Fresno Nightcrawler Variant 2: Hyperdimensional Anomalocaris

Here's another speculative variation on the California "wishbone" cryptid.

Anomalocarids were a taxonomic group of large marine predatory invertebrates of the Paleozoic. Though they have no direct descendants, fossil evidence indicates that they were close relatives of arthropods, tardigrades and a small phylum of animals known as onycophorans, or velvet worms.

Various species of anomalocarids and their close relatives. Clockwise from top right: Schinderhannes bartelsi, Pambdelurion whittingtoni, Peytoia (Laggania) nathorsti, Anomalocaris canadensis, Amplectobelua symbrachiata, Hurdia victoria, Opabinia regalis, Kerygmachela kierkegaardi

Anomalocarids propelled themselves through the water using a series of lobes or fins along their sides that they waved in a sinuous motion rather like the wings of a stingray or the fins of a squid. The most distinctive feature of anomalocarids, however, was the pair of jointed Great Appendages that sprouted just in front of their mouths. In most species, these mandibles were adorned with sharp spines to help them capture and tear apart prey. Some of these creatures, however, developed into giant, gentle filter-feeders, using the elongated spines on their Great Appendages like strainers to catch plankton.

More anomalocarids. Top: Hurdia victoria. Bottom: Stanleycaris hirpex

Anomalocarid fossils were for a long time only known from the Cambrian period- the earliest age of large, multicellular mobile animals. But the discovery in 2009 of Schinderhannes bartelsi in the Hunsrück Slate of Germany extended their range all the way to the Devonian.

I've long been a fan of anomalocarids, as you can probably tell from all the drawings I've done of them. Heck, I've even designed a couple speculative species, like this one here.

My Speculative Hermit Anomalocaris, Repticaris caerulea.

In an interesting instance of life imitating art, one of my speculative animals even "predicted" the discovery of one of the first known filter-feeding anomalocarids called Tamisiocaris. Here's a picture of my invented animal, Cetimimus barbus:

And here's a reconstruction of Tamisiocaris by Rob Nicholls:

So, anyway, what's this got to do with the Fresno Nightcrawler? Well, while watching those two famous videos, I couldn't help noticing that the critter's legs looked a bit like anomalocarid Great Appendages (of course, when you've constantly got anomalocarids on the brain like me, it's not hard to see them everywhere). I started wondering: what if the weird "walking wishbone" we see is only a small part of a larger animal? What if the rest of it exists in another dimension we can't perceive? Perhaps the walking "legs" are actually modified mandibles that tow the animal along. Here I have imagined the creature's lateral swimming lobes having become huge flaps, forming a net or basket for capturing "astral plankton" which floats all around us just a few dimensions away. 

On a final note, this won't be the last time you see me interpret a cryptid as a sort of unusual anomalocarid. Stay tuned for more! 

The Van Meter Visitor-- Iowa

Visitor in crouching form.

In the early morning of September 29 1903, U.G  Griffith was returning to his home in Van Meter, Iowa, when he spotted a bright light like an incandescent torch on a nearby rooftop .  He assumed, at first, that a burglary was in progress, but that idea changed when the light jumped from the roof and sailed to another building across the empty dirt road. Griffith found the phenomenon odd but didn’t think much else of it. This innocuous event, however, was the beginning of a week of hauntings in the small Iowa town by a creature that has come to be known as The Van Meter Visitor.

The being was described as a tall , black or dull gray humanoid with wings, a beak and a blunt horn on its head that emitted a bright, blinding light. Bullets were said to bounce off of it with a metallic clang (a feature which is oddly common among otherworldly visitors. The Hopkinsville Goblins were also impervious to bullets, as were many of the “dragons” and “thunderbirds” sighted throughout the American West. More on those in a future post).

The creature appeared always at night. It seemed more curious than aggressive, merely popping up in residents’ windows to shine its light around. One man reported seeing it asleep on the top of a telephone pole. He shot at it, but the creature merely crawled down the pole using its beak like a third foot as a parrot does, then flew off into the night.

Shooting at the Visitor was, unfortunately, the typical response, as it so often seems to be when people encounter otherworldly beings in these incidents. By the end of the week a large posse had gathered around the abandoned coal mine outside of town that some men had seen the creature flying in and out of on its nightly journeys.  They waited through the night and early morning to blow the being out of the sky when it returned.  And return it did, this time accompanied by a smaller member of its species. Though everyone unloaded their guns, as before the bullets merely bounced off the creatures with a metallic ping.  Sailing over their assailants as if they weren’t even there, the Visitors disappeared into their subterranean den never to be seen again.

