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Mystery Creaturesby
Murray Montgomery |  |
Recently
I came across a story from Fox News that really got me to thinking about all the
things in this old world that cannot be readily explained; even by modern science
or the so-called experts. This particular article was headlined, “Maine mystery
beast possibly killed by car.” Anything with the word “mystery” in it gets my
attention right away.
It seems that this particular creature is believed
to be responsible for frightening residents, killing dogs, and being the subject
of local legend for half a generation. According to Fox News, for the past 15
years residents in Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious
animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night.
A woman saw the beast in her yard and told a Maine newspaper that it looked liked
a hybrid mutant of something. “It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible
stench I will never forget,” she said. “We locked eyes for a few seconds and then
it took off. I’ve lived in Maine my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like
it.” The woman’s husband said it looked “half-rodent, half-dog” to him.
Other folks who saw the animal described it as being charcoal gray, weighing between
40 and 50 pounds with a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs
hanging over its lips. One man said it looked like “something out of a Stephen
King story.” And to think this thing was reportedly hit and killed by a car while
chasing a cat. Don’t you know that cat is having some bad dreams?
Without
even seeing the beast, wildlife officials in Maine have decided that it’s a rare
wolf-dog hybrid. However, at this point no one is really sure.
Now you’ve
got to admit this is some mighty interesting stuff. So interesting to me that
I decided to do a search on the Internet for more stories about mystery creatures.
And it seems that not long ago, Fox News had this headline on one of their articles:
“Eleven-Hundred Pound ‘Hogzilla’ Killed in Georgia.”
They report that
this hog which was killed in the suburbs of Atlanta was even bigger than the near-mythical
“Hogzilla” caught in rural South Georgia a few years ago. A team from National
Geographic confirmed that South Georgia’s “Hogzilla” was indeed real. It was seven
and one-half to eight feet long and weighed 800 pounds. That means the hog killed
near Atlanta is 300 pounds bigger. An editor with Georgia Outdoor News said, “Nobody
keeps official records, but it’s one heck of a hog.”
Not
to be outdone, Texas also has its share of mystery
creatures. One of the most famous being the “Chupacabra.”
Although considered mythical by most, there are many people who believe that this
creature does exist. The first reported sighting was in Puerto Rico in 1947 and
since then it allegedly has been seen in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and the United
States. According to one online dictionary, the Chupacabra,
which means “goat sucker” in Spanish, has also been spotted in Maine as well as
Texas.
Once again, however, the so-called
experts say that the Chupacabra
is only legend, although many in the Latin American communities believe it to
be real. I wonder, how do you claim something isn’t real or doesn’t exist if you’ve
never seen it? Evidently some folks have seen something they can’t explain; that
doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong.
And consider this, recently
the NBC affiliate in Dallas/Ft. Worth, Channel Five, ran a story about a mystery
creature found in the Lufkin area.
On their website, they were also running a close-up photo of the animal’s teeth
which include large fangs. “Some people in the southeast Texas town say the creature
is a Chupacabra – a mythical
creature sporting large fangs that sucks blood from its prey,” the report stated.
Last year a rancher in South Texas
shot an animal that had been killing his livestock. The description of which is
very similar to the beast found in Lufkin
. I also came across the same kind of reports from Maryland and elsewhere in the
United States. In fact, just this past summer (2007) a lady in Cuero,
Texas, claims to have a Chupacabra
in her possession. It was one ugly varmint and the story made all the local papers.
She had Texas State University run a DNA test on the thing and the results were
very vague. They pretty much speculated that it was a coyote with the mange but
they weren’t really sure.
Unexplained things do exist and there are
many instances where the so-called experts are too quick to call a considerable
number of people, “liars.” They might not be quite as cocky if they happened to
be lost on some dark, foggy night in southeast Lavaca County and made a face-to-face
encounter with the “Wild Woman of the
Navidad.”
© Murray Montgomery
Lone
Star Diary
December 24, 2007 Column
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