I’ve read
many, many books in the course of my research for this blog, and figured I’d
start reviewing and sharing some of them in between regular State Cryptid
posts.
For five days
in late autumn 1903, the small Iowa town of Van Meter was haunted by a
mysterious winged Visitor with a glowing horn on its head. Though the story was
big news at the time, it fell into
obscurity for decades until paranormal investigators Voss, Lewis, and Nelson
turned their flashlights on it.
This book is
the culmination of their research. It is as much a character study of
historical Van Meter as it is a recounting the Visitor encounters. In my own cryptid
research, I often find that the people and circumstances surrounding the
sightings are just as fascinating as the creatures themselves.
The majority
of evidence is drawn from accounts in local newspapers. This might make the
whole Visitor phenomenon seem dubious at first since “monster yarns” were a
common feature in papers of the 1800s and early 1900s (see, for example, my
entries on the Bear Lake Monster and the Snallygaster). Journalistic integrity
hadn’t fully developed yet, and many papers were more like sensationalist
tabloids like the old Weekly World News that used to lurk in grocery store
check-outs. The details of the Van Meter Visitor, however, feel different from
a typical newspaper tall tale. Fantastic as the sightings are, there is a
degree of realism in the accounts. It seems that the people of Van Meter definitely
experienced something- though whether it was monster, demon, or mass
hysteria is still unknown. The authors offer several possibilities as to the
being’s identity. Could it have been an alien? A living thoughtform? A demon? A
case of mass hysteria? Or something more?
This book was
my first introduction to John Keel’s Ultraterrestrial theory, which has become
a major theme of my cryptid writings and illustrations. Keel postulated that
unexplained, seemingly supernatural phenomena- ghosts, UFOs, bigfoot, fairies, Mothman-
are actually manifestations of beings from higher dimensions beyond our own.
When they move into our plane of reality, our minds cannot fully perceive or
comprehend them, so we translate them into forms that we can handle. The
authors speculate that the Visitor may have been one such manifestation.
I’d highly
recommend this book as a thorough investigation in a lesser known, but very intriguing,
cryptid. You can get a copy here.
