by Cole Herrold
Flying Humanoids are perhaps the most
interesting of all cryptids. A great deal of this is because, unlike Bigfoot,
lake monsters, or thunderbirds, there is nothing we can compare them to in
either the fossil record or in the current known zoological categories. They
are an entirely alien lifeform; however, they appear in almost every country
and culture from around the world. Of all the flying humanoids reported, the
most famous is Mothman. When someone pictures a flying humanoid as a
cryptozoological being, they ultimately envision a dark winged creature with
piercing red eyes. While there are certainly versions of this kind of creature
aside from Mothman, such as the Lake Michigan Mothmen and The Owlman of Mawnan,
they are not entirely uniform in this description. In Pennsylvania throughout
2011, there was a rash of winged humanoid sightings whose description was by
far one of the most bizarre on the books.
The day after the sighting, RK would
return to the location of where he saw the creature and searched for evidence
even though none could be found. After analyzing the signpost and taking a
proper measure, he managed to determine that the creature was approximately 8ft
tall, for when the creature stood erect, it was a whole four inches higher than
the sign. RK, two days after his follow up to the area, sent a message to Stan
Gordon on the 21st about his initial sighting, which would later
appear in his book Astonishing Encounters. Most people familiar with
this case believe that this is the end of RK’s experience with a flying humanoid,
but this is not the case. in an interview with Lon Strickler released on
February 24, 2014, describes how RK had two other separate sightings of the
same creature he witnessed back in March. He waited to tell about his other
encounters simply to see if anyone else after his initial report would also
verify that they, too, had seen the same creature. His second sighting would
occur two weeks after his first and driving on the same road as his initial
sighting, but this time in the opposite direction. He was driving just after
daylight and had managed to get close to where his first sighting took place.
His mind and eyes were on high alert as his car got closer to the area where he
had seen the flying fiend. He was not even a mile from the exact point where he
encountered the freak when as he scanned the fields to the left of him, he once
more saw something anomalous. Thereby a hay bail was the same or similar
creature hunched down. The figure was in a position that seemed like a
stereotypical gargoyle, its hands on the ground looking as though it was
clutching the ledge of some great cathedral with its wings splayed out around
it to the point it was cliché. The creature, even in this squatted position,
was a whole three feet taller than the hay bale. He could tell that with the
beginning light of the morning that the creature's skin was a greyish tone, and
unlike the previous encounter where the creature was seen only from the side or
from the back, RK would state that he could see the creature from the front and
that it is a sinister twist was looking right at him. Curiously enough, he
would go on to state that there was nothing strange in the way of the eyes.
Something totally opposite of what most flying humanoid sightings report.
While this may seem to be the close of his encounters with an enigmatic entity, this would not be the case. About a month after his second encounter, he would have a third encounter that would be very similar to his first. Where when driving on the same stretch of road as his first and second encounter, he had entered a wooded hollow area approximately 500 yards from the second encounter location. It was from there that he noticed a figure shambling towards the woods just before dusk. The figure he could see only from the side, but even with only this partial observation, he could tell that it was, in fact, the same creature he had witnessed the last two times.
This last account is the final time RK had
an encounter with the winged weirdo, but this grotesque gargoyle during this
time was not done terrorizing the resounding area with its presence. Throughout
the month of March of 2011, three more sightings occurred. In East Brady, which
is about 10 miles from Chicora, a motorcyclist was out driving one night. He
had passed a local custard stand and continued to drive another two miles when
he happened to notice a peculiarly large animal. The creature appeared to be
hunched over on the ground and appeared to either be looking for something or
potentially eating something. As he got within 75ft of the form, it proceeded
to stand upright. The motorcyclist would describe the creature as at least
8-9ft tall with long arms that hung down to its knees. Its body was covered in
a dark-coloured leathery skin. The creature's eyes were swept up into the
corners giving it that almost almond shape that had been reported in the RK
encounters. The creature also had the same pointed type of head. One
peculiarity of this case, however, is that the witness would claim that the
creature had wings on the side of its head, which is something not seen in RK's
encounter nor for the fact any of the other flying humanoid reports connected
to the Butler County Gargoyle. The motorcyclist was very disturbed by this
encounter and felt that he was not looking at something from this world but
something from the depths of Hell itself and that it was angry. The creature,
after staring at the unprotected rider for some time, turned and proceeded to
run towards the woods.
