Ken Gerhard, cryptozoologist and Missing in Alaska host, examines global flying humanoid legends—from the Philippines’ Aswang to Vietnam’s "bird woman"—often tied to military zones like La Huasteca’s ancient UFO pictographs. He cites 1956 Nebraska’s mechanical-winged humanoid, 2006 Wisconsin’s man-bat, and Art Bell’s disputed 9/11 photograph as evidence of either prehistoric survivors or ultraterrestrial tricksters. Despite no physical attacks, reports describe terrorization, illness, and MIB harassment, like John Keel’s West Virginia Mothman flap. Gerhard links these to folklore’s "grain of truth," though Alaska’s 4/1,000 missing persons rate hints at deeper, unexplained connections—suggesting cryptozoology’s mysteries may blur the line between myth and reality. [Automatically generated summary]
Our president is at climate talks in France, trying to keep, along with the rest of the world, the world, from getting too hot to handle, which would mean three degrees Celsius.
Can you imagine three degrees Celsius?
We'd have water everywhere.
I've got to tell you, what is going on in France, I hope, is mostly about what's going on in Syria.
The situation in Syria is really scaring the hell out of me and should scare you too.
And I hope that's what they're actually talking about.
Even though climate warming is certainly important, having people to worry for is also important.
And the Russians have now installed this incredible new missile battery.
These missiles are capable of flying at Mach 5, hitting something at Mach 5.
They are missiles that disperse other missiles, very, very high-tech, as good or probably better than what we have.
Now, as you know, Turkey, a NATO member, has shot down a Russian jet.
They are not going to apologize for it.
And because of that, borders close, gas gets turned off to parts of Turkey, and all kinds of terrible things are happening between the Russians and the Turks.
And that's bad enough.
But I'm telling you, with the mix, it's the devil's mix in Syria.
And what we have in Syria right now, in my opinion, is a soup that could end up cooking to a boil and becoming World War III.
I know that's scary, but I'm going to tell you, I'm keeping my eye on it.
And the fact that Turkey shot down a Russian plane, bad.
Not yet World War III, right?
But keep in mind, those of you who haven't been around for a long time, we have a treaty with Turkey.
And if Turkey were to really begin mixing it up with the Russians, we have an obligation, a duty, a treaty-bound duty to come to Turkey's, come help them, right?
So if it really gets bad, here's what you should watch for.
If you hear of other warplanes getting shot down, if you hear of a U.S. jet getting shot down by the Russians, and they haven't put those things there for nothing.
I mean, there are French planes flying and bombing, Russian planes flying and bombing, U.S. planes flying and bombing.
There's bombing going all over the place, going on all over the place over there.
So if you begin to see awful things happen, like a U.S. plane getting shot down, or a couple of U.S. planes, or a U.S. plane and a Russian plane getting into a fight, or Turkey shooting down more Russian planes, or an assault of some kind on Turkey, or perhaps somebody's asset at sea gets clobbered.
If you see something like that begin to happen, take notice, because that would be the opening salvo of World War III.
If that happened, I would pack my family up and be off to Southeast Asia as quickly as I could.
Not that I think that would help much in the case of World War III.
I'm supposing that nobody much cares about Southeast Asia.
So all I might succeed in doing is having a slow, painful death due to radiation.
But I'm trying to drive home to you how dangerous what's going on in Syria is right now to you.
I understand this treaty, the NATO treaty.
We have no choice.
If Russia were to attack Turkey in some meaningful way, we would have no choice.
And how quickly could that escalate?
Well, the people that have studied the possibility of thermonuclear war think pretty quickly.
So I'll leave it at that.
Shoppers did a lot more on Cyber Monday than they did on, what is it, Black Friday?
People are starting to stay home and do their buying on the keyboard.
And I wonder what that's going to do to shopping centers, you know?
I mean, it's just too easy.
You can shop, you can click, you can compare, you can get the cheapest price, you can generally get free shipping, maybe no tax, who knows?
It's quite a deal.
Eventually, we're all going to just stay home.
Now, I told you this story would make the bigger news, and it has.
Fox News reports that astronomers in Australia have picked up an alien radio signal, notice how I emphasized alien, From space for the first time as it occurred.
The signal or radio burst was discovered on May 15, 2014.
It was just being reported by the monthly notice of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The burst identified within 10 seconds of its occurrence, said Emily Petroff, a doctoral student from Melbourne's Swissburn University of Technology.
The importance of the discovery was recognized very quickly, and we're all working very excitedly to contact other astronomers and telescopes around the world to look at the location of the burst.
Now, to give you some idea of the strength of the burst, it released in a few milliseconds as much power as our sun does in 24 hours.
The first one actually was discovered back in 2007, but always after the fact.
Now they're hearing it real time.
One of them was a double burst.
So, could it be aliens?
Yes.
I wouldn't get really excited about it, according to Petrov, at this point, but they think it could also be coming from natural sources.
So we have now had two things to get pretty excited about, more so than at any time that I've done broadcasting.
And that goes back, as you know, a very, very long way.
So between the megastructures, which, by the way, despite NASA's attempt at talking about a comet swarm, which is a possibility, still remain every bit as much a mystery as the day they were announced, as now do these radio signals.
So we have now had two instances of possible alien contact, or I guess I should say, recognizing the fact that they are there in a month.
And I went decades waiting for something like that.
All right, coming up in a moment, Ken Gerhard is a widely recognized cryptozoologist.
He's a field investigator for the Center for Foreign Zoology, a fellow of the Pangea Institute, and consultant for several anomalous research organizations.
He has traveled the world searching for evidence of legendary beasts, including Bigfoot.
I almost heard a cheer go up.
The Loch Ness Monster, the Chupacabra, Enigmatic Winged Creatures, and Werewolves.
In addition to co-hosting the History Channel TV series Missing in Alaska, that's an interesting one.
We will ask about that, Ken, has appeared in Monster Quest, featured in the History Channel special The Real Wolfman, as well as Legend Hunters, Unexplained Files, Paranatural, Weird, or What, Ancient Aliens, Monsters, and Mysteries in America, Ultimate Encounters, True Supernatural, and The Monster Project.
Born on Friday the 13th of October, what a day.
Ken has traveled to 26 different countries on six continents, as well as virtually all of the U.S. An avid adventurer, he has camped along the Amazon, explored the Galapagos, hiked the Australian outback, and has visited many ancient and mysterious sites from Machu Picchu to Stonehenge.
Here, in just a moment, will come Ken, and he's going to talk about cryptids.
Yeah, that's been kind of a focus of my research through the years.
You know, the field of cryptozoology is vast and it's expanding and evolving.
It's a movement that's been around for a while, and it encompasses a lot of really strange, bizarre, and unknown creatures.
But I've found that the flying cryptids are often neglected by researchers and investigators, my colleagues.
So I've, you know, kind of been on that particular trail for a number of years now.
And I've got to tell you, I have accumulated a surprising number of accounts from very credible people who have seen flying creatures that are not recognized by science in a number of forms.
Well, here's the conundrum because a flying humanoid, and keep in mind that the field of cryptozoology was, it was a movement that was started by actual zoologists.
So it's based on hard science, the fossil history, and so forth.
So the notion of a flying humanoid, it doesn't really fit squarely in there.
You know what I mean?
But we do investigate these things as cryptid researchers because somebody has to.
And as I mentioned, there are literally hundreds of documented sightings of these flying humanoid beings.
And I imagine that those only are scratching the surface.
So humanoid-like, not exactly totally humans, but humanoid-like, or partly human.
And a good example would be, before the show, I had Ken look up, because I didn't want to spring it on him, Aswang, A-S-W-A-N-G.
My wife, as you know, is a Filipina, and she is from the southern island of the Philippines where everybody, everybody believes in the Aswang.
And if you guys out there in the audience go to Google and you put in Aswang, A-S-W-A-N-G, and then click on images on Google, you can kind of scroll down and you can see all these different photographs, as Ken did prior to the show.
And an awful lot of them, to me, look like what we're talking about tonight.
Now, when I tell you my wife believes in the Aswang, I'm not kidding.
I mean, she is scared to death of this creature.
And when you see it, you'll understand why.
So, Ken, when you see the photographs that depict the Oswong, what do you make of it?
Well, the Oswong is actually, it reminds me of similar creatures that are reported in other diverse cultures around the world.
For example, on the African island of Pemba, there's something known as the Papabawa, which is basically a vampire-like creature, not human, nobody really knows, but it flies in in the dark of night and attacks and kills and inviscerates.
And people on that island are very terrified of the Papabawa to the extent that in the 1990s, there was actually a case of mass hysteria on that particular island.
So, of course, in Mexico, very close to where I live, we have the Chupacabra.
