- STRANGE CREATURES FROM TIME AND SPACE DEPARTMENT -
Riverside Man's Dream Is As Big As His Quarry
Daniel Perez wants to find
Bigfoot: 'It might be the biggest scientific discovery the world has
ever seen.'
The Center for Bigfoot Studies, like the creature itself, is not easy to find. It hides amid the forest of homes and thickets of Christmas lights on a quiet Riverside street.
No signs or monster-size tracks point the way, but those in the know can pin it down to an upper floor of one unassuming house. There, jammed inside a few small rooms, sits one of the nation's largest repositories of Bigfoot lore.
Rows of books, stuffed filing cabinets, sculptures and plaster casts of overgrown feet compete for space in a cluttered world dedicated to the legendary hulking primate.
Daniel Perez, 44, is curator and director of the center, which doubles as his home. It's not typical Bigfoot habitat, but he couldn't beat the price. And for Perez it's the work, not the location, that matters.
"This isn't about finding some new species of butterfly in South America which would have little impact on your life or mine," he said. "If we ever find this, it might be the biggest scientific discovery the world has ever seen."
Perez is no flake. He's a serious-minded, soft-spoken electrician who let his hobby become his passion and now much of his life. He publishes the monthly Bigfoot Times, circulation 760, and has traveled the country investigating sightings and interviewing witnesses.
A recent newsletter reported a sighting from 1936 in Davistown, Pa. The 81-year-old witness told Perez she had seen an upright animal lurking around her rural home on numerous occasions when she was a girl.
"He must have been 6 feet tall, dark brown, long arms and very hairy," she said. "Gosh, did we run across the fields into the house."
Another article is about two men's claims to have audio recordings of Bigfoot's "breathing, teeth popping and growls."
"But our conclusion was that it was nothing more than wind," a local Bigfoot researcher wrote.
Perez is a believer but also a skeptic.
Hoaxers have tried to con him, and promising leads have unraveled. Critical evidence, such as a hefty ape-like skull allegedly found near Bishop, has had a habit of disappearing. Yet there are the stories that keep him going, the strikingly similar accounts of hairy, stinking, bipedal animals stomping through forests from Canada to California to Ohio.
Tales of ape men leading clandestine lives in the North American backwoods go back centuries. Native Americans called them Sasquatches. But the modern Bigfoot phenomenon really got its start in 1958, Perez said, when workers began finding large footprints while building a road in Oregon.
"Some guy took the story to the local newspaper, and the word 'Bigfoot' was born," he said.
In 1986, Perez interviewed members of a six-man crew building a bridge 26 miles south of California's Mt. Whitney who reported seeing a large upright creature that left 13-inch footprints in its wake.
"It scared the heebie-jeebies out of them," said Perez, who interviewed the workers at the scene. "One guy told me it sounded like an elephant trumpeting. Another said it was a bloodcurdling scream which resembled a woman being tortured. These were serious, grown men with no reason to lie. It was my first experience with multiple sightings. I was hooked after that."
Actually, he was hooked before that.
Perez's pursuit of Bigfoot began at age 10 after he watched "The Legend of Boggy Creek" at a Norwalk theater. The documentary-style film dealt with a Bigfoot-like beast frightening rural Fouke, Ark.
"I thought it was just another monster movie, but it turned out to be the paving stone to who I am today," he said. "I was curious but skeptical."
He immediately went to the library and withdrew books about Bigfoot and other creatures, including the Loch Ness monster. He wrote letters to Bigfoot experts, who impressed him with their earnestness.
"It was almost like a science project for him," recalled his father, Edward Perez. "It was something to keep him busy and enabled him to figure out what's what."
The elder Perez questions the whole thing.
"Whenever the subject is broached, I ask him, 'Where are the bodies? Why are there no bodies?' "
In 1979, Perez rushed with a friend to Hemet's Diamond Valley, chasing reports that huge footprints had been found there. He and his friend saw and measured the proof, he said. The prints were 17 inches long.
He started interviewing people who claimed to have seen Bigfoot. He dug up newspaper clippings from as far back as 1889 reporting encounters with the creature and other "wild men" of the woods. He researched Native American stories of Sasquatch, Himalayan tales of the Yeti and sightings of the Yowie in Australia.
