Phantoms and Monsters

Well....'Something' Was Filmed In Pennsylvania
Alaskan Cryptid: The 'Hairy Man'
Reader Response to Recent Posts
Rare Natural Phenomenon Appears In Snowy UK

Well....'Something' Was Filmed In Pennsylvania

Posted: 10 Jan 2010 04:26 PM PST

Click for video - enhanced

Statement with video: Residents of this small Pa. town are concerned of recent sightings and strange noises being heard at night of what appears to be some sort of big foot human looking type creature. The creature though, is white in color. A homeowner captured this footage after they heard a disturbance in the back yard of their wooded property. This homeowner and others in this town had previously heard strange noises and disturbances for the last two weeks or so prior to this being captured on film.

NOTE: This video was forwarded to me (it may even have been the person who filmed it...I don't know). Nonetheless, if I would have run across something in the woods in the middle of the night with only a flashlight and a camcorder, I would have said much more than 'what was that?' My best guess is that it was someone who got lost on their way to the cross burning. Your guess is probably much better...Lon

Alaskan Cryptid: The 'Hairy Man'

Posted: 10 Jan 2010 09:28 AM PST

travelinalaska - The Urayuli or "Hairy Man" is a famous Cryptid located in Southwest Alaska. It has several other names, such as Arulataq, Bushman, Big Man, Tent Monster, Nant'ina, and Woodsman.

The Urayuli, as described, stands about 6 to 10 feet tall and is covered with shaggy, coarse hair or fur of approximately 2 to 4 inches long. It has glowing eyes and is said to look somewhat like the extinct primates. Its arms are elongated enough that the creature can reach its ankles.

The Urayuli lives in the wide tundra areas near Lake Iliamna. This quick and agile Alaskan Cryptid is oftentimes seen traveling at night and is a fast swimmer. It is often blamed for stealing fish and dogs, as well as destroying the tents of nearby campers. Many people from that particular region have their stories of encounters with the creature.

In 1956, a fisherman spotted the Urayuli as he was anchoring his fishing boat on the beach at night. A biologist from Ketchikan had later found and took a photograph of huge human-like footprints on the same beach.

In 1982, in the city of Dillingham, a hunting guide showed a picture that he had taken of the Urayuli standing on a mountain ridge. It had an approximate height of 10 feet and a weight of around 750 pounds, with long reddish brown fur.

In July of 1999, along the banks of the Kiseralik River in Alaska, a group was able to take a photo of a pair of huge wedge-shaped footprints that they had noticed in the mud. The footprints were estimated to be about 12 to 14 inches long and 3 inches deep, and were approximated to be at least 6 feet apart.

In the same year, a black-haired huge creature was seen standing on two legs in the Cold Bay of Belkofski. It stood about 14 feet tall and had the appearance of an Ape, with very long arms and legs.

Legendary accounts say that children who go out of the house at night get lost in the woods and are transformed into the Urayuli. Perhaps, this tale was told to children so they would be afraid to go out at night and stay at home instead.

Encounters with the Urayuli are mostly harmless and undisruptive. But, like any other beings or creatures, it will surely defend itself if it feels that its life is being threatened.
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Originally posted 10/23/09

Nantiinaq: Half Man, Half Beast

homertribune.com - Malania Helen Kehl, Nanwalek's eldest resident, is frequently called upon around the village to impart her memories of how life used to be on this southern-most tip of the Kenai Peninsula.

Among her remembrances are medicines used to heal the sick and ways of preserving sea lion meat in barrels for winter. She also is one of the last to tell the ghostly story of how the village of Port Chatham came to be deserted; why the abandoned town was shunned, and those who once lived there vowed never to return.

Malania was born Jan. 25, 1934 at Port Chatham, then a small village founded at the edge of a peaceful moorage. The village once offered shelter for many people, including Capt. Nathaniel Portlock's ship on his 1786 Alaska expedition. But when Malania was a baby, the family abruptly moved away from Chatham, leaving the house and every board of its frame behind.

What frightening situation caused John and Helen Romanoff to take their children and flee to Nanwalek?

"We left our houses and the school, and started all new here," Malania said in a recent interview, speaking in her traditional Sugt'stun through translator Sally Ash. "There was plentiful land here for gardening and people. My parents built a house on the beach."

What had frightened Malania's parents hadn't been a single event. Over a "long period of time," a nantiinaq (Nan-te-nuk) – or big hairy creature – was reportedly terrorizing villagers. And Malania also told of the spirit of a woman dressed in draping black clothes that would come out of the cliffs.