Of course, we'll take very, very seriously south of the border.
So, you know, again, it's kind of the interesting thing about taking a global perspective and look at these flying humanoid creatures is there are many similarities in different cultures around the world.
The fear is very real, as you indicated.
The descriptions do vary, and, you know, that is the really interesting part.
Well, in the case of the Aswang, unfortunately, what it does is find young, newly pregnant women, and it takes the fetus from them.
It's pretty horrible.
Pretty horrible.
And my wife believes that she heard one on her roof trying to get in, trying really, really hard to get in.
And it is, I believe, unique to the Philippines.
But as you mentioned, each culture seems to have their own, no matter where you go around the world.
So there has to be a reason for it.
Earlier, you used the word mythological.
And to me, that implies not real.
but somewhere at the beginning or the middle or the end of all these things that are cooked up around the world that we believe could be flying and could be killing, there is a germ of truth somewhere.
And, you know, you hit the nail on the head there.
It's really about perspective, isn't it?
Because many of the remarkable animal discoveries of the past century started out as quote-unquote myths.
The mountain gorilla, the giant squid, the Komodo dragon, the giant panda.
I mean, all of these animals were considered mythological, except to the people, of course, that lived in those particular areas and were familiar with the animals.
But to Western science, they were considered mythological.
So cryptozoology is all about kind of bringing the shroud, the veil of mythology down and revealing that grain of truth behind each myth.
Well, Bigfoot really represents cryptozoology art, as do his cousins around the world, the yeti or abominable snowman of the Himalayas, the Yeren of China, the Yaoi of Australia, essentially man-like forms, hominids, and evidently of a subhuman, you know, sort of an ancient subhuman type.
So from a zoological standpoint, it makes perfect sense.
Listen, Art, for thousands of years, there were several different forms, subspecies of humans that were living alongside each other.
In other words, if Bigfoot is a real McCoy, We kind of, you know, I've had people on that have played Bigfoot talking to each other, and it sounded very intelligent.
It sounded like a real language.
And we say subhuman, but we don't really know enough to say subhuman.
So perhaps, yeah, that wasn't the right vernacular.
But my point being that there were things that looked very similar to Bigfoot in our fossil history, we know that lived for sure hundreds of thousands of years ago during the mid-Pleistocene epoch.
They are, presumably, they are highly intelligent.
They're not merely apes.
All of the major great apes have been discovered as of 1902.
So these are hominins, probably, you know, our closest, obviously our closest relatives on the planet.
There have been indications of potential language, a basal language.
There have been indications of sort of a rudimentary tool use in terms of, you know, stones and rocks.
No indication that they use fire.
But it's my personal belief that a lot of these could be adaptations that are basically that these beings have evolved to avoid contact with humans, that they deem us as their primary competition, and thus they've chosen to live in the most remote areas.
They've chosen to live kind of a nocturnal lifestyle.
They seem to move around a lot at night.
And they are very skillful and adept at avoiding contact with us.
But there's a mountain of evidence, sir, a mountain of evidence.
And most people that are sort of mildly interested probably aren't acquainted with all of the evidence.
But if you immerse yourself in the subject matter and you combine thousands of documented eyewitnesses over the years, all of the legends, the global legends around the world that correspond, very consistent.
And then you factor in the footprints that have been cast.
The first time I saw the Patterson film art, on an instinctive level, I thought that's got to be real.
I mean, the movements are so fluid and natural.
I've watched it, obviously, countless times throughout the course of my life.
And it always comes back to the fact that we're talking about an era, 1967, when costume technology was not that advanced.
And if you compare the movements and the size and the bulk of the figure in the Patterson film, the fluidity of this creature, you can actually see its muscles moving and flexing.
The hairflow patterns are very natural.
All of it works in concert together.
And then if you go and look at any movie from that time period, like the Planet of the Apes movies, and you realize how primitive costume technology was in those days, I'm convinced the Patterson film is real.
I guess it'll always be kind of inconclusive.
No one's going to be able to prove it either way.
They've never produced a suit.
But then again, the creature got away.
It did leave footprints.
And so that kind of added to the evidence as well.
If we were to get the equivalent of the Patterson film today and we got it digitally, nobody would believe it.
And I say that because we live in a time of CGI that is so good that it can be made to be better than the real thing because they get all the exact angles they want.
And for that reason, I actually disregard a lot of the photographic evidence, or I should say I debunk a lot of the photographic evidence that I'm given these days because a lot of it has been manufactured.
You know, it is very easy for someone with the skill and the software to devise something like that.
But in 1967, that wasn't the case.
And Patterson, people that knew Roger Patterson thought he was a stand, you know, he was a bit of a character, but he was a very simple man.
And I honestly don't think that he had the resources and the mind to conceive of a hoax that brilliant.
And furthermore, Art, there have been physical anthropologists that have studied that film, men much smarter than I am, and experts in biomechanics who've studied it, and have determined that the figure in the film is moving in a very non-human fashion.
Its mode of locomotion, although it is bipedal, is very different from a human's.
And it actually corresponds exactly with what you would have to have to propel a bipedal hominid that weighs several hundred pounds through those forests.
Well, we're coming up on a break, Ken, but I want you to think about something during the break.
And I ask this of everybody who talks about Bigfoot and these kinds of creatures, Frankly, in general, and that is, if you were, I don't know, out in the forest somewhere and you saw a Bigfoot, there it is.
You've got a high-powered rifle.
You can actually settle for once and forever the fact that, you know, Bigfoot is real.
You can be the king of cryptozoology forever.
All you've got to do is squeeze that trigger and take it down.
Well, that is definitely a hot-button topic in the field of Bigfoot.
Kill or no-kill is the debate that's been going on for years.
You know, honestly, Art, I think several years ago when I was kind of getting started in the field, I would have absolutely pulled the trigger.
And not for selfish reasons, not for money, not for fame, but because I really felt that the only way to protect Bigfoot was to prove conclusively 100% that it existed.
And it has been estimated that there are probably at least several hundred, if not a couple of thousand individuals in North America alone.
You would have to have that in order to maintain a viable breeding population.
So if you shoot one, you're not necessarily shooting the last one.
But, you know, where I'm sitting now, I think through the years that I've begun to view these beings, you know, as truly sentient.
And I know that I've read many accounts of people that have actually had them in their sites, hunters and so forth, that have actually not been able to pull the trigger because they said that the things just looked so darn human.
And, you know, could you live with yourself if you shot this thing and realized that essentially that is a human, a human form?
So I would say right now in this place in time, no, I probably couldn't do it.
But I'm hopeful that someone will eventually find remains.
I mean, if these things are out there, they're dying of natural causes.
I do actually have been asked that question a lot, particularly in recent years.
You know, I get the sense that we're kind of moving through sort of a rebirth of the spiritualist movement where people are very much embracing the paranormal and sort of cosmic, otherworldly aspects to our dimension and so forth.
So, yeah, that is probably a strong argument why we haven't found a body, that they're simply stepping out into another dimension or through a doorway or a portal.
There does seem to be a segment of Bigfoot sightings that have kind of really strange aspects where they've been shot at point-blank range and are impervious to bullets or where they're seen running and their tracks just disappear in the middle of nowhere.
But coming from a traditional cryptozoology background, I still like to kind of hedge my bets and think that these are essentially pre-human forms, hominids from an earlier age that are essentially still around and they're highly intelligent.
And who's to say that these things aren't capable of burying their own dead?
Maybe that's one of the reasons we haven't found their remains.
Very true.
They've obviously evolved and adapted Behavior patterns to avoid being found by humans because they probably think that once they are found out, that'll essentially be the end of them.
Yeah, I actually knew a gentleman or a group of gentlemen that were actively investigating and researching Bigfoot years ago.
And according to them, they actually did take a shot and end up wounding one of the creatures.
And, you know, it's kind of a grisly story.
The thing got away, thank goodness.
But, you know, I think maybe that was kind of a bit of an awakening for some of those gentlemen because I sensed after the fact that they realized what they had done.
But perhaps they got caught up in the heat of the moment.
You know, there have been accounts, this is interesting.
You were talking about Asia earlier.
There actually have been a handful of accounts from Asia of Bigfoot-type creatures being either captured or killed.
Oh, yes.
Oftentimes in a war scenario.
I'm sure you've heard of the stories too, the rock apes of Vietnam and so forth.
So there could potentially be remains out there somewhere in another part of the world.
And boy, I sure wish we could get our hands on that evidence.
Well, Mothman art is obviously one of the most enigmatic figures in the Annals of the Unexplained.
I mean, the physical description is pretty wild.
A gray man-like creature standing over six feet tall with immense wings attached to its body.
