

  Also from 1980, came the report that a reptilian-looking inhumanoid with large leathery wings had “buzzed” a car traveling down a lonely stretch of road in Finksburg, Maryland. The presence of the creature made the car shake, witnesses claimed, before it flew away and vanished. Another winged inhumanoid figure was later seen in the woods of nearby Kent County, Maryland.

  A dark, bird-like figure was also seen in Albertsville, Johannesburg, South Africa in 1980 by a young boy playing in a garden with his friends. Moreover, the child’s parents reportedly saw strange shadows, flying lights and even an albino ape in the area.

  Gambian folklore tells of the Kikiyaon, a monstrous flying birdman whose icy stare alone is enough to kill a human. West African villagers fear this creature greatly, and it is said to have an owl-like head with a huge beak and long, sharp talons. Although it is rarely sighted, its weird screams are often heard and are thought to signify a coming death.

  Another aerial inhumanoid, this time of a different type, was seen in Uganda between Kinyara and Kitanosie, in 1995. The “Red Angel” was described as a human-looking winged entity with curly blond hair. The “angel” was immersed in a glowing halo effect with a shimmering face and stood an incredible twelve feet tall. It reportedly faced the witness twice (?) before gliding away.

  Mothman Speaks!

  “I saw Mothman right before Mount St. Helens blew up when I was kid,” claims 40-year-old Shawni Harrison. Harrison, a former resident of Zilah, Washington, remembers the day of May 17th, 1980, one day before the volcanic eruption occurred spewing millions of tons of super-heated ash and debris into the air, killing 57 people. She doesn’t remember much about the encounter, she told me. “I was only five years old at the time. I just remember watching him fly down from a tree in front of my window. He then transformed into an actual person but his eyes were still black and red. He told me to stay inside. Something bad was going to happen.”

  She said the figure, which she
described as “tall, broad and thick” did not speak to her in the usual manner, but telepathically. “His mouth did not move.”

  According to her, she spoke back to him! “I asked him if he could change into something else. And he changed into different people. My mom being one. But when I heard her calling my name, I screamed and he smiled and turned back into this mass he was flying in before. It was a black-bodied figure with eyes and wings. Not really a body, just fuzzy blackness. He was gone after that. I did stay inside for a couple days. The next day the volcano blew up. It put feet of ash all over the orchard and house. Crazy. I didn’t know it was him. It wasn’t until my family told me about the bridge collapse back in the day and told me stories of it, that I put the two together.”

  Harrison is referring here to the Silver Bridge collapse in Point Pleasant West Virginia on December 15th, 1967 which killed 46 people. The collapse of the bridge is considered by many to be the culmination of the Mothman sightings flap which gripped Point Pleasant and surrounding counties for months before the tragedy. Interestingly, Harrison claims that some of her relatives were victims of the event and died that cold December night just before Christmas.

  No one else saw the entity, she told me. She had been playing alone in her room when she looked out the window when the event transpired. When I asked her if she was sure that it wasn’t merely a dream, but an actual memory from her past, she stated, “It was real.”

  In 1981, two carloads of adults traveling down a lonely road in Granite Falls on Washington State’s Mount Philchuck were allegedly attacked from above by an eight-foot tall humanoid with huge, leathery wings and a lizard-like face. The witnesses, all in their sixties, had pulled over to take photographs of the scenery when they saw what they at first took to be a hang-glider in the sky above them.

  The figure then drew closer and sent all witnesses dashing for their cars in horror. They sped away; with the creature in pursuit. The horrific entity tore at the cars, leaving long scratch marks on the vehicles and frightening the passengers so badly that one car allegedly crashed into a roadside ditch causing the driver to have a stroke while the other continued on for help.

  Local police soon arrived onsite where they reportedly fired on the creature with their service pistols, to no effect, before calling in the National Guard for support! The whole affair, of course, was immediately ‘hushed up’ and all records of the incident were soon afterwards destroyed in a suspicious fire at the local police station. The incident sounds too bizarre to be true, like a scene out of a science fiction movie, but the area reputedly has a long history of sightings of similar creatures dating back to the 1940s.

  Another ‘Birdman’ incident, albeit one with a more bird-like description, allegedly took place in Greece one afternoon in the summer of 1986, when three hunters encountered a terrifying creature while in the woods near the Asteroussia Mountains. It was described as a low-flying, winged ‘man’ with a long, bird-like beak, leathery skin and lengthy, sharp-looking talons. Badly frightened by the experience, all three men immediately fled the scene. The curious avian entity is somewhat reminiscent of the old ‘Hawkman’ character which has appeared for decades in the D.C. Comics publications.

  Also in 1986, in Santa Catarina, Brazil, a young girl was awakened one evening by strange noises coming from outside. When she opened the door she was shocked to see her father, armed only with a lump of wood, attempting to fend off a huge winged entity wearing a dark cape and carrying some type of trident. The leathery looking attacker was described as having two, fiery, triangular shaped eyes and huge black wings. She saw her father throw the wood at the creature as it approached, yet the missile seemed to vanish in mid-air before it could strike the monster.

  In Kostroma, Russia a crowd of onlookers saw another strange flying figure in 1990, that they, at first took to be some sort of machine; until it drew closer and they were astonished to see that it was a man with “no neck and large, dark wings that hid its face.”

