Alien Meccano-Mummy- North Dakota

Late at night on August 26th, 1975, Sandra Larson, her boyfriend and her daughter, Jackie, were driving to Bismarck, North Dakota when a collection of rumbling, orange orbs descended from the sky and approached their car. Suddenly all three reported a strange feeling of being "stuck", as if frozen in ice. Suddenly Sandra, who had been driving, was sitting in the backseat while her daughter had moved to the front. Feeling disoriented, the group pulled over at a gas station only to discover that they were missing a whole hour of time.

Later Sandra and Jackie would undergo hypnosis by psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle of the University of Wyoming. Sandra would recall being levitated towards one of the UFOs, where she was given a medical exam by a bizarre being. According to her, the creature had large, bulging eyes that stared out of a head covered in wrappings "like a mummy". It's arms were made out of jointed strips of metal like a Meccano set (a metal toy-building kit similar to an Erector set). It's body was covered in what she described as "brown vinyl".

The being performed several strange experiments on her, such as rubbing a clear liquid on her body and taking a painful scrapping of the inside of her nose with an instrument. At one point Sandra even felt as if her brain had been removed from her skull.

In later hypnosis sessions with Sprinkle, Sandra would recall being visited by this being and its fellows earlier in her life, including several instances where she was levitated through solid walls.

This bizarre case occupies a unique point in the history of UFO research. Since its inception, the field of ufology has been divided into two camps- those who try to examine the phenomenon of UFOs and alleged alien encounters from a scientific perspective, and those who approach it from a more spiritual or psychological angle. Scientific investigators tried to study these cases as either genuine visitations by extraterrestrial entities or as hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis, hypnogogia or misidentification of natural phenomena. Those looking at the phenomenon spiritually and psychologically focus on the perceptions and feelings of the abductees themselves. Some perceive the encounters as a sort of New Age communion with higher beings. Others see them as mental constructs that the abductees have created to deal with trauma and other emotionally-charged experiences.  The Sandra Larson case was one of the first to be examined by both camps and would eventually lead to a partial melding of the two groups which has continued into the modern era of UFO investigations.

SOURCES

The Big Book of UFOS by Chris A. Rutkowksi.

An article from Week in Weird on Abductions and Hypnosis

A chronology of UFO incidents

HowStuffWorks article on the encounter

The Curse of the Space Mummies

Gray Aliens- New Hampshire

On the night of September 19, 1961 Betty and Barney Hill were driving to their home in New Hampshire after a trip to Quebec when they noticed a strange light following them in the sky. They stopped to watch the object for a bit then continued to drive. When they rounded a corner, they found the strange glowing object hovering over the highway in front of them. Barney got out to have a closer look and described the craft as being disk-shaped with a row of windows around its edge through which he could see several silhouetted figures. As he watched, a pair of fins or wings unfolded from the sides of the craft.

Terrified, the Hills  quickly got back into their car and sped home with the ship following close behind. For days afterwards Betty and Barney experienced anxiety and strange fragmented dreams about being led through the woods by odd, gray-skinned men.  Eventually they phoned the local air force base to relate their story, and Betty shared her experience with a couple close friends. Soon their tale began to circulate among UFO enthusiasts who eventually invited them to speak at a conference in 1963.  Enthusiastic members of the audience encouraged the Hills to see a clinical hypnotist to recall more of their story. They met with Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist specializing in trauma-induced amnesia.

Betty and Barney Hill.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Simon’s hypnosis sessions slowly drew out a complete abduction narrative. Betty described the two of them being led aboard the craft by the aliens. Inside, the they were given medical examinations which involved the beings taking samples of their hair, skin and fingernails and examining their mouths, ears and genitals. Betty further described having a conversation with the apparent leader of the beings. When she asked him where he came from, he pulled down a star-chart to show her his home planet. Betty would later reproduce this map from memory and publish it in a number of UFO-related magazines. Amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish would eventually identify the stars in the map as Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, a binary system in the southern constellation of Reticulum (thus leading to another name for this type of alien, Zeta Reticulans).

