Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

The world of the paranormal can sometimes seem to be stuffed with mundane monsters. Anytime Bigfoot sees a camera he high steps it out of range. And Nessie – she’ll occasionally allow her floating-log looking hump to be photographed from a distance, but she’s far too shy for a close up.

Not so for the Brosno Dragon! It’s best known for eating Mongol armies and swallowing Nazi warplanes.

Until recently we’ve hated Russia with a deep resolve – what with their hours-long breadlines and throaty dialect. Can you blame us? Suddenly, however, we’re realising that as paranormal things go they seem to be the hub of everything great. Case in point – the Koranic kid and the crazy footage of the Communist army milling about the remnants of a crashed UFO.

Yes, awesomeness like that almost Earns Russia 15 minutes alone with Obama’s secret nuclear code briefcase. If anyone in authority can make this happen, we really think they’ve earned it.

Keep in mind it’s only OK because they’ve been such an Awesome or Off-Putting hotbed of late. We already gave you the two recent examples – and now let us present you with a third: The Brosno Dragon.

The locals lovingly refer to it as Brosnya, and as we understand it the thing is basically Nessie with a taste for musky human flesh and fine tuned German engineering. Confused? Wikipedia shall clarify:

“Rumors of a strange, giant creature living in Lake Brosno have existed for several centuries. One legend says that the lake monster scared to death the Tatar-Mongol army that headed for Novgorod in the 13th century. Batu Khan stopped the troops on the sides of Lake Brosno to rest. Horses were allowed to drink water from the lake. However, when the horses ventured down to the lake, a huge roaring creature emerged from the water and started devouring horses and soldiers. The Batu-khan troops were so terrified that they turned back, and Novgorod was saved. Old legends describe an “enormous mouth” devouring fishermen. Chronicles mention a “sand mountain” that appeared on the lake surface from time to time. According to another legend, some Varangians (Swedish mercenaries) wanted to hide stolen treasure in the lake. When they approached the small island, a dragon came to the surface from the lake and swallowed the island up.”

Now compare that, if you will, to this recent Nessie sighting:

“We rounded the corner and saw [Nessie] taking a dump and reading the sports section. Most unexpected.”

Nessie is a stupid pussy. If that quote is true at all Nessie is a stupid pussy. The Russian monster is way better – and to top it all off, Wikipedia goes on to say this about her:

“It is said that during WWII the beast swallowed up a German airplane.”

This is a fact that becomes all the more compelling when you note that a National Geographic photo-shoot of the incident clearly shows the propellers were still spinning.

That’s so neat.

We can’t actually say that the most noble NG was on site. In fact, we can definitely say that they weren’t. We can say that other people claim to have scientifically looked into the matter – as found on the site Unknown Explorers:

“In the summer of 2002, Experts from the Kosmopoisk Research Association along with members from Karavan Magazine, went on an expedition to Lake Brosno and did deep echo location sounding. Vadim Chernobroiv, the Kosmopoisk coordinator said in an interview to the Moscow newspaper that the sonar research registered an anomaly. There was a huge jelly like mass the size of a railway car roughly five meters above the bottom of the lake. The mass stood motionless, until the group decided to throw an underwater petard, a low capacity explosive devise, at the mass. When the device detonated the mass started going up and although nothing ever surfaced resembling a monster the test did return some interesting results.”

Now that Russian science has once and for all proved that they are good at things besides just making two-headed dogs and gorilla hybrid super soldiers, well, we really think they’ve earned a crack at that briefcase.

C’mon Obama. You’re just being stingy.

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Off the coast of South America in 1997, hydrophones originally set up by the US to detect incoming Soviet Submarines picked up a sound. That sound seemed to be from a live animal, but were that the case said animal would have been larger than a blue whale.

Nobody yet knows what caused it – but we’ve got the noise for your personal listening pleasure right here…

The Bloop is a sound picked up underwater in 1997, an unexplained sound. The best scientific minds out there still don’t know what it is. There’s no doubt been talk of it being some sort of a submersible alien craft skimming the bottom side of the various ocean’s waters, but the few clues its given seem to indicate its an animal. At least according to CNN anyway:

“While [the sound] bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth, Britain’s New Scientist reported on Thursday. It is too big for a whale and one theory is that it is a deep sea monster, possibly a many-tentacled giant squid.”