"Her dress was so long she would drag it," Malania said. "She had a very white face and would disappear back into the cliffs."

The goose-bumped terror felt when people encountered these spirits was nothing compared to what happened to Malania's godfather, Andrew Kamluck. He was logging in 1931, when someone or something hit him over the head with a piece of log-moving equipment. The blow reportedly killed him instantly.

Malania isn't the only one to tell of strange events at Port Chatham. Port Graham Elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff, said he remembers when nantiinaq was blamed for the disappearance of a gold miner.

"This one guy over there had a little place where he was digging for gold," Kvasnikoff said. "He went up there one time and never came back. No one found any sign of him."

Another story recounted the experience of a sawmill owner named Tom Larsen, who had a job cutting wood for the old fish traps. He told of spotting nantiinaq on the beach once. After going back to his house to get his gun, he returned to the beach and "the thing looked at him," Kvasnikoff said. For some reason, Larsen decided against firing a shot.

In an April 15, 1973 issue of the Anchorage Daily News, a feature article told of the abandoned cannery town of Portlock near Port Chatham. The writer had learned the story during an evening spent with the school teacher and his wife at English Bay (Nanwalek) while on a boat trip.

The story is told:

"Portlock began its existence sometime after the turn of the century as a cannery town. In 1921, a post office was established there, and for a time the residents, mostly natives of Russian-Aleut mix, lived in peace with their picturesque mountain-and-sea setting."

According to the ADN story, sometime in the beginning years of World War II, rumors began to seep along the Kenai Peninsula that things were not right in Portlock. Men from the cannery town would reportedly go up into the hills to hunt Dall sheep and bear, and never return. Worse yet, sometimes stories would circulate about mutilated bodies that were swept down into the lagoon, torn and dismembered in a way that bears could not, or would not, do.

"Tales were told of villagers tracking moose over soft ground. They would find giant, man-like tracks over 18 inches in length closing upon those of the moose, the signs of a short struggle where the grass had been matted down, then only the deep tracks of the manlike animal departing toward the high, fog-shrouded mountains …"
The article goes on to tell how the fed-up townfolk decided to move en masse, and by 1950, the U.S. Post office had closed there.

Even into more recent times, nantiinaq reports haven't stopped entirely. A man who prefers to remain anonymous tells his story.

"In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage."

En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an "Aleut" from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to Dog Fish Bay and was once weathered in there.

"This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, 'Did it bother you?' Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, 'Yes.' "Did you see it?" was his next question. I said "No. ..Did you see it?" He said "No, but my brother seen it. It chased him."

In August of 1973, Ed and two others were bowhunting for goats and black bear when a storm forced them to take shelter in Dogfish Bay Lagoon.

"We beached our skiff and let the tide run her dry. After a dinner of broiled salmon we turned in to our tent. Back in those days, the best tent I had was a dark green canvas job with a center pole and no windows or floor. We left the fire burning and cleaned the pots and pans so as not to attract bears during the night and turned in," Ed wrote.

The sky was clear, but the wind was howling through the old growth timber that lined the shore. Sometime around 2 a.m., Dennis woke Ed after hearing what sounded like footsteps outside the tent. It wasn't a bear. Ed said the walking – or rather creeping – continued until it half circled the tent.

"In August, there is still some light in the sky until about 10 or 11. I recall that we all were embarrassed about being afraid about the coming night. We had a flashlight and the rifle in the tent between us, locked and loaded. I finally dosed off but woke right up when Dennis squeezed my leg. The illuminated hands of my watch showed it was 2:30. Joe was already sitting up and had the rifle in hand. I heard the first step, not more than about 10 feet from the back of the tent. Slowly. Then another and another. Whatever this was, it sounded like it was walking on two feet. It made the same semi-circle around the tent. When we finally got enough courage to crawl out of the tent and turn the flashlight on, we saw nothing. No tracks, nothing. The third night we decided if it bothered us again, we would come out of the tent shooting. We were actually scared. It never came back the third night and the following day we had a break in the weather and got the heck out of there."

Though Sasquatches became something of a popular phenomenon in the 1960s and '70s in the Lower 48, the nantiinaq in Sugt'stun culture has been around for a long time. According to the culture, he might be a different kind of creature, a tragic half-man, half-beast who wasn't always in this condition. He perhaps used to be fully human.

Elder Nick Tanape said he doesn't discredit the stories about nantiinaq, but says he's never seen one.

"I think there's something to them," he said.

Malania said that, once her family moved to Nanwalek, the nantiinaq stayed far away and left them in peace. It didn't follow them, and for that they were grateful. She grew up, raised 13 children and remains one of the few regional elders who can pass on the old traditions.