Mothman really is the quintessential monster.
I mean, it's almost like something that stepped right out of a science fiction movie.
Most eyewitnesses have described it as possessing a low-slung head with two enormous eyes.
And that's the most startling feature of the Mothman, these giant blood-red embers like automobile reflectors that seemingly have a hypnotic effect over humans.
Red eyes, and some people have claimed that when they were looking into these eyes, that they basically lost all control, fell into a hypnotic trance-like state.
But the really frightening thing is that Mothman's behavior, there have been many accounts of Mothman chasing cars at speeds approaching 100 miles an hour.
His sole purpose seems to be to absolutely terrify human beings.
And, you know, obviously the story is that there were literally dozens, or according to researcher John Keel, hundreds of sightings of the Mothman beginning in November of 1966 with the Scarbury Mallet sighting.
And then over the course of that next year, there were literally dozens or hundreds of sightings of this Mothman creature in and around the sleepy little town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Well, the seminal sighting involved two young couples, Roger Linda Scarberry and Stephen Mary Mallet.
They were cruising around outside Point Pleasant in an area known as the TNT area.
And the reason it's called that art is back during World War II, they were using, there was actually a factory there that was manufacturing TNT for the war effort and other chemicals.
It's a pretty wild place.
It's actually, to this day, there's about 60 to 100 concrete igno-like structures where they stored the explosives and these hazardous chemicals.
But by the 1960s, this was a hangout for the local teenagers.
So they were basically just cruising through this area one night, November 15, 1966.
And suddenly near an old abandoned building known as the power plant, they saw this figure.
And the description was, you know, six and a half, seven feet tall, giant bat-like wings coming out of his shoulders and the giant red eyes.
And of course, they saw this thing and they were utterly terrified.
They took off back towards town, and to their horror and chagrin, the Mothman actually took off straight off the ground, and that's significant like a helicopter, and chased them all the way back to the town of Point Pleasant.
It disappeared into town, and they were so terrified that they went to the local sheriff's office and burst in and filed a report.
And the sheriff who was on duty, Deputy Dennis Hereford, was he actually knew the couple, the two young couples.
Point Pleasant is a very small town, of course.
Everyone knows everyone.
And he knew them to be fairly upstanding and honest citizens and thought that they were basically scared witless.
So they returned to the scene.
They didn't see the Mothman, but they heard some strange noises.
And that was it.
That kind of started the whole movement.
The next night, there were hundreds of people out at the TNT area looking for Mothman.
And another woman named Marcella Bennett, who was visiting some friends nearby the TNT area, claimed that the Mothman actually rose up behind her car when she got out of her car, causing her to collapse in a trance-like state and fall on top of her infant child.
So those are kind of the two seminal sightings of the Mothman that started the entire affair.
Would the description, do we see, let's see, is this Mothman?
We've got a couple of drawings I know on the site.
And God, they're ugly.
If you go to artbell.com and click on my guest information, we've got a couple of things here.
And I'm trying to figure out How such a creature, I mean, most everything we know that has wings takes gathering a little forward speed to get off the ground.
You have certain laws of physics and inertia and momentum and so forth that all flying creatures born on this earth typically have some type of forward thrust or movement.
And so again, many of the descriptions of Mothman was a very unnatural movement.
This thing took off straight off the ground without flapping its wings, essentially didn't flap its wings while in flight.
It was more of a glider and moved at just impossible speeds, you know, 100 miles an hour.
So it definitely did not behave like anything that has evolved on this planet, anything that we can find in our fossil history.
And again, as a cryptozoologist, I tend to look for the more pragmatic explanations.
And for example, there's kind of an absurd theory out there that some cryptozoologists have put forward that what Mothman was, in fact, was some type of large owl that people mistook for something else and it created mass hysteria.
Well, certainly I don't believe that based on all of the research that I've done.
The only conclusions I can draw, Art, is that Mothman is some type of spectral entity or apparition.
Whether you want to say or speculate that it is an extraterrestrial, whether it's an interdimensional being, a demonic, there are many different ways that people look at this phenomenon.
But, you know, essentially it is not of this earth.
It's not a flesh and blood creature in the way that we know it.
Yes, Owl Man is England's version of, essentially England's version of the Mothman.
It's a very similar creature in terms of it's often seen in the same location.
It has the, I hate to say it, Art, it's got the large glowing red eyes, once again.
Wonderful.
But the descriptions are somewhat different.
Owl Man, which has been sighted primarily in the grounds and woods surrounding an old church in Cornwall, England, known as Mount Ann Church.
It's right there on the coast.
And interestingly, the church is said to be built on an ancient earthwork.
But the Owl Man is described as essentially man-sized and winged, but with grizzled gray fur or feathers, pointy ears, a sneering, gaping black mouth, not a beak, and feet like pincers or crab claws.
And what's interesting is that all of the encounters have been in the woods around this old church, and virtually all of the witnesses, and the sightings began in 1976, in the spring and summer of 1976, that all of the witnesses have been essentially teenage girls and one adolescent male.
Now, my colleague John Downs in England has written a seminal book on the owl man, and what's interesting is that he believes that he's experienced a great deal of what we call psychic backlash while investing in this particular case.
All kinds of unfortunate things that happened to him.
And, you know, very reminiscent of the Mothman, where you have allegations of this curse, this death curse, that people that are involved in the Mothman have been harassed by the men in black or have met kind of mysterious and untimely ends.
Okay, so the implication of that would be that our own government at some level knows something about these things.
And I can't imagine they wouldn't.
I mean, if there are reliable reports of creatures that are able to fly, whether it's the American or British government, you would definitely think there would be an interest in finding out what they are.
I mean, who knows?
They could be weapons, right?
Turned into weapons on the battlefield.
So the U.S. government, British government, I would think, would have interest in them, hence the men in black.
And John Keel, of course, who wrote the famous Mothman Prophecies book and kind of was there in the moment during the 1966, 67 flap, he certainly believed that there was government involvement, that his phones were being tapped, that he was being followed and harassed.
He spoke to many of the Mothman eyewitnesses that came forward, claimed that they were harassed and threatened into silence.
So there are that elements of the case as well.
Now, don't you think it's interesting that the Mothman, most of the sightings of the Mothman were in this TNT area, essentially a place that represented the manufacture of explosives and hazardous chemicals and other things that were going to be used in a war effort as well?
That's kind of a bizarre tie-in right there, I think.
Well, as I've researched a lot of these flying humanoid beings throughout history, I found that there is an underlying belief that these beings, whatever they are, are essentially harbingers or portents of tragic cataclysmic events.
In the case of Mothman, you have the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge, which occurred in December of 1967, right around the time Mothman was being seen.
And interestingly enough, the sightings of Mothman dramatically reduced after that.
You have, in antiquity, you have Pazuzu.
Pazuzu was a Sumerian, I'm sorry, an Assyrian winged humanoid type of figure that was often associated with famine and drought and all of these horrible events.
And then, you know, going across the world to Scotland, you have something known as the Skree.
The Skree is a flying humanoid type of creature, kind of a hideous witch, similar to the Oswang, I guess, in some ways, that is said to overfly battlefields before many people have been killed and things like that.
So there's this underlying theme that these flying humanoids, whatever they are, are essentially omens.
I found that in antiquity and different legends around the world, creatures that are depicted as being similar to the Mothman, and there are many examples, were greatly feared by those different local peoples because they represented a tragic event to come.
Well, Keith, if you're listening, I'm so sorry to ask this again, but there was a ton of photography done around the tragedy that was 9-11.
Ken, I don't know if you've ever seen this photograph, but if you haven't, I'm going to fix it so you can see it.
It was a photograph taken during the 9-11 tragedy, and it showed, God, I'm telling you, Ken, I can't get over it.
I'll never get over it.
It showed, and you had a building as a reference for his eyes, this giant prehistoric something or another, Ken, that was flying in the skies in New York while this was going on.
And somebody caught it in a photograph.
And if I can, somebody will send Keith, or Keith hasn't put it up, whatever, if we can get it up there, I'll get it up there, and you can take a look.
You're not by any chance familiar with what I'm talking about, are you?
All right, so I know you've got specific stories you can tell us about things that have affected people that you really think, you know, are real, really happened, things that really happened, any cases, and we've got the time.
Well, there's some classic cases, Art, that are pretty creepy and honestly very frightening.
For example, in 1956, in a place called Falls City, Nebraska, a gentleman, a farmer who used a pseudonym, John Hanks, when he actually reported the event, obviously didn't want to be exposed.
But according to this gentleman, this farmer, he encountered a being while working out in his field one day, and this thing basically overflew him at a height of about 15 feet.
And the description is pretty chilling.
