Tomorrow is Halloween and so what better a time to drop another Cryptozoology article?!  I like to keep things close to home but y’know what?

Screw that – we’re going to England!

But first let’s take a look at some hooters…

…owls, to be correct you filthy, dirty simians!

Owls are bad-assed!

No – seriously…

For starters they have those  razor-sharp talons that are pretty much vice-grips. Vice grips with freaking flesh-slicing nails on them. That don’t let go until they decide to let go (which, y’know, is usually when you’re being eaten). They have those, huge round eyes that have telescopic vision and they can see perfectly at night.

Perfectly.

At night.

In pitch black.

Plus they have serrated feathers so that when they fly they are pretty much ninety-percent silent.

See those circles of feathers around their eyes? Those are natural radar dishes.

That they can adjust.

Individually.

Each feather can be maneuvered to help home-in on a sound. Their ear holes are aligned one higher than the other so they can detect a rabbit stepping on a blade of grass about one hundred feet away.

They are avian ninjas!

Also they are feircely territorial. Like hippos. Most monster sightings and attacks are chalked-up to having been owl attacks when folks have unknowingly violated their air-space, with reports reflecting the “glowing eyes” and monstrous screetches!

Shit.

However the good people across the pond in the village of Mawnan, Cornwall United Kingdom would beg to differ.

On April 17th, 1976, one mister Don Melling was visiting Mawnan with his two daughters – June (12) and Vicky (9).

As they were walking through the forest the two girls ran up ahead to see the old Mawnan church. When they reached the clearing, they saw a giant, owl-looking being perched up on the church tower.  They ran and got their father and they all three saw the Owlman staring down at them.

This was frightening enough that mister Melling decided “F&% this.” and packed his car up, took his girls  and beat-feet outta’ Mawnan totes-fast, cutting his vacation short three whole days because they spotted a giant, humanoid owlman perched up on a church.

Staring at them.

THIS…

…WAS ON A CHURCH… STARING AT THEM!

Which somehow makes the whole experience even more horrifying when you think about it.

So a couple months later in June – some 14 year old girl named Sally Chapman was camping in the woods near the creepy church with her friend Barbara.

Apparently these chics hadn’t seen a lot of monster movies at the time because they were pretty much setting themselves up for disaster, because when Sally was standing outside the tent she heard a nasty hiss and  saw “an owl as big as a man, with pointed ears and red eyes.”

Shit.

At this point, and in true Dark Knight fashion, the creature raised it’s wings and took flight, showcasing those awesome razor-sharp talons I told you about earlier.

Except, y’know much bigger and ergo much more terrifying and NOTHING at all like the above picture!

It looked more like this (I hope):

Whether they shat themselves, flailed their arms and ran away toot-sweet remains to be seen, because Wikipedia didn’t elaborate on that (personally I’d like to think that that’s what Barbara did, while Sally pulled out a shotgun, cocked it and Bruce Campbell-style shouted “Come get some, bitch!”).

So I guess there were a lot of  sightings straight through the decades. Hell, some tourist from Chicago saw it in 1995 (but since they like Deep-Dish Pizza over New York thin-style I should call bullshit, but really how freaking awesome would a giant freaking owl monster in England be?!).

It gets referred to a lot as the Mothman of the UK and if you don’t know who or what the Mothman is, Google and Wikipedia are your best friends right now because I’m tired of writing this article and stuff.

So yeah.

Happy Halloween.

Could these be actual, new Nessie pics? I know there has been very little on the Loch Ness Monster radar in recent years, and even more damning, the revelation that the famous “surgeon” Nessie picture being a fake.

Do you believe there is something large and mysterious living in the Loch? Comment below!

The mangled remains of a human being were found inside a large Tiger shark pulled from the sea by three Bahamian fishermen near Exuma.

The fishermen were reportedly processing their day’s catch when they discovered a partially decomposed human foot in the shark’s mouth.

At the time of the discovery, the fishing vessel was about 35 miles south of New Providence near the Exuma chain.

The Tribune newspaper reports that one of the fishermen, Bahamian investment banker Humphrey Simmons, said, “Everything was intact from the knee down, it was mangled, but there was still flesh on the bone.”

After dissecting the predator, additional body parts were discovered including the man’s other leg, two severed arms and a torso in two sections.

Its like the REAL-LIFE JAWS!!!!

The incidents began on the evening of August 21, 1955 and continued through to the dawn of the next morning, occurring mostly around a rural farmhouse at the time belonging to the Sutton family, which was located near the small town of Kelly and the small city of Hopkinsville, both in Christian County, Kentucky, United States. Witnesses include policemen and state troopers, and the incidents were taken seriously enough as to be officially investigated by the United States Air Force.

