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.

If Hecklerspray ever sees a UFO, we’d like to think it would be in Antarctica right after we rescued Agent Scully from said UFO’s iron belly. If any other opportunity ever arises, we’re really not interested.

That’s not true. Really we’d probably poop our pants and stand their crying while any alien orbs scooted by several hundred feet above our heads. You know, like what recently happened in in Missouri a few weeks ago.

You hadn’t heard about that? Well then you’d better click on over to the next page.

It seems like UFO sightings don’t happen in the daytime very often. Sure, you’ve got the occasional Dennis Kucinich sighting that went down at noon on a balcony or something, but usually – it’s night time.

The unidentified objects often manifest themselves as lights outlining a ship shape (like this), or as amorphous glowing blobs that zip around at a distance (like this). Today’s topic seems to fall into the latter category – but with far more of these orange lights than usual. According to Examiner.com:

“Several Missouri witnesses traveling southbound on I-435 stopped to observe as many as 125 low-flying, orange objects that moved up from the tree line and traveled away at about the speed of a helicopter.”

We know what you’re thinking. If they moved like helicopters they were probably helicopters, right? Well could a helicopter do this? From the same source:

“”As they spread and slowly began to disappear into the clouds above (low ceiling), a larger and brighter orange object at a faster speed, about 1-2 degrees above the horizon, behind the tree line, and then as it started to ascend, split into five smaller orange objects, again radical in flight, without formation, and slowly ascended into the cloud cover,” the reporting witness stated. “This occurred about 20 times over a 25 minute span. They all came from the North (low on horizon) to South and then turning toward the East and then into cloud cover.”

“The event occurred over a 25-minute period and stopped after the largest object was seen – also splitting into five smaller objects.”

The last time we saw a helicopter divide into five pieces, it was an exploding Decepticon in a Michael Bay movie.

These orange orbs doing their thing were so obvious in the Missouri night sky that a lot of people actually pulled their cars over  to watch the action. One witness claimed to have seen 15 of the orbs at once floating around. What’s particularly interesting to us is the last little part of the quote up there, where it says everything stopped after the biggest orange blob flew in and split into five. It’s almost like it was bringing up the rear.

It all went down, according to the Examiner article, on May 13th, 2011. It gets stranger – check this out:

“4 a.m. Sunday, May 15, 2011: A very large Grey metallic saucer-shaped craft with a dome and one large horizontal long light and two smaller lights on the side was sighted in Lee’s Summit, MO, on Sunday morning at 4 a.m. Five witnesses saw this. One was a designated driver (he failed to put that in the report) and was not drinking. The others had been drinking at a bar earlier but he assures me that they were not drunk at the time of the sighting. He and his wife also report seeing Apache helicopters, fully armed, circling Lee’s Summit and Blue Springs for 7 days before this sighting. None were seen at the time of the sighting. Note: my secretary lives in Blue Springs and said she has heard the helicopters as well. Lee’s Summit Regional Airport is a small airport and not normally a place where military helicopters are sighted.”

So what do you think is zipping around the ‘Show Me’ state? Us, we think it’s probably weather balloons and swamp gas. And Chinese lanterns. And Venus. All dividing into five pieces and then ascending into the sky.

Scientific conclusion lead us to that obvious premise.

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.

That’s a pretty long name for a monster, isn’t it? We prefer something like ‘Nessie’ as it’s two short syllables that really get out of your mouth quickly – but that’s a different kind of monster all together.

You see, The Beast of the Land Between the Lakes, or The Beast of LBL for short, is like a giant wolfman that’s been terrifying people in the area for quite a long time. Nobody’s quite sure what it is – but there are theories…

The Land Between the Lakes is a huge wildlife refuge. It’s got around 300 miles of shoreline, forest-galore and there are no man-made developments anywhere in sight. It covers a lot of land too – 170,000 acres to be exact. That’s plenty of room for a gigantic human/dog hybrid to prance about murdering things in secret.

And allegedly, that’s just what the Beast of the Land Between the Lakes does. But what is he? Like we said – there are theories, like these ones from Geochaching.com:

“Some say the Beast is an exiled Indian Shaman that used his shape shifting abilities to do evil and was killed by tribal braves – before he died he vowed to torment the tribe and anyone on this land…. More recent explanations say the beast is a predator cousin of Bigfoot that kills for sport and always kills more than it can consume.”

A predator cousin of Bigfoot? Now that’s a family reunion we’d not want to find ourselves at for fear that if we ever found ourselves in attendance – it would be because we were on the grill being flipped by a fairly large spatula.