He said that this figure had a human-like form, would have been about nine feet tall.
The wings were not actually organic wings.
They were mechanical, sort of silver mechanical wings with a row of lights going down them, about 15 feet across.
And this being, whatever it was, was operating these wings and flying with a control panel strapped to his chest.
But the really chilling part was the description of the face.
The face, he described the face as looking demonic with these blue, watery eyes and wrinkled, sort of leathery skin and a scowling frowl on its face.
And as he watched this thing, it just sort of hovered over him ominously and then kind of took off.
Another one that I'm quite fond of for similar reasons refers to the extraordinary bird woman of Da Nang, Vietnam.
And apparently, according to a Marine by the name of Earl Morrison, he relayed this story to a UFO researcher named Don Worley.
During the Vietnam War, he was stationed along with two other buddies and on top of, you know, sort of on watchtower type situation.
And they saw a figure approaching in the distance.
And at first they thought it was a very large bat, but they realized quickly that this thing was much larger than any bat they had ever seen before.
And as this figure got closer and closer, they were able to make out that it was actually the form of a nude winged woman, completely black in color, seemed to be covered in kind of a black fur or hair-like substance and bat-like wings, and that she essentially she hovered like right over, flew right over their heads, peering down at them kind of ominously.
And she seemed to be giving off kind of a green cast or a green glow.
So that was kind of a very unnerving experience that these three gentlemen had.
And what's really interesting, again, there is that, you know, we're talking about a battle type scenario.
So these flying humanoids are often reported around military installations or over battlefields, things of that nature.
But certainly not all the accounts are very old.
I have a lot of modern accounts that I chronicle in my book, Encounters with Flying Humanoids.
And in fact, I continue to receive accounts of these flying humanoid-type creatures.
One of the most recent was a gentleman that lived out in West Texas.
He caught in touch with me, and I interviewed this gentleman over the phone many times, and he comes off as extremely sincere and credible.
And what he tells me is that he was out one night with his wife, kind of looking at the stars and an approaching storm system, and similar to the bird woman of Da Nang, they saw this figure approaching them.
And when it got right over their heads, he said it was essentially a man-like creature with long flowing hair and giant black angelic wings.
And he said this thing would have stood about 10 or 14 feet tall.
It had very high cheekbones and a kind of a chisel to its face, facial features.
And, you know, again, it soared right over their heads.
So, you know, those are just some examples, but, you know, there are many, many more.
It may not seem like it, but if you could somehow control these creatures during battle and you could make these things appear to your enemy, you know, listen, most of us feel that way.
Frankly, if I saw something with glowing red eyes, you know, hovering in front of me, I'd probably toss down whatever I had and go in the other direction.
And so they would be a big asset to anybody who could control them on a battlefield.
The time period when the Mothman was being sighted in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there were UFO sightings, strange lights in the sky that were being reported to the local law enforcement agencies almost on a nightly basis.
In fact, if you go back and look at the newspaper archives at that time, you've got literally as many reports of strange flying lights and UFO-type objects as the Mothman itself around that same time period and in that same area.
Additionally, many of the flying humanoids that I've investigated in Mexico, and for some strange reason, Mexico seems to be ground zero for the flying humanoid phenomenon.
Really, a lot of reports coming out of Mexico.
And a lot of those have been logged by UFO investigators that are essentially videotaping these strange flying humanoid creatures in conjunction or in areas where they've also videotaped flying objects.
You know, in terms of the flying humanoids, there are several videos that can be found online, and these were made by Mexican UFO researchers.
And these are referred to as unidentified flying humanoids, UFHs.
Now, the videotape quality is not that great.
Essentially, what you're going to see in these videotapes are you're going to see a man-like figure.
I mean, you can definitely make out two legs hanging down, two arms hanging down.
But these are very different from the Mothman.
They don't have any wings or any visible means of propulsion.
But these figures, whatever they are, are essentially hovering around or flying around high up in the atmosphere.
And they have been videotaped in many locations around Mexico going back to the year 2000.
And again, in areas where UFOs have been reported as well.
So I do cover these in the book because they do seem to be related in many ways to the Mothman-type figure, although they do not have wings or any visible way to fly.
They're just merely up there very high in the air flying around.
Since you're in San Antonio, please comment for me on the chupacabra because when I was on the air, you know, a decade or two ago, the chupacabra thing was actually going on at the time.
I saw some pretty awful pictures of what the chupacabra did and pictures that were represented to be a chupacabra.
Well, that's one of the questions I get asked the most because there seem to be many different things going on here.
The chupacabra is a case of composite identity where one particular word or name is being used as kind of a blanket to explain a lot of different weird things.
But obviously the original chupacabra originated in Puerto Rico during the 1990s when there were a series of very grotesque livestock killings.
And the name chupacabra, the literal translation is goat sucker.
So it's a vampire-like creature.
And of course the initial descriptions that came out of Puerto Rico and other Latin American countries describe this kind of a gargoyle-type creature, bipedal with a reptilian quality and giant eyes.
But here in Texas over the past decade or so, there have been other animals that have been turning up that have been referred to as chupacabras.
They always make it into the newspaper, onto the local news channel.
Now, I've examined about a half dozen of these animals myself, the remains of these animals, and they are essentially they are grotesque-looking Canids or dog-like animals.
They are completely hairless.
They have kind of a rough hide-type covering, almost like an elephant.
In many cases, they have abnormally large teeth, canine teeth or fangs, long claws, and so forth.
And they're very grotesque and ugly-looking.
And there have been allegations by some of the local ranchers and livestock owners that these dog-like animals are drinking the blood of their livestock.
That has not been substantiated scientifically.
But because there is a very strong Mexican-American influence here in Texas and other parts of the southern United States, you have that cultural influence essentially, that crossover aspect, where you have these strange-looking animals, predators that are showing up, and people are referring to them as chupacabras when they are, in fact, completely different from the creature or whatever it is that was reported from Puerto Rico beginning in the 1990s.
And now, whether it's a chupacabra or something with glowing red eyes, no thank you.
Are there any reports?
I have this feeling that if these things are perhaps demonic in nature, it seems like demonic things, ghosts, whatever, cannot actually harm, physically harm people.
They can attempt to drive people into doing bad things, but they can't seem to actually manipulate in our physical universe.
And I wonder if that is true of these flying cryptids as well.
In other words, are there reports of people getting torn to bits by these things?
Or generally, do we not get reports of physical attacks?
There are no documented accounts of anyone actually being physically attacked by a flying humanoid or Mothman-type creature, although there are many, many accounts of Mothman, Owlman, and other flying humanoid creatures chasing and terrorizing humans.
So they do in fact seem to, for whatever reason, they want to terrify us.
They want to frighten us.
You know, I guess if you want to characterize that as demonic, then that's fair.
This reminds me of an interesting citing, a case that occurred fairly recently in 2006, and this refers to the man-bat of Briggs Road, Wisconsin.
And that illustration, incidentally, is by Linda Godfrey, who I believe you had as a guest on your show.
That's correct.
That's her interpretation.
But according to Linda, who was the initial investigator, these two gentlemen of Native American descent were driving home one evening in a place called Holman, Wisconsin, which is very close to La Crosse.
And suddenly this creature that you see there dived out of the treetops and basically dive-bombed the pickup truck they were driving in.
And they described it as having a human-like form with bat-like wings, a hideous face with long fangs, and kind of a pronounced rib cage and long claws.
Well, this thing dive-bombed their pickup truck and took off.
And shortly thereafter, they could hear this ringing noise, a very high-pitched ringing noise that actually forced them to pull over to the side of the road where they both became violently ill.
Shortly thereafter, they got home and began to experience all kinds of strange things.
Their dog, which was normally very affable and friendly, was hiding and cowering under the bed.
They were hearing strange noises, banging noises around the outside of their house as if something, some type of unseen force was banging on their walls and harassing them.
So this is just an example of kind of the attachment aspect of the flying humanoid phenomena.
Not only are these flying humanoid creatures seemingly interested in terrifying and chasing and scaring the bejesus out of people, but oftentimes there is a residual attachment effect where people will actually experience all kinds of bad feelings and illness and kind of hibbie-jeebies after the event takes place.
Well, this is something that has been documented by, or was primarily documented by, again, John Keel, author of Mothman Prophecies.
Now, no one was in the thick of it like Keel.
He was actually there on the ground shortly after Mothman was first reported in Point Pleasant.
He interviewed many of the eyewitnesses, and according to Keel, many of the eyewitnesses claimed that they were, in fact, visited by strange men in black-like figures.
In fact, a woman named Mary Heyer, who was a local newspaper reporter there in Point Pleasant, claimed that a strange figure visited her at her office one time, and she said that he spoke in a strange, halting voice, almost as if English was a foreign language.