There were dozens of eyewitnesses to the incidents, which included two families present at the farmhouse and others in the area, including policemen and a state trooper who saw strange phenomena such as unexplained lights in the night sky and noises the same night. The seven people present in the farmhouse would claim that they were terrorized by an unknown number of creatures similar to gremlins, which have since often been referred to as the “Hopkinsville Goblins” in popular culture. The residents of the farmhouse described them as around three feet tall, with upright pointed ears, thin limbs (their legs were said to be almost in a state of atrophy), long arms and claw-like hands or talons. The creatures were either silvery in color, or wearing something metallic. Their movements on occasion seemed to defy gravity with them floating above the ground and appearing in high up places, and they “walked” with a swaying motion as through wading through water. Although the creatures never entered the house, they would pop up at windows and at the doorway, working up the children in the house to a hysterical frenzy. The families fled the farmhouse in the middle of the night to the local police station and sheriff Russell Greenwell noted they were visibly shaken. The families returned to the farmhouse with Sheriff Greenwell and twenty officers, yet the occurrences continued. Police saw evidence of the struggle and damage to the house, as well as seeing strange lights and hearing noises themselves. The witnesses additionally claimed to have used firearms to shoot at the creatures, with little or no effect, and the house and surrounding grounds were extensively damaged during the incident.

Even years later the eyewitness stories still corroborated remarkably under individual questioning, although speculation amongst the eyewitnesses regarding the motivations of the creatures has ranged from field study on their part, or that the creatures were acting out of mere curiosity or even outright malevolence. The two families involved were noted locally to not be the types to make up a hoax, and this would be seemingly backed up by the fact the families obtained no financial gain or significant fame from the incident, and fled the area when the incident became known locally and they gained an abundance of trespassers wanting to see the site.

UFO researcher Allan Hendry wrote “[t]his case is distinguished by its duration and also by the number of witnesses involved.” Jerome Clark writes that “[i]nvestigations by police, Air Force officers from nearby Fort Campbell, and civilian ufologists found no evidence of a hoax”. Although they never formally investigated the case, Blue Book confessed to being stumped. So was Isabel Davis, one of the most hardheaded of UFO investigators.

On the evening of August 21, 1955, members of the Taylor family from Philadelphia were visiting friends, the Sutton family of Kentucky. The Sutton family home was a rural farmhouse located near the towns of Kelly and Hopkinsville, in Christian County, Kentucky (the farmhouse still stands today although the Sutton family moved soon after the incident). There were a total of seven people in the house that night, including the children of the two families. The Suttons had no running water in the farmhouse, and due to it being a warm evening Billy Ray Taylor, the patriarch of the Taylor family, went to an outside water pump for a drink. It was about 7.00 p.m. Taylor said he observed strange lights in the sky to the west, which he believed to be an unusual craft. He excitedly told the others about his “flying saucer” sighting, but no one believed him, instead thinking that he had become overly excited after seeing a vivid “shooting star”.

At about 8.00 p.m., the families began hearing strange and unexplained noises outside. The Sutton family dog which was in the yard outside began barking loudly and then hid under the house, where it remained until the next day. Going outside a few minutes later with their guns, Billy Ray Taylor and Elmer “Lucky” Sutton then asserted that they saw a strange creature emerge from the nearby trees. Jerome Clark describes the creature as:

a luminous, three-and-a-half-foot-tall being with an oversized head, big, floppy, pointed ears, glowing eyes, and hands with talons at their ends. The figure, either made of or simply dressed in silvery metal, had its hands raised.

Disquieted by the creature’s bizarre appearance, the pair were further unnerved when it began rushing towards the house holding its hands up in the air, which the men took as threatening behavior. When the creature approached to within about 20 feet, the two men became scared of a home invasion and began shooting at it, one using a shotgun, the other man using a .22 rifle. There was a noise “sounding like bullets being rattled about in a metal drum”, and the creature, they said, then flipped over and fled into the darkness and shadows. Sure that they had wounded the creature, Lucky and Billy Ray went out to look for it. Hendry writes that as the men were stepping from the porch, “a taloned hand reached down from above and began grasping at their hair.”

They again shot at the creature—it was perched on an awning over the porch—and it was knocked from the roof. Again they heard the rattling noise, although the creature was apparently unharmed.

Lucky and Billy Ray returned to the house in a disturbed state. Within minutes, Lucky’s brother J.C. Sutton said that he saw the same creature (or at least a similar creature) peer into a window in the home; J.C. and Billy Ray shot at it, breaking the window, whereupon it too flipped over and fled. For the next few hours, the witnesses would assert that the creatures repeatedly approached the home, either popping up at the doorway or at windows in an almost playful manner, only to be shot at each time they did. The witnesses were unsure as to how many of the creatures that there were; at least two, as two were seen at once, but there may have been as many as fifteen. At one point the witnesses shot one of the beings nearly point blank, and again would insist that the sound resembled bullets striking a metal bucket. The floating creatures’ legs seemed to be atrophied and nearly useless, and they appeared to propel themselves with a curious hip-swaying motion, steering with their arms. Clark writes that “[i]f the creatures were in a tree or on the roof when hit [by gunfire], they would float, not fall, to the ground.”

