The Inhumanoids

by Barton M Nunnelly

  “I don’t know what the hell it was,” he said, “but it seemed really pissed off. I know this sounds really crazy most people will say that I was just hitting the ‘shine,’ or that I’m a liar or just plain crazy, and all sorts of unchristian things; but I swear this actually happened to me and I will go to my grave telling this story here as true.”

  Mothman allegedly photographed in Russell County by two residents while walking their dog near the Ohio River just before dusk one evening in 2003. As they watched, the 6-foot-tall, dark-colored figure unfolded a pair bat-like wings and suddenly sprang from its perch, flying off into the evening sky in the direction of Ironton, Ohio.

  Batsquatch

  A wonderfully bizarre sighting took place in 1994 near Mount Rainier, in Washington. Columnist, C. R. Roberts wrote in the May,1, 1994 edition of Tacoma’s News Tribune:

  “The engine died, and the dashboards lights fell dark. Although he hadn’t applied his brakes, the pickup truck he was driving stopped suddenly, abruptly, square in the middle of the road there between the edge of a forest and a scrubby, clear-cut field. His headlights cut a hole through the night. He sat wondering what was wrong. Then, he saw the feet descending. Bird feet. Claw feet Then the legs, the torso, the chest. And the wings, folded, attached to the back of broad shoulders. Then the head. That face. The creature, nine-feet tall, thirty feet away. Blue tinted fur, yellowish eyes, tufted ears, and sharp, straight teeth. With a dust raising thud it landed.

  Brian Canfield, 18, held tight the steering wheel. He was alone and on his way home; from Buckley to the isolated settlement of Camp One, located in the Mt. Rainie foothills above lake Kapowsin; at 9:30 a week ago Saturday night. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t take drugs. He’s a high

  school senior known locally as an average, normal kid.

  “It was just standing there staring at me, like it was resting, like it didn’t know what to think,” Canfield says. “I was scared. It raised the hair on me. I didn’t feel threatened. I just felt out of place.

  “We’re sitting in a camper outside the Canfield home a few days after the encounter. I’d heard Brian’s story from a neighbor and I’d asked for an interview. He is no fan of heavy metal music and he’s never played ‘Dungeons & Dragons.’ He’s never seen a UFO. He remains baffled by what he saw.

  “Its eyes were yellow and shaped like a piece of pie with pupils like a half moon. The mouth was pretty big. White teeth. No fangs. The face was like a wolf,” he says.

  Can he smell anything? Hear anything? I ask him to close his eyes and remember. He can hear the wind. He smells gasoline; he’d been having trouble his carburetor.

  “It’s looking right at me like in a deep stare, like right through me. It’s standing perfectly still.”

  It stood, how long? A few minutes. Several minutes. Then its fingers twitched and its wings began to unfold. Those wings were as wide as the road.

  “It turned its head and looked back at me and started flapping its wings,” Canfield says. Then slowly it rose and so great was the turbulence the truck began to rock and sway.

  Slowly the creature flew off in the direction of Mt. Rainer.

  “A few minutes later the truck just started,” Canfield says. “I took off as fast as I could.”

  He drove home. “I just flew in the house. I woke my mom and dad up. I told my dad to grab the gun and the camera and come with me. While he was getting dressed I told them what had happened. I almost couldn’t breathe.”

  “I could tell something was wrong, the way he ran in,” says his mother. He said; “Really, I gotta talk to you. We just gotta talk.” They went into the living room. He was shaking. “His mouth was dry, he was pale, his hair was still standing on end,” Sandra says. She handed him a tablet and he began to draw what he’d seen.

  A few minutes later they visited a neighbor; a man who knows the woods, and they soon drove to that spot on the road. Within the silence and the night, they found no trace of the creature. The neighbor said; “I know he saw something, but I don’t know what it was.”

  Mount Rainier, Washington.

  Canfield told his story at school early last week. Some friends believed him and some have begun to tease him. One friend helped him with the sketch and the others have come up with a name for the creature.

  “I’m not really into this stuff,” Canfield says. “It boggles my mind really hard core. I really can’t explain it. It’s weird, definitely weird. I don’t like it. Usually stuff like this happens to someone else.”

