NOTHING LIKE US: EXAMINING REPORTS OF NIGHTMARE ENTITIES - PART II

If you missed Part I in this series click here: http://ufodigest.com/article/nightmare-entities-0228

There are quite a few ghost tales which, had they been publicised in different cultural environments, would serve just as well as sightings of non-human entities. Peter Ackroyd, in his compendium of English Ghosts retells the experience of Mr Andrews and friend in Swinbrook, Oxfordhire in the early seventies.

Something `jet black` stood ahead of them on the country road they were walking along. It rose into a `column` and became the shape and size of a man – except it was composed of what looked like smoke in zigzag patterns (Ackroyd p110-11.) We would say now that they had beheld a shape-shifting shadowman!

A good source of modern unclassifiable reports of this kind is the `It Happened to Me` section of the Fortean Times online forum, although these are difficult to follow up or verify.

What I do find credible is a recent thread about a `spiky thing` seen in houses by a number of Australian posters. One of them describes as being like a `three dimensional asterix`. Another tells of a gelatinous looking spider like being clinging to the ceiling of her bedroom. This was seen by more than one person. We are back in Nameless Thing territory! (see www.Fortean Times.com/forum.)

Down to brass tacks.

Non-human entity claims are not that difficult to debunk. We are more apt to misjudge the nature of something that we are not so familiar with –like a passing animal – than something we are used to.

In accordance with this, sceptics have written off many of these sightings as simple misidentifications of known animals. Nor are they without a point. A walking reptilian entity was seen by some policemen in Loveland, Ohio, USA and was dubbed the Loveland frog. It has since transpired that what they saw might well have been a rare, but classified Nile Monitor Lizard (Bord, p-246-247.)

In that same tradition Joe Mitchell has proposed that the Flatwoods monster was nothing but an owl (see ufos.about.com) After all, many are now satisfied that the Kelly-Hopkinsville case, where eight adults were besieged by floating demons, may have been triggered by a hysterical misperception of owls following a UFO sighting. The famous `Mothman `with its glowing red eyes has been given a similar reductionist explanation. (See ufos.about.com and www.csicoporg, for example)

Likewise a British UFO investigator called Chris Wolfe has re-opened the Saltwood case. He has declared the headless bat type creature to have been a crow illuminated by a passing train....

Some of these zoological debunkings end up in places less prosaic than what was started with.  Some saw fit to account for the Nameless Thing of 50 Berkeley Square as having been a mutated freshwater cephalopod – octopus to you and me. This had somehow ended up in the sewers from the Thames and so into the plumbing of that building. The thing had graduated from eating rats to people. (Now that is my kind of debunking exercise!)

Then there are the tricks of the mind brought about by aberrant psychology. A must read for all paranormal enthusiasts is Oliver Sacks’ book Hallucinations (2011). This is chockfull of instances of detailed images that our ever creative brains can throw up in the right circumstances (and, yes, little people are a feature of this.) Indeed, one sceptic has reviewed the Pascagoula abduction in the light of hypnopompic hallucinations (see www.csicorp.org/famous-alien-abductions.)

As for me.

I find the owl interpretation of the Hopkins goblin case quite convincing. This is because what they described does tally well with both the behaviour and appearance of some owls. When, however, people extrapolate from this and apply the same thinking to the Flatwoods monster I am far less sure. What they saw was much larger, less owl like and was seen by separate witnesses.

Nor does it seem probable to me that four boys in Saltwood would mistake a common bird for the high strangeness entity which they spoke of.

That there was a mutant killer octopus creeping through the sewers of London is a lovely Gothic notion. The whole legend, however, has more than a whiff of London town blarney about it. There have been no further incidents associated with it, and the matter seems to be lost in time.