Excuse me.
And that he kind of had a fascination, a strange fascination for sort of the mundane objects that were laid across her desk.
But the message was, in fact, very real that he did not want her to be reporting these Mothman accounts in the local newspaper and actually became kind of threatening in terms of his tone and demeanor and so forth.
And I can only, you know, if you sit down and try and imagine, well, why would our government or their agents be interested in this sort of thing?
Again, I go back to the possibility of their use in terrorizing an enemy.
That's all I can think of.
Or, if you want to get even a little further down the road of strange conjecture, it could be that in some government lab somewhere they created these damn things.
Well, those are certainly two of the theories that have been suggested, you know, that Mothman is some type of diabolical military experiment, you know, that perhaps Mothman rose up out of the sort of the cosmic chemicals and some of those other, you know, kind of like a mutation that kind of rose up there in Point Pleasant, you know, but perhaps it was some type of intelligent design.
I also had a lady who called, I think we were in an open lines segment, or maybe it was, we were doing something on Bigfoot, and she said that something like a Bigfoot actually ran into her car.
In other words, she was going down the highway, and this thing came from the side and happened to hit the side toward the rear of her car, and there was a fair amount of damage.
Whatever it is, got away, but it actually just apparently wanted to run into her car.
I don't think I've heard of an account quite like that.
I've heard of many people who claim that Bigfoot-type creatures have chased their vehicles similar to the Mothman or jumped out at them, you know, sort of as they were changing a flat tire on the side of the road on a dark and lonely road, that type of thing.
Mexico, of course, has, for those of your listeners that are familiar, and I'm sure many of them are familiar with the ancient alien aspect or tie-in to Mexico, you have all of these great civilizations that sprung up there,
the Olmec and the Zapotec and the Aztec and the Maya, and civilizations that obviously had a very perplexing level of technology and mathematic and knowledge of astronomy and different things like that.
So the inference, of course, is that there have been perhaps extraterrestrial landing spots, I guess you would say, in Mexico.
Now, when I was investigating a flying humanoid type creature just outside of Monterey, Mexico, back in 2009, I was taken to a mysterious place known as La Huasteca, which is in the Sierra Madre Mountains just outside of Monterey.
And there in a kind of a sacred spot are these ancient pictographs on the side of this rock wall that are thousands of years old.
Nobody really knows how old they are.
And they seem to depict strange circular objects flying around in the sky.
So, you know, that's just yet another example of why, you know, Mexico seems to have been a UFO hotspot for probably thousands of years.
And of course, in recent years, you have many, many sightings of UFOs down there as well.
But there are many accounts of these flying humanoid creatures in and around Monterey, in and around Mexico City.
And so Mexico, just for whatever reason, seems to be ground zero.
And I wish I could explain it better than that, Art, but it's a pretty fascinating place.
Well, whether it's Bigfoot or these flying cryptids or it's UFOs and Mexico, I wish we could pin all this down and come to some kind of conclusion about it, but it seems always just out of reach, just out of being able to actually prove something.
And yet it keeps coming back and tantalizing us with appearances, showing us things.
UFOs, God knows, I've had my own sightings.
I think most people have, and yet it just stays at arm's length from us in terms of actual proof.
Just like Mothman.
Just like Bigfoot.
All of these things share.
That's why I think people like myself tend to say it's got to be in the paranormal category.
And for that matter, ufology, some of ufology may even be, because they disappear, they appear.
If you've seen one, you can't unsee it.
I mean, I've seen a UFO up close, too close, and I will never unsee that.
That'll be planted in my brain forever.
I know that other people who have not seen doubt and even make fun of the whole thing, but it's going on, Ken.
There's no question about it.
I have a feeling it's the same with these cryptids.
People are probably, implying cryptids, they're probably even less likely to come out and admit to go to the police and make drawings or whatever.
And it's very frustrating as an investigator, Art, because coming from more of a scientific methodology or background, one of the things you look for is discernible patterns.
And the flying humanoid phenomenon is so amorphous and ambiguous in nature.
You have all of these different descriptions and different locations and mysterious motives.
But the one thing I can say for sure is that many, many people have encountered or seen these creatures.
I've interviewed many credible people with no reason to lie or make this up.
These have been very traumatic, life-changing experiences.
Going back to John Keel for a second, author of the Mothman Prophecies, I know I've mentioned him a few times here now, but he really does, you know, he really was kind of the father of this whole flying humanoid movement.
And he had a belief, Keele did, that all the things that you mentioned, the UFOs, demonic activity and ghosts, even many of the cryptids, that those were all essentially manifestations of the same phenomenon.
And he referred to it as the cosmic trickster.
Sometimes he referred to it as the goblin universe.
And essentially what Kiel felt was that there was what he called an ultraterrestrial intelligence, something well beyond our realm of understanding, that would essentially manifest in all of these different forms that we refer to as unexplained phenomenon for reasons that are probably far beyond our comprehension, but certainly something that has to be contemplated, you know, that there could be a force out there that is essentially toying with us in that manner.
Well, you mentioned that he was harassed by MIBs, right, Men in Black.
And you too, I would think, I mean, writing about this and investigating it the way you are, frankly, Ken, I would think that you might have had an experience or two with people coming to see what you're all about.
Probably the strangest thing that's happened to the art was when I was actually traveling to Point Pleasant to film a television show, a documentary on the Mothman one time.
I was sitting next to a gentleman on the airplane who looked like just kind of a young, clean-cut, all-American kind of guy.
And he kind of struck up a conversation with me and began asking me where I was headed.
And I said, Point Pleasant.
And he essentially stated that that's where he was from and began asking me about the Mothman.
And he seemed to just have a real kind of unusual interest in my motivation and why I was going to investigate the Mothman and made every attempt and effort to kind of debunk it in different ways.
To kind of, I guess, take the wind out of my sails, so to speak, which I thought was really strange coming from this particular individual who, it was just very out of context.
It wasn't really intimidating, but it was kind of a subversive way to, you know, distract me from my mission, so to speak.
Yes, well, as I mentioned earlier, when you've seen something like this, whether it's a cryptid flying or not, and it seems not human or semi-human, and or you've seen something in our skies that doesn't belong there and is completely inexplicable by any physics that we understand, then you have to imagine one of two things.
Either, you know, they really are here, and or they have shared something with our government.
I mean, what I saw either was lighter than air, which I don't believe for a second, or was operating on some sort of anti-gravity system of some kind.
Hold on.
Hey, listen, everybody.
Our public number, if you want to join in on this cryptid, flying cryptid conversation, our national number is now open at area code 952-225-5278.
You know what this all potentially reminds me of, Art.
One thing that I've investigated besides the flying humanoid forms are the quote-unquote thunderbirds.
And thunderbirds are cryptids.
The name Thunderbird is derived from different Native American traditions of these enormous bird-like creatures, very different from the flying humanoids because they do appear to be either enormous birds with wing spans that are comparable to small airplanes, or some people have described them as actually looking very prehistoric, like the pterosaurs, the pterodactyls.
unidentified
I wish we had the zoomed-in picture of this reptiles.
If we have the zoomed-in picture, you would look at that and you would say, I promise you, prehistoric.
And again, it was connected with 9-11.
We've got a lot of people who want to talk to you.
I don't want to take up a lot of time, but I did want to point that out when you said that they frequently are around wars and disasters and all that sort of thing.
So very quickly, let's go first to Skype and say hi, Your Honor Ken.
I'd just like to give a quick shout out to the people I'm listening to with over on Slash X. Slash X?
Indeed.
You'd rather, it's better you didn't.
I have a comment and a question for your guest.
Comment first in regards to why it seems to be a lot of flying creature sightings or a lot of these sort of crypto-zoological sightings in general in South America and Mexico is probably because you see, if you look at it anthropologically, a lot of these places were sort of, dare I say, paganistic Catholics.
Like if you look over in the Philippines, they were colonized by the Spanish.
And if you look in Mexico and Brazil, et cetera, et cetera, they were all colonized by Portuguese and Spaniards.
And they were very lenient in their sort of conversion with the culture.
And I think that's why we see a lot more of these sort of mythical creature sightings, because they sort of have that paganistic essence to their Catholicism.
And I wanted to know what your guests thought about that.
And I guess I've kind of dealt with that quite a bit because I've done a lot of research down in Mexico.
And the way I always explain it to people is that Mexico is a very traditional culture.
And a lot of that, when you have traditional spirituality, a lot of times that does go hand in hand with sort of paganistic and almost superstitious belief systems.
So it's just a matter of interpretation.
So you're definitely onto something there from a cultural aspect.