"I understand that many people are ignorant of the data on the subject, but this is more than just tabloid stuff," he said, picking up a cast of a large footprint. "As you can see, it's very manlike. It walks like us and has feet like us, but it's covered in hair and has gorilla-like features. It could be a missing link."
Perez is writing a book about the Patterson-Gimlin film, a grainy 60-second movie purporting to show a large primate walking through Bluff Creek in Northern California. It was shot by Robert Gimlin and the late Roger Patterson.
The film, shot in 1967, still generates controversy. Believers say it's the best evidence that Bigfoot exists. Others say it's the best proof the whole thing is bogus. The doubters' case was bolstered when Bob Hieronimus of Yakima, Wash., announced in 2004 that he was the film's Bigfoot. He said Patterson offered him $1,000 to don a gorilla suit.
"Why they keep focusing on this film is beyond me," said Robert Kiviat, producer of "World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed," a Fox Network show that investigated the film.
Kiviat, who appeared with the self-proclaimed hoaxer on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" when Hieronimus made his claim, said most people laughed at the film. "It is essentially a few brief seconds of what appears to be a man walking in a gorilla suit in the woods," he said. "But I do believe there is a mysterious animal out there. We have some hair, some DNA and some video and photographic evidence that is tantalizing."
Perez doesn't buy the fraud story. He says Hieronimus could never fill an 8-foot gorilla suit, and he says the suit has never been found.
He has analyzed the footage hundreds of times. He has enlarged it and slowed it down. He points out what he sees as telling details of authenticity.
"You can see the breasts on the subject. That tells us it is female," he said. "It would seem if you wanted to fake something, you wouldn't put breasts on it, because it would seem outlandish. You can see the buttocks and the spinal cord. Look how it walks. No human walks like that. Superficially it looks like a man, but when you look closely, it's clearly not."
Perez's views are largely supported by Jeffrey Meldrum, professor of anthropology and anatomy at Idaho State University, who has studied Bigfoot for more than a decade.
"Daniel is a very skilled investigator who goes after details and ties up loose ends," he said. "Correlating evidence is very important in this study."
Meldrum, an expert on primate morphology, says the hoax stories don't hold up under scrutiny.
"If you watch the film as a student of anatomy, primates and locomotion, you can see the movement of the shoulder blade under the skin," he said. "I can see the calf muscles contract at the appropriate moments. When anyone tries to replicate it in any way, it doesn't look like a primate."
His theory?
"You can never be 100% sure of anything, but beyond a reasonable doubt I am convinced it portrays a real animal," he said. "My working hypothesis is they are a species of great ape restricted to the ground but having an arboreal legacy. They would most likely be related to the orangutans."
Meldrum said the lack of Bigfoot corpses is not a mystery given the remote spots where they are believed to live as well as the dampness of the forest and the acidic quality of forest soil, which encourages decomposition.
Upstairs in his office, Perez plays the Patterson-Gimlin film on his computer again and again.
He thinks as many as 100,000 Bigfoots could be roaming North America, but he knows he may never find even one of them.
"A lot of early researchers thought we would solve the mystery in a few years, but we haven't," he said. "I can't prove Bigfoot exists, but either someone has been fabricating tracks for over a hundred years or there is a real animal out there."
Source: LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bigfoot26dec26,1,5252112.story?
track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true
Author of the Haunted Liverpool series of books, Tom Slemen, has written a special story for Formby Times and Conspiracy Journal readers.
There are said to be invisible ley-lines of earth energies, known to the ancient peoples of Lancashire, that criss-cross Formby, and local folklore suggests the existence of spectral beings that frequent these old, unseen tracks.
The most prominent paranormal entity of this kind is Skriker – often misspelled as ‘Striker’ – a huge, black, ghostly dog with fiery red eyes that roams the Formby waterfront.
Some traditions maintain that he acts as a sentinel to something buried beneath Formby dunes in the remote past. In 1999, baffling prehistoric footprints of children, and unidentified dogs, were found on the Formby foreshore.
The imprints had been made in the lee of an offshore sandbar up to 6,500 years ago.
