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.

What a great name, eh? The Batsquatch – part bat, part Sasquatch. It’s like a marriage made in cryptozoological heaven. It exists though – allegedly. It’s been sighted around Mt. St. Helens in the US, and according to witness report – its exactly what is sound like.

Batsquatch is a rare paranormal anomaly that we’ve never previously heard of. So rare, in fact, that its possible he could be lumped into the exact same category as the Clutchbone. Here’s how AmericanMonsters.com describes the creature:

“Purportedly living in the shadows of Washington’s colossal Mt. Saint Helens, are a species of purple-skinned, nocturnal primates, which allegedly have pterodactyl-like wings, blood-red eyes, and a head which is said to resemble that of a simian synthesized with large bat. Hence its name… Batsquatch.”

Before you get too excited you should know ol’ Batty’s only been seen once – in 1994 by a man named Butch Whittaker. Of course, only having one sighting allows plenty of room to call it all a simple and obvious hoax – if there weren’t any pictures. Whittaker did allegedly snap some off, though. These pics aren’t available online, apparently, but all the sites relating the encounter state the man definitely took some.

Obviously Whittaker has his detractors – and some of them appear to be from the paranormal community, too. These paranormal naysayers aren’t necessarily calling the man a liar – they just think he’s mistaken some other paranormal phenomenon for the previously unidentified Batsquatch.

Some say he probably saw Mothman – the harbinger of doom. Other’s think it may have been the Jersey Devil, apparently on a sight-seeing vacation or something. Still, others claim it could have been a Chupacabra, or just a regular Sasquatch strapped comfortably into a hang glider.

There’s also at least one more down to earth explanation, as found, again, on AmericanMonsters.com:

“Other researchers have contended that these animals may not be flying primates at all, but a large (and heretofore unknown) species of North American fruit bat. That having been said, Batsquatch has been known to display a decidedly carnivorous disposition, and numerous chickens, goats, hogs and cows in the region have turned up missing, although there has been no direct evidence linking the creature to this phenomenon.”

So does Batsquatch exist? We’re leaning towards the probably not – but if Butch were to make his alleged photos available online it could change our thinking. And if he can’t – its probably because the pics never existed in the first place.

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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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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.”

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.

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.

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)

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