Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joe Nickell (Amherst, NY) has been called "the modern Sherlock Holmes" and "the real-life Scully" (from the X-Files). He has been on the trail of man-beasts and other mysterious creatures and phenomena for four decades. Since 1995 he has been the world’s only fulltime, professional, science-based paranormal investigator. His careful, often innovative investigations have won him international respect in a field charged with controversy. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently Real or Fake? Studies in Authentication and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. See www.joenickell.com for more.

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TRACKING THE MAN-BEASTS

Prometheus Books

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................11Introduction..................................................................13Chapter 1: Monstrosities......................................................21Chapter 2: Dwarfs among us....................................................27Chapter 3: The Real Giants....................................................35Chapter 4: Wild Men—Or Not..............................................43Chapter 5: Yeti— The Abominable Snowman.................................55Chapter 6: Sasquatch/Bigfoot..................................................63Chapter 7: Tracking Bigsuit!..................................................77Chapter 8: Man-Beasts Range Far...............................................85Chapter 9: Werewolves—Or Weren't?.......................................101Chapter 10: On the Trail of the Loup-Garou....................................109Chapter 11: Of Vampirology....................................................121Chapter 12: Searching for Vampire Graves......................................131Chapter 13: Chupacabras!......................................................141Chapter 14: Other Supernaturals...............................................147Chapter 15: Alien Monster at Flatwoods........................................159Chapter 16: Attack of the "Little Green Men"..................................167Chapter 17: Mothman Metamorphosis.............................................175Chapter 18: The Humanoids.....................................................183Chapter 19: unidentified Flying Humanoids.....................................193Chapter 20: Hybrids...........................................................199Chapter 21: Merpeople.........................................................207Chapter 22: Lure of Swamp Creatures...........................................213Afterword.....................................................................223Appendix: The North American Bigfoot—Image and Myth.....................225Index.........................................................................231

Chapter One

From ancient history, abnormal creatures—both animal and human—were termed monstrosities. The births of these so-called monsters were typically explained in superstitious terms that invoked the supernatural: they were held to presage disaster or thought to be evidence of divine judgment. Some thought they resulted from mating with animals (Thompson 1968, 17). Often, they were put to death (Fiedler 1993, 21) (see figure 1.1).

Between discussions of "an infant born with two heads" and "a monster with four arms and four feet endowed with but one head" (from today's perspective, obviously the result of incomplete separation of a single, fertilized egg), seventeenth-century writer John Bulwer (1653) commented, "these apparitions that be contrarie to nature, happen not without the providence of Almighty God, but for the punishing and admonishing of men, these things by just judgment are often permitted, not but that man hath a great hand in these monstrosities." He did note that the "monster" with eight limbs, "being baptized," had "lived some time afterwards."

Human Monsters

Among the earliest records of monstrosities, ancient Babylonian texts show that those in the form of newborn infants were among the divinatory images consulted by astrologers. Here is a selection from some of the texts (translated from cuneiform writing impressed into clay tablets) from circa 2800 BCE:

When a woman gives birth to an infant;—that has the ears of a lion; there will be a powerful King in the country....

That has a bird's beak; the country will be peaceful.... That has no well-marked sex; calamity and affliction will seize upon the land....

That has no feet; the canals of the country will be cut (intercepted) and the house ruined....

Other references in the Babylonian texts are to "six toes on each foot," "the right foot in the form of a fish's tail," and many others, including "three feet, two in their normal position (attached to the body) and the third between them" (quoted in Thompson 1968, 25–29). The last mentioned, for example, is reminiscent of the modern oddity Francesco A. "Frank" Lentini (1889–1966), billed in circus sideshows as the "Three-Legged Wonder" (Nickell 2005, 131–32). Such similarities between past and present oddities confirm that many of the same deformities were known nearly five millennia ago.

Still later, as Thompson (1968, 30) observes:

The curious beliefs that gathered round the occurrence of monsters in early times were common also among the ancient Greeks and Romans, and there is ample evidence of this in the mythological stories in such impossible beings as centaurs, fauns with extremities like goats, and creatures with pectoral eyes, syrens, nereids, double-headed monsters and the other fearsome creatures that play a prominent part in many of their legends and traditions.

("Syrens" [or sirens] and nereids were sea nymphs.)

Exhibited "Freaks"

Over the centuries, there are few certain records of monstrosities until the close of the eleventh century. However, in the year 945, a pair of Armenian boys joined at their abdomens (very much like the later "Siamese twins," Chang and Eng Bunker, once exhibited by P. T. Barnum) were exhibited in Constantinople. "They excited great interest and curiosity," remarks Thompson (1968, 30–31), "but they were removed by order of the authorities, as it was considered at the time that such abnormal creatures presaged evil."

In later circuses and carnivals, such human oddities were termed freaks (as in freaks of nature) and were exhibited in what were typically called freak shows. Fiedler (1993, 23–24) observed that, beyond the merely disabled, "[o]nly the true freak challenges the conventional boundaries between male and female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and other, and consequently between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth."

Whatever their era, examples of human monstrosities include midgets and dwarfs at one end of the size spectrum and giants at the other. (These will be discussed in chapters 2 and 3, respectively.) Other examples are conjoined twins (like those already described), hirsute people (especially those entirely covered with long hair), and certain others regarded as human-animal hybrids (see part 5).

Of course, there have been exaggerated descriptions of monstrosities, many occurring over time due to processes well known to folklorists. Moreover, those fantastic creatures represented in monster books were often "repetitions, depicted with greater freedom of imagination, of those described in earlier times" (Thompson 1968, 30).

Real or Fake?

There have also been outright fakes, like the infant exhibited at Paris in 1593 with an enormous head. A suspicious magistrate investigated, and soon the parents confessed that they had made an incision in the crown for the insertion of a reed, and—having blown into it in increments over some months (using wax to seal up the hole)—had inflated...