In Kepple's Corners which is almost three
miles from Chicora, two witnesses would report seeing a dark tan figure which,
much like RKs sightings, crossed the road in front of their car. The witnesses
had a decent look at the creature and, similarly to RK, described the head
similar to RK but felt that the face of the creature had seemed "smashed
in". The creature had the same muscular body with long arms that ended in
claws as well as them of estimating the height to be about 8ft tall and also
seeing large folded in wings on the creatures back. An interesting feature
about their sighting, however, is how they described the creature move, which
to them seemed that it loped with each step it took. The witnesses who saw this
bizarre beast were so in shock by their encounter that they proceeded to stop
the car in the middle of the road and did not move until they noticed another
car coming behind them. The witnesses also would go on to further say that what
they saw was real and that they would take a lie detector test to prove they
were telling the truth.
The final March 2011 sighting that has at
least been reported/made available to the public took place in/near Rimersburg,
which is the farthest encounter with the Butler Gargoyle as the borough is
almost 20 miles from Chicora. Two witnesses were heading towards Rimersburg
after having left an ice cream stand when they noticed something crossing the
road ahead of them. They managed to get about 35 ft of the creature and
described it in the same way as the previous encounters. The creature was about
9ft tall with dark brown skin, long arms, broad shoulders, a pointed head,
pointed ears, large wings on its back, and a flat forehead. The creature's long
arms had four fingers with long black claws. Once again, the creature is
described as having eyes that seemed to squint upwards into the corner.
Interestingly these witnesses are also the first witnesses to describe a mouth
which bizarrely enough was described as just being like a slit. Another
interesting feature with this encounter is that the witnesses, when describing
how this creature moved, claimed that when the creature moved, the whole body
would turn and that it in no way moved the way a normal person would,
especially with the movement of the arms. With this account, we also get a more
detailed description of the wings, which the witnesses described as being
see-through like mesh and hat a bat-like structure to them. These witnesses
also viewed the creature as something infernal, strongly believing it had been
loosed from Hell itself.
While the vast majority of sightings that
appear in the books and websites revolve around this one month in 2011. There
have been other sightings of the same or similar creature before and after the
famous RK encounter and its fellow March menagerie. There are even sightings
that predate the 2011 cases, which are often believed to be the first of the
Butler County Gargoyle. Daniel Hageman of BORU and Brian Leech of the
Center for Unexplained Events have collected over 23 different reports of
the same or similar creature in the Butler County area as well as in other
counties around PA. The oldest report in his collection occurred in June 1993
but occurred not in Butler County but in Lehigh County on the opposite side of
the state. The sighting occurred in Allentown of all places and happened when
four individuals named John, his girlfriend, son and his son's fiancée, coming
home late one night from a nearby drive-in, would see a creature that seemed to
of escaped off the silver screen. They had reached an area known as Baker's
Point when they watched as a bizarre creature crossed the road in front of
them. The creature was huge in stature, approximately 6ft tall and had large
wings on its back. The creature seemed to either take no notice of the car or
was simply not afraid of the vehicle. When the creature made it to the other
side of the road, it proceeded to spread its wings out and shot up into the sky
just like something out of Jeepers Creepers. The witnesses would later
describe that the creature's legs were very similar to those reported in 2011,
with them seeming to be on backwards and that the creature walked like a
chicken as it crossed the road. While this account seems entirely uniform to
the other Butler County Gargoyle cases, there are two features the witnesses
would describe that are different. For one thing, the creature, in this case,
did not have the leathery skin as reported in the other cases but was covered
in dark brown hair. Another feature that was prominent enough for them to point
out yet does not seem to appear in other accounts is that the creature had a
protruding jaw as opposed to the smashed in or flat face as described in other
cases.