In 1967, a retired man named Richard Lomax was bird-watching on Formby beach when he spotted a woman burying something among the dunes.
Gripped with curiosity, Mr Lomax went and dug up the thing the lady had buried as soon as she was out of sight. It was a small teak box, sealed by two nails that had been driven through each corner of the lid. Mr Lomax took the box home to his house near Little Altcar and prised it open to reveal a small stone cross with a concentric ring around it, rather like the design of a Celtic cross.
The birdwatcher decided he’d take it to his brother-in-law George – an antique dealer – in the morning, to see what he made of the strange find.
That night, Mr Lomax heard a dog snarling in his garden somewhere, followed by the sounds of the animal scratching at his front door. The following morning, Mr Lomax saw three long, black claw-marks in the front door and, when he inspected these marks, they looked as if they’d been scorched into the woodwork with a branding iron.
Lomax showed the stone cross to his brother-in-law George, and he recoiled in horror and told him to get rid of the cross or he’d suffer a long run of bad luck, for he had seen such crosses before, and they were deemed to be cursed.
Mr Lomax was amused at George’s claims and believed he was just superstitious.
However, on the following day, Richard Lomax was starting his car when he realised he couldn’t feel the accelerator pedal. His right foot was numb. It transpired that this was because of a tumour in his spine. Then his sister died days later.
Even more misfortune followed, and Mr Lomax ended up hurrying back to the spot where he had unearthed the strange artefact. He reasoned that the previous owner of the accursed cross had probably buried it to break its curse.
Not long afterwards, a huge black dog with red eyes was seen by many people, sitting on the very spot where the cross was reburied.
There are some rare reports which show the Formby ‘Hell Hound’ in a favourable light. For example, at Christmas 1977, a 13-year-old girl went out onto the sands of Formby after a row with her parents, and became stranded when the tide came rushing in.
She tried to make her way back to safety, but became trapped up to her knees in the mud. The girl somehow managed to escape from the quagmire, and crawled along the beach with the water crashing over her. She stood up, and as she started to sink again, she saw an enormous black dog standing about twenty feet away.
The girl instinctively scrambled towards the strange, oversized animal, and as she did it turned and walked off towards dry land, unaffected by the mud. The girl walked behind the hound in its tracks and the sand beneath her feet felt solid. When she got to the dry shore the black dog seemed to fade away into the twilight.
Three years later, the girl was walking along Formby beach during a spectacular sunset, when she suddenly experienced a strange inexplicable urge to visit a particular dune. When the girl reached the dune she saw the same black dog that had saved her life three years before. It sat looking out to sea, with red glowing eyes and a phosphorescent glow around its muscular body. The mysterious hound turned its head to gaze at her for a while, then looked seawards. Seconds later it faded away.
That girl is now a woman and she strolls along Formby beach most evenings, hoping to see the enigmatic black dog.
Is it a sentry, guarding some ancient talisman?
What is the story behind the stone cross and why does calamity strike those who move it from the dunes?
We may know more one day.
Source: Formby Times
http://icseftonandwestlancs.icnetwork.co.uk/formbytimes/news/tm_headline=
terrifying-8216-hell-hound-8217-also-helped-a-girl-escape-death&method=full
&objectid=20278599&siteid=60252-name_page.html
The Center for Bigfoot Studies, like the creature itself, is not easy to find. It hides amid the forest of homes and thickets of Christmas lights on a quiet Riverside street.
No signs or monster-size tracks point the way, but those in the know can pin it down to an upper floor of one unassuming house. There, jammed inside a few small rooms, sits one of the nation's largest repositories of Bigfoot lore.
Rows of books, stuffed filing cabinets, sculptures and plaster casts of overgrown feet compete for space in a cluttered world dedicated to the legendary hulking primate.
Daniel Perez, 44, is curator and director of the center, which doubles as his home. It's not typical Bigfoot habitat, but he couldn't beat the price. And for Perez it's the work, not the location, that matters.
"This isn't about finding some new species of butterfly in South America which would have little impact on your life or mine," he said. "If we ever find this, it might be the biggest scientific discovery the world has ever seen."