The Hill’s descriptions of the beings that abducted them varied somewhat. Both described them as being short with gray skin and large heads that tapered to narrow chins. Outfit-wise, they were dressed in trousers and jackets without buttons or zippers.  Betty initially claimed the aliens had black hair and bulbous noses like Jimmy Durante, though she would later describe them as looking a bit like Tibetans or Amerindians from Patagonia. Barney recalled them having no noses, with only slits for nostrils, and another slit for a mouth.  Their leader, he claimed, wore a black scarf and a billed cap or hat. Under hypnosis, Barney would often become terrified by their eyes, which he claimed were so large and long that they wrapped partway around their heads.

Prior to the Hill’s abduction, the majority of reported alien encounters involved beings that looked like tall, blond beautiful humans. These benevolent “Nordics” often claimed to be from Venus, and said they had initiated contact with humans to bring offers of peace or warnings about the dangers mankind posed to the Earth. Barney and Betty’s tale marked a shift towards more nightmarish abductions where hypnotized humans were subjected to strange, painful and frightening medical procedures by large-eyed, gray-skinned beings.  While reports of encounters with such creatures had occurred before the Hill case, this was the incident that brought the imagery into popular culture.

The Hill case was dramatized in the 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident with James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty.

Skeptics have come up with various theories to explain what happened to the Hills. Some have suggested that a combination of fatigue and stress caused Betty and Barney to experience hypnogogic hallucinations (hallucinations experienced when one is halfway between being asleep and awake) that were later elaborated on by their unconscious minds through nightmare and false memories.

As to the appearance of the beings, it is worth mentioning that extraterrestrials with bulbous heads and large eyes are not unprecedented. They have been a staple of science fiction tales going all the way back to the 19th century. If one takes a skeptical view of the Hill case, it’s not too difficult to imagine that Betty and Barney had encountered these depictions before and ended up weaving this image of an “alien” into their recollections of their abduction.

On an additional note, while the Hill case first brought the image of the Gray Alien into popular culture, the aliens’ current, much more stylized appearance- black, oval eyes, triangular faces, thin, wispy bodies- did not fully coalesce until the publication of the book Communion by Whitley Strieber in 1987. Like the Hills, Strieber described multiple frightening encounters with large-headed and large-eyed beings. His experiences, though, eventually developed a more spiritual undertone harkening back to the older encounters with peaceful Nordics bringing enlightenment to mankind.

source: Wikipedia.org

SOURCES

The Big Book of UFOs by Chris A. Rutkowski

The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials by Patrick Huyghe

Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber

Yankee Skeptic: Who Invented Little Grays? Hollywood or the Hills? 

Skeptic Report: The Hill Abduction

Falkville Metal Man- Alabama

On the evening of October 17, 1973, Falkville Alabama chief of police Jeff Greenhaw received a call from an anonymous woman claiming she had seen a UFO sail over her house and land in a nearby field. Though hesitant to go out when he was already off duty, Chief Greenhaw got in his car to have a look. When he arrived at the field no UFO could be found, so he decided to drive around the area to see if there was anything in the area.

While cruising down a dirt path, Greenhaw spotted a person standing on the side of the road. Thinking it might be someone in need of help, he got out and approached the figure. Up close, however, he discovered that the being was completely covered by some sort of metallic outfit. To quote Greenshaw himself:

“It looked like his head and neck were kind of made together... He was real bright, something like rubbing mercury on nickel, but just as smooth as glass. Different angles give different lighting.... When I saw him standing in the middle of the road I immediately stopped the car and asked if he was a foreigner, but no sound came out of his mouth.”

Thinking quickly, Greenshaw ran back to his truck, grabbed his camera and snapped several photographs of the creature before it ran off into the night at speeds supposedly faster than a normal human could go.