The second oldest case comes from July
2002 in the Moraine State Park, making it the oldest of the Butler County
cases. An eyewitness driving the 528 bridge in Moraine State Park around 1am
happened to see something in his headlights that would be unlike anything he
had ever seen before. There on the bridge, he caught sight of what he could
only describe as a 3-4ft tall bat-like creature. The creature had no
discernible facial features and was either black or grey in colour. As the car
got closer to the creature, the creature whose back was towards the man,
proceeded to jump off the bridge spreading its 7-8ft wingspan and flew away.
The entire encounter lasted only a mere 10 seconds.
A little over a year after the flap of
Butler County Gargoyle sightings, another case appeared at a campsite near
Rimersburg. The encounters of a similar creature occurred in Mid-July of 2012,
but details on this particular encounter are scant in available resources, and
all that is really known is that campers and others in the area are said to of
seen a creature of similar appearance during that time span.
On August 24, 2016, in nearby Allegheny
County, a witness sitting on his porch with his dog would be the last detailed
encounter of the Butler Gargoyle. It was late in the day when man and dog were
enjoying the cool night. All of this would be soon ended as the dog seemed to
rise up from its position and look into the woods as though entranced. This
watching of the trees would be short-lived as the dog, in a surprising move,
proceeded to bolt towards the woods and proceeded to bark madly into the
darkness. The man followed after his dog to get him back into the house and
found his dog near a tree looking up and barking, and the man either by
accident or instinct proceeded to look up and there up in the y of the tree
standing on the branch was a winged humanoid creature staring down at them. The
man, without skipping a beat, proceeded to run back into his house to get a
pistol and ran right back to the tree where he saw the entity, but by the time
he returned, it had flown the coop.
While these are the only available detailed accounts of the Butler County Gargoyle, they are not the only ones. In an interview with Daniel Hageman in the book Mothman and Other Flying Creatures of the Midwest, Hageman claimed that there had been sightings in/near Chicora as well as along Route 422 in Worthington, other sightings on the 528 Bridge in the Moraine State Park as well as along the 422 bridge that goes from the Moraine State Park into New Castle. Hageman also pointed to sightings of similar flying humanoid sightings seen near the PA/New York border as well as with flying humanoid sightings that have been interconnected with the Lake Michigan Mothman flap as some of the flying humanoids reported have specific earmarks that are similar to the Butler Gargoyle as opposed to the Mothman. Yet, the details on these other accounts are nonexistent in available resources, thereby ending all the known accounts of cases of the Butler Gargoyle.
With the Butler Gargoyle, we are seeing
something extremely interesting in that there is an in almost all cases, a
mirror description of something that is very different from what most flying
cryptids are said to look like. Often flying cryptids are giant insects, birds,
pterosaurs, or something chimeral such as the Vermont Awful or even Batsquatch
with its wolf head, bigfoot body, and bat wings. The Butler Gargoyle is not
like the Mothman of Point Pleasant in any way or its British cousin Owlman. It truly
is an alien cryptid. So, it raises the question of what could it be? Clearly,
there's nothing in the fossil record to match anything like it, so how could a
creature like this be around.
Sceptically speaking, even though it
sounds ludicrous is that what people could be seeing is a moulted bird like a
crane or a heron since that could explain the grey leathery skin and such as
well as the backwards style legs and the bizarreness of how it moves and even
some of the facial features, but this is extremely unlikely. The bird itself
would have to be positioned just right for a relatively long time to even come
close to such an appearance, and even then, that still does not explain the
clawed arms and bat-like wings. The only other option then is that this is a
new species of some kind, but even then, that raises more questions and
ventures into some more esoteric possibilities to this creatures' origin.
