Beast of Cole Hollow Road

Eighteen-year-old Randy Emmert and a group of his friends were apparently the first ones to be confronted by the stinking simian spectre that would plague the area around Pekin, Illinois in the summer of 1972. Emmert had his encounter in early May, but eventually over 200 reports of the pale ape-like creature known as 'Cohomo' or the 'Cole Hollow Road Monster' would stack up...

Cohomo!

This illustration appeared in the Chicago Tribune

Emmert and his friends noted that the terrifying creature made a loud shrieking noise, and described it as being very large and covered in white hair. They apparently believed that it made its lair underneath a local abandoned house, but there is no indication as to why they came to this conclusion. Emmert originally didn't want to report his sighting out of fear of being thought to be insane, but he eventually pulled through. Little did he know that his report in May would kick off an outbreak of monster hysteria two months later.
The next widely-publicised sighting was on July 25th, and was reported by the Creve Coeur authorities who had apparently received a story about something big swimming in the Illinois River. Just one day later, over 200 phonecalls had been logged by the East Peoria police as coming from terrified townsfolk who had allegedly seen the hirsute horror. Also on the evening of the 26th, the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department took a presumably-frantic call from a man living in Eureka who had apparently been partaking in a family birthday party at Fondulac Park in East Peoria when he caught sight of at least one UFO. He and the rest of the party all saw some bizarre lights moving in a vertical position before going down behind some trees and disappearing. These lights left a vaporous trail behind them. Other reports included such incidents as the monster being seen walking in the forest, roaming back-yards, patrolling riverbanks and even destroying one unlucky caller's garden fence. The police - led by then-sheriff James Donahue - were skeptical of the reports but logged them nonetheless.
On July 28th, a woman in rural Pekin had a run-in with Cohomo while picking berries by an old mine. The witness was so terrified, according to her testimony to the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department, that she fled the scene immediately and left her purse behind. That same night, East Peoria Police claimed that a further two reliable citizens claimed to have seen said furry fiend. The creature was described as having long, u-shaped ears and a red mouth with sharp teeth. It had thumbs with 'long second joints'. Overall, it was compared to a mix of an ape and a caveman. Newspaper articles from the time stated that monster had a distinct stench about it comparable to that of a wet dog, rotten eggs or akin to sulphur. Early articles from the local Daily Times newspaper originally suggested that perhaps the Missouri Monster 'Momo' had migrated to Tazewell County, seeing as it had been seen just one year before the monster mayhem kicked off.
A search party even eventually took to the East Peoria woods in search of the simian monstrosity. This party consisted of roughly 100 armed men, and they patrolled the thick forest for quite a long while before one hapless volunteer accidentally shot himself in the foot and the search was promptly called off for health and safety reasons.
Another twist arrived in this already-bizarre story in 1991 when Emmert (held to be the first witness) called the Peoria Journal Star to claim that he had made the entire thing up. He and his friends had apparently invented the entire story to frighten another friend of theirs who worked late shifts at a local gas station. However, this obviously doesn't explain the rest of the 200+ reported sightings during this brief monster flap. So we are left to ask, what on earth happened in Tazewell County in the summer of 1972?

Sources
'Did a Hairy Monster Stalk Tazewell County?' published by FLOutdoorsman
Cryptid Profile: Cole Hollow Road Monster by the Pine Barrens Institute

Xuc and the Alux

Illustration by Harry Trumbore

The moon hung over the ancient ruins of the great city of Mayapán late on night in 1977. Xuc (pronounced like Chuck) was just tending to the last his duties that night as the caretaker of the historical site when he became aware of odd noises coming from somewhere near to the ruins of the Temple of the Birds. Curious, and sensing that something was perhaps amiss seeing as the site was meant to be closed to visitors past 5pm, Xuc approached the temple and was confronted with an attack by a creature that he had previously assumed to be mythical.