Malania – a favorite among the young people of Nanwalek, especially when she tells stories – learned many things from her grandmother, who was a traditional healer.

Reader Response to Recent Posts

Posted: 10 Jan 2010 08:30 AM PST

The following are interesting emails I received in reference to posts. The first email is a response to A New Mother's Concern. Please note, this posting generated the highest number of comments I have ever received.

Hello,

I would like to relate to you an experience I had last night that may or may not be related to the new mother's concern. If anything, it maybe just be a coincidence if not a synchronicity of some sort. I am sorry I do not have advice for the new mother, and my experience does not shed any light on her unique and strange situation. My experience involves something I saw with my mind's eye last night, which I did not give any definite significance. In fact I completely forgot about it when I woke up this morning to goto work. It was at work while on my break that I checked my email for the first time and saw your daily update and read about this mother's situation which brought back my memory of what I had seen.

To give an honest context for which this experience happened, I am someone who is an avid reader of paranormal and UFO-related phenomenon. Last night I was reading Ed Conroy's "Report On Communion" on the living room couch, while the rest of the family was asleep. During my reading, I felt or heard a low vibratory noise that I never heard before, but gradually went away. I didn't think much of it as the family dog usually barks at anything out of the ordinary. I eventually was feeling sleepy and decided to go upstairs into bed. I can't explain the feeling other than while my body was sleepy and tired, my brain seemed to be active and busy.

I woke up several times during the night, in which I had dreams intermittently. I did wake up once to find myself in sleep paralysis, which somehow I broke out of. However it is the visions that I saw that I want to relate. It's not the first time that I have been able to "see" with my mind's eye, though I never considered myself psychic or anything like that. Sometime during the night I found myself awake, although my eyes were closed. I could see the blackness and in the blackness I could see an image forming in my mind. I saw a pair of human eyes looking at me. I saw a left eye and a right eye and partially the bridge of the nose in between. I could not see a face. If I had to guess, the eyes looked a bit like grey-blue. Anyways this image was in my mind for a little while and then suddenly the eyes blinked but in a manner that was most shocking to me. It blinked sideways and I had a really sinking feeling that it was really looking at me and it creeped me out. It made me uncomfortable and the image gradually vanished from my mind's eye and I went back to sleep and dreams. Later on just before waking up fully to get ready for work, I saw another pair of human eyes glaring at me, but this time the eyes did not move nor blink. I remember thinking "Why am I seeing eyes looking at me?" By the time I got up for work, my thoughts concentrated more on my sleep paralysis episode and my dreams. I didn't give much thought to the visions I had seen and I forgot about them until I read about the new mother's baby eyes blinking sideways. I thought what I had seen last night was just my imagination running wild and maybe it was also just a happenstance coincidence. But I have never seen or heard eyes that blink sideways until last night when I had this experience and today when I read your blog posting.

I really hope the new mother finds some help concerning her child. I don't know if my experience would validate her situation at all or make it worse, especially if it is true. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Sincerely yours,
Joshua

The second email was a response to The America West 564 UFO Incident: Can It Be Explained?.

Hi Lon,

I just read your bit on The America West 564 UFO Incident and thought I'd comment. I think I can tell you what High-balls are, too, but I'm not so sure about "Tieband" (unless they are referring to UHF, the antennae for which sometimes resemble bow-tie shapes--it's a question to ask your favorite radio geek) or Bigfoot, except that it's probably the local military radar system which has the biggest "footprint", as it were.

This plane is traveling through an area that has had chronic earthlight phenomena stretching back into native historical memory. I am a witness myself of their weird play, having been a college student in the region and I also did a brief stint at Cannon in a civil service capacity. By the way, Cannon has a fairly small and short set of runways and is used to train fighter pilots since people flew Corsairs in ww2, except that it was about 15 miles away from the current location, I think. I doubt it has the manpower to do anything experimental and when I was there, the gear was pretty old, simulators from the 50's etc.

This particular earthlight phenomenon happens at ground level to about 200 feet, but sometimes at higher altitudes where they can (if the stories heard around Cannon are true) interfere with aircraft electrical systems. These are probably your "highballs". This area of New Mexico is high desert and prone to Spring thunderstorms, such as the one featured in the story and this kind of phenomena are pretty strongly associated with that kind of weather activity. I have personally witnessed some very intense electrical storms marching across the desert like 6-mile high electrical giants--truly awesome. I have had 2 encounters, one quite close, with earthlights in this vicinity.