Now would you like some more details as to the legend? Of course you would – so here’s a bit from somebody named Jan, who heard all this from a bunch of old timers sitting on a bench somewhere in LBL (as found on the website Guardian Tales):

“Each [old timer] told stories of finding livestock slaughtered, ripped to pieces and ate upon.  Cows and pigs with their legs dismembered from the sockets.  Even a few horses had met their end with savage attacks upon their bodies.  A few of them described what they saw at different times when they caught glimpses of  the figure by  peeking out of the curtains of the windows into the night.  One man said it jumped out of one of the horse stalls one evening while he was putting up some animals. It stopped in front of him, arms spread out like it was getting ready to grab him, let out a howl and then sprang past him and into the dusky shadows of  the  sunset.  This particular man said he ‘wet his overalls’ during the episode.  Another man said he never seen it, but would always hear it’s baleful wails frequently at night, not like a regular wolf or a coyote, “No,” he said, “It was more deeper, longer, stronger sounding then what would come out of any animal I ever heard.”  Another old timer said his wife had seen it trying to get into the chicken coup but gave up after getting tangled in the chicken wire.  They all had tales of ‘someone’s hound dog’ getting killed, ripped apart limb from limb, ‘someone’s pig or cow or chicken’ getting eaten, the mysterious footprints left in the mud, and the stench it left behind where ever it appeared.  And more then one had the same story of listening to it walk across their front porches at night and scratching on the doors and walls which would leave deep gouges in the wood they would find in the morning.”

There’s also a story about how the beast killed a family of four. The details include bowels & limbs strewn all over the place and a blood splattered camping trailer that probably didn’t have that kind of insurance coverage. It’s far too long of a tale to tell here – but it’s just long enough to tell it there (It’s the blog of that Jan we mentioned earlier).

Normally cryptid stories include a giant, fuzzy whatever or other caught out of the corner of your eye, a plaster cast foot print or something that looks like a blurry Rosie O’Donnell having her way with a super-sexy girl buffet table. That last one was seen by our friend Kurt. He doesn’t like talking about it.

The point being all the creatures seen normally run into the distance to escape the eyes that happen upon them. Murder is generally not part of the story.

This time though – this time we’re talking about a monster we’d really rather not see unzipping our tent on a camping trip.

Not unless it’s bringing us breakfast.

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

People are familiar enough with Bigfoot and the common descriptions given to him – that being visually identical to how Rosie O’Donnell would look if she always walked around naked and backwards with her face on the reverse-side of her skull. What people don’t often know is that the sasquatch is not the only hairy anomaly out there – oh no.

You see, there’s also the much less reported Agogwe – an animal that’s every bit as hairy as sasquatch but a fraction of the size. There have actually been a surprising amount of sightings of this guy – sightings to be detailed on the next page, sucka.

When it comes to the Agogwe, there are three basic sightings that seem to get reported the most. Let’s get them out of the way right off the bat. Here is what Captain William Hitchens claims to have seen in 1900, in his own words:

“Some years ago I was sent on an official lion-hunt in [east Africa] and, while waiting in a forest glade for a man-eater, I saw two small, brown, furry creatures come from dense forest on one side of the glade and disappear into the thickets on the other. They were like little men, about 4 feet high, walking upright, but clad in russet hair. The native hunter with me gazed in mingled fear and amazement. They were, he said, agogwe, the little furry men whom one does not see once in a lifetime.”

Hitchens didn’t tell his story publicly until 1937. He was, of course, met with ridicule at which point Cuthbert Burgoyne defended him in a magazine with his own Agogwe sighting a year later. Here are his own words:

“As we watched [Africa's east coast from a Japanese cargo ship] two little brown men walked together out of the bush and down amongst the baboons. They were certainly not any known monkey and yet they must have been akin or they would have disturbed the baboons. They were too far away to be seen in great detail, but these small human-like animals were probably between four and five feet tall, quite upright and graceful in figure. At the time I was thrilled as they were quite evidently no beast of which I had heard or read. Later a friend and big game hunter told me he was in the Portuguese East Africa with his wife and three hunters, and saw a mother, father and child, apparently of the same species, walk across the further side of the bush clearing. The natives loudly forbade him to shoot.” Without the quote, an account of Mr. Burgoyne’s making such a report is given in.”