There might have been partial corroboration of the Taylor-Sutton tale: at about 11 p.m., a state highway trooper near Kelly independently reported some unusual “meteor-like objects” flying overhead, “with a sound like artillery fire coming directly from them.”

Hendry writes that Sutton family matriarch “Mrs. Lankford … counseled an end to the hostilities,” noting that the creatures had never seemed to try harming anyone nor had they actually entered the house. Between appearances from the creatures, the family tried to temper the children’s growing hysteria. At about 11.00 p.m., the Taylor-Sutton crew decided to flee the farmhouse in their automobiles and after about 30 minutes they arrived at the Hopkinsville police station. Police Chief Russell Greenwell judged the witnesses to have been frightened by something “beyond reason, not ordinary.” He also opined “[t]hese were not the sort of people who normally ran to the police … something frightened them, something beyond their comprehension.” A police officer with medical training determined that Billy Ray’s pulse rate was more than twice normal.

Twenty police officers accompanied the Taylor-Suttons back to the farmhouse, and several entered it to assess the damage. According to Daniels et al., “[t]he official response was prompt and thorough.” In 1998, Karal Ayn Barnett wrote, “By all accounts, the witnesses were deemed sane, not under the influence [of drugs or alcohol], and in such a state of terror, no one involved doubted that they had seen something beyond far their ken.” Police and photographers who visited the home saw many bullet holes and spent shells, and further discovered what Clark describes as “an odd luminous patch along a fence where one of the beings had been shot, and, in the woods beyond, a green light whose source could not be determined.” Though the investigation was inconclusive, Daniels et al. writes, “Investigators did conclude, however, that these people were sincere and sane and that they had no interest in exploiting the case for publicity. The patch sample, although photographed, was never collected and had mysteriously disappeared by the noon the next day. “

Police left at about 2:15 a.m., and not long afterward, the witnesses claimed that the creatures returned. Billy Ray fired at them once more, ruining yet another window. The last of the creatures was allegedly sighted just before dawn, at about 4:45 a.m. on August 22.
The case earned publicity within hours of its alleged occurrence. The August 22, 1955 Kentucky New Era claimed that “12 to 15 little men” had been seen. Clark writes that none of the witnesses ever claimed this, rather that “[t]he observers had no idea how many of the creatures there were. They could only be certain that there were at least two because they saw that number at the same time.”

Later on August 22, Andrew “Bud” Ledwith of WHOP radio interviewed the seven adult witnesses in two different groups. He judged their tale of the events as consistent, especially in their descriptions of the strange glowing beings. Ledwith had worked as a professional artist, and sketched the creatures based on the witnesses descriptions. Their descriptions were generally consistent, though the female witnesses insisted that the creatures had a somewhat huskier build than the male witnesses remembered, and Billy Ray Taylor was alone in insisting that the beings had antennae. Hendry describes Ledwith’s efforts as “fortunate … because the publicity soon grew so obnoxious to that Sutton family that they later simply avoided telling the story and refused to cooperate [with UFO investigators, excepting] Isabel Davis.”

As reports reached the newspapers, public opinion tended to view the story as a hoax and showed only brief interest in the event. Some residents of the local community, including members of the police department, were skeptical of the Sutton’s story and believed that alcohol (possibly moonshine) may have played a part in the incident, although to date no evidence has been found to support this belief. The fact that some of the witnesses worked for a carnival somehow contributed to the belief in a hoax.

The farm became a tourist attraction for a brief period, which upset the Suttons who tried to keep people away, eventually attempting to charge people an entrance fee to discourage them. That only convinced the sight-seers that the family was attempting to make money from the event, and increased the public view that the event was a hoax. Finally, the Suttons refused all visitors and refused to discuss the event further with anyone. To date, family members who survived the event rarely talk to reporters or researchers, and by given accounts have stuck to their version of the event. As late as 2002, Lucky Sutton’s daughter, Geraldine Hawkins, believed her father’s account, stating,

“It was a serious thing to him. It happened to him. He said it happened to him. He said it wasn’t funny. It was an experience he said he would never forget. It was fresh in his mind until the day he died. It was fresh in his mind like it happened yesterday. He never cracked a smile when he told the story because it happened to him and there wasn’t nothing funny about it. He got pale and you could see it in his eyes. He was scared to death.”

The United States Air Force took the allegations seriously and officers from nearby Fort Campbell inspected the case, but could find no rational explanation and to this day is still labelled an open case. The official UFO investigation office, Project Blue Book, never officially investigated the case, although a file has been kept on it and is labelled “unexplained” Prominent Ufologist Allen Hynek had interviews with two persons with direct knowledge of the event a year after the event took place.

Now in the Yeti’s defense, the Polish bird in this video does have a nice bod.

Wait – Yeti’s live waaaaaaaaay up north in the Himalayas!

This is technically a Polish Bigfoot.

Or Polish Sasquatch, if one prefers.