As for hallucinations: no doubt some of the more idiosyncratic solo experiences can be dropped from our enquiries by the hallucination theory. What comes across from Sacks’ study of these, however, is that they are more often than not the result of an illness or prolonged sensory deprivation (rather than excitement.) The visions may be exotic but they are almost always of things known to the observer. Furthermore, the observer almost always knows that they are hallucinating. (A typical example given is that of an elderly woman who, on losing her sight, began to hallucinate detailed pictures of people clad in elaborate Eastern clothing going about their daily tasks.) Nor is it clear that hallucinations can be shared: Sacks himself does not provide any examples of this.

The case for exotic arial phenomena does seem much better to me than for any entity of any description, no matter how common are the claims made for it. I think it possible – as suggested by Allen Danelek in UFOs: the Great Debate –that some non-terrestrial intelligence is manipulating our consciousness. This intelligence could be doing so to monitor our reactions to varied stimuli. This could be being done as a preliminary precaution before first contact is made for real.

If this hypothesis is correct then we have no idea what ET looks like until we finally meet up with it for real!

Edward Crabtree

References.

Ackroyd, Peter  The English Ghost: Spectres through Time (London: Vintage Books, 2011)

Bord, Janet and Colin Modern Mysteries of the World: Strange Events of the Twentieth Century (London: guild Publishing, 1989)

Bowen, Charles (Ed.) Encounter Cases from the Flying Saucer Review (USA: signet, 1977)

Danelek, J. Allen UFOs: The Great Debate: An Objective Look at Extraterrestrials, Government cover Ups and the Prospect of First Contact (Minessota: Llellewyn  Publications, 2010.)

Dennet, Preston Extraterrestrial Visitations: True Accounts of Contact (Minessota: Llellewyn worldwide, 2001)

Sacks, Oliver Hallucinations (United Kingdom: Picador, 2011)

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NOTHING LIKE US: EXAMINING REPORTS OF NIGHTMARE ENTITIES

In a colossal science fantasy story by Herbert Wells, First Contact is made with an alien species. Our first sight of them is not a happy one: they look nothing like us!

A lock unscrews on the cylindrical projectile which has been shot from the planet Mars only to alight in Surrey, England. What clambers out has a sideways beak and is octopus like. The narrator’s reaction is one of horrified disgust – and this is before they have declared their hostile intent!

The War of the Worlds was first serialised in the last three years of the nineteenth century. Fast forward past another century and there are now those who say they have glimpsed real life creatures from beyond our earth.

Within the abduction/contactee end of the study of UFOs there are is a whole carnival of space aliens. The vast majority of these are not as Wells had feared. They are humanoid in design. At worse, they may have three fingered hands, but not tentacles.

Those who take a mythopoeic approach to this phenomenon can point out that all these beings partake of what the poet Philip Larkin once called `the common myth kitty`. That is to say, they are archetypes.

So we have Angels. These are the ones who look most like us, but are more beautiful. They have come to save us from ourselves. Then we have the Little Folk, who are like diminutive humans who act in mischievous or just incomprehensible ways. Then the Demons: these are also small, but they stick things into our private parts as demons have always done. There can even be found some mention of Man-beasts who double up as UFO occupants (see my piece `Solid Sasquatch and the Goblin universe` on this site).

As folklore adjusts to the times, we can now supplement the roll call with spacemen (in their close fitting `diving suits` with logos on, etc), robots and insectoid humans.

Click here to enlarge top photo.

Much television science fantasy also trades in human-like space aliens. People need to be able to relate to the participants in any drama, even if they happen to be extraterrestrial; besides it is a whole lot easier to slap a bit of make up on an actor than it is to construct a convincing original looking alien.

For the scientific community, however, the question remains open. How disconcerting to us would the appearance of an alien be?

According to a popular thesis called Convergent Evolution, ecologies which are earth-like would be liable to bring forth creatures which have adapted to look more or less like us. Our stereoscopic sight, for example, gives us an evolutionary advantage, and would for them too. So our seas house both barracudas, which are fish, and dolphins which belong to the mammal family. They look alike, however. (See Professor Simon Conway Morris in the Telegraph online, Jan 25th 2010.)