The 'Mayan Pixie'
Xuc compared the sound to a machete chopping wood, and presumably wondered what on earth a woodsman would be doing in that area at the time. He unlocked the entry gate to the site and proceeded in the direction from which the odd sounds were emanating. He had just rounded the corner of the Temple of the Birds when a small clay pellet was flung from some unseen location - whizzing past dangerously close to his head.
Xuc compared the sound to a machete chopping wood, and presumably wondered what on earth a woodsman would be doing in that area at the time. He unlocked the entry gate to the site and proceeded in the direction from which the odd sounds were emanating. He had just rounded the corner of the Temple of the Birds when a small clay pellet was flung from some unseen location - whizzing past dangerously close to his head.
Ducking behind a mound of fallen masonry in alarm, Xuc could now hear a further barrage of the aforementioned pellets pelting the stonework defending him from the onslaught. The rain of rocks briefly paused, allowing Xuc to take a peek out from his hiding place to try and snatch a glance at where exactly the projectiles were coming from. He was utterly flabbergasted to see a tiny humanoid silhouetted in the pale moonlight. It had a disproportionately-large head, a jet-black beard and appeared to be wearing a white huipil (a traditional Mayan garment resembling a tunic). A full-sized machete was slung over the creature's shoulder, being almost as long as the bizarre critter was tall.
What happened immediately after this is unknown, but I think it is a fair assumption to say that Xuc likely ran from the scene in terror. However, his fear didn't stop him from returning the next morning to collect the pellets that had been thrown by the entity. He amassed about eight of the anomalous objects, and they were described as being roughly the size of walnuts and as having been apparently baked to the point that they were akin to bullets in terms of hardness.

Source
Apparently the original source for this story is an article written in Fate Magazine by one Bill Mack for the August 1984 issue of said magazine. He had personally spoken with Xuc in the late 1970s, and had been given the impression that he was a 'personable' and intelligent individual. When Mack expressed some skepticism as to the veracity of Xuc's claims, the caretaker then revealed the eight pellets he had recovered. Fate Magazine is obviously not available online - and so I instead found this story in 'Lost Cities of North & South America' by David Hatcher Childress.

Wrath of El Pombéro

Illustration of the character in question

Said Pombéro (no relation to Pom-Bears) is a rapacious dwarf-like creature originally attested to in Guaraní culture - but of which legends have since spread across Argentina, Paraguay and Southern Brazil. It is described as a diminutive humanoid with black skin and hairy extremities, and is usually said to be a harmless trickster figure - but is sometimes also known to kidnap women and force them into having sexual intercourse, and to commit other such heinous acts. Of course, this wildly unpredictable entity is naught more than local folklore, right? Well - according to a testimony given by one Liliana Nieves - this allegedly-mythical critter is all too real, and extremely violent...