Perez is no flake. He's a serious-minded, soft-spoken electrician who let his hobby become his passion and now much of his life. He publishes the monthly Bigfoot Times, circulation 760, and has traveled the country investigating sightings and interviewing witnesses.
A recent newsletter reported a sighting from 1936 in Davistown, Pa. The 81-year-old witness told Perez she had seen an upright animal lurking around her rural home on numerous occasions when she was a girl.
"He must have been 6 feet tall, dark brown, long arms and very hairy," she said. "Gosh, did we run across the fields into the house."
Another article is about two men's claims to have audio recordings of Bigfoot's "breathing, teeth popping and growls."
"But our conclusion was that it was nothing more than wind," a local Bigfoot researcher wrote.
Perez is a believer but also a skeptic.
Hoaxers have tried to con him, and promising leads have unraveled. Critical evidence, such as a hefty ape-like skull allegedly found near Bishop, has had a habit of disappearing. Yet there are the stories that keep him going, the strikingly similar accounts of hairy, stinking, bipedal animals stomping through forests from Canada to California to Ohio.
Tales of ape men leading clandestine lives in the North American backwoods go back centuries. Native Americans called them Sasquatches. But the modern Bigfoot phenomenon really got its start in 1958, Perez said, when workers began finding large footprints while building a road in Oregon.
"Some guy took the story to the local newspaper, and the word 'Bigfoot' was born," he said.
In 1986, Perez interviewed members of a six-man crew building a bridge 26 miles south of California's Mt. Whitney who reported seeing a large upright creature that left 13-inch footprints in its wake.
"It scared the heebie-jeebies out of them," said Perez, who interviewed the workers at the scene. "One guy told me it sounded like an elephant trumpeting. Another said it was a bloodcurdling scream which resembled a woman being tortured. These were serious, grown men with no reason to lie. It was my first experience with multiple sightings. I was hooked after that."
Actually, he was hooked before that.
Perez's pursuit of Bigfoot began at age 10 after he watched "The Legend of Boggy Creek" at a Norwalk theater. The documentary-style film dealt with a Bigfoot-like beast frightening rural Fouke, Ark.
"I thought it was just another monster movie, but it turned out to be the paving stone to who I am today," he said. "I was curious but skeptical."
He immediately went to the library and withdrew books about Bigfoot and other creatures, including the Loch Ness monster. He wrote letters to Bigfoot experts, who impressed him with their earnestness.
"It was almost like a science project for him," recalled his father, Edward Perez. "It was something to keep him busy and enabled him to figure out what's what."
The elder Perez questions the whole thing.
"Whenever the subject is broached, I ask him, 'Where are the bodies? Why are there no bodies?' "
In 1979, Perez rushed with a friend to Hemet's Diamond Valley, chasing reports that huge footprints had been found there. He and his friend saw and measured the proof, he said. The prints were 17 inches long.
He started interviewing people who claimed to have seen Bigfoot. He dug up newspaper clippings from as far back as 1889 reporting encounters with the creature and other "wild men" of the woods. He researched Native American stories of Sasquatch, Himalayan tales of the Yeti and sightings of the Yowie in Australia.
"I understand that many people are ignorant of the data on the subject, but this is more than just tabloid stuff," he said, picking up a cast of a large footprint. "As you can see, it's very manlike. It walks like us and has feet like us, but it's covered in hair and has gorilla-like features. It could be a missing link."
Perez is writing a book about the Patterson-Gimlin film, a grainy 60-second movie purporting to show a large primate walking through Bluff Creek in Northern California. It was shot by Robert Gimlin and the late Roger Patterson.
The film, shot in 1967, still generates controversy. Believers say it's the best evidence that Bigfoot exists. Others say it's the best proof the whole thing is bogus. The doubters' case was bolstered when Bob Hieronimus of Yakima, Wash., announced in 2004 that he was the film's Bigfoot. He said Patterson offered him $1,000 to don a gorilla suit.
"Why they keep focusing on this film is beyond me," said Robert Kiviat, producer of "World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed," a Fox Network show that investigated the film.
Kiviat, who appeared with the self-proclaimed hoaxer on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" when Hieronimus made his claim, said most people laughed at the film. "It is essentially a few brief seconds of what appears to be a man walking in a gorilla suit in the woods," he said. "But I do believe there is a mysterious animal out there. We have some hair, some DNA and some video and photographic evidence that is tantalizing."