A mega-squid has been quickly discounted as the sound-source because those animals don’t have the body parts to make these types of noises. The way they can tell it’s too big to be a whale is by the magnitude of the sound that emanated from it. Another curious factor about it is the sound was recorded on multiple occasions in areas geographically close to each other. A website called Disclose.tv has a spattering of additional details:

“The sound, traced to somewhere around 50° S 100° W (South American southwest coast), was detected repeatedly by the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array, which uses U.S. Navy equipment originally designed to detect Soviet submarines… it “rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km.”…it matches the audio profile of a living creature but there is no known animal that could have produced the sound. If it is an animal, it would have to be, reportedly, much larger than even a Blue Whale, the largest known animal on the earth.”

At the end of the day – it’s just a sound. Had the sound’s maker been caught on video then this may not be such a mystery. At the same time – if it had been caught on video – and the creature’s appearance was just too much to bear, maybe mankind would prefer to keep itself landlocked for the rest of our existence.

No more fish sandwiches.

Lets leave this mystery be.

Here’s the Bloop:

Thoughts of people flying aren’t so strange today. We’ve seen video of big bulky jet packs carrying people all sorts of places through the air – like from a prison on Arrested Development. As we understand it, that show was a documentary, and everything we saw there really happened.

What’s stranger, though, is that multiple people swear up and down they saw people fly without the aid of a device. That’s probably because human/bird hybrids don’t need mechanics to soar through the air.

Ah Brazil – the sleeping giant. It’s a huge land packed full of natural resources and crooked politicians that take public road-money and turn it into a personal in-house jacuzzi for their expensive girlfriends to steam in.

It’s also home to some crazy paranormal incidents – video footage of an alien at the side of a road with its head on fire, for instance. We’re not talking about that today though – no.

Today we’re talking about a strange sighting that took place in the fifties. A Brazilian couple was out for a walk who-knows-where, when they saw the shadow of some gigantic birds pass by over head. We’ll let Paranormal.About.com tell you the rest:

“In the early 1950s, a couple was taking an evening stroll near their home by the sea at Pelotas, Brazil. When two fast-moving shadows crossed their path, they looked up to see what they at first thought were two enormous birds flying about 30 feet above the ground. It was soon evident to the couple that these were not birds at all when the two flying creatures descended vertically and landed not far away. It was then clear that they looked like men, standing about six feet tall. Discovering they were being watched by the couple, the two “birdmen” squatted close to the ground, as if trying to hide. The female half of the couple convinced her husband to leave – and quickly.”

Obviously, there’s really not a lot of detail in there. We scoured the internet for more, but none seemed available – at least for that sighting. Here’s a similar one though – it happened in England. According to Shadowlands.net:

“In the 1970’s a silvery feathered birdman was observed by people in the Mawnan in Cornwall, England.  The birdman was said to have pincers as feet, reddish eyes and a large mouth.  Two sisters watched it fly over a church in 1976.  In July of the same year there were more sightings of the creature both on the ground and in the sky. In June through August of 1978 there were additional sightings in the area of the church in Mawnan.”

See that? That one was in England – and England is a first world country. You can’t deny a first world country, can you?

Well maybe you can. But for the sake of this article we don’t want to.

The Bunyip is an Australian legend that started with the Aborigines, and was subsequently spread among the white settlers. It’s been physically described as looking a thousand different ways – having everything from horse parts to tentacles.

At one point a skull of the creature was thought to be found, and when science at the time could not definitively identify it – it looked like the legends were all too true.

Here is a definition of the Bunyip as found in the Encyclopedia Mythica:

“A bellowing water monster from Aboriginal legend, believed to bring diseases. It lives at the bottom of the water holes, swamps, lakes and rivers of the Australian outback. The creature is roughly the size of a calf and requires calm water to live in. Unless its food sources are interfered with, the bunyip usually leaves human beings alone. However, if necessary it has the strength to pull a person down into the water and drown him. The name comes from an Aboriginal word meaning “devil” or “spirit”.”