And finally, here is the third frequently given account, as found on Wikipedia:

“Charles Cordier, a professional animal collector who worked for zoos and museums, followed the tracks of the [Agogwe] in Zaire in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Once, said Cordier, [an Agogwe] had become entangled in one of his bird snares. “It fell on its face,” said Cordier, “turned over, sat up, took the noose off its feet, and walked away before the nearby African could do anything”

Well that’s pretty interesting, and if that last account is true it shows quite a bit of intelligence clicking and ticking deep in the skull of that little furry animal. You should know that the Agogwe seems to go by different names depending on where its living. Other names it goes by include the Kakundakari, the Kilomba, the Sehite, the Agogure and Orang Pendek.

We said there were three primary stories available for the curious to read, but that’s only for those specifically researching the Agogwe. If you check under the other names, like the Orang Pendek, for instance, there’s more to find. For example, here’s a sighting from a Dutch colonist. We found it, too, on Wikipedia:

“I saw that he had short hair, cut short, I thought; and I suddenly realized that his neck was oddly leathery and extremely filthy. “That chap’s got a very dirty and wrinkled neck!” I said to myself. His body was as large as a medium-sized native’s and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all… he seemed to be quite as tall as I. Then I saw that it was not a man. It was not an orang-utan. I had seen one of these large apes a short time before. It was more like a monstrously large siamang, but a siamang has long hair, and there was no doubt that it had short hair.”

And there you have it. Hairy creatures of various sizes are found absolutely all over the world – and sightings of them are taken seriously enough for National Geographic to be in the middle of a very real effort to catch the Orang Pendek on film.

Good luck to them, that’s what we say. Good luck to them.

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

If you live in a Filipino village with an economy primarily based on fishing, it could present quite a problem if five monsters suddenly show up in your water keeping everybody land-locked out of fear. Some say this is what caused the current world-wide economic meltdown. Others claim we just made that up right now.

Still others claim five snake-like black beasts did show up in the local waters of a Philippine island of Luzon.

In November of 2002 a Filipino boy reported seeing a big black creature swimming near his village. He thought he was seeing a log until the thing moved – showing off a little more of its shape. The description now given it is that it looked like a cross between a catfish and a shark. The boy screamed, bringing other locals to his aid – but the creature was gone.

About two months later a a whole bunch of people reported seeing the same thing at the same time – a creature measuring three feet wide and seven feet long. Their description was that the creature seemed to be rolling as it swam down stream.

Pandemonium ensued. As the website American Monsters puts it:

“Although there are no accounts of malicious river monsters in any Aeta lore, the tribal leaders have taken drastic actions in order to avoid any civilian casualties. In the small village of Labuan, children are no longer allowed to bathe or play in the river and men and women have ceased fishing altogether, forcing the members of their community to subsist on a diet whose sole source of protein consists of captured frogs.”

Via a local newspaper tribal leaders requested the Philippine government to send a scientist for the purpose of getting their people mostly off of the all-frog diet. Their request was granted, and without seeing anything, said scientist determined a school of fish was causing the madness.

Not much of an answer, right? Well don’t fret – the Sci Fi channel is on it. Their show Destination Truth reportedly investigated things. They didn’t find anything either. Now you can fret.

Lastly – there is at least one strange guess as to where the creatures came from. There is an abandoned gold mine relatively close to the village with the sightings. While it was operating it dumped tons of mercury into the water. According to PinatuboMonster.com:

“Another theory often disregarded is that the Pinatubo Monster is the product of toxic waste dumped into the river creating new mutant hybrid creatures…Since the locals have stopped fishing for safety reasons, we have yet to hear of any reports of fish being toxic or causing birth defects in villages.”

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

The mental imagery of a creature called the Dover Demon may be one of a horned, scaly biped surrounded in flames and looking quite sinister. This description, however, seems to be more suited to Courtney Love than the actual Dover Demon itself. No, the Demon is actually described as being about four feet tall with a watermelon shaped, noseless and mouthless head. It was sighted three times in 1977, and people still be trippin’ about it today.

Wikipedia has a good opening paragraph for the topic at hand:

“The Dover Demon was first sighted at night by three seventeen-year-olds who were driving through the Dover area when the car’s headlights illuminated it. Bill Bartlett, the driver, reported that he saw what he thought at first was a dog or a cat, but upon closer inspection realized that it was a bizarre, unearthly-looking creature crawling along a stone wall on Farm Street.

“Bartlett continued to watch the creature, and he reported it to have a disproportionately large, watermelon-shaped head and illuminated orange eyes, like glass marbles. It had long, thin arms and legs with slender fingers, which it used to grasp onto the pavement. It was hairless and had rough, flesh-toned skin, described as tan and sandpaper-like. The creature’s appearance was very plain, with no nose or ears, and no mouth was seen.”