This cigar-shaped UFO is pretty much the same thing as what took out the power plant in Argentina as reported a month or 2 ago. I often see them reported in connection with earthquake activity, fault lines and electrical storms. They are essentially ionized gas in a magnetic bottle, emitting energy in a very odd manner across many different parts of the em spectrum--sometimes in visible light, sometimes in radar or UHF.

I guess the principle problem with this report is that it takes place at a time when we were just starting to understand these kinds of weird "electroforms". Paul Devereaux and Albert Budden were at that time just putting it together and even now few people will listen, unless they are very specifically aware of these things from the standpoint of being a military researcher or a cutting edge weather expert or a paranormal researcher of my particular ilk. I find it odd that the date should fall around '95, tho'--reports of these things tend to pick up around the time of about 3 years before Solar Max. This is why (I believe) we are having such a display right now--we are a few years in front of Solar Max (2013 or so). Think about it--what are the banner years for UFO's? Counting backwards from today, we have '98-99 (solar max in 2000), 87-88 (max in 89), 77-78 (max in 79), 66-67 (max in 68) 56-57, (biggest max ever recorded in 58), 45-46 (max in 47). My theory is that these electroforms form as a result of interactions between the magnetosphere of the earth at points of greatest solar irradiation and in conjunction with seismic activity, which also cycles along with the advance and retreat of sunspot activity. They can form at other times, when the conditions are good, but boy are they good at Solar max.

I know am painted as a disbeliever, when I really am a great deal more open-minded than most skeptics. I just think that if we're ever going to get to the bottom of this UFO business and do some serious research, we desperately need tools by which to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to reports. It's a fairly small field of endeavor with limited resources--we sure don't need them squandered chasing weird weather (even tho' that's a fascinating field in and of itself). We spend so much time looking at (likely) solved cases like Roswell and Dulce base that we are effectively diverted from cases like Shag Harbor, which strains every explanation that can be offered, aside from ETs or time travelers. I imagine there are elements in the military that like it that way just fine.

Just my $0.02 worth.

J.K.

NOTE: thanks to Joshua and J.K., as well as everyone else, for your input and continued support...Lon

Rare Natural Phenomenon Appears In Snowy UK

Posted: 10 Jan 2010 07:37 AM PST

telegraph - Also known as snowrollers, snow bales and snow doughnuts, they form mostly in unusual conditions created by a precise combination of snow, ice, wind, temperature and moisture on the prairies of North America.

But this week's frozen weather has allowed the snow cylinders to make a freak appearance in the UK.

Ron Trevett, 55, and his wife Aileen, 54, readers of The Daily Telegraph, were stunned when they stumbled across the mysterious formations as they walked their dogs in a field near their home in Yeovil, Somerset.

"We saw them from a distance on the ridge of the field, and we thought some kids had been playing up there and making giant snowballs," said Mr Trevett.

"But when we got up there we saw there were no footprints and there were hundreds of them – too many for children to have done it. We realised it must have been the wind."

Mr Trevett, a builder, said he and his wife felt privileged to have witnessed such a rare phenomenon. "We feel very lucky. I'm the wrong side of fifty and I've never seen anything like it in my life. We were gobsmacked to look at them there in the sunlight. It was a really impressive sight, and I took some pictures so other people could share it," he said.

Frank Barrow, a lecturer in meteorology at the Met Office, said the rolls can only form in a precise set of unusual conditions.

"They start off with nice thick layer of snow, with the top snow just on the point of melting either because of general temperature or sunshine on the surface," he said.

"The top snow layer becomes a bit sticky, and you then need a fairly strong wind. The sticky layer can be peeled off the colder and more powdery snow underneath by the wind forming a roll. In the first picture you can see some of the powdery stuff sticking to the lower outside surface of the roll. I suppose it is a natural version of making a snowman."

After being formed, the rolls eventually become too large and heavy for the wind to move, or are halted by rising ground or a tuft of vegetation.

They are often hollow because the weak inner layers which form first can easily be blown away, and the fragile formations can collapse in the slightest change of temperature or gust of wind.

Liz Bentley, of the Royal Meteorological Society, said despite their rarity in the UK, there is a chance of more snow rolls appearing over the next few days.

"These rolls are unusual here because we don't tend to have major snow events like the one we're experiencing now. They happen with the combination of lying snow and high wind speeds, mostly in North America and Northern Europe, and they can be as small as a tennis ball or they can be as large as two feet across – depending on how strong the wind is and how smooth the surface of the snow is," she said.

"There are quite strong winds predicted this weekend as well as more snow, so if people keep a look out they might see a few more of these appearing around the country over the next few days."

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