And what exactly do Greenshaw’s photos depict? Well....

source: http://obscurban-legend.wikia.com/wiki/Falkville_Metal_Man

It’s pretty clear from this photo that the “alien” is nothing more than someone in a metallic asbestos or radiation suit. It is worth noting that this sighting came only a few days after the more famous alien encounter along the Pascagoula River in Mississippi detailed in the previous entry. Perhaps this “encounter” was staged in an attempt to ride on the fame of the mummy-robot story.

The question, though, is whether Greenshaw was in on the hoax or just an innocent bystander.  If the former, his participation in the events brought him nothing but misfortune. His report on the encounter was widely ridiculed and eventually led to his job as chief of police being terminated. Whether or not Greenshaw knew the being was just a prank, that ending seems rather harsh.

Let’s imagine for a moment, though, that the Metal Man actually WAS a genuine extraterrestrial (or perhaps extradimensional) entity. Could the metallic exterior have been a space suit for an entity that was not used to Earth’s atmosphere? Or is the creature’s similarity to the Pascagoula mummy-robots more than superficial? Could it also have been some sort of synthetic being? Perhaps a slightly different model of the Pascagoula creatures? Maybe it was a probe sent out to explore an environment its creators could not? Greenshaw  does describe the being as having stiff, robot-like movements.

Encounters with other apparently mechanical alien beings have been reported on multiple occasions. These creatures come in a surprising variety of shapes.

For example, in 1977, Antonia La Rubia of Paciencia, Brazil reported being abducted on his way to work by beings with metallic scales and tentacle-like arms. Each entity stood upon a single leg with a flared base that La Rubia described as looking like the base of a barstool. Each creature also carried a belt of syringe-like instruments. One of the beings used a syringe to zap La Rubia with a blue light and carry him into a waiting space ship. Inside, the robots used a piano-like device to show him a series of images, some of them depicting himself being examined by blue lights from their instruments (though La Rubia’s account makes no mention of him actually being examined. Perhaps those memories were removed by the robots?).  They also drew some of his blood before returning him to Earth.

Another 1977 encounter with apparently robotic beings occurred in Prospect, Kentucky. While driving home one night Lee Parish spotted a rectangular craft hovering in the sky. When he finally arrived home he discovered a half hour gap missing from his memory. Under hypnosis Parish recalled being brought aboard the strange craft where he was confronted by three blocky, mechanical creatures. The largest being resembled a “tombstone” and had a single jointed arm jutting out of it. Another, shorter being was pure white with a rough “head” and arms that did not move. Though the beings never spoke, Parish got the impression that this one was somehow the leader. The smallest being was bright red and had a single, unjointed limb projecting from it.

The red and black machine-creatures examined Parish (the black one apparently causing a painful cold, burning feeling when it’s limb contacted him) while the white being observed. Once the machines were done with their examination they merged with one another and vanished, at which point Parish was returned to his car.

Yet another strange encounter with mechanical aliens occurred in 1951 over the skies of Georgia. Pilot Fred Reagan was flying his plane when he was sucked upwards by an unknown force and crashed into a lozenge-shaped UFO. Reagan immediately found himself teleported inside the craft, where he was met by three foot tall metal aliens that he described as looking like asparagus stalks.

The beings apologized for the crash and gave him a medical exam to make sure he was not injured.  During the procedure, so Reagan claims, they found cancer within his body and removed it as an apology for the trouble they had caused. The robots then deposited him safely in a field next to the wreckage of his plane. On an unnerving side note, Reagan died less than a year later due to brain tissue damage which was believed to have been caused by exposure to high levels of radiation.

This variety of unusual robotic beings raises some interesting speculative questions. Is each type sent out by a different alien species? Or is it possible that there is just one investigating alien species and each variety of robot is simply a different design used for a specific purposes that the humans do not comprehend?

SOURCES

Cryptopia article on the Metal Man

True Tales of the Unexplained article on the Metal Man

Bogleech article on the Asparagus rods, The Prospect Monoliths, La Rubia Barstool Robots and other obscure extraterrestrials.