  The past week I’ve spoken with neighbors and with Canfield’s family. I believe his story. I believe he saw something that night a week ago. I have no idea what he saw. I’ve spoken with experts on legends and creatures and none knows of a being such as this. But I believe Brian Canfield. And I believe that we daily face so many real things fearful; drugs, gangs AIDS, violence, divorce, poverty, Rwanda, Bosnia, tuberculosis, North Korea and so on down the list; that it’s almost pleasant to consider a monster no-one can explain. It’s pleasant to read for the rest of us, perhaps. But not for Brian Canfield.

  “It did happen. I’m willing to put my life on it,” he says. “I just have this picture in front of my head, the picture of it standing there. I can’t get rid of it. It’s just there. I kind of wish it didn’t happen.”

  A similarly described monster, also said to resemble a Bigfoot was seen one year earlier in 1993, at a place called Baker’s Point, near Allentown, Pennsylvania. It also sprouted huge wings and flew off into the sky, but ‘Batsquatch’ did not make his debut in the 1990s.

  At dusk one evening some twenty years earlier, in 1974, four experienced hikers on a mountain trail in Northern California were shocked to see an inhumanoid ‘thing’ as it squatted on a rocky ledge some distance above and in front of them. It was sitting still, they said, and was a grayish color that blended in with the boulders on the mountainside. Using binoculars, the hikers were able to get a good look at the thing. It had a dog-like or wolf-like face, they said, large feet with talons, and the legs, arms and shoulders of a man.

  The thing remained motionless, seated there on its precarious perch, until it momentarily extended from its back “what looked like a big, black wing.” The men, certain that it was no Condor, or any other bird with which they were familiar, climbed to the ledge the next day, but found nothing other than a strong, acrid odor where the creature had been crouched. A similar bigfoot-type entity, said to have wings and the head of a bull moose, the Poomoola is said to haunt Mount Katahdin in the Baxter State Park in Maine. It is also known as the ‘Injun Devil.’

  In July 1994, in a cemetery at the El Sabino ranch in Mexico another bizarre, winged entity; half human, half bird, was seen by a ranch owner and another local woman. An expedition was organized by the Fundacion Cosmos to investigate the strange anomaly.

  Armed with a variety of equipment; radios, video cameras, binoculars and lights; they searched the area where the creature was sighted, to no avail. The only evidence they were able to gather came in the form of a recorded testimony given by a ranch worker who claimed also to have seen the birdman. He described it as humanoid with thick, gray plumage. The upper half of the body towards the head was human, he said, and the other half was like a bird. It had two enormous wings on its back.

  An even more bizarre winged humanoid was seen on August 16, 1995, in Puebla, Mexico by farmer Victor Morales. Morales had the misfortune to have disturbed this creature’s attack on his livestock that day. He described it, incredibly, as half woman, half fish with a long tail and huge wings. Imagine the farmer’s horror when the dreadful ‘merwoman’ turned her attack upon him instead, biting him on the arm before flying angrily off into the sky.

  Multiple witnesses at a rural barbeque in Colchester, Utah got more than a good meal when they noticed five winged humanoids flying through the skies in August of 2000. They were described as black and skinny-looking; flying toward the city. The airborne terrors were violent as well.

 
A local woman later claimed that she was attacked at her home by five black beings with large wings and big eyes as she sat in her car parked in the driveway. One of the monstrous ‘gargoyles’ allegedly broke through her car window and managed to bite her arm, drawing blood. Though thoroughly terrified, she bravely fought with the hellish creatures for over an hour before they finally gave up and flew away.

  In August of 2004, a Maryland man admitted that he’d had a similar encounter with such a creature when he was eighteen years old. One evening at about 1 a.m. as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house he decided to take a short cut down a dark, tree-lined street in rural Maryland. He made it nearly to the end of the deserted street when he “started to feel strange.” He writes:

  “I looked up, and about 20 feet in front of me and about 15 feet above the ground I saw this big, black thing hovering in the air that was about 8 feet tall. I remember it having a body like a big prehistoric bird, but it looked completely black. I couldn’t make out its shape except for its outline. It had ears or something that were like spikes that came straight up, kind of like the ones on Batman’s suit. Its eyes glowed like when you shine a flashlight at an animal’s eyes, and I could hear this prolonged pulse sound in my head that was more like a vibration.”

