We can also find a number of small aspects of these 'invented' stories which frequently crop up in real monster cases, such as glowing eyes, a sulphurous smell and time suspension during the encounter. Others will occur to us as we look at some of the case histories in this book.
This all should warn that the relationship berween fact and fiction is not so much a sharp dividing line as a curious blend of mutual interaction.
In order to summarize some of the points made in this chapter it would be opportune to give a few examples of actual sightings.
A typical case from just before the pre-modem era was investigated by Dr Michele Clare and occurred in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, during the winter of 1937.
The wimess, Robert, was walking his dog along a dark lane near one of the coal pits that dot the area when he observed a strange figure running down a steep slope. It was evening, and dark, but the behaviour of the figure was recognizable as most unusual because it ran straight at a fence and went
through
it as if nothing were there.This might at first sound like some sort of ghost story, except that the being passed within inches of Robert and was plainly not human (dead or alive). It was only just over five feet tall, covered in hair and had claw-like hands and feet. The head also appeared to be pointed. The figure continued its mad dash straight towards the railway line heading into Sheffield, and Robert's dog decided it had had enough and bolted home.
The description of the entity was rather like that of a popular
ized visitor from Hades: 'You look as if you've seen the devil!'
38 MIND MONSTERS
his mother exclaimed when she first saw Robert's ashen face.
'I have; was all Robert need reply
This simple story illustrates the common theme of animal reaction (as if animals 'sense' things we do not) and also shows one of the problems of interpretation in such cases. Robert had his own views on who or what the figure was. Others would have formed the conclusion it was a spectre, whilst a couple of decades later the press would have been looking for the space
ship out of which the 'alien' had emerged. 16
We can update this story to the space age very easily by looking at the case of Gary, now an engineer at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, one of the busiest terminals in the world. He wrote to tell me of his experiences when in his late teens.
It was in the winter of 1978. Gary was living in Illinois and standing by the bathroom window when 'suddenly a light in the comer caused me to stare at it. A white, round, completely unbelievable form slowly emerged through the no-see-through glass. It came just inside the inner pane and said "Boo" - then slowly retreated back out and was gone
One is tempted to smile at such a story, especially when we examine Gary's sketch of the vapourish face, round eyes that glowed red and the peculiar mouth. However, this was only one experience amidst many others. Gary has gone through a life
time of seeing strange things in the skies around Chicago and inside his bedroom, including some quite frightening monster
apparitions. His evaluation of these encounters is, almost inevit
ably, that he has been abducted by space aliens. In 1987, when he first wrote to me, that was the 'in vogue' solution in the USA.
But is that true in any
real
sense, or just the contemporary evaluation of a much longer standing problem?To him these things are real, and that is what counts. But note here the interesting idea that the monstrous form materialized out of a patch of misty light. It emerged from nothing by way of an amorphous blob.
Much more traditional monsters were seen by a woman who wrote to me about her many and varied adventures. By profes
sion she is an astrologer and her experiences include everything from 'standing up and feeling that there were two of me, and not being sure which was the real me' (probably a relevant observa
tion) to a meeting in Swiss Cottage, London that Robert from
Rotherham would have found familiar Here she met 'a man in a red track suit, tall and dark and looking rather like the old pictures of the devil'.
Howevet; amidst these many visions of unusual forms the most interesting reported by our astrologer took place in May
1972 when she was on a coach tour of Eastern Europe.
It was in the middle of the night and she was somewhere near Posen in Poland. Ahead of her a sister coach was travelling the same homebound route. All occupants of both vehicles were asleep. Suddenly: 'I saw a group of "Gremlins" on the roof of
the bus. They were the size of a child aged seven or eight, but very human in appearance, yet obviously not human:
She describes these fugitives from a Steven Spielberg movie as 'not quite solid, yet not transparent' and gleefully playing about on the roof, aware that the humans right below them had no understanding they were there. Whilst she tried to persuade herself that she was 'hallucinating' she continued to see them for many minutes. The driver of her coach, who was (presum
ably!) awake, apparently saw nothing and she never mentioned the figures to him. Her view is that she was specially attuned to being able to observe these monsters, whereas others were not. 17
We might speculate endlessly about some sort of experience on the edge between wakefulness and sleep (where vivid hallucinations are not uncommon). Also I think we g;ain interesting insights into her perception of reality when we learn that earlier the same night (on the road between Smolensk and Moscow) she says the bus was followed by a UFO. Yet, from what we can g;ather about the date and the time, and her description of this object evaluated as a 'spaceship', it might well have been the moon, which was full on the 28 May 1972, low
on the horizon and in the right position.
But how does somebody fail to recognize an object as familiar as the moon? The answer to that question is yet another that is probably important.
Sometimes the object that is involved in the encounter is very ambiguous and interpretation of what it may be is imposed from outside. This is much more likely to happen in this day and age of media hysteria where in order to sell a story we have to pin a label on it first.
40 MIND MONSTERS
Two cases in 1988 demonstrate this well.
just before 5 a.m. on the summer's morning of 20 January 1988 the Knowles family were driving their 1984 Ford along the Eyre Highway between Perth and Adelaide in southern Australia. According to the testimony of Mrs Faye Knowles and her three sons, including Sean (the driver), a white glow first appeared in the east. T hen, before they knew what was happen
ing, the egg-like mass was directly above them and Sean was struggling to retain control. Mrs Knowles put her hand through the open window and felt a spongey texture to the blob floating invisibly above their heads. Sean, now speeding to get away, burst a tyre and the Ford screeched to a halt.
Leaping from the car they fled to a bush beside the road, with the invisible 'thing' still nearby and humming. A foul stench had invaded the car with a black mist, which they assumed came from the thing that followed them, and it was some minutes before they had the composure to come out of hiding, see that the mass had gone, change tyres and drive on to the police station at Ceduna.
Excellent and rapid investigation was carried out by Ray Brooke and others of a local investigation team (UFORA).
Whilst the sincerity of the family was obvious and something clearly had distressed them, analysis of the physical evidence (e.g. the black ash left in the car) proved inconclusive, as this ttimed out to be quite like worn brake-lining.
Of much more concern was the response of the media. One·
TV company intercepted the car on the family's way home from the police, signed them up with lucrative offers and soon the case became a major international story. The car was taken over for a 'tour' by an entrepeneur Signposts warning motorists of low flying UFOs appeared and front page reports on the case were in papers all over the world within 24 hours. The Knowles family were not really to blame It is the way of the supematurak world.
The dark mass was now clearly identified as a 'UFO', the car had been 'attacked' and 'driven off the road' and the whole story
began to lose itself amidst its own exaggerations. Over in Britain, the tabloids wrote it up in graphic detail, e.g. the
Daily Star
's 'UFO hijack terror' and the even more specificDaily Mirror
headline 'The pong from outer space'.