Although no specific sighting or encounters with the creature seem to have been reported, there was still plenty of fuel to feed the fire. For instance, according to Skeptic World.com:

“In 1846 a peculiar skull was taken from the banks of Murrumbidgee River in New South Wales. In the first flush of excitement, several experts concluded that it was the skull of something unknown to science. In 1847 the so-called bunyip skull was put on exhibition in the Australian Museum (Sydney) for two days. Visitors flocked to see it and the Sydney Morning Herald said that it prompted many people to speak out about their ‘bunyip sightings’ “Almost everyone became immediately aware that he had heard ’strange sounds’ from the lagoons at night, or had seen ’something black’ in the water.”"

The skull was eventually called that of a deformed horse or calf, but public interest did not fade. Take the Bunyip of the Greta area, for instance. Long had locals claimed to hear a ‘loud booming sound’ coming from the swamp. When a search party would be dispatched, they always reported the same thing – nothing. Eventually the swamp was drained and the noise stopped. Some thought the creature had been killed by the death of it’s natural habitat, others thought it just moved.

Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence that the Bunyip exists is the fact it was shown in a South Park episode playing the role of God (season 3). Camera footage like that is very hard to fake, and thus far, science has not been able to definitively prove it wrong.

Just you think about that for a minute.

Many believe the creature takes human form by day, and lives among the people. Others believe he’s just a lonely, horny gay monster accidentally unleashed on the public back in the seventies. Whatever he is, we have more on him right here.

Wikipedia has a horrifying opening paragraph for the legend of Popobawa:

“Popobawa is variously described as either a ghost or ogre with gigantic bat wings and a giant penis. At times he is simply known as “Imran”. He is sometimes thought to be a shapeshifter who looks like an ordinary human during the day. His presence is usually announced by the sound of scraping claws on their roof and a sharp, pungent smell. Different from other incubus legends, Popobawa primarily attacks men and only in their own beds, resulting in many men sleeping outside in streets or on porches after recent reported attacks.

“He attacks men as they sleep, overpowering them, holding their face to the floor and sodomizing them for up to an hour. People who claim to be victims of Popobawa are mostly poorer residents on the island of Pemba, though other reports have also come from other islands and coastal Tanzania. The victims are threatened with repeated, and longer, sodomizations if they do not let their friends and neighbors know of their experience.”

Usually experiences with the beast happen in one on one scenarios as listed above. In the seventies though, he publicly addressed a group of people at once, using a possessed girl as a mouthpiece. During the speech many of those present claimed to hear a car engine ‘revving and rustling’ from a nearby roof.

A strange piece of the Papobawa story is that his attacks, according to some, spike during times of public office election. The BBC elaborates:

“In recent years the residents on the semi-autonomous Tanzanian islands claimed that Popo Bawa only visited the islanders during voting, such as in the contentious general elections in 1995 and 2000.”

Some argue a political connection. One victim who has spoken to the media about his ordeal is Mjaka Hamad, a fifty-something year old farmer, who said he could feel:

“…something pressing on me. I couldn’t imagine what sort of thing was happening to me. You feel as if you are screaming with no voice. It was just like a dream but then I was thinking it was this Popobawa and he had come to do something terrible to me, something sexual. It is worse than what he does to women. I don’t believe in spirits so maybe that’s why it attacked me. Maybe it will attack anybody who doesn’t believe.”

Well if that’s the only reason the beasty needs to attack your southside, then let us publicly acknowledge his existence. He is very much alive, and may or may not have a stake in the upcoming US Presidential election.

Read More:

The Skeptic-Raping Demon Of Zanzibar – The Committee For Skeptical Inquiry

This week: Cryptozoology/Odd Sightings

Cryptozoology has a stuffed-full menu of weird creatures that have had dozens of sightings all over the world. The Jersey Devil has got to be one of the best known, but it seems it's sightings don't happen quite as much as others in its great big monster family. Once though, almost a hundred years ago, a whole bunch of firemen hosed one right off a roof.

Then it attacked a dog and got shot at by police. Quite an experience from all we've read.

Bigfoot, modern-day cavemen, frog people and the Clutchbone – they're all members of the monster family, most with historical sightings as well as modern ones. The Jersey Devil is on that list too. Wikipedia sheds some light on the matter:

"The Jersey Devil, sometimes called the Leeds Devil, is a legendary creature or cryptid said to inhabit the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey. The creature is often described as a flying biped with hooves, but there are many variations."

