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Jan. 20, 2026 - Skeptoid
18:53
Skeptoid #1024: The Van Meter Visitors

A century-old hoax takes wing again, proof that good stories never stay buried. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Natural Selection of Stories 00:06:32
Late on an autumn night in 1903, the citizens of a small Iowa town were torn from their slumber by the sinister appearance of a large creature with a glowing horn, four limbs, and bat-like wings.
Notable locals engaged the creature with firearms, but their weapons had no effect.
More than a century later, how can we make sense of the chilling tale of the Vanmeter visitors?
And in our extended content for premium members, we're going to talk about what drives the creation of amazing but implausible stories in mass media.
Coming up next on Skeptoid.
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Since 2013, the small town of Vanmeter, Iowa has become closely associated with a pair of monsters ripped right out of the headlines of 1903 newspapers.
But except for a 1950s mention in Fate magazine and a 2009 article in Fortian Times, there had been little notice of the story since its original appearance in newspapers of the early 20th century in Middle America.
In this episode, we're going to look at the birth and evolution of a monster and how such creatures can spring back to life after long periods of dormancy.
The strange story of the Van Meter Visitors is one of the most cinematic and interesting narratives I've read in my work as a skeptical monster investigator.
Reading through the original coverage and then subsequent articles, lets one watch the transformation of the story.
Today, it's common for media outlets to repackage a story from another outlet that's too credulous as a means of getting around journalistic integrity constraints.
We're not saying this story is true.
We're saying that the Podunk Advisor said it was true and we're just passing it along is all.
A good example is the 2008 Georgia Bigfoot in a Freezer hoax.
Outlets like CNN and major newspapers covered the story exactly in this way as if repeating a story framed as an outlandish claim justified its national exposure.
This practice is old and we see it identically played out in 1903.
Working backwards from the first printed news story of the Van Meter monsters, which was published on October 4th, 1903 in the Des Moines Daily News, the events started on the morning of September 28th at 1 a.m.
The initial reports describe a man seeing an uncanny light moving between buildings.
The next night, a resident was awakened by a bright light and confronted by a creature that seemed half human and half animal with great bat-like wings.
Its light came from a single blunt horn on its forehead.
The residents fired five shots, which had no effect.
A cashier, fearing a robbery, stood guard at the bank.
At 1 a.m., he saw the mysterious light in a great form in the front window.
He fired, breaking the glass, but the only evidence left were strange three-toed tracks found outside.
Another witness saw the monster sitting on a telephone pole, descending it using its large beak to aid in the process.
When shot at, the creature emitted an odor that seemed to stupefy the man.
The monster was described as making great leaps.
The climax involved several witnesses gathering near an abandoned coal mine.
Shortly before dawn, two bioluminescent monsters emerged from the cavern.
A crowd of men with guns fired upon them.
Their combined firepower failed to stop the creatures, which slowly descended back into the mine shaft, prompting the town to barricade the entrance.
And the phrasing is quite colorful.
The creature seemed half human and half animal with great bat-like wings.
The bank teller, fearing a robber, tore himself from the bosom of his family to stand guard.
The creature climbed down the pole after the manner of a parrot using its huge beak.
These details were all in that first story, but it was not a tale written by a seasoned newspaper reporter.
It was full of colorful language and the names of many citizens, often with first names reduced to initials.
Eug Griffith, Dr. Alcott, Peter Dunn, O. V. White, Sidney Gregg, J.L. Platt, and a Professor Martin are all name-checked in the story, but none give quotes or eyewitness accounts.
Just as in modern news, the story got picked up by other outlets, but those outlets didn't simply reprint it.
They edited for a more journalistic style, and these edits changed the tenor of the story considerably, pushing it further away from the adventurous and giving it a more emotionally detached perspective.
Compare Presently the noise opened up again as though Satan and a regiment of imps were coming forth for battle.
Or the reception they received would have sunk the Spanish fleet to how the St. Paul Globe retold the story a week later on October 11th.
Shortly after midnight, J.L. Platt, foreman of the brick plant, heard a peculiar sound in an abandoned coal mine, and as the men had reported a similar sound before, a body of volunteers started an investigation.
Presently, the monster emerged from the shaft, accompanied by a smaller one.
Sailing Into Skeptical Adventures 00:02:28
A score of shots were fired without effect.
Storytelling is subject to a kind of natural selection.
Practitioners don't always know what will make the story take off or spread, but as they apply their editing and writing skills, they sand off parts that don't work and patch in bits that do.
Whether through malice or grammar, through creativity or sincerely correcting apparent inconsistencies, the story changes.
Sometimes such changes are all that's needed to make a story spread wildly.
Other times the changes kill the magic and the story dies, or at least goes fallow.
Stories are like vampires in a horror movie franchise.
They don't stay dead.
But just as this story was spreading through reprints and rewrites back in 1903, the citizens of Van Meter indignantly fought back against the narrative, asserting that it had been made up.