But you're working on the premise that people are essentially, I don't want to say creating or fabricating because I don't mean to insult you.
But people are, from my experience and my research, these are real experiences.
So if you're saying it's a matter of perception or perspective, then I accept that.
But it certainly still does not explain the fact that many people are sighting and encountering these strange creatures.
And there really is no scientific explanation for that.
unidentified
I just have one more quick question.
It's also in relation to South American stuff.
In the last couple of years, there have been a lot of sightings coming online about gnomes or goblins, some people would call them, but specifically like very small-sized humanoid individuals.
And I'll take the answer to that off the air.
But I was just wondering if you know anything about the space-a lot art.
Hey, I just wanted to ask Ken what he thought about And people are, because some of these UFOs are actually seen to morph into different shapes, almost like placebo-like creatures.
I know in recent years there have been a number of studies done with high-elevation balloons and things where they have actually detected life forms.
There is life on the very fringe of our atmosphere in the upper stratosphere and so forth.
Now, obviously, microscopic, everything that's been found has been kind of on a microscopic level.
But nothing else, it illustrates the fact that life finds a way, and you can potentially have life forms in places where you wouldn't expect it.
Now, in terms of the kind of living UFOs or organic UFOs, there have been a number of accounts recently that I'm aware of of these kind of manta ray-shaped creatures that are seen flying through the air.
Very distinct and different from Mothman.
These are not humanoids, but essentially they look like, you know, again, stingrays or manta rays that you would expect to see in the ocean, but people have reported seeing these things flying over the air in places like Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida, and so forth.
And I'm hopeful that one of your callers will also talk about the vast and deep oceans of the world, because I think that's where you have the real hope for new discoveries of all kinds of fascinating and strange life forms.
I mean, we know literally nothing.
I think 5% of the Earth's deep oceans have been explored at this point.
It's on the History Channel, and it's actually a two-pronged investigation.
We are, in fact, investigating actual cases of missing persons.
And Alaska, strangely enough, has a higher percentage of missing persons per capita.
I believe it's like four out of every 1,000 people are reported missing in the state of Alaska.
And while there are obvious reasons why that might take place, hypothermia, bear attacks, things of that nature, getting lost in the wilderness and so forth, for that particular show, we are exploring a lot of sort of unexplained phenomenon and legendary type creatures and things that could potentially have connections or affinities to some of these missing persons' cases as well.
So we do an episode on Bigfoot, many reports of Bigfoot in Alaska, lots of UFO activity up there.
There have been cases, I'm sure you're familiar with some of the cases of these missing aircraft up there.
I mean, there have been airplanes that have vanished up in Alaska that, you know, they've mounted incredibly extensive searches and, you know, still have never found any sign or trace of these aircraft.
Some of the military craft with 46 people on board.
I worked for KENI in Anchorage for three years, so I know Alaska.
Okay.
Have a lot of friends still.
Much better than I. Not much better, but pretty well.
What I remember about Alaska, to be honest with you, is that when winter sets in, the cold, the real cold comes, and the snow comes, Alaska, Anchorage in particular, and I'm sure Fairbanks as well, turns into a gigantic party town.
You've never seen anything like it in your life.
So I can imagine that people who party it up really well and then wander off somewhere into 30 below zero can probably disappear quite readily.
Let's go back to Skype and Paul.
Hi, you're on the air with Ken.
Hello, Art.
How are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
unidentified
Well, I wanted to ask you and Ken, actually I want to give you just a tiny bit of background.
Here in Kentucky, we have a lot of folk legends.
My father was born here in 1903.
He grew up in The military.
He was in the 82nd Mounted Cavalry.
He was a weapons expert.
He was home out of the military in 1927 due to cutbacks, was hunting up in a gorge around Mammoth Cave, Cobrun, close to where I'm at right now.
And he saw a bird-like animal in the top of a snag.
He said approximately 100 yards away.
This guy was an expert shot, however, a .22-caliber weapon.
And he told me this story from the time I was a kid on going out into the woods.
I'd go out walking with me and with him.
And it bothered him so bad if a hawk or an eagle circled overhead, it would trouble him.
He said, you know, I really hate that because he thought this thing was going to carry him off.
He felt like it had that kind of power.
And he described it as having bat-like wings folded around it and approximately the height of a man.
He had 20, 15 vision.
The other thing I wanted to tell you is I was in Point Pleasant the very first of the year 1970 because they had another flare-up of the Mothman type sighting.
But Ken, you know, with so many sightings like this, you must have some insight into are these transdimensional or are they some prehistoric carryover we just haven't cornered?
Well, I think when addressing the problem of flying cryptids, I think we're dealing with a lot of different things here, and I think that that kind of muddies the water, so to speak.
In the case of the flying humanoids, things like Mothman, Owlman, and so forth, I think you would absolutely have to say that we're dealing with something supernatural or spectral in nature.
You know, they don't resemble anything in the fossil history.
They seem to vanish as quickly as they appear in sort of a supernatural fashion.
But on the other hand, you have these, again, these thunderbird-type creatures, which is kind of what you're talking about there, this giant prehistoric bird-like creature that could very well be some type of surviving pterosaur or pterotorn or something from our prehistoric past.
So I think there's a bit of a confusion there because people tend to lump all of the flying cryptids together and associate them when, in fact, we may be looking at something that is cryptozoologically viable in terms of a surviving prehistoric giant bird or flying reptile.
And then you also have these reports of these spectral mothman-type flying humanoids.
And, you know, I think people tend to lump all of that stuff together just because they're big, scary flying things.
Well, if you consider 600 miles neighborly, but you're just west of me there, a little hopskipping.
You know, that's interesting.
Texas does seem to have right after Mexico, and I guess I consider Texas a bit of an extension of Mexico in terms of geography, that we have a lot of weird flying things that are reported here in Texas as well.
Yeah, shapeshifters, very, very scary in terms of, you know, different interpretations of shape-shifting type creatures.
The Oswang, you know, we kind of started off at the beginning of the show, bit of a shapeshifter.
In Alaska, there is a creature known as the Kushtaka, the land otter man, greatly feared.
We did an episode on that, and people were very, very terrified.
The native people were very terrified of that.
And then, of course, the Navajo traditions in the United States of the skinwalkers, essentially shape-shifting type beings.
Now, in South America, I have a contact who has been sending me accounts and sightings of something known as the Lobazon.
And the Lobazon is essentially a South American werewolf, a shapeshifter.
And there are accounts of these creatures actually transforming, you know, from the shape of a human into a kind of a monstrous wolf-like type of creature.
So, you know, again, just like with the gnomes, you have all of these global, disparate legends or myths of these shape-shifting creatures.
And as you said at the top, Art, myths don't come from nothing.
There is some grain or shred of truth behind all of these myths or legends.
Now, my question is, do you think as far as the Sasquatch, Yeti, or whatever you want to call it goes, there's evidence that we crossbred with Neanderthals and some of their DNA remains in our current structure?
Do you think it would be possible for us to crossbreed with, say, a Sasquatch and perhaps some advanced, more powerful hybrid could come of it?
this is basically all wild speculation, but we would have to know how genetically close humans and Sasquatches are.
Now, if they are Neanderthals, which some people have theorized, or Denisovans, or some of these, you know, fairly recent sub-branches of Homo, the genus Homo, then yes, I guess theoretically it's possible.
But if you're talking about something that comes from a lineage, say, hundreds of thousands of years ago, like Gigantopithecus or Homo erectus or something like that, then the chances are that there has been so much time has passed since we genetically split at that point that we would not be able to successfully hybridize.
unidentified
But don't you think that given the time that people have been claiming they see Sasquatch and stuff, they've basically been on the same speed of biological evolution that we have, so we can assume that we're at least close enough?
I mean, I'm not saying that like with other species, like if we were to try to mate with Otterman, that would work.
Of course, there were these diabolical experiments that some of Stalin's scientists were trying to crossbreed humans and different great apes.
Again, it's a question of, and I don't pretend to be an expert in genetics, but it's a question of the time period that we split.
Case in point, dogs and wolves or dogs and coyotes can crossbreed fairly successfully because they only split about 15,000 years ago.
That's just a drop of water in the bucket.
But dogs and other caniforms like bears, for example, split about 15 million years ago.
And so that divergence was so long ago and have become so genetically diverse and different that there's no way that those types of animals can interbreed.
So, you know, again, it's a question of how long ago, whatever Sauce Watcher Bigfoot is, you know, how closely related are we to it?
Is it more of like a Neanderthal type of creature, or are we talking about something that split off from the human lineage, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago?
Well, there are controversial claims of DNA analysis that have been out there now for a few years.