  On seeing this the witness was understandably terrified. The thing had huge wings but, strangely, they seemed to be flapping in slow motion, “like a jellyfish would move.” This bizarre slow-motion effect has also been reported during other, seemingly unrelated, inhumanoid encounters.

  After about five seconds the horror turned its head to the side as if looking at a nearby tree, and allowed the witness to view its head in profile, which he claimed was muzzled, resembling a dog’s. It let out a shriek, the witness claimed, that sounded like a mixture of a woman’s and an animal’s. Then it “...flew into the tree like a Mack truck; and vanished.” As might be expected, the man had trouble sleeping that night and decided to return to the scene the following day with his younger brother. They found that the side of the tree where the creature had ‘crash-landed’ and disappeared was destroyed.

  Another flying humanoid was seen in Kent County that same year, at a place called Rock Hall. But 2004 had barely even begun when accounts of UFI’s started to arrive. And not just from the United States.

  On March 8th of that year two men had the misfortune of running into one of these frightful creatures while out for a stroll across Northicote Farm in Wolverhampton, West Midlands. And this one had no intentions of flying away. It was standing high up in the branches of a tree ‘blending in’ with the foliage. It was described as a gray-colored humanoid with ‘membranous wings’ which were attached to clawed hands, and a human-like head. They could hardly believe their eyes. The creature watched the witnesses for a moment, then, as the startled pair looked on in amazement, it glided over to another tree, the weight of the thing bending the branches downward, and continued to stare at the men. Unnerved by the entity’s unsettling stare, the witnesses, like so many others before them, expeditiously removed themselves from the area.

  Another tall inhumanoid creature with black wings was seen by a woman in Akron, Ohio in April. Like many other witnesses to the UFI phenomenon, she believed the creature was an omen of doom, or a warning of some sort, as did the Northern Alabama woman who saw a “tall, humanoid being with black wings” that same month while studying for an exam.

  One month later, in May of 2004, another surreal, aerial inhumanoid appeared in Al-Naiisia, Syria to seven laborers working in an olive grove. According to the Syrian State Newspaper, they had spotted the bizarre entity sitting beneath a tree. It was reddish in color, they claimed and “peasant-like” in appearance. As they approached the thing climbed up into the tree, then “...rushed skyward with incredible swiftness leaving a wake of smoky white bubbles.”

  Earlier I mentioned the ‘Red Angel;’ the glowing Ugandan mystery humanoid seen in 1995. One witness claimed the winged ‘angel’ had curly blonde hair, a ‘shimmering’ face and stood over twelve feet tall. He also claimed that the angelic being attempting to communicate with him “telepathically” before gliding away. The decidedly inhuman ability to communicate in this manner seems to be a trait shared by nearly all the inhumanoids.

  In any event, like so many other places throughout the world, Africa is not only frequented by angels; but demons as well. From the Zanzibar Islands comes this unsettling account of a different kind of Batman. One of lustful appetites to which roofs and walls pose no obstacles at all. The following story ran in the British newspaper, The Sun on May 15, 2005:

  Belief In Sex-Mad Demon Tests Nerves In Zanzibar:

  Mohammed Juma starts to sweat and fidget as he reveals his rape by Popo Bawa, the most feared spirit visitor of the Zanzibar spice islands, located just off the coast of Tanzania in east Africa. “We believe reading the Koran is our only defence; nothing else,” said the 41- year-old driver and father of four. “But Popo Bawa is real, and well-prepared.”

  Holidaymakers on this Indian Ocean island tend to smile dismissively at accounts of the bat-like ogre said to prey on men, women and children. But, for Zanzibaris, a visit from the sodomising gremlin is no joke. Although no one has ever seen it, belief in the monster is so strong that even villagers will sleep outside for protection.

  Popo Bawa prefers to attack behind closed doors at night in huts set amidst rustling groves of jackfruit and mangoes on Zanzibar’s Pemba Island. Villagers claim “they detected a bad smell, became cold and went into a trance in the minutes before they felt the creature’s inhuman strength. Some attacks were heralded by the sound of giant fangs and claws rattling and scraping on the huts’ tin roofs. Others cringed in terror at what sounded like a car’s engine turning over.

