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.