A geneticist from Texas claims that she's actually collected Sasquatch DNA from, I believe, three different sources and that she has mapped that DNA and that it indicates, similar to what this gentleman is inferring, I think, some type of hybrid between a human and some type of archaic hominid.
But DNA is obviously it's a comparative science.
So, you know, if you don't have a source type of a Sasquatch DNA, then you have no basis for comparison.
So if someone produces DNA and says it's from a Sasquatch, there's no archetype that you can refer to.
So it's, you know, it's a bit of a circular type of problem, I guess.
I wanted to ask him, like, has any time during his research or his investigation, like, has he ever been threatened or harassed by, like, men in black or people of the government?
So I had an experience with one of these flying humanoids once, and it was a pretty shocking experience.
I was standing outside by my pool, and I had a light on the inside, just enough light to basically see out there.
And all of a sudden, just out of nowhere, this flying, sort of like a chupacabra thing flew down.
I saw it as clear as day, really.
And the crazy thing was, it had sort of red eyes.
And it was staring right at me.
And a friend of mine was out there, and he made a big yell as well.
And now's where I have to debunk myself because I kid you not, if there wouldn't have been someone else out there, I'd be telling you, I'd put my hand on the Bible and say this thing had a wingspan of 10, 15 feet.
In reality, what it was, it was a bat.
And this bat flew right in front of my face about three feet out and just hovered there.
But because of the perception and the light and everything, I would have sworn the thing was 10 feet tall.
So, you know, I just wanted to share that for my story, I wish it was real, but it's a debunked thing that thank God he was out there.
That's Jaffe, I think, from somewhere outside the country?
unidentified
South Korea, once again, our second time I've managed to get through to you.
So thank you for taking my call.
It's very much appreciated.
Sure.
So, yeah, this is interesting because I actually was going to call in just with a quick little story, but one of your last callers brought up the whole issue of crossbreeding and Sasquatch in particular.
And immediately a light went off in my head.
And I realized, I remembered a story from when I was a kid.
And you can actually find this online too.
Ken, you might have heard of this yourself.
British Columbia, back around the turn of the last century, that's the start of the 20th century, basically.
This Catholic nun was taking, leading a number of schoolgirls through the bush, from, I guess it was their school to some other place off in the distance, maybe a day trip or what have you.
And suddenly, apparently from just out of nowhere, out of the bush, there was this huge hairy beast appeared and jumped out, grabbed one of the little girls and ran off and disappeared, and she was gone.
Lo and behold, what happened was the next year, I guess it was, or maybe it was a year or two, the girl showed up back again in a similar location, a basic area.
And what did she have?
She had a little baby with her.
And it was apparently, according to the story, it was half ape, half human.
So like I said, that wasn't the story.
That wasn't what I was calling it originally.
But we can just go for that with that for now if you like.
There was another quick one I could add, but regarding acryptids and flying, what is it, angels?
No, not angels.
Acryptids?
What happened is I had a girlfriend who, well, what are those beasts called?
I had a girlfriend, and she basically, she careened off the road.
She was driving along in the van.
She had a couple of her kids with her, and she just lost control on one of these roads in up central interior, British Columbia.
She was going over a large embankment.
It was like a cliff, really serious situation from out of nowhere.
And this is the story she told me.
This is her own personal experience.
She's a pretty straight shooter, too.
So these giant wings appeared from out of nowhere, just as she was going over this steep embankment/slash cliff with her kids.
And these giant wings just covered the van from the front and stopped her right as she was heading off to face her doom.
And things would not have worked out too well for her and her family, obviously.
So have you ever heard anything like that along those lines with like a thunderbird slash angel slash God only knows what, appearing out of nowhere and saving people, not just being a malevolent sort of entity or force, but something that was helpful?
Well, there's actually one account in my book that refers to kind of a helpful flying humanoid, if you will, benevolent.
There's a story from Ecuador years ago.
It was documented by author Robert Traylons of these two young kids that were playing up on a mountainside in Ecuador and began to slip and fall off the mountain.
And as they were kind of hanging on the edge of this cliff, according to them, this angel-like figure, this winged humanoid figure flew down from the sky and actually grasped, you know, sort of grasped them up from certain doom and rescued them.
And when they got back to their village, that's the story they told, that they were rescued by this winged figure who subsequently became known as the Angel of Ecuador.
So that's really the only account I can think of in my book.
Just real quick, as far as the first story you mentioned about the girl getting kidnapped by a Sasquatch, there are different legends around the world.
For example, in Central America, there's something known as the Sisamite, which is the Central American version of Sasquatch.
And one of the beliefs that pertain to the Sisamite is that they will actually abduct young women in an Attempt to take them as brides.
Not that dissimilar from the old legends of the mountain gorillas.
Before the mountain gorilla was discovered and scientifically described, it was portrayed as this kind of a veritable King Kong, you know, this monster ape that would abduct young women and take them hostage.
So it's interesting you have those different legends around the world.
My dad and I were hunting in one area that we didn't like to frequent much because my dad had a bad experience back in the 70s that he didn't like to talk about.
Short version, something hunted him.
He never saw what it was, but it hunted him.
But we were back in this area by the time I'd been born, it was about 13, 14, and we were back in there a ways.
And we'd been hunting all day, so we stopped for a potty break.
So my dad went behind one tree, and being a girl, I went for the bush.
And I'm sitting there with a 30-30, and I saw my dad walk around in front of me and go up onto the ridge we were hunting on.
So I'm like, oh, well, he's done.
So I finished up and climbed up out of the bush and was up behind him.
So we're hiking back in, and I'm following him.
And my dad was one of those people, he always had to look behind him to see who was behind him, if he knew.
Well, I'm following him, I'm following him, or I think I'm following him.
And turning back and looking at me, and like about quarter mile, half mile of hiking behind him, I'm like, something just set off my spider senses, and I'm like, this isn't my dad.
So six years, seven years out in the woods with him.
I knew my dad pretty well.
And so I just stopped and I'm like, hey, turn around.
And he didn't stop and turn around.
Like, even if Ben screwing with me, he would turn around.
Whatever this was didn't stop.
It kept walking and it walked around a spruce tree in front of me and disappeared.
And I'm standing there and I cocked the gun because I'm like, I'm walking behind this person.
I can hear their footsteps.
I can see the light hitting their body.
And they just step around a tree and disappear.
So I'm standing there and I've told this to my husband.
I'm not a person that believes things unless I see them.
I mean, I've been in the woods most of my life.
I'm sitting there looking dead on at where this person disappeared.
And something comes running at me.
I can hear it, but I can't see it.
But it's like predator.
I can see the light being displaced by it.
So it's running at me, and I opened fire, and that's how my dad found where I was at, because he heard the gunshot.
So I opened fire, but I don't know if I hit it.
I had been trained never to shoot at something unless you saw what you're shooting at.
That's true.
Gun safety 101.
Nothing dropped, and it didn't seem like I hit anything, but my dad comes running up onto the ridge, and he's like, you know, we get into an argument because he thinks I'm just, you know, shooting bleep.
And I'm like, I'm not just shooting things, you know, I was following you.
So we finally hash it out.
I'm like, no.
You walked in front of me up onto the ridge.
I followed you because you were done using the bathroom.
I've been hiking behind you for 20 minutes now.
And someone or something walked around that tree in front of us and disappeared.
And then something ran at me that I couldn't see.
Well, my dad's decision was, let's get the heck out of here.
So we noped out of here.
He noped out of here.
But that's when he told me that a few years back in the 70s when he was in the Air Force, he'd been hunting in that area and it was getting close to dark.
And he always walked around arms.
He carried a 45-hand cannon and he had a rifle.
He always carried the hand cannon in his hand because that'll stop a bear.
He'd been hunting in this area and he kept hearing something behind him.
So he thought it was a bear, circled back, circled back, never caught this bear.
He's almost to his pickup truck and whatever it was was about 30 feet behind him.
And this is a clear trail back then, so it hadn't grown up.
He's looking around, he can't see it.
So he pulled the 44 and right when it's about 10 feet from behind him, he turns around.
There is nothing there.
But the entire trip back to his truck, he said it felt like something was just standing on his neck.
And he couldn't see it.
And I haven't gone back to that.
I even told my husband, I've been hunting since I was eight.
The Klinget people talk about its ability or, you know, its desire to lure you out into the wilderness.
And one of the ways that it does this is by assimilating or taking the form of someone that you know.
So when you said that this thing looked like your father, but you could tell that it wasn't instinctively, and that it was attempting to lead you into the wilderness, that sounds pretty much like the stories that I heard about the Kushtaka.