  Also from Russia, this time in 1992 in the Pidan region, a man named Kurentsevym claimed to see a huge, winged ‘man’ flying through the sky above him as he was relaxing near a bonfire one evening. The creature didn’t seem to notice the startled witness as it flew on into the distance. Kurentsevym noted further that the thing had a two-meter wingspan and glowing eyes.

  These days Mothman seems to prefer to spend most of his time frightening witnesses in Kentucky. Perhaps he lives there, has always lived there and has merely returned home. The Land Between the Lakes, or LBL, area in Trigg County is known by many to be the alleged stomping grounds of the “Beast of LBL,” a creature some believe to be a modern-day werewolf, but few know that a Mothman-type inhumanoid has also been seen there for many decades. Some say that sightings of the aerial enigma in and around the Golden Pond area date back to the 1920s when several people claimed to have seen a ‘devil-like creature’ near the old Tennessee House Hotel. Witnesses said the creature had a very large wingspan and appeared to float in the air as though it were flying. More recently, a similar winged entity was seen by a truck driver in 1974 as he passed beneath a bridge located on the Trace, the main road which runs through the LBL area, near Golden Pond.

  In late summer of 2002, two motorists got the shock of their lives as they were traveling south down the Trace. It was a sunny afternoon and the two witnesses, both elderly women, were on their way to the county seat of Cadiz, intending to spend a quiet afternoon shopping for antiques, when the unexplainable happened. Just beyond the next curve the unknown was waiting for them. They had just passed the Golden Pond area when they noticed a figure, some distance away, standing in the road. It appeared to be the figure of a man facing in their direction.

  But it was no man.

  It stood there, unmoving, in the middle of the road as they approached and, upon realizing that it did not intend to move, the driver slowed the vehicle. The closer they got to this “man,” however, the more alarmed the witnesses became at his appearance. They stopped the car within twenty feet of the figure, in complete disbelief and dread at what was standing before them.

  “It looked like a demon from Hell,” one of the witnesses later said. It was shaped like a man with a very muscular build, but it stood over seven feet tall. And it wasn’t wearing any clothes. Its skin was a dark grayish-green, they said, and bumpy-looking on the parts of its body not covered with scales. It had huge, ruby-red eyes, “as big as eggs,” that bulged outward from its head, large, flared nostrils and pointed, upturned ears. Its mouth was wide and pencil-thin, but it made no sound as it stood facing the women, glaring at them with its oversized eyes.

  It’s a wonder that both of them didn’t expire right there on the spot from fright. But, to make matters even stranger, the creature suddenly flung out its arms, revealing a set of leathery, bat-like wings, then jumped into the air, flew directly over their car and disappeared heading North toward Lyon County.

  The two made it into Cadiz without further incident, and stopped at a roadside diner to calm their nerves, where they told their story to some of the patrons who noticed how upset they were. After two hours had passed, they asked for directions to an alternate route home in order to avoid traveling back down the Trace.

  And no one blamed them.

  One evening in July 2003, Kimberly Frazier, her husband, her stepdaughter and her husband, were driving on the interstate near the town of Olive Hill in Carter County, Kentucky when they noticed a light up in the sky that, at first, they thought was a spotlight. The odd light followed them for a distance of about 35 miles before it started getting closer to the car. Then it swooped down toward the vehicle and back up into the sky. They described it as a dark gray, smoky shape with wings about five to six feet wide almost like a huge bird. The incident didn’t really scare them, one of them later stated, but they were all amazed when they realized that they had made a nearly two-hour trip in about 35 or 40 minutes.

  According author/researcher, Ron Coffey, Mothman has been e
ncountered in Pike County on at least three occasions. In August of 2008, he claims, one Pikeville woman reported that she was out walking her dog one night when it refused to go any further, as if sensing something up ahead that she couldn’t see. As she was paused there for a few moments, baffled, a tall bird-like figure stumbled out from the nearby bushes. “It looked straight at me,” she said. “It had giant, red glowing eyes, and must have been over seven feet tall. I ran as fast as I could back to the house with the dog howling the whole way.”

  Later that night a local police deputy was making his rounds when he came upon what he thought was the figure of a man standing in the road facing away from him. He stopped the patrol, got out and began to approach the man.

  Coffey writes, “As the officer stopped his car and got out to investigate, he was shocked when the “man” turned to face him. That was when he noticed its large, red piercing eyes and eight to ten-foot bat-like wings. The unknown creature extended its wings and began to slowly walk, with a somewhat clumsy waddle, toward the deputy. The startled witness ordered the creature to stop. When the creature did not heed the warning, the deputy drew his weapon and fired six shots. If any of the bullets hit their intended target, it had no noticeable effect. The unnerved deputy then made a hasty retreat from the area.”

  Coffey writes that the next day around 2:00 a.m. a local farmer named Harley Foster went outside to investigate a commotion he had heard coming from near his barn. When he approached the barn, he was startled to see a six to seven-foot-tall creature standing there.

  “It looked like a big owl or something, “he stated. As if that wasn’t enough, the damned thing started chasing him, bobbing its head back and forth “like a big chicken, and shrieking at me.” The witness only had one good leg, he said, but he managed to make it inside the house and retrieved his rifle. By the time he made it back outside the “bird-man” was gone.