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American Sky Monsters Explained 00:06:39
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On October 6th, 1903, the Des Moines Daily Capital published a combination letter to the editor and commentary that read in part, The town of Vanmeter is justly indignant over a series of articles that have appeared in the daily news, and the Capitol is in receipt of a number of letters from citizens of that place who feel highly indignant over the matter.
The articles alleged that the town was highly wrought up over the alleged affair.
In a letter received by the Capitol, it was stated, It is very apparent on the face of every sane person that it is pure fabrication.
But to the residents of the town here, it is the height of foolishness.
It seems as though the corporation manufactured this story from an incident or two and sent it into the news.
They published the yarn and then began to investigate its source.
They sent several telephone calls to the central office here asking concerning the party and stating that he was the author of their rampant story.
That is generally their way of doing business.
When faced with a surprising story of a monster, there are several tools we can use to at least test the plausibility of the claims.
We could start with psychologist Ray Hyman's categorical imperative.
Before investigating an outlandish claim, we should check to see whether there's anything to investigate at all.
Did anything happen?
Since 2013, a lot of ink has been spilled describing the incidents and people in Vanmeter, but most of those sources are built off the work of three investigators and one source.
Chad Lewis, Noah Voss, and Kevin Lee Nelson's 2013 book, The Van Meter Visitor, A True and Mysterious Encounter with the Unknown.
The authors pulled together a lot of details about the town and the story using vintage newspaper articles, oral histories, old photos, maps, and more.
They do at least inquire about whether the story might have been a hoax, but they largely dismiss this idea under the misconception that in order for it to be a hoax, too many people would have had to have been involved.
They don't seem to seriously consider the idea that the original author, Van Meter local Harry H. Phillips, might have just made the whole thing up.
Longtime Skeptoid listeners will know that this would not be the first time a newspaper article was determined to be a make-em-up.
And that's relevant for contextualizing the Van Meter story.
Two major narrative currents converge in the Vanmeter story, both of which had been circulating in American popular culture since at least the late 19th century.
The first is what might be called the American dragon tradition.
In the mid-1800s, as the United States was still forming a national identity, large portions of the country were perceived, especially by urban coastal audiences, as untamed wilderness.
In that context, it was not difficult to imagine dragons occupying American skies.
Newspapers of the period regularly reported encounters with flying serpents, winged reptiles, and other mysterious hybrids across the Midwest and West from the 1860s through the early 1900s.
These accounts featured biologically implausible creatures presented in dramatic encounter narratives, their plausibility propped up by a public that lacked a firm understanding of evolutionary constraints.
Before Darwinian natural selection and genetics were widely understood, there was little popular awareness of what kinds of organisms were fundamentally impossible rather than merely undiscovered.
The Van Meter monster contains several such implausibilities.
Most notably, it is described as having a bioluminescent horn capable of emitting a sustained blinding beam of light.
While brief flashes or glows exist in nature, nothing resembling a high-intensity biological spotlight has any precedent.
More significant are the creature's limbs.
Large terrestrial animals are tetrapods, four-limbed vertebrates.
Birds and bats fly by modifying their forelimbs into wings, but no large animal possesses both four functional legs and two functional wings.
Such creatures would be a hexapod, requiring an entirely separate evolutionary lineage of large six-limbed animals.
If we exclude visitors from another planet as an explanation under Occam's razor, the reported anatomy alone strongly suggests an exaggeration or fiction.
Another narrative fresh in the minds of readers would have been the airship mystery of 1896 to 97.
This was a wave of newspaper reports describing mysterious craft in American skies.
While there is no credible evidence that such airships ever actually existed, they saturated the press at a moment when powered flight felt imminent.
Writers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had primed the public imagination and readers were already looking skyward.
Newspapers filled that expectation with fantastical machines, inventors, and even alien pilots.
The point is not that the Van Meter story consciously copied earlier dragon tales or airship reports, but that the newspaper ecosystem of the time readily accommodated such stories.
They were not aggressively filtered by modern standards of skepticism or editorial restraint.
And if we're honest, similar dynamics still operate today.
After the initial story ran in the Des Moines Daily News, there was a flurry of knockoff stories, and then silence.
Prior to the 2013 publication of Lewis, Voss, and Nelson's book, there had been very little coverage of this incident.
While skeptics will find the book a bit credulous, given the implausibility of the monster at the heart of the legend, it does have a lot of very useful research data aggregated into a single, very readable volume.
But it's also the book that put the monster back on the map.
For more than a century, the story had gone to sleep, but now there are more than 40 podcasts, dozens of books, and of course hundreds of YouTube videos about the incident, nearly all of them credulous.
A lot has changed in the world since 1903.
Supporting Free Critical Thinking 00:03:09
We split the atom, connected the world with computers, and mastered buttery-flavored microwave popcorn.
Yet, when it comes time to do battle with implausible flying subterranean monsters, the best defense we have today is the same as back in 1903.
Well-honed skepticism and critical thinking.
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