A report on the Prospect Mechanical Monoliths

A report on the La Rubia Barstool Robots

Pascagoula Wrinkled Robots-- Mississippi

On the cool evening of October 11th, 1973, Charles Hickson and his friend Calvin Parker, Jr. were fishing off a pier on the Pascagoula River. As they watched, a football-shaped, glowing craft zipped down from the sky and hovered over the river. Three bizarre beings floated out of the ship and approached the men. Hickson described the extraterrestrials as “robots” with wrinkled gray skin like an elephant’s, and claw-like hands. Their bullet-shaped heads had no necks, instead merging seamlessly into their shoulders. The creatures had slits for mouths and carrot-like growths where their noses and ears wouldhave be. They did not appear to have any eyes. Their cylindrical legs appeared to be welded together.

The alien robots somehow paralyzed Hickson and Parker and took them back to their ship. There, the men were floated into a bright, empty room and scanned by a football-shaped mechanical eye. According to Hickson, Parker quickly passed out during the encounter. Years later, under hypnosis, he would recall seeing shadowy beings watching the procedure from another compartment. Perhaps these were the creators and controllers of the wrinkled robots.

After a short while, both men were returned to the pier.  Once able to move again, they ran to their car and sat for a long time, regaining their composure.

So what exactly happened to Hickson and Parker that night on the Pascagoula River? Were they indeed paralyzed by wrinkled robots and taken about a spacecraft? Were the beings from another planet? Another dimension (perhaps the same higher dimension that was the possible home of the Van Meter Visitor and other bizarre phantoms)?

 Or was the whole encounter a vivid, terrifying hallucination? Joe Nickell, Ph.D., a Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSA) wrote an interesting article for the May/June 2012 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine which postulates that Hickson may have actually experienced a hypnagogic episode.

 Hypnagogia is the state between waking and sleeping where some people can experience vivid, dream-like hallucinations, often including strange lights and visions of frightening beings. Many  people also report sleep paralysis during this time-- a condition caused by the body being in “sleep mode”, though the mind is still partially active. 

Hallucinations and sleep paralysis, so Nickell hypothesizes, might explain the bizarre appearance of the wrinkled robots, as well as the way they paralyzed the two men. Parker, as was mentioned before, fell asleep at the beginning of the alleged encounter and did not wake up until afterwards. He only recalled details of the incident later. Perhaps his "recovered memories" were influenced by Hickson’s own genuine belief in the encounter.

Hypnogogic hallucination it may have been, but regardless the experience still haunted the men for years afterwards. Both suffered mental trauma from what they believed they saw. Parker was supposedly even hospitalized at one point after an emotional breakdown.

In an interesting possible sequel to this encounter, just six days later a metallic, wrinkly, robot-like being somewhat similar to the Pascagoula aliens was reported in Falkville, Alabama. I'll be detailing that incident in my next entry.

SOURCES

Joe Nickell's Skeptical Inquirer article

A detailed account of the Pascagoula Abduction on Cryptopia

A Bogleech.com article on the Pascagoula Aliens and other non-Gray extraterrestrials

Hopkinsville Goblins-- Kentucky

On August 21, 1955 Billy Ray Taylor was visiting friends, the eleven-member Sutton family, at their rural farmhouse on the outskirts of Kelly and Hopkinsville, Kentucky.  On his way to an outhouse, he reportedly saw several strange lights in the sky which he believed were part of an alien spacecraft. Taylor told the Suttons of his sighting but they dismissed it as just an hallucination. 

Later that night, however, the people in the house heard bizarre noises outside. Billy Ray and Elmer Sutton went out with shotguns and encountered a gremlin-like being emerging from the woods.  Soon more of the “goblins”, as they eventually came to be called, appeared and terrorized the family throughout the night,  scratching at the outside walls and peering in through the windows. One of them even grabbed a victim by the hair when he stepped out onto the porch. At one point the police were called but the goblins quickly disappeared, only to return later to continue terrorizing the family for the rest of the night.

