Medford Shmoos
By Cole Herrold
Cryptids and aliens come in all shapes and
sizes, but some of these beings are so peculiar in form that one has to wonder
whether some evolutionary joke was pulled by the cosmos. Some look like sloppy space
brains, others look like living tombstones and coke machines or Michelin men,
yet some are even weirder not because of their details but because of their
simplicity of form. In Medford, Oregon, in the 50s, a trio of creatures that to
the witnesses seemed to be ripped from the pages of a family-friendly comic
were encountered, and their bizarre appearance has led many to wonder just what
these entities are.
An unnamed woman, her husband, and their
12-year-old daughter were driving at about 10 o clock one night in the summer
of 1953. The trio who lived in the wooded outskirts of Medford were on their
way home. They had turned off Old Stage Road to Scenic Avenue, which was near their
home, when they noticed something strange moving along the side of the road.
There illuminated by the car's headlights was much like them, a trio of
figures, but unlike them, these figures were anything but human. The family
stopped their car upon seeing them and watched in awe as the creatures, instead
of walking as one would expect, seemed to glide across the road in front of them.
It was at that moment that they were able to get a clear look at these
enigmatic entities; they were white and shaped very much like geese with a long
neck and small "head" but were unlike a bird covered in a satiny
white fur. The creatures also were missing wings, arms, legs, or anything else
that would appear to be an appendage. The creatures were about 6ft away from
their car, and as the group looked, they noticed something else odd about these
creatures; as the trio looked at the creature's head, they noticed that it had
no beak or muzzle, and they could not see any additional facial features. As
the trio of beings crossed the road, the family gauged that their size was
about 4ft high, with the last creature trailing behind being just slightly
smaller than the other two. The family watched as the creatures moved into the
surrounding woodlands, and the family continued to stay stopped in their car
for a little longer until finally starting again and driving the ¼ of a mile to
their home. Upon returning home, the group discussed their sighting, and the
family agreed that these shaggy bowling pin-like beings very much resembled the
Shmoo characters from the Lil’ Abner comics and associated stories,
except that they were much larger and bore longer necks than the Shmoos of the
comic world. The following day they searched the area for any evidence of the
creatures but found nothing, and upon asking the neighbors on whether they had
seen any strange creatures in the area, the group only managed to scare them
and found that no one else in the area had seen the creatures. The family,
after that, kept their encounter to themselves until they moved to Galt,
California, and sent a letter to CUFOs in July of 1983. In the letter, the wife
of the family sent both a sketch of the creatures, which appeared in the
April-May edition of the 1984 CUFOS Associate Newsletter, and a map of
the area where the creatures were seen, which CUFOS did not publish in the
article. The sighting had such an effect that upon writing to CUFOS, the wife
stated the following "My daughter is 42 years old now and still remembers
the incident plainly" and "But, I've always wondered who or what they
were, and from where?".
These creatures are perhaps some of the most perplexing entities out there. With these entities, there are a lot of things to discuss, but perhaps the best way to do so is to speculate as to just what they are. Skeptically speaking, there is always the possibility of a hoax; while we don't know who the witnesses are in this case, as they were anonymous for the article, one could venture and say that someone is pulling a gag and using a known comic book character as a template to fake an encounter claim. This added to the fact that there is no evidence for the Shmoos in Medford, such as matted down grass where the creatures were, tracks, hair, photographs, etc. there's nothing to prove that anything did occur. Now an interesting thing about the encounter based on the information given by the wife in the article is that there are specific roads listed and a general idea of where the house would be where the witnesses lived, and perhaps it may be possible to check and see who lived in the area at the time of the sighting and see if one may be able to find the witness and verify whether this was a hoax or a real event. Yet it's also from this that these little references to roads and such tend to seem, at least from the article, that the encounter did occur as it was not some generic tale of driving down a nameless road at night or something along those lines in the account.
Another possibility I feel I need to
mention is the possibility of misidentification. In an article on the Shmoos by
Martin Kottmeyer, he proposes that what was seen by the witnesses was actually
the white underbelly and flank of a deer with the white tail sticking up. He
describes how he came up with what he feels to be the answer to the mystery in
the following: "I was driving down the lane leading from my home, and four
deer jumped out of a neighbor's cornfield across the road. They ran across 80
acres of open field towards a forest following a curved arc. As I watched, the
viewing angle gradually changed so that I was seeing them directly from the
rear. Two of the deer had white haunches and white tails which were short and
sticking straight up. The light brown portion of the hide, including the legs,
blended into the color of the open field and suddenly I was observing a pair of
white blobby smoos gliding sideways across the landscape. The smoos even tilted
off the vertical as in the drawing. This was because of the curved nature of
their path across the field and their leaning into the curve as they ran. What
seemed so unexpected was how the haunches did not bounce up and down, but
simply glided. Everything fit: the shape, the color, the motion, the size, the
satiny fur, the direction to a wooded area, and the brevity of the experience.
Only two things were different. The Medford witnesses were closer. The deer
were over a hundred yards away when I recognized the smoo shape. But their
encounter was also at night, where mine was during the day. Presumably the
darkness would have been conducive to such an illusion at closer
quarters". This is an interesting point to the mystery of the Shmoos, but
it does have a problem the witnesses, when they saw the Shmoos saw them some
6ft away this makes mistaking a deer in a field much less possible. Plus, these
creatures crossed the road in front of the witnesses, so at least one should
have been able to see the full deer as it was not blending in with the color of
a surrounding brown-colored field. So it's an interesting possibility but,
again, unlikely.