What we believe may be the most intriguing encounter with the beast involves a time it meandered onto the roof of a local fire chief's home. Two men out for a walk saw it up there and apparently reported it to the fire department. In the book Phantom of the Pines: More Tales of the Jersey Devil, author James F. McCloy gives us more detail:

"Soon the fire department arrived and turned the hose on the Devil. At first it fled the water by running down the street about one hundred and fifty feet. Then it turned, and to the panic of its tormentors charged at them. Sticks, stones, and other missiles had no effect on the rampant Devil, as it bore down upon the frightened crowd. Fortunately for them, the creature suddenly spread its wings and soared over them, disappearing into the night."

The Devil then flew off and attacked a dog in a woman's backyard. Said woman heard the commotion and freed her pet with a swinging broom stick. This encounter ended with two policemen trigger pulling in the direction of the monster, but to no effect. Once again it disappeared into the night.

One thing that sets the Jersey Devil apart from other 'mystical' creatures is that some people claim to know where it lives. Once again we turn to Wikipedia for details:

"An important piece of the Jersey Devil legend concerns its supposed home at the Blue Hole located near Winslow, New Jersey. According to popular folklore, the blue hole is not only bottomless but also acts as one of the many gateways to Hell. The water in the hole is abnormally cold, even during the summer months, averaging only 58 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. In addition, the hole is said to have a whirlpool effect on any person who enters it."

Physical descriptions of the creature very from small and ape-ish to giraffe-like. It seems in most cases it's agreed the creature has wings, but that seems to be the only constant. It seems to run away from people without too much effort, so don't lose sleep over all this if you live in southern New Jersey, but just the same, if you're going out at night, be sure to check the skies.

Read More:

JERSEYANA; Once Upon a Time, the New Jersey Devil Meant More Than Hockey – The New York Times

The Goatman we're talking about today has more to do with Bigfoot than it does a cowboy with an unnatural animal fixation. In fact – Goatman pretty much is Bigfoot from the sound of it, just replace all the ape parts with that of goat. He's all covered in fur, he walks on two legs and has cloven hooves. The hybrid has been spotted all over North America, and has several attacks on loving couples attributed to him.

The Goatman, a creature with goat legs, horns and hooves but human everything-else, is shrouded in mystery. Even less is known about him than Bigfoot. Speculation on his origins fly about anyway – according to an obscure Geocities website:

Opinions vary on where the Goatman came from. Some local scholars believe it is just the area's repressed subconscious feelings about the devil and religion that are manifesting themselves in these sitings. Other believe they really are seeing the ancient spirits of the satyrs and Pan. While the last theory seems to have the most interesting qualities. A scientist who worked at the National Agricultural Research Center, which just happens to be located in Prince Georges County, was supposed to have been doing some kind of research with goats. Then something went wrong with the experiments, and the scientist slowly turned into the half-goat, half-human monster [we] now know. Goatman retreated into the woods where he hides most of the time. The Goatman also developed an intense hatred of man and other animals.

Clearly those origins sound pretty comic bookish. In bigfoot stories, the beasty is generally only attributed a typical animal's brain-power. In the Goatman tales, however, it seems to be given human-like intelligence – enough to carry a double-edged battle axe. You read that right – this guy, at least in some sightings, carries an axe. Unknown-creatures.com describes this in a Maryland sighting:

In the first encounter reported, a couple was parked alone a lonely country road during a moon lit love making session, when the suddenly heard something banging on the hood of their car. Looking up they were scared to death to see the goat like creature staring at them, waving what looked like a double edged axe in it's hand. The creature suddenly turned and dashed into the surrounding woods.

Goatman-mania hit the area enough that on Nov 10, 1971, this headline graced the front page of a local paper:

"Residents Fear Goatman Lives: Dog Found Decapitated in Old Bowie"

The article told a story of a woman who heard her dog barking, then looked outside and saw the shadow of a hulking creature in her yard. The dog disappeared, then the next day she found her pooch quite decapitated. The article went on to tell how sightings of the Goatman had been reported all along a few local roads.

As far as we can tell there's been nothing but urban myth and rumours of the Goatman since the newspaper ran that story. It really doesn't give us a lot to work with. Maybe the big beast never existed at all.

Then again, maybe it does.

Read More:

Goatman (Maryland) – Wikipedia