To start off with, the most plausible of the
gambit of more speculative possibilities is that this is a biological animal
that is either a hominid that somehow developed the ability for flight and
remained undiscovered throughout the United States or that it is possibly a
super highly evolved bat that developed anthropoid features to better help in
some way evolutionarily. The latter, to me, seems the most plausible because
bats are already super highly tuned to their environmental niche, so a bat
creature evolving into something that has gripping hands to get prey or cling
to walls better or some other reason is a plausible reason for such features to
appear in nature. Also, the fact that bats live in caves to roost would be the
ideal place for a creature like this to hide, and caves would also be the
perfect place for such an evolutionary transformation to occur without being
noticed. The problems with this hypothesis, however, is again no fossil
evidence, and morphologically speaking, the fact that the creature essentially
has two sets of arms. Wings in birds and bats are modified hands and arms, so
that would imply that this creature would have had to develop an entirely new
set of limbs that would remain in a more primitive state as opposed to the ones
which would continue to be modified for flight which just seems extremely
improbable. Another issue with the biological aspect of this creature and
flying humanoids, in general, is that they are almost never reported in pairs,
but as single specimens, whereas with other cryptids like Bigfoot or Champ,
there have been families or pairs of them seen together. This makes
establishing the creatures as a biological breeding population as extremely
difficult, even from a hypothetical standpoint. Now it is possible that the
Moraine State Park 3-4ft flying humanoid could have been a juvenile since the
Butler County Gargoyle has almost always been described as being 8-9ft tall and
thereby might add to the argument that there is a breeding population, but
again that is just speculation.
The next possibility is that these
creatures, as felt by several of the witnesses, are of demonic origin. Flying
humanoids, particularly those with bat wings, have been associated with the
evil one since religious iconography has been around, and this is a universal
concept. While some can argue its an artistic representation of those animals
that early man or society felt was unclean or some symbolic reference to
darkness due to the nocturnal nature of bats, there is also the possibility
that maybe just maybe what our ancestors were describing as demons and their
features are accurate and these are what demons are supposed to look like.
Often time when people encounter these creatures, they feel extremely disturbed
or that they are aggressive creatures solely, and just on that and their
appearance, they get the label of demon. There are a lot of problems with this
hypothesis; the first is that this creature does not do anything heinous as one
would expect a demon to do. It behaves more like an animal than a spirit of any
kind, and this includes supernatural environmental entities as it is often seen
crouched down or crossing a road as opposed to possessing Raggedy Ann dolls or
scrawling sinister messages in homes as demons are said to do. Another thing is
that there is nothing to point to this creature being demonic at all, for it
does not dissipate into nothing or disappear or anything like that. It
awkwardly walks across roads and very rarely flies which, if this were a demon,
would seem pointless.
The final possibility of what this
creature could be is that it could be an interdimensional entity. The fact that
this creature seems to be zipping in different areas at different times
throughout PA seems to point to something that just shows up and then
disappears. Dan Hageman had even supported this idea as to when discussing some
of the creature's behaviour he stated that some witnesses felt that the
creature did not know that they were there or that it was unfamiliar with the
location and even seemed disoriented as on a few occasions it would sniff the
air as though it was curious or unfamiliar with the area. This
un-acknowledgement of its surroundings is interestingly similar enough to
another flying humanoid sighting of a creature I covered in a previous article,
the Greene County Winged Humanoid, which has many similar features from eye
shape, head shape, fingers, and wings. In that case, the creature stood on a
fence post and stared ahead, not noticing the eyewitness who was a mere couple
of feet away from the creature. Now the Greene County Winged Humanoid seemed to
be either stuck in between dimensions or frozen in some bizarre way which is
different from the Butler County Gargoyle, which does interact with its
environment as it crosses the road and tumbles through the brushes and, in some
cases does watch some witnesses so it is perhaps something on our plane and can
interact with some of the environment but not all of it or all the time. Sure,
all of this is speculation, but it is one of the better possibilities for this
phenomenon and more plausible than the demonic aspect.
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