I mean, when you look at the sheer distance, you know, obviously it's difficult sometimes to accurately gauge something in flight, but you have the scale or you have the perspective here of the buildings next to it, and you can tell how far down the street the photographer is from the object.
Yeah, I would say pretty huge, pretty prehistoric.
And you mentioned that they come around at dire times.
Well, that was sure as heck a dire time.
Caller, you're back on the air with Ken.
Hi.
unidentified
Hello.
Yeah, I was just asking Ken if you knew about the Lachusos because for some reason, South Texas is like saturated with like bird-like stories.
Like, for instance, maybe like back in the 80s, there was that big bird story.
And everyone and their mom had an incident with the big bird.
I wasn't born around the time, but my folks would tell me that this thing was at least like 15 feet, you know, big and huge wingspan and stuff like that.
And I was just wondering if Ken might have an explanation for that because, I mean, for some reason, one way or another, like, there's been so many sightings over here of lechusas and, you know, and all these other big, great giant birds.
And I also had a question for Art.
Are you familiar with the Mananangal from the Philippines?
Yeah, I'm afraid I don't have anything on that one.
But my first book is actually about the big bird.
It's called Big Bird, Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters, and it addresses the accounts of something known as the Big Bird, which was sighted starting in 1976.
You were close, but it literally became worldwide news because there were so many sightings of this enormous flying creature.
It was either a giant bird or a giant pterodactyl type of creature.
And I still continue to get reports of the big bird.
I've gotten some very recently from people around here in the San Antonio area.
And as far as La Latusa, I have one quick, very quick chilling story.
I spoke to a family.
I interviewed a family from a traditional part of Mexico who told me that there was this giant, ugly bird that was terrorizing their village.
And at one point, somebody actually went out and shot this thing and killed it.
And when they got to the location where this thing had gone down to the ground, it had actually taken on the form of a woman who was suspected, a local woman who was suspected of being a witch.
So that is one example of a Letusa story that you have this witch who is essentially shape-shifting into the form of this hideous bird.
That's kind of what the Aswang in the Philippines does.
They're thought to be originally some sort of humans and some sort of witch or some sort of...
Anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about, except as my wife has told me.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Ken.
Please go ahead.
unidentified
Yeah, Art.
My name's Kelly.
I'm from north central Washington state, and I got a story for you guys.
Okay.
I had a run-in.
I've had a few encounters with some real Sasquatches, a whole family of them, as a matter of fact.
Once my friend and I decided we were going to go plant ourselves smack dab in the middle of the Sasquatch country.
So we went 45 miles to the end of the road, and then we hiked six miles up and in and around.
And about 2,000 feet elevation gain, by the time we got there, it was totally dark.
I shined my light ahead of him, and I saw these red eyes glowing right in front of him.
So I grabbed him by his back.
Stop, Don't go that way.
And it was right on the edge of the clear cut, right where we almost got to where we were supposed to camp.
So we went around the others' way a couple hundred yards.
And when we got to where we were going to set up camp in the middle of this clear cut, because avalanche or snow sludge came through and wiped everything out.
And right over there in that exact spot, right where I had just grabbed him, all of a sudden we heard a 300-pound like boulder just go crashing through the brush.
And it was like a totally flat spot.
And that's when it started.
They pretty much left us alone all night, but the next morning we started hearing the rock knockers up around us, up on the cliff.
And then we started hearing what sounded like 300-pound giant woodpeckers.
And I figured it was them.
They were making this noise with their throats, but really loud.
And they were moving around a lot over in the woods, but we couldn't see anything.
And then we heard him, the screaming howlers, the big daddy started coming up the valley, letting out this roar every minute for a half an hour straight.
And he screamed for like 30 seconds.
He sounded like the Westmoreland PA howler, if you've ever heard that.
Yeah, we hiked out of there and he let us go.
That was just one.
And if anything, you should know, Ken and you should know about Lloyd Pye.
He talks about how the Sasquatch are really the hominids and they are the missing link to us Homo sapiens.
I believe, telling the truth, I really, I felt like a couple other encounters I had when I came close to Sasquatch, I never saw him.
But one other time, I heard him speak to me and I just got the sense to leave him alone that they actually, I didn't even, I didn't have a light on me at the time.
I just heard him speak and in the brush.
And yeah, I said, don't take another step over there.
You might fall off and go into the river and go bye-bye.
And I heard him say back to me from about 10 feet away, bye-bye.
Yeah, it was in Pennsylvania at a place called Otter Lake.
And at the closest, it was about a foot and a half from where I was.
And it had a very human kind of features to its face with elongated ears, very large human hands, very long, thin arms, like a white kind of wool or something like that all over it.
And it had its legs almost appeared to be like what you would see in like a satanic goat god kind of thing, you know?
Well, you know, the first thing that kind of springs to mind is, you know, you said you're in Pennsylvania, and of course, they have the great legends and sightings of something known as the Jersey Devil, which is primarily reported down in southern New Jersey, but there are some crossover accounts from Pennsylvania.
Now, did you say you said this creature also had wings?
Yeah, well, it sounds like a chimera, kind of a mixture of different animal characteristics, humanoid and some animalistic.
You know, it could actually fit very well within the paradigm of flying humanoids because, as we've been discussing for the whole show, they take all shapes and forms.
It's almost as if they're shapeshifters in some respect.
But, you know, if nothing else, you get a reprieve here because the eyes are glowing yellow instead of red, right?
I think the vast majority of people that have had these experiences, obviously, for obvious reasons, are fearful of ridicule and having their credibility and character question.
But when you create a climate or an environment where you can talk about these things in an open setting, then I think a lot of people have seen these things, whatever they are, or encountered these things and have never come forward.
It also reminds me of something known as the goat man.
And the goat man is a strange creature that's been reported around North America.
It's kind of got a kind of similar to the mythological Greek satyr, you know, kind of like a human form with the lower half of a goat and kind of a demonic aspect to it.
I'm from West Virginia, a huge Mothman enthusiast, of course.
I grew up about five miles away from where the Woody Derenberger injured cold event happened.
So I've been interested in that for many years and have done a little bit of research on everything.
And I actually go out to the old TNT site on a fairly regular basis and, you know, just kind of fiddle around there.
I've never really seen anything out there.
But in all of my research, after I, you know, I became interested in the moss man and everything, I came across an article, and I guess it was in France in the 1800s, that some French miners, I'm not sure what they were mining, had blown, I guess, part of a mountain out, and there was some type of flying reptile that was reported that it came out of there.
I'm familiar with the account, and I think John Keel documented in some of his books.
You know, as strange as this sounds from someone that investigates monsters for a living, I am very skeptical about some of these old newspaper accounts from the old, you know, the late 1800s and early 1900s.
I get the sense, having read a lot of these types of articles, that back in the day, they oftentimes would take some, shall we say, creative license with some of these stories in order to sell more newspapers.
But not to totally rain on your parade, there's an even more famous account that's relative to the United States.
In 1886 or 1890, according to an article in the Tombstone, Arizona Epitaph newspaper, there was a giant pterodactyl that was shot just outside of Tombstone in the Whetstone Mountains, and there was actually a photograph taken of this thing stretched out across a barn with several people standing in front of it.
So it's known as the Thunderbird photo, and it's an elusive photograph that may or may not exist that could conclusively prove that these giant pterodactyl-type thunderbirds exist.
But although many people have claimed to have seen this photograph, no one has been able to produce a copy of it in modern times.
unidentified
Wow.
Nice.
That's something I'll have to research.
And then also, whenever the scholars started calling in about the hybrid creatures, I actually had a, it reminded me of a time when I was younger.
I grew up in central West Virginia in the mountains, pretty rural area.
I'm a hunter, fisherman, outdoors person for years.
This has happened when I was younger, about five or six, as me, my mother, and my sister were driving home.
We lived out in the middle of nowhere on a mountain, and we had two neighbors.
And for the longest time, they'd been reported seeing something that looked like a fox or a raccoon hybrid.
And they said, you know, it looked like the markings of a raccoon, but it stood pretty tall, almost taller than what a fox would stand.
It had longer legs, had kind of like the bandit-looking markings on the face, but then it had a ring tail.
And they said it, you know, it didn't look like a fox's tail.
It's kind of bushy.
They said this was a long, thin tail that had rings on it.
And I was wondering if it was possible for foxes and raccoons to, I guess, mate, and you get a crossbreed of those two animals.
And again, just as I was saying earlier, although they are in the same family of caniforms, foxes and raccoons diverged millions of years ago, so they're not genetically close enough to mate.
But you do have animals, raccoon-like animals, like coattis and red pandas and all kinds of, you know, the raccoon family is very diverse, and around the world you have different subspecies that look very different from the raccoons we know here in North America.
So maybe it was an escaped animal or something like that.