The goblins were described as having wide, large eyes, pointed, swept back ears and slim bodies with atrophied legs. They seemed to float with their feet just barely touching the ground, swaying their hips with arms up in the air as if wading through water. When the Suttons shot at the goblins, the creatures emitted a metallic clang and would flip backwards into the woods. If shot from a tree, they would glide to the ground rather than fall.

The Hopskinville Goblin case has become one of the most famous “alien encounter” stories in American folklore, along with the Mothman and Flatwoods Monster.  It was even the basis for a planned movie by Steven Spielberg called Night Skies that would eventually evolve into the much lighter and softer E.T. Go here to check out some cool pictures of the designs for the Night Skies 

Special effects artist Rick Baker working on a model of an alien from the lost Night Skies film. Source: etonline.com

Although the origin of the goblins was never discovered, they are commonly believed to have been extraterrestrials due to Taylor’s sighting of lights in the sky just prior to their appearance.  Skeptics, however, have postulated that the goblins could, in fact, have been nothing more than a pair of large, territorial horned owls. And indeed, much of the creature’s anatomy is very owl-like.  The back-swept “ears” could easily be the tufts of feathers on the heads of many owls. The way that they moved with arms over their heads and atrophied feet dragging along the ground could be a misinterpretation of an owl flying low to the ground with its wings extended. The metallic sounds the creatures made when apparently shot could merely be the sounds of bullets bouncing off the house or outhouse. Though it might seem ridiculous that so many people would mistake ordinary owls for otherworldly creatures, the fear and adrenaline rush of the encounter combined with Taylor's claims of having seen strange lights could have easily distorted the Suttons' perceptions.

Goblin sketch based off eyewitness description. Source: theironskeptic.com

Great Horned Owl. Source: Wikimedia.org

For my interpretation of the goblins, I’ve incorporated some of the owl explanation into their faces. The loping, wading gait recalled to my mind a gibbon walking, so I based some of the anatomy and pose on these apes. 

Sources:

http://bogleech.com/realaliens.html

http://thenightsky.org/sutton.html

http://www.cracked.com/article_16671_6-famous-unsolved-mysteries-with-really-obvious-solutions.html

(entry #4 talks about the owl explanation for the Goblins)

The Field Guide to North American Monsters by W. Haden Blackman

The Melon Heads-- Connecticut

Okay, finally getting to the Melonheads.  I've been putting off talking about these guys because I really don't like the mythology surrounding them. And you'll see why in a moment.  Although some folklore purists may not like it, I've decided to create my own story behind these elusive beings, incorporating some other semi-famous pieces of "weird" New England.

First, the original lore.  The stories vary somewhat, but the gist of the myths involve an old asylum for the criminally insane where the doctors carry out horrific experiments upon the patients.  After years of torture, the patients escape and murder the doctors, burn down the asylum, then flee into the surrounding woods.  They live out there for years, hidden from civilization, growing more and more savage.  Their gigantic heads are either a pre-existing hydrocephalic condition or caused by decades of inbreeding.  They attack people on lonely wooded roads, dragging them back to their lairs to devour them.

Hopefully by now you can see why I dislike this mythology. The biggest problem I have is that this story relies primarily on the lazy, hurtful stereotype of the mentally-ill as being dangerous and savage.  People struggling with mental illness have enough prejudice to deal with, without being turned into cannibalistic boogeymen.  Even worse are the versions of the story where the Melonheads' enlarged craniums are caused by hydrocephalism.  Because having a debilitating disease naturally makes you a monster, of course.

I should mention that there's another version of the Melonhead story that portrays them as the descendants of an exiled Colonial-era family who hid in the woods and, once again, degenerated into sub-human cannibalistic monsters due to inbreeding.  Still not really any better.