The reports of the Van Meter Visitor give little clue as to what it might have been.  The most skeptical explanation was that it was all a case of mass hysteria embellished with fanciful details for the newspapers.  Some have suggested that the creature could have been a fear-fueled misinterpretation of a large bird such an out-of-place pelican or eagle owl.

Cryptozoologists have drawn parallels between the Visitor and the pterosaur-like Thunderbirds sighted throughout the western states.  Others have compared it to the West Virginia Mothman or Cornish Owlman.

Investigator Kevin Lee Nelson (who, along with his partners Chad Lewis and Noah Voss, wrote what’s probably the most definitive-- and maybe only-- book on the Van Meter Visitor) suggests that the creature might have been a being from another dimension that somehow slipped through a window into our world. Nelson writes extensively about this “ultraterrestrial” hypothesis, which was first proposed by paranormal investigator John Keel in his book The Mothman Prophecies.

Of all the supernatural explanations for the Visitor, this is by far my favorite.  I particularly like Nelson’s suggestion that the winged, glowing creature people saw may have just been the closest their minds could come to comprehending the being’s true, hyperdimensional form.  

I’ve used this ultraterrestrial concept for my depiction of the Van Meter Visitor. I like the idea that the Visitor seems, at first, like a recognizable monster-- in this case a winged dragon as depicted above.  But when it leaps into flight, as illustrated below, one quickly realizes that it is not even remotely related to a dragon, or anything reptilian.

The Visitor in flight.

 It’s whole body unfolds like a fleshy flower. The neck and “head” become tentacles while the wings transform into a membranous hood. The three-toed “feet” become fins on the bottom of a gelatinous body while the arms prove to be nothing but more highly-modified tentacles.

 I based this body design on the swimming sea cucumber Enypniastes eximia. The “head” is styled after the bizarre, hinged, almost completely detachable head of the Stoplight Loosejaw Malacosteus 

niger.

Enypniastes eximia by Alice Viola on Flickr

Stoplight Loosejaw by Alex Ries

Sources:

The Van Meter Visitor: A True and Mysterious Encounter with the Unknown
by Chad Lewis, Noah Voss and Kevin Lee Nelson

Des Moines Register article

Mothman-- West Virginia

Next to Bigfoot, the Mothman that terrorized Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1965 to 67 is probably one of the most iconic American cryptids.  Initial sightings followed the typical "boogeyman" mold: a bizarre monster appears in the road suddenly to terrify motorists or chase horny teenagers in a local make-out spot and old munitions dump known as the TNT Area.

 

The Mothman is described as a gray,  sometimes brown, biped with  enormous wings and two red glowing eyes.  Some descriptions said that the beast didn't even have a head, and that its eyes sprouted directly out of its torso. Though the creature did not closely resemble a moth, its name was coined in reference to the Adam West Batman TV series, which was extremely popular at the time.

The numerous sightings gradually attracted more and more media attention, bringing tourists to the town, hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster. Eventually paranormal investigator John Keel arrived to study the being.  The results of his investigation became the book The Mothman Prophecies-- the basis for the 2002 Richard Gere film.  According to Keel's book, the Mothman's hauntings were accompanied by a plague of paranormal phenomena, including disembodied voices, poltergeists, visits from Men in Black (the actual, historical mysterious beings upon whom the movies were based) and encounters with an otherworldly being called Indrid Cold who seemed human, but always bore an enormous, unnerving grin.

Sightings of the Mothman came to an abrupt end near the end of 1967.  In December of that year, the Silver Bridge spanning the Ohio River near Point Pleasant collapsed, killling 46 people.  As time went on, many began to connect the Mothman to the disaster.  Did the creature somehow cause it?  Or, as Keel and others have speculated, was it perhaps a harbinger of the coming tragedy?  A being drawn to the impending fear and death? Or maybe it was even trying to warn the locals about  what was coming?

So what was the Mothman, exactly?  Some think it was an extraterrestrial, or even extradimensional being.  A creature living outside time and space.   

On the mundane side, it's possible that the creature was just an owl or other bird, which was turned into a "monster" by poor light conditions and mass hysteria.  The hypothesis I like best is that the Mothman was actually a misidentified Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis).  These birds are huge-- nearly as tall as a human being-- with an enormous wingspan.  Seen at night by someone unfamiliar with, or not expectin it,  it isn't difficult to see how one of those birds could be "transformed" into a red-eyed winged monster.

Regardless of what it was, mundane or supernatural,  the Mothman has become a cultural phenomenon, turning up in cartoons, comics, video games, etc.  Point Pleasant itself has erected a statue of  the creature, and even boasts a small museum. 

Mothman statue in Point Pleasant, WV

references:

http://www.mothmanmuseum.com/

http://www.americanmonsters.com/site/2012/12/mothman-west-virginia-usa/

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.