Perez doesn't buy the fraud story. He says Hieronimus could never fill an 8-foot gorilla suit, and he says the suit has never been found.
He has analyzed the footage hundreds of times. He has enlarged it and slowed it down. He points out what he sees as telling details of authenticity.
"You can see the breasts on the subject. That tells us it is female," he said. "It would seem if you wanted to fake something, you wouldn't put breasts on it, because it would seem outlandish. You can see the buttocks and the spinal cord. Look how it walks. No human walks like that. Superficially it looks like a man, but when you look closely, it's clearly not."
Perez's views are largely supported by Jeffrey Meldrum, professor of anthropology and anatomy at Idaho State University, who has studied Bigfoot for more than a decade.
"Daniel is a very skilled investigator who goes after details and ties up loose ends," he said. "Correlating evidence is very important in this study."
Meldrum, an expert on primate morphology, says the hoax stories don't hold up under scrutiny.
"If you watch the film as a student of anatomy, primates and locomotion, you can see the movement of the shoulder blade under the skin," he said. "I can see the calf muscles contract at the appropriate moments. When anyone tries to replicate it in any way, it doesn't look like a primate."
His theory?
"You can never be 100% sure of anything, but beyond a reasonable doubt I am convinced it portrays a real animal," he said. "My working hypothesis is they are a species of great ape restricted to the ground but having an arboreal legacy. They would most likely be related to the orangutans."
Meldrum said the lack of Bigfoot corpses is not a mystery given the remote spots where they are believed to live as well as the dampness of the forest and the acidic quality of forest soil, which encourages decomposition.
Upstairs in his office, Perez plays the Patterson-Gimlin film on his computer again and again.
He thinks as many as 100,000 Bigfoots could be roaming North America, but he knows he may never find even one of them.
"A lot of early researchers thought we would solve the mystery in a few years, but we haven't," he said. "I can't prove Bigfoot exists, but either someone has been fabricating tracks for over a hundred years or there is a real animal out there."
Source: LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bigfoot26dec26,1,5252112.story?
track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true
-
PARANORMAL PROTECTORS DEPARTMENT -
‘Hell Hound’ Helped Girl Escape Death
‘Hell Hound’ Helped Girl Escape Death
Author of the Haunted Liverpool series of books, Tom Slemen, has written a special story for Formby Times and Conspiracy Journal readers.
There are said to be invisible ley-lines of earth energies, known to the ancient peoples of Lancashire, that criss-cross Formby, and local folklore suggests the existence of spectral beings that frequent these old, unseen tracks.
The most prominent paranormal entity of this kind is Skriker – often misspelled as ‘Striker’ – a huge, black, ghostly dog with fiery red eyes that roams the Formby waterfront.
Some traditions maintain that he acts as a sentinel to something buried beneath Formby dunes in the remote past. In 1999, baffling prehistoric footprints of children, and unidentified dogs, were found on the Formby foreshore.
The imprints had been made in the lee of an offshore sandbar up to 6,500 years ago.
In 1967, a retired man named Richard Lomax was bird-watching on Formby beach when he spotted a woman burying something among the dunes.
Gripped with curiosity, Mr Lomax went and dug up the thing the lady had buried as soon as she was out of sight. It was a small teak box, sealed by two nails that had been driven through each corner of the lid. Mr Lomax took the box home to his house near Little Altcar and prised it open to reveal a small stone cross with a concentric ring around it, rather like the design of a Celtic cross.
The birdwatcher decided he’d take it to his brother-in-law George – an antique dealer – in the morning, to see what he made of the strange find.
That night, Mr Lomax heard a dog snarling in his garden somewhere, followed by the sounds of the animal scratching at his front door. The following morning, Mr Lomax saw three long, black claw-marks in the front door and, when he inspected these marks, they looked as if they’d been scorched into the woodwork with a branding iron.
Lomax showed the stone cross to his brother-in-law George, and he recoiled in horror and told him to get rid of the cross or he’d suffer a long run of bad luck, for he had seen such crosses before, and they were deemed to be cursed.