Later that day, and then again the day following, the creature was seen again. One of the newer sightings was made by John Baxter, a kid who encountered the creature on foot. It seems to have run away from him, and then inexplicably just stood near a tree at a safe distance.

The third sighting was by two young people in a car. All descriptions are roughly the same except for the eye colour, and they all happened within about a mile of each other.

One cause of grief to all the people who reported an encounter is that they were all teenagers. Skeptics found things easy to brush off as an immature conspiracy of sorts. We haven’t seen any reports that say all the witnesses knew each other, but again, they all did seem to live in pretty close proximity (we refer you, again, to the fact that all sightings were within a mile).

Another interesting paranormal anecdote lies within the book Dover Farms, which is an account of local area history. It’s a passive description of one man’s encounter with a different kind of demon – the king of demons, in fact:

‘‘In early times this road went around by the picturesque Polka rock [an area very close to the Dover sightings] which was called for a man by that name, of whom it is remembered, that amid the superstitions of the age he thought he saw his Satanic Majesty as he was riding on horseback by this secluded spot.”

It seems that not much of a description was given for the horse-back demon, so it’s impossible to say whether or not the encounter was with the same beast. One thing worth mentioning is that the 1977 Massachusetts police chief who looked into the Dover Demon case has mentioned that he personally knew all the young witnesses, and that they were all good kids.

Could good kids make crap up? No – never. That’s never been done. Still though – thirty-some-odd years later and the involved parties – now full fledged adults, obviously – haven’t changed their story. That’s gotta be good for something.

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

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.

There are times in life when things look bad, when you don't see the point in much and when, well, you just downright hate things.

Then something happens that picks you up, makes you happy again and fills you with a beaming smile that somehow manages to envelop your entire body, filling your whole physical presence with joy from head to toe.

Take, for example, when a UFO sighting was reported somewhere in Wales, and this police radio conversation was conducted:

Control: "Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?"

Officer: "Yes, it's the Moon. Over."

hecklerspray loves you, Wales.

Original Story (BBC)

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

This week: Cryptozoology/Odd Sightings

Encounters with a paranormal creature usually have one witness. Some kid is out in the wild hiking alone, then wham-o, the bitter stench of Bigfoot fills his nostrils in a face to face meet and greet. The better sightings will have two or more unwitting participants who eventually issue similar statements. The real good kind of paranormal encounter includes a sighting, a local radio broadcast of the sighting, droves of onlookers racing to the scene via automobiles and police running for their lives.

And so it is with the Lake Worth Monster.

Lake Worth is a Texas city with a population of 4,618, according to a 2000 survey. It's pretty typical in every sense of the word except one – it had the most incredible recorded monster sighting hecklerspray has come across in ages.

The monster made itself exceptionally newsworthy on July 10th 1969 when it apparently jumped over a car full of people. These are the first witnesses to describe the creature as:

"…half-man, half-goat with fur and scales…"

An interesting description, that – three animals, one of them apparently aquatic, all rolled into one. Of course we've seen the man-goat combo before, but the fish aspect is a brand new ingredient. News of this encounter leaked to the radio, which reported on it pretty quickly. Of course the story resulted in dozens of people flocking to the scene – and said flocking paid off.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram described the sighting the day it happened. According to a witness they interviewed:

"We were driving around trying to find it, when we heard it squalling. We heard it before we saw it. I saw it come across the road and I tried to take a picture of it but the flash didn't work. I took another picture but I don't know if I got anything because I was too busy rolling up my window. We watched him run up and down a bluff for a while and other cars arrived. There must have been 30 or 40 people watching him. Well, some of them thought they would get mean with the thing, but about that time, it got hold of a spare tire that had a rim in it and threw it at our cars. He threw it more than 500 feet and it was coming so fast that everyone took off. Everybody jumped back in their cars."

But common-folk weren't the only people to see the thing. Police were on scene as well – and so was a camera. A picture was taken of the thing, but we can't make heads or tails of it. It's up there on the left accompanying the article, take a look for yourself.

But picture or no picture, not everyone is convinced of the beastie's monster-ness. Some say it was a high school kid dressed in a gorilla suit that was for some reason fluffy, scaly and white. One person claims it was only a bobcat. We haven't seen a lot of bobcats good at the spare tire discus, but just the same, everyone is allowed their opinion.

Read More:

Police, Residents Observe But Can't Identify Monster – The Fort Worth Star-Telegram