So, here's my version of the Melonhead origin story:

In 1852, Pastor and Spiritualist John Murray Spears began claiming he was in touch with "The Association of Electrizers", a coalition of spirits that included Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other famous persons. Their reason for contacting him, so he claimed, was to bring new technology to mankind and create an age of spiritual and social prosperity. The key to this revolution was the creation of a mechanical Messiah dubbed the "New Motive Power". 

Spears gathered his followers to a shed in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they built their Messiah out of machined rods and other bits of copper, zinc and magnetic iron.  To give the thing life, one of Spears' female followers even underwent a "spiritual pregnancy and labor".

 Once everything was in place, Spears followed through the ritual as dictated by the Electrizers to finally bring his New Motive Power to life. 

But nothing happened.  The machine failed to work.

Except, it did.

For what Spears didn't know was that the beings who called themselves the Electrizers had given him instructions not for a new Messiah, but for a machine to create a gateway between two worlds.  Their universe was dying and they were trying to escape into ours. 

The gateway itself had actually been built centuries ago before any European had set foot in the New World.  Its builders were a mystery, for none of the local First Nations had done it.  Perhaps the gate was created by the same unknown people who built the tower off of Brenton Point in Rhode Island (which I'll talk about more in my Rhode Island entry).  The gateway was a stone-lined well dug into a hill in what would one day be Goshen, CT.  Two passageways ran off the main well.  One was merely a drain to keep the well from flooding. But the other led to a vast underground chamber where the forgotten race had assembled a massive mechanical apparatus that would link the two worlds. 

Why it wasn't activated centuries ago isn't clear, nor is it known why the Electrizers used a pastor in Massachusetts to create their power source instead of someone closer to the actual gateway.  Perhaps time and space weren't obstacles for this ritual.  Whatever the reason, when the ritual to awaken the New Motive Power was  conducted, the mechanism in the well came to life. A small group of beings slid through into our world, but something went wrong.  The power to the mechanism was cut off prematurely, and the resulting energy feedback caused the chamber to cave in.  Some of the beings managed to escape the well before the apparatus and its chamber completely collapsed.  But their connection to the old universe was cut off, buried under tons of stone. 

Today the well is known as the Goshen Mystery and can be found in an old cemetery.

Though similar in appearance to humans, the Electrizer beings were actually another species of hominid that had become the dominate species in their reality.  Their most obvious difference from Homo sapiens were their enlarged skulls, which developed at puberty.  Knowing their appearance would make it difficult to blend in with human society, the Melonheads (as they were dubbed by the few people who saw them) hid in the woods, doing their best to eke  out a living.  Inevitably, they were distorted into  the monstrous boogeymen of the familiar tales due to human fears of the strange and unknown.  But in truth these beings are no worse nor better than any other human being.  Over the years, they have made contact with a select few sympathetic humans who have helped them improve their lives and have even on occasion intermarried (or at least interbred) with them.

For this drawing, I wanted to avoid the "feral boogeyman" look that the traditional folklore depicts and instead show them as just normal people-- albeit normal people from a different dimension and species than Homo sapiens.  The long dark ridge in the background is one of the basaltic dikes of the Metacomet Range which are ubiquitous throughout Central Connecticut. 

Sources:

http://www.damnedct.com/the-melon-heads

http://www.weirdus.com/states/ohio/fabled_people_and_places/melonheads/

(this is the Ohio version of the myth.)

To learn more about Reverend John Murray Spear, check out these pages: 

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/06/the-bizarre-mechanical-messiah-of-john-murray-spear/

http://whofortedblog.com/2010/08/10/the-new-motor-building-the-god-machine/

And here's a site about the Goshen Mystery Tunner:

http://mysterious-hills.blogspot.com/2006/01/goshen-tunnel-enigma.html

I originally heard about the Tunnel and Revered Spear from the book Curious New England, by Joseph A. Citro and Diane E. Foulds.  It's got a lot of pretty cool, sometimes creepy, places and things to see in all six New England states.