Dark Forces in Barrio Santa Teresita
The community was already in a state of fear due to the recent appearance of a Aguara Guazú (maned wolf) in the area - which they had linked to the legendary werewolf-like monster known as the Lobizón. This general unease would reach a boiling point, however, when all hell broke lose in Barrio Santa Teresita...
Liliana's harrowing ordeal began on February 17, 2004 (the Tuesday before her story was told by the online news source El Norte Digital) when over 10 witnesses would concur that they saw a rain of stones fall onto Liliana's house - located 'at 31 and 0000 street in Santa Teresita'. Although everyone could see the stones falling, nobody except Liliana could hazard a guess at who was throwing them. The terrified homeowner claimed that she saw something tearing mandarin and tomato plants out of the ground in her back-yard, and then caught sight of a person running away from the scene. Her husband and another unnamed man chased after the entity, leaving Liliana alone in the house with her sister-in-law, Norma Cordoba.
While the two women were alone, a brick suddenly hurtled into the roof. Liliana frantically called Norma over to where she was standing, saying that she could see another entity. Norma said that she caught her first glimpse of the creature when 'a shadow shot out toward the back of the property'. The shadow in question continued to pelt the house with debris until 4am, at which point Norma had a breakdown and was taken to the hospital.
The rampant poltergeist-like activity briefly eased up, with nothing happening on Wednesday leading the beseiged family to perhaps dare to assume that Tuesday's events were naught more than a cruel prank. This hope, however, would be dashed when the assault resumed on Thursday - this time with even more ferocity. Norma was in bed at the time, and Liliana and her husband were sitting outside on the patio when stones started to fall onto the roof again. Norma got out of bed, presumably terrified that her ordeal was about to repeat itself, and went outside to see that her other neighbours were all aware of the commotion. The rocky rain struck Liliana's house and neighbouring properties alike, and at this point a decent portion of the community was stood outside in their back-yards gawking at the phenomenon.
All the houses in the neighbourhood are linked by a common patio, filled with trees with branches that touch the ground. It was into this forested area that Liliana strayed in an attempt to locate the source of the stone-throwing - this was evidently a bad idea, seeing as she didn't reemerge for quite a while. Frightened, her neighbours started to call out to her and received no reply until a local man ventured out into the forest to find the missing woman. He was successful in this operation, but what he found was almost certainly not what he was hoping for. Liliana was sprawled on the ground suffering from what appeared to be the aftermath of a savage blow to her face, severely wounding 'part of her eye and mouth' - leaving it 'all broken'.
When Norma was asked about how Liliana described her attacker, she claimed that her sister-in-law had said that it was a humanoid entity about waist-height on her - and that it had 'covered her mouth, dragged her to the bushes and beat her'. The creature apparently abandoned its hapless victim when it heard her neighbours calling for her, and was gone by the time they started searching for her.
When the community brought Liliana inside, she suddenly fell down onto the floor and begged her brother and neighbours to vanquish whatever it was that was grabbing onto her feet. Confused, the bystanders stood her back up only to watch her collapse back down onto the ground 'as if her feet were being pulled out from under her'. This frightening force was completely invisible to Liliana's would-be rescuers, but they rained down machete blows onto the space around her anyway in the hope that they would hit the imperceptible assailant. Liliana was completely hysterical, desperately pleading with the bystanders to save her from this phantom attacker. The police eventually arrived and took Liliana away to the psychiatric ward of the Hospital 4 de Junio, where she remained until February 21st of that year.
It was roughly midday on that Saturday - the 21st - when deacon Dionisio Castagna of the San José Parish visited the village, speaking to and praying with the frenzied locals. He agreed to bless their homes, and didn't question whether the story was true or not - simply saying that they should 'strengthen their faith in God and reaffirm family ties' in order to stay safe.
Mario Obregon, Liliana's brother, said that she would frequently say that the creature would appear and say that 'it wanted to take her away'. Trying his best to help, Mario would stand in front of his sister and try to defend her to the best of his ability, but could never even catch a glimpse of the assailant. Liliana said that the entity would continually appear despite her brother's attempts to protect her. A neighbour apparently came onto the scene with a crucifix and started to pray, but this seemingly only angered the creature - it would attack Liliana even more viciously and frequently. This episode was what frightened the locals the most, seeing as it was clear to them that there was seemingly an invisible force that was trying to push and drag Liliana. She said that it was a 'little man, all black' resembling an imp, and eventually the neighbours took her out of the house in an attempt to evade the entity, because it kept threatening to take her away into the forest and beat her.
According to a police report taken during the same period, a woman had been the victim of a brick attack on Friday (20th of February) at around 02:00am. Oddly, this is the same time as when the Aguara Guazú appeared in the neighbourhood. The police were dispatched the scene and apparently noted that there were brick shards on the ground near the site of the attack. An hour later, a deputy sheriff by the name of Aldo Fernandez led an operation to return to the site - and was alarmed to find that a large number of bystanders claimed to have seen the woman in question being 'lifted and thrown against the wall' by an invisible force, apparently resulting in her being severely bruised and needing to be hospitalised.

Chronology
Okay so as you can tell this is a very intriguing case, but the chronology of events seems to get a bit confused towards the end of the report. This is through no fault of my own, and this jumbled situation was present in the original source article. As far as I can tell, Liliana was attacked by the creature while out searching for the source of the stones, was brought inside where she was repeatedly pushed over by the entity - so much so that Mario stepped in to protect her but ultimately failed, leading to the community members taking Liliana outside to escape the threats of the creature. It was then that the police came. That's what I make of this, but I can see that other interpretations of the timeline might also be valid...

Source
El Norte Digital - February 22, 2004. The specific article within this issue was found as the last case detailed on this website. My antivirus software says that ads were blocked on this page, and so you might need to do the same...

Wondrous Wraith of Willow Creek

Willow Creek is nestled just two miles from Brooksville, Kentucky. According to a report made in the Atlanta Daily Constitution on the 4th of November, 1868 - a 'wonderful phenomenon' made its presence known here, much to the hysterical excitement of the local residents.