Mr Lomax was amused at George’s claims and believed he was just superstitious.
However, on the following day, Richard Lomax was starting his car when he realised he couldn’t feel the accelerator pedal. His right foot was numb. It transpired that this was because of a tumour in his spine. Then his sister died days later.
Even more misfortune followed, and Mr Lomax ended up hurrying back to the spot where he had unearthed the strange artefact. He reasoned that the previous owner of the accursed cross had probably buried it to break its curse.
Not long afterwards, a huge black dog with red eyes was seen by many people, sitting on the very spot where the cross was reburied.
There are some rare reports which show the Formby ‘Hell Hound’ in a favourable light. For example, at Christmas 1977, a 13-year-old girl went out onto the sands of Formby after a row with her parents, and became stranded when the tide came rushing in.
She tried to make her way back to safety, but became trapped up to her knees in the mud. The girl somehow managed to escape from the quagmire, and crawled along the beach with the water crashing over her. She stood up, and as she started to sink again, she saw an enormous black dog standing about twenty feet away.
The girl instinctively scrambled towards the strange, oversized animal, and as she did it turned and walked off towards dry land, unaffected by the mud. The girl walked behind the hound in its tracks and the sand beneath her feet felt solid. When she got to the dry shore the black dog seemed to fade away into the twilight.
Three years later, the girl was walking along Formby beach during a spectacular sunset, when she suddenly experienced a strange inexplicable urge to visit a particular dune. When the girl reached the dune she saw the same black dog that had saved her life three years before. It sat looking out to sea, with red glowing eyes and a phosphorescent glow around its muscular body. The mysterious hound turned its head to gaze at her for a while, then looked seawards. Seconds later it faded away.
That girl is now a woman and she strolls along Formby beach most evenings, hoping to see the enigmatic black dog.
Is it a sentry, guarding some ancient talisman?
What is the story behind the stone cross and why does calamity strike those who move it from the dunes?
We may know more one day.
Source: Formby Times
http://icseftonandwestlancs.icnetwork.co.uk/formbytimes/news/tm_headline=
terrifying-8216-hell-hound-8217-also-helped-a-girl-escape-death&method=full
&objectid=20278599&siteid=60252-name_page.html
-
RED EYES SHINING IN THE NIGHT DEPARTMENT -
West Virginia Town Benefits From Mothman Legend
West Virginia Town Benefits From Mothman Legend
A quick stroll up Main Street is enough to learn who this river town's most famous resident is: His name is on signs, in shop windows and restaurants, and there's even a museum devoted to him.
And the sculpture in the middle of town prominently depicts his enormous wings and glowing red eyes.
More than 40 years after the first reported sighting of the mysterious creature later dubbed "Mothman," residents here have embraced his legend, helping to turn the town into a destination for people in search of an offbeat tourism experience.
But while there's no local consensus on the veracity of the stories, most agree that Mothman is good for business.
"It's helped the town, it's actually helped with business recruitment," said Ruth Finley, who owns the 106-year-old Lowe Hotel on Main Street along with her husband. "People come because of Mothman and they stay at the hotel, they go to the restaurants."
Every September, Point Pleasant hosts the weekend-long Mothman Festival, which draws about 2,000 people a year to this town of roughly 4,500 at the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers.
Walking along Main Street, conventioneers can have their picture taken near the statue, drink a "Mothman Frappachino" (advertised in a local cafe window) and drop into the Mothman Museum, which convincingly bills itself as the world's only such institution.
Inside, they can look over everything from handwritten eyewitness accounts of Mothman sightings to voluminous newspaper clippings to props from the 2002 Richard Gere film "The Mothman Prophecies," which helped boost interest in the creature and Point Pleasant.
Jeremy Pitchford, an employee at the 2-year-old museum, said it's a valuable repository for a side of Point Pleasant that few were willing to even discuss until recently.
"This has been something that's been kind of suppressed, in a way," he said. "A lot of people never knew that Point Pleasant had anything like its own folklore."
The first sighting was reported on Nov. 15, 1966, by a group of people in an area of town known as TNT, the site of a former World War II munitions plant. Others later came forward to say they had seen a gray creature about 7 feet tall with bright red eyes and wings like a bird.
