Otherkin News

Content warnings: spooky creatures.

A cryptozoologist named Ken Gerhard published a non-fiction book about a certain category of sightings. It's Encounters with Flying Humanoids: Mothman, Manbirds, Gargoyles & Other Winged Beasts. As his colleague Nick Redfern remarked, "this is a topic that is very rarely covered in full-length book form."

Trigger warnings: None.

Last May, George Monbiot's book Feral was published. An extract of the book was published in The Guardian, a British newspaper. The extract is about sightings of non-native big cats in Britain.¹ Cryptozoologists (people who study sightings of questionably real animals, where we need more proof that these animals are real) call these sightings "mystery big cats" or "alien big cats." Monbiot wrote about the lack of proof for the mystery big cats:

"Of the photographs and fragments of footage I have seen, around half are evidently domestic cats. Roughly a quarter are cardboard cut-outs, cuddly toys, the result of crude Photoshopping or – as the surrounding vegetation reveals – pictures taken in the tropics. The remainder are so distant and indistinct that they could be anything: dogs, deer, foxes, bin liners, yetis on all fours. [...] That is about the extent of it: no photos, no captures, no dung, no corpses [...] not even a verifiable footprint. The Beasts of Britain have evaded police helicopters and armed response teams (it beats logging car crime), a five-week hunt by the Royal Marines, a succession of big cat experts and bounty hunters and the mass deployment of tracking, attracting and sensing technologies."²

There have been many sightings of mystery big cats, and many attempts to collect proof of them, but no proof has yet been found. Monbiot asks whether these sightings might represent some sort of wishful thinking. Doubtful News, a news blog that takes a skeptical look at supposedly paranormal current events, spoke approvingly of the book.³

The subject of mystery big cats is relevant to this blog. Around 2002, a big cat therianthrope named Barakus Leviathan expressed a belief that the mystery big cats might be therianthropes who can physically shape-shift into animal form.⁴ I have heard similar views expressed by therianthropes who have faith that physical shape-shifting might be possible.



Sources

1. George Monbiot, "Big-cat sightings: Is Britain suffering from mass hysteria?" 2013-05-21. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/21/big-cat-sightings-mass-hysteria

2. Ibid.

3. Sharon Hill (idoubtit), "British big cats: Where's the evidence?" 2013-05-22. Doubtful News. http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/05/british-big-cats-wheres-the-evidence/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=british-big-cats-wheres-the-evidence

4. Barakus Leviathan, “A.B.C.: Alien Big Cats.” Circa 2002. The Draconcat. http://barakusdraconcat.tripod.com/id4.htm

Trigger warnings: Paranormal phenomena.

This month, paranormal investigator and cryptozoology blogger Lon Strickler¹ posted a witness report (purportedly collected in 2009) from a correspondent named only as Dee, regarding her sighting in 1990 of short, elf-like humanoids who emerged from a portal in New York. The portal was an area of open air that shimmered like water, accompanied by a humming sound.²

Paranormal investigator Robert Goerman, of the Nonhuman Research Agency, noticed that Dee’s report closely resembled another report. As Goerman pointed out in Fate Magazine,³ the similar report was published in Philip Imbrogno’s and Marianne Horrigan’s Celtic Mysteries in New England (2000), in which an anonymous team of paranormal investigators saw bearded, dwarf-like humanoids emerge from a buzzing, shimmering portal in New York in 1992. As with the other story, the portal appeared near a group of boulders.⁴

As always with witness reports of paranormal phenomena, both reports could be fabrications. The many similarities between the two reports suggest that one may have been based on the other. If they are merely tall tales, it's still interesting to track elf and dwarf folklore in modern New York.

- O. Scribner

( Sources )