A Sulfurous Centaur

'Fire Centaur' by JupiterWaits on DeviantArt

It was October 10th of 1868 when an unnamed 'prominent tobacco merchant' was confronted by the outlandish apparition in question. He lived in Brooksville, and was returning home along a darkened country road in the southern portion of Bracken County after a long day buying up tobacco crops. Running late and thus presumably in quite a rush, his swift course was suddenly halted when he beheld 'a most frightful object' stood in the middle of the road before him. He described it as walking upright and reaching a height of 6ft, and as having a 'very pale' face like that of a man - with flames licking down over its shoulders like a hellish mockery of human hair. Its eyes were 'of sulfurous blue' and appeared to be constantly changing in size, one moment being as large as tin cups and the next being almost nonexistent.
Its 'deadly pale' arms once again resembled those of a human, and in one hand it carried a torch while in the other it held a sword of roughly 4ft in length. Its lower half was that of a horse with 'well proportioned' legs tipped with equine hooves. In place of a tail, it had a 3ft-long mass of flames - and its breath was also described as 'a solid sheet of fire, which vibrated with the heaving of its breast, like the pendulum of a clock'. The fiery fiend - apparently the most frightful thing that the witness had ever seen - walked off to the side of the road and vanished into the darkness.
Immediately motivated to give chase to the weird wonder, the witness put spurs to his horse and galloped towards the area to which he had seen the entity disappear. Roughly 200 yards later he had reached the summit of the hill - but had not yet managed to apprehend the infernal apparition. However, as soon as he looked back in the direction he had come, he caught sight of the creature 'in the same spot where he had first beheld it'. Presumably somewhat peeved and utterly bewildered at this point, the merchant stopped his horse to observe the anomalous happening. The creature, perhaps upon realising that it was being watched, crossed over to the left side of the road whereupon it scaled a fence and commenced running at full tilt towards the witness.
Horrified, he beat a hasty retreat from the apparition and made a beeline towards the nearest town - where he told some of the citizens about what he had seen. Presumably all eager to track down a bona fide monster, said citizens almost immediately formed a mob and 'started out to see the strange visitant'. When they got to the location at which the creature had been observed - some of them were able to clearly see the entity while it seemed completely invisible to others. The creature was seen on the fence, running rapidly backwards and forwards. It passed the witnesses at a distance of 'a quarter of a mile'. I do not pretend to know what this latter segment of the description means - I have no idea as to what the entity's movements were supposed to be at this point...
At about 23:00pm, the monstrous creature vanished and was not to be seen again that night. However, since then it would apparently manifest every night at the same time - being 'on hand' like clockwork. Nervous excitement was said to be mounting in the little Bracken County community as of the source's publication. It is, sadly, unclear what became of the spectre due to the event still being ongoing when the source was written.

Source
'Humanoid Encounters' by Albert Rosales

When Pokémon Attack

Pokemon Go was, and still is, wildly popular. It enables people to hunt for virtual monsters throughout the real world, using GPS functions to create a map of the world around players. It was downloaded roughly 15 million times in its first week of release. Because it encourages people to explore the world around them, numerous bizarre stories have come to light involving the game - some of which are of the paranormal variety. For example, the Loveland Frogman was allegedly encountered in 2016, long after the first wave of sightings had finished in 1972. In another report, some players supposedly broke into Area 51 after discovering a wild Mewtwo in the government base.

A Truly Gastly Encounter

Original artist unknown

However, nothing can top what apparently happened to a woman in Moscow. Bizarre circumstances led to a formal police complaint being lodged against a Pokemon character. The married woman had been playing the game before she fell asleep, and was then woken up to find a giant Pokemon lying on top of her body while it sexually assaulted her. Not surprisingly, she jumped out of the bed immediately, causing the bizarre apparition to vanish - but the virtual reality game could allegedly still detect the presence of the monster on her bed. She woke her husband and told him what had happened, but it became clear that he didn’t believe her when later speaking to the police. Both the police and her husband said that she should seek psychiatric help, and a later visit to a psychic turned up nothing. According to Ivan Makarov, a friend of the woman who’s name has not been release to the press, she says that there are ‘too many Pokemon at her place and even the dog can sense them. She says the dog barks whenever she plays Pokemon Go’.
The attack that jumpstarted this series of events reminds me of a sleep paralysis episode. Sufferers of this condition normally tell of being sexually assaulted or lied on by supernatural or demonic beings, and so perhaps this woman saw a Pokemon because she had been playing the game before bed. The rest of the story - the details about the dog being able to sense the Pokemon - could be explained by paranoia. The woman eventually accepted psychiatric help for what she had been through, bringing an end to the truly bizarre anomalous incident. As far as I know, nothing like this has ever happened since.