The sightings ended abruptly on Dec. 15, 1967, the day of the collapse of the Silver Bridge, which linked Point Pleasant to Ohio. Forty-six people were killed, and ever since people have speculated on whether the sightings were connected to the tragedy.
During the Mothman convention, tourists drive out to TNT hoping to catch a glimpse of the creature, but usually have to settle for a more prosaic version: the Mothman pizza made at Village Pizza.
A genuinely unique creation, the $10 pie depicts the fearsome creature with eyes made of red and green peppers dotted by an olive pupil, mushroom wings and a pepperoni body. It's such a classic that Bill Ward knew he had to leave it on the menu when he bought the restaurant four years ago.
"We sell a lot of them when the convention's in town," he said.
Even when it's not convention time, the town has its share of Mothman visitors, including film crews. Recently, a crew shooting an episode for the new A&E series "Paranormal State" was in town, and the Lowe Hotel has hosted crews from as far away as Japan and Australia.
But some chafe at the notion that Point Pleasant is best-known for reputed visits from a winged creature with glowing eyes. In fact, the town is rich in real American history, from the Revolutionary War to the era when steamboat traffic crowded the Ohio and Kanawha rivers.
"With all the history we have here, what do people come here for? That darn Mothman," said Jack Fowler, executive director of the Point Pleasant River Museum.
Located a few blocks down Main Street from the Mothman statue, the river museum includes historical exhibits and archives on everything from the steamboat trade to the 1967 Silver Bridge disaster. With plans to expand and add an aquarium in partnership with Marshall University, Mothman is distinctly out of place here.
Out of place, but not entirely absent: the river museum sells copies of a book about Mothman.
"I always said there would never be anything about Mothman in this museum," sighed Fowler. "But when the convention's happening, so many people come in here and ask about it."
Although he's not keen on Mothman, Fowler has made his peace with the creature's local backers. The river museum and the Mothman Museum have a reciprocal relationship, directing curious visitors to each other's exhibits. It's a way to let tourists see all sides of Point Pleasant, Fowler and Pitchford say.
"The great thing is, it brings in people from all over," Finley said. "They may come here for Mothman, but once they're here it's our responsibility to show them why they should come back."
Source: San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/travel/ci_7799808?nclick_check=1
-
HIDING OUT WITH BATBOY DEPARTMENT -
'Werewolf Boy' Escapes Moscow Clinic
'Werewolf Boy' Escapes Moscow Clinic
Russian police are hunting a "werewolf boy" - who snarls and bites - after he escaped from a Moscow clinic just a day after being rescued from the wild.
Doctors expressed shock saying he was found living with a pack of wolves in a remote forest in the Kaluga region of central Russia.
"He's clearly dangerous to other people," said a police spokesman yesterday.
"He's got typical wolf-like habits and behaviour.
"He has very strong and sharp teeth, which could really endanger someone if he bites."
The boy looks about ten - but after tests conducted by Moscow medics, they believe he maybe much older. They are puzzled because he appears intelligent but does not seem to speak Russian or any other language. It is suspected he has been running wild for many years.
Such cases are not uncommon in Russia where there have been regular reports of 'Mowgli' children abandoned by their parents who are cared for by animals. The boy moves around with his legs half bent, said Tvoi Den newspaper. "He was running with wolves and searching for food with them."
Villagers found this "wild creature" in a lair made of leaves and sticks in freezing temperatures and told the police who named him Lyokha, though his real identity is not known.
"He's dirty, hungry, and looked to have had a hard time," said the police spokesman. "We brought him to a clinic in Moscow.
"It was simply unbelievable. He doesn't react when we call to him." Medics gave him clothes and said that he sprang down the corridor, bursting into his room and devouring his food like an animal.
His nails on his feet were like claws.
After 24 hours he had evaded security men at the clinic and escaped. He is now believed to be on the loose in Moscow region.
"We didn't even manage to complete the proper medical checks. We only succeeded in giving him a shower, cutting his nails and took some blood and other tests," said a doctor.
"It's quite possible he is a dangerous with psychological problems but also a source of viruses and infections."
Source: The Daily Mail (UK)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html
?in_article_id=503736&in_page_id=1811