The Palos Verde Blue Space Brains (Runner-up: Fresno Nightcrawlers)-- California

Late at night in August of 1971, two residents of Palos Verde, CA-- Peter Rodriguez and John Hodges-- got into their car after leaving a friend's house and flicked on the head lights to discover two bizarre, brain-shaped beings squatting in the road in front of them.

Frightened, the two men sped away into the night.  After dropping off Rodriguez, John Hodges drove home only to discover that this normally 10-minute trip had taken almost 2 hours.  As often happens in cases of alien encounters, Hodges had a large gap of "missing time", where he could not explain where he'd been or what he'd been doing.

After letting the strange events of that night marinate in his mind for five years, Hodges finally decided to undergo hypnotherapy to try to discover more of what happened.  Under hypnosis, he "recalled" that one of the brains had said to him:

"Take the time to understand yourselves.  The time draws near when you shall need to.  You shall not remember this incident until we meet again."

      --quoted from Americanmonsters.com

Regressing further into his "lost" memories, Hodges discovered that the brains had been waiting for him at his home after he dropped Rodriguez off.  Somehow they transported him to a metal room full of computers where he encountered several seven foot-tall web-fingered gray-skinned beings.  These creatures explained that the brains were actually just organic translators to allow them to communicate with Earthly life.  As often happens with these types of alien encounters, the gray beings warned that humanity must learn to control it's dangerous power or face obliteration-- though whether by our own hands or by the advanced technology of another race is not clear.

I initially learned of the Space Brains from an article on non-gray aliens at Bogleech.com, which features illustrations by Eric Kowalick-- also known as Monster-Man-08 on Deviantart.  I didn't want my version of the brains to look like just a copy of Kowalick's already pretty cool design, so I tried to give them a more wrinkled, almost brain coral-like look.  Plus insect-like walking limbs (which, admittedly, were inspired from a creature in an old adventure from Dungeon magazie called "The Night Parade").

Runner Up: The Fresno Nightcrawlers

Although the Palos Verde Brains are the "official" (at least according to my goofy little blog) cryptids of California, I also found the recent phenomenon of the Nightcrawlers cool and weird enough to give them an honorary "Second Banana" status.

Information about these cryptids is spotty, and mostly found piecemeal on various blogs and wikis across the web, but here is what I've managed to gather:

In 2011, a video appeared on Youtube supposedly showing two strange, bulbous-headed creatures drifting across a lawn in Fresno, CA.  The beings' lower bodies are either made of two strips of cloth-like material, or they have a pair of billowing, pant-like legs.  The video is too grainy to see them clearly.

  A few months later, another video appeared supposedly showing a pair of the creatures walking down a hill in Yosemite.  The second set of creatures are a bit clearer and appear to be nothing but round heads on a pair of bendable, stilt-like legs.

The videos gathered enough notoriety that they were eventually featured in one of the Syfy Channels paranormal investigation shows.  There are even rumors of "Native American legends" about the creatures going back at least a hundred years, though no one has yet provided a more detailed account of what these stories are actually about, or where they come from.

Looking at the videos, it seems pretty clear that the creatures in the first video are nothing more than cloth puppets similar to classic Halloween ghosts being pulled along on strings.  The second video is a little harder to identify, though, as one commentator has pointed out, it is possible that the beings are just CGI.

Even if the Nightcrawlers are pretty obvious hoaxes, though, I think they still deserve a place in California cryptid folklore, if for nothing more than their unusual and rather haunting appearances.

The Tuscumbia Green Space Penguins-- Missouri

On February 14, 1967, farmer Claude Edwards of Tuscumbia, Missouri stepped out of his house to find a giant, metallic gray-green mushroom standing in his field.  As he approached the object, he noticed several three-foot tall figures waddling around the structure.  Moving closer, he saw that the strange beings were the same dark olive green as the mushroom-shaped structure-- which Edwards was now convinced was some sort of space craft. The beings had large black eyes-- or possibly goggles.  Edwards wasn't quite sure.  They also had black coverings over their snouts-- though whether these were parts of their bodies, or some type of breathing apparatus isn't clear. 