This position does have some critics though. One of them is the Senior Astronomer of the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak. He reasons that any aliens that we meet would have to be way in advance of us in technological terms (otherwise, how would we ever get to know them?) Such a species would most likely have advanced beyond their own biology and become cyborgs or even overtaken by their own artificial intelligences. They would look nothing like us, then (see www.space.com/6978-aliens.html.)

Notwithstanding this, contemporary abduction and contact claims, popular science fantasy and many astrobiologists all concur that E.T would not upset the human eye too much.

What, then, are we to make of those rare cases of encounters with creatures which are quite unlike us?

Bug Eyed Monsters.

Next to the enigma of Betty and Barney Hill, the most celebrated early abduction case must be the one that centres on Pascagoula city in Jackson County, Mississippi, U.S.A. Unlike the Hill case, which seemed to set the template for later alleged abductions, this case is almost unique. It features wholly non-humanlike beings.

The details of the case are well documented. What interests here is the nature of what took Charles Higson and his younger friend Calvin Parker in 1973. These `ufonauts` - if they were that –had legs with round feet – which they did not use, bullet shaped heads, carrot shaped protrusions on the sides of their heads where one might expect ears and – for the accounts changed – either a slit or a hole for the mouth. Their hands were akin to the claws of a lobster (see, for example, www.open-minds.tv.)

These kinds of exotic liaisons are not without precedent either.

A decade earlier in the wooded shipway district in Saltwood, Kent on the south east coast of Britain four boys – among them John Flexton (17) and Martin Hutchinson (18) ran to the police with an unbelievable tale.

That evening, on November16th 1963, they observed an ovoid object descend without sound into the woods. They insisted that what then came out of the woods was bat-like but with no head. About the size of a human, it had webbed feet. (Bowen, p-22.)

Again if we trawl back another eleven years to 1952 we discover that there arose a similar case in Flatwoods, in Braxton County, West Virginia USA.  After seeing a `meteorite` land in a nearby forest Kathleen May and four boys went to see what they could find. What came down through the forest to meet them was much bigger than any human. It had a spade shaped head which was bright red, and glowing green eyes. It appeared to be dressed in some sort of garment and had no legs. Later a woman and her mother said they had seen the same apparition, as did another couple found by the investigator John Keel  (Bord, p-99-101, also ufocasebook.com/flatwoods.html.)

There are some just as outlandish figures belonging to more recent abduction accounts. The `praying mantis` type aliens have now become common enough to have been welcomed into the alien zoo, in North America at least.

Preston Dennet relates the case of Paul Nelson who was a party to visitations from 1967 onwards. It might be significant that he had been exposed to UFO literature and that when he undertook regressive hypnosis his expectation was that the aliens would be the classic Greys. Instead, what he recalled were more in the nature of Praying Mantis types (Dennet, p-94-95.)

The forgoing exhibits all occurred in connection with the presence of anomalous ariel phenomena (although is notable that in two of the scenarios the entities were not seen getting out of the craft – if craft they were.) What about non-human entities which appear without the need for transport?

Nameless things.

One delicious offering from the casebook comes from the improbable surrounds of Westminster in the West End of London. Here you can find an antique book shop on 50 Berkeley Square. This property has its own antique legend. Some call it the `Nameless thing`. The story is singular in that it incorporates the death of one of the witnesses!

They say that the second – or is it the fourth? –floor of this building is the haunt of something gruesome and not at all human.

One person who decided to investigate was sir Robert Warboys. In the 1840’s he spent the night there – and paid for it with his life!

Much later, in 1943, two sailors squatted in the property for a night. The Nameless thing attacked one of them too. There are few clear descriptions of what this `thing` looked like, except it was a slithering creature with Lovecraftian overtones.

Seeing the case as demonic in nature, the haunted house habitué Harry Price made his own scrutiny of the property. His report linked the `haunting` to historical events which had occurred there much earlier. This did nothing to account for the monstrous aspect of the spirit. (See, for example, www.americanmonsters.com.)

Part II in this series concludes tomorrow: Saturday, March 1, 2014! http://ufodigest.com/articles/nightmare-entities-0301

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