  “We heard a rustling on the roof,” recalls Asha Saleh, in her late 50s, a resident of Machomanne village near Pemba’s main town of Chake Chake. “I felt someone fondling me. I felt very cold. I felt uneasy,” she said, recalling the attack some 35 years ago.

  “I couldn’t call out for help to my husband, who was lying asleep beside me. Popo Bawa is strong. He really presses down on you. And it took a long time; one hour! Eventually, I lost consciousness. And I was one of many who was attacked during the Popo Bawa manifestation of 1970.”

  Multiple waves of colonists and traders; Arabs, Portuguese, Hindus, Chinese, British, Persians and Africans; left behind a multinational array of legends on Zanzibar. Accordingly, many dismiss Popo Bawa as another of the satanic stories swapped over the centuries by the migrating Indian Ocean peoples as they moved back and forth from Indonesia to the Comoros, from Madagascar to the Maldives. Zanzibar’s distinctive past as an Arab-run slave market prompted some academicians to speculate that the story of Popo Bawa emerged from a collective race memory of the horrors of slavery.

  But Popo Bawa is similar to the many goblins believed by the villagers to still populate the tall grasses that surround their huts. Many of the elderly are adept at exorcism, placing charms at the base of fig trees or sacrificing goats to avert evil or draw favors from the spirit world. So experienced are the island’s traditional healers that they draw visitors from the (Persian) Gulf and East Africa, with the successful amassing riches and prestige.

  In 1995, Juma said, “Many were afraid and were sleeping outside. But I was confident and was alone in my room. I was reading the Koran for protection. After about 20 minutes, I started feeling sleepy. I heard something falling on the roof. I continued reading. I started feeling something in my room. I felt my mouth becoming bigger and bigger. I started losing my ability to form words. My feeling was that my lower lip had extended to my lap. I felt something in my body. I became very sweaty. My experience was like that of a neighbor of mine who said his head seemed to grow to an enormous size.”

  Popo Bawa gets annoyed if villagers deny his existence; a fact of which Khamis Juma Hamad says he can testify. Hamad, a retired village chief now 75, said that, in 1971, Popo Bawa spoke to terrified villag
ers through a girl possessed by the monster. “I am Popo Bawa,” said the girl, called Fatuma, speaking in the unnaturally deep voice of a man. “You have challenged my existence, so I have come to prove I am here.” Seconds later, he said, the villagers heard the sound of an engine revolving and a rustling on a nearby roof was a sign of Popo Bawa.

  “The people felt cold, almost paralyzed. They were terrified,” he said.

  Popo Bawa was last seen on Pemba Island in 2000 and 2001. Villagers fear that the strange entity might make another appearance this year.”

  Back in America, a horrid, flying creature was encountered on the evening of September 26, 2006 in Lacrosse, Wisconsin by a 53-year-old Cherokee man named Wohali and his 25-year-old son. My dear friend, Fortean author and researcher, Linda Godfrey, who first published the account, later dubbed the creature the ‘Man-bat’ after a character from the old Detective Comics stories.

  The two witnesses were reportedly driving down Briggs Road when suddenly, a large, flying creature resembling a cross between a human and a bat loomed in the headlights and came within inches of crashing into the vehicle’s windshield before swooping straight up and disappearing from sight.

  The beast was so frightening that, within seconds of the encounter, both men became physically ill and had to pull to the side of the road. The son, who was driving, even vomited six or seven times. Wohali wretched as well and both men remained ill for an entire week.

  Godfrey writes of the event:

  “This sighting happened Tuesday, Sept. 26, on Briggs Road near Lacrosse, between 9:15 and 9:30 p.m. The creature was an estimated 6-7 feet tall, sported bat-like, leathery wings with a span of 10-12 feet, long claws on its feet and “hands” and a snarling expression on its face. The large muzzle featured rows of sharp teeth, and the creature “screamed” at them before sailing straight up into the air. Wohali stated that he did not know whether the creature had been on the road and then bounced up at them, or if it had been flying at the time it came at their car. He was sure the thing was a physical, actual creature, he said, but like nothing he had ever seen before.”