When first reading about these creatures,
it's easy to initially want to jump into the cryptid category; they have white
fur, something relatively common in unknown animal reports like Sheepsquatch,
the Albino Giant Ground Sloths of Sherman, or the Murphysboro Mud Monster
cases. Yet things get difficult when one sees that these creatures are devoid
of appendages that would allow some sort of locomotion. These creatures possess
no arms or legs, and they are not even described as having other features such
as eyes, ears, a nose, or mouth. They seem to simply be hairy bowling pins. Yet
they move and not by hopping like some sort of overgrown jumping bean or
hoppity hop, but they glide above the ground. This is something one does not
necessarily associate with cryptids. Cryptids are, by and large, animals, and
they are supposed to behave as such. Yet Gliding cryptids or floating cryptids,
or flying cryptids without the aid of wings or skin flaps are reported, and
perhaps the Shmoos are some species that are capable of this motion. It is
important to point out that the Shmoos do bear interestingly enough to a flying
white-haired shaggy cryptid from West Virginia called the Abominable Albino
Aerobeasts. These creatures are described as large white shaggy-haired
creatures with the ability to seemingly fly without any form of propulsion.
They are often by eyewitnesses mistaken for clouds until those brief
occurrences when they come relatively close to vehicles. Perhaps the Shmoos are
a population of these creatures that made their way from the Mountain State to
Oregon. The biggest problem with the shmoos being Abominable Albino Aerobeasts
is that the Shmoos are small and hover a little bit off the ground; seemingly
based on the report, Aerobeasts are described as having heads some 3ft wide and
flying high off the ground rather than hovering or gliding. Yet with the
unknown nature of all these creatures, anything is technically possible, so
perhaps the shmoos could be juveniles or that Aerobeasts can come closer to the
ground than previously thought; again, however, this is all speculation.
Another Cryptid that interestingly bears
some resemblance to the Shmoos is the Fresno Nightcrawler. These creatures,
which appear as white entities with small heads attached to long legs, have
taken the cryptozoology world by storm due to the several pieces of footage
captured over the years. While one originally would not think to compare a
floating pinball-shaped creature to a jolly bounding two-legged head creature,
there is a possible connection. In the original video of the Fresno Nightcrawlers,
there are two creatures reported, one of which is the one most are familiar
with or have ingrained in memory, but many forget that before that creature
walked along the lawn, there was a strange entity best described as a living
Q-Tip which slowly seemed to move across the yard. It did not do the long
strides as associated with the Nightcrawlers but instead seemed to move with
either its legs together or by hovering. Another thing to note is that the
Shmoos might not have actually glided, but they may have simply seemed to do
so; as the witness said when describing their motion that they "seemed to
glide," there was no official confirmation of that particular ability that
means that they could have had feet unseen under their bulbous lower half or
that the witness did not focus in on that section of the body as much or that
they did legitimately glide. Shmoos and Nightcrawlers also are also both white
in color, and California and Oregon are not relatively far from each other, so
what the Shmoos might have been was the very first Nightcrawler report.
While I've strongly brought up the
possibility that the Shmoos might have been a cryptid, one cannot also ignore
the possible Extraterrestrial possibility. These creatures, while no UFO was
reported in the case or in the area, could still have been from another world,
be it another dimension or another planet. With many similar cases, there is
always the chance that a craft of some sort was nestled in a nearby brush or
that it was located somewhere further, and these are some visitors. The bizarre
anatomy and possible abilities that are described could completely be possible
in a world where evolution occurred differently than here, and in fact, it
would seem that if the Shmoos were ETs, they perhaps would be some of the most possible
and authentic as they are so alien and not humanoid like in the slightest.
Other possibilities of just what the
Shmoos could have been seems unlikely. There’s nothing exactly similar in
faerie lore to the Shmoos except for when one looks at Japan's Yokai, and even
then, there are none that are the right color or behave the same way, and most
of the Yokai that are similar have eyes or other features that the Shmoos as
far as can be perceived do not. In spiritualistic studies and demonology, there
again is nothing similar, so it seems unlikely that it would be an example of
this. It's from this that if this is an authentic encounter, it would have to
be either a cryptid, extraterrestrial, or interdimensional being.
The Shmoos are an interesting case, albeit
an exceptionally brief one. With so many bizarre, overly designed creatures
reported, its kind of refreshing to have a creature that seems exceedingly
simple as though it had escaped from the imaginative scribblings and doodles of
a toddlers piece of paper or as if some sort of bean bag chair suddenly came to
life and stretched itself out. It's something that is so simple and so weird
that a creature like this is truly unforgettable in the pages of Forteana.
Species/Potential Species: Mammal/
Paranormal Entity
Location: Medford, Oregon
Sighted: Summer 1953
Works Cited:
CUFOs Associate Newsletter April-May 1984
Martin Kottmeyer "TRN - Mar/Apr 1996
- What's Smoo?" - REALL. http://reall.org/newsletter/v04/n03/smoo.html