He also saw that the mushroom-craft had a row of windows or lights along its base that oscillated in a myriad of colors.

Edwards watched the creatures trundle about under their craft for a while, swinging their arms all over.  Eventually he grabbed two rocks, intending to use them to punch a hole through the craft to prevent it taking off.  However before he could get too close he struck some sort of invisible force field around the penguins and their ship.  Edwards flung his rocks anyway.  One bounced off the invisible wall, while the second skidded over the top of the mushroom ship and landed on the ground behind it.  The farmer's aggressive behavior apparently startled the little green creatures enough that they retreated into the "stalk" of their craft and quietly floated up into the sky.

Edwards never gives a clear description of what the space penguins' arms looked like.  However, using his original sketch of the creatures as a guide, I've taken a little artistic license and given them flat, hand-less ribbon-like limbs.

source:
http://www.americanmonsters.com/site/2011/10/space-penguins-of-tuscumbia-missouri-usa/

The Dover Demon-- Massachusetts

Welcome to the first entry for Cryptids State-by-State.

States have plenty of official things-- rocks, flowers, mammals, fish, trees, mottos, fossils.  Even state soils.  Yet there are no state cryptids-- a grievous oversight that I aim to fix. 

I've been thinking about doing this blog off and on for a while now.  With Halloween approaching, I figured this would be an opportune time to finally get things rolling.

There's a ton of cryptid artwork out there, especially for famous critters like the Mothman, Sasquatch, Lake Monsters, Flatwoods Monster, etc.  So I've tried my best to make my little doodles stand out a bit.  You can judge how well I succeeded.

For my first entry, I originally wanted to start off with the unofficial cryptid of my current home, Connecticut.  The Nutmeg State's creatures are the Melonheads, whose mythology I have a bit of a problem with.  I'll explain more when I get to their entry soon.

So instead, this week's entry is the State Cryptid of Massachusetts:

THE DOVER DEMON

On the night of April 21, 1977, three teenagers were driving in their hometown of Dover, Massachusetts.  One of the boys, Bill Bartlett, spotted a strange creature with a massive, hourglass-shaped head crawling on all fours along a rock wall.  As the car passed by the being, it turned its head and its eyes flashed with orange light.  Bartlett later described the Demon as having pale, peach-colored skin that appeared rough like sandpaper, and toes that curled around the rocks as it moved.

Later that night another teenager, John Baxter, saw a figure approaching him in the shadows as he walked home from his girlfriend's house.  Thinking it was a friend of his, he called out.  The being did not respond, and as Baxter drew closer, it ran off.  He followed it halfway across a roadside gully, before stopping to observe it at a distance.  Like Bartlett, Baxter described the Demon as having a figure-eight shaped head and toes that curled around the contours of rocks and a tree it leaned against.  Before he could get a better look, the Demon ran off.

The creature's description initially resembles a classic "Gray" alien-- with its large eyes, enormous head and spindly body.  But there were no reports of UFO activity at the time.  Additionally, other features stray from the usual alien myth, such as its quadrapedal stance, it's glowing orange eyes and it's odd toes.

Some skeptics think the "Demon" was nothing more than a baby moose distorted by the darkness and by the brief glimpses the witnesses had.  It's glowing eyes could merely have been the light reflecting back from the headlights of the car or another bright light source-- a phenomenon called eyeshine.

I tried to make my Dover Demon reflect a bit of the "baby moose" explanation, at least in the face.  But I wanted it to still have an otherworldly look, with its spindly neck and egg-shaped body.  I ran with the idea of its toes curling around the rocks and made them more like boneless tentacles.

So there you go, Massachusetts-- you're the first state to get your very own wicked awesome unofficial Official State Cryptid.  

Sources:

http://www.theawl.com/2012/10/a-spooky-scary-secret-monster-in-every-state

http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/lost-tapes/creatures/dover-demon.htm

http://cryptidz.wikia.com/wiki/Dover_Demon