Source
'Woman Tells Police She Was Raped by Pokemon Go Character' by Simon Holmes for the Daily Mail

Where Did Lillian Carney Go?

An old photograph of the Aroostook River (circa 1920)

One Sunday - August 8, 1897 to be precise - Mr and Mrs Carney decided to go out blueberry picking in the Mullen Bog, which is apparently situated just west of Aroostook River in Masardis, Maine. This entire region is surrounded by dense forests and secluded lakes, and is just 15 miles from the Canadian border. They brought their daughter, Lillian, with them. She was only six years and five months old at the time, and so when she wandered away from her parents a search party was quickly organised. She would not be seen again until 46 hours had elapsed - and she had a bizarre story to tell her rescuers.

An Unnatural Sunshine
As soon as her parents realised that she was missing and that she could not be located after an initial hour of searching, they called for assistance - and were rewarded with an extensive search that lasted until midnight that night. On Monday morning, 200 concerned citizens joined the search effort - combing every inch of the forest 'without finding a trace of the lost child'. The distraught family and their friends ended up staying in the dense woods throughout both nights.
One day later, on Tuesday morning, 300 men turned up to the ever-growing search effort. It was roughly 10am when one Mr. Burt Pollard found Lillian 'two or three miles from where she started'. She seemed to be perfectly calm and collected, and was asking for her mother. There were some wild berries in her hand, but she said that she wouldn't want to eat them for fear that they might negatively impact her health. Guns were fired as joyful signals and the steam whistle at the Simpson Mill sounded to alert people that the child had been found. Tired but satisfied, everyone returned to their daily business.
When questioned about what she had seen while missing, she said that 'the sun shined all the time in the woods' - which has struck many a researcher (including David Paulides) as being extremely odd. The original newspaper source felt the need to clarify that the moon had been shining brightly for some of the time she was alone in the woods, but this also strongly implies that it was also partially cloudy for some duration of the period. When further asked about her experience, she claimed to have heard some people talking a day previously (these were presumably the search party) but had kept still for fear that they might've been 'tramps'. She also claimed to have seen 'little things' roughly the size of her cat, but had clapped her hands to scare them away. The newspaper speculated that these could've been rabbits.
It is interesting to note the similarities between this 1897 case and the more modern Missing 411 phenomenon. People who are victims of this bizarre phenomenon usually swiftly vanish without a trace, and then turn up (either alive or dead) quite close to where they originally disappeared from. This is certainly true for Lillian. Another odd link between this case and the Missing 411 phenomenon is the activity of berry-picking, which has been noted by David Paulides as being a strange constant in several cases.
We also have the manner in which the child seemed to have been unaware that anyone was looking for her, and remained perfectly calm throughout the whole ordeal. I would almost say that she experienced something like a jump forwards in time - there one moment and then not there anymore until 10am on Tuesday morning. Where did she go? Well, Paulides implied on a podcast called Where Did the Road Go? that he is of the opinion that the so-called sun seen by Lillian was actually some artificial light-source. What would artificial lights have been doing in the 1800s?

Sources
Lewiston Evening Journal - Aug 12, 1897
'The Devil's in the Detail' interview with David Paulides on Where Did the Road Go? Podcast

Why I Don't Talk to Glowing White Chameleons Anymore

Luke Payne has a very odd memory from his childhood. You’ve heard the phrase ‘there’s always a bigger fish’, right? Well I think that the paranormal version of this should be 'there’s always a weirder case’. If the story of the giant glowing chameleon is true and not a dream or screen memory on behalf of the witness, then I think I may have found one of the weirdest.

I created this image for this case.

A Waking Dream? Or Something Weirder? 

When he was five years old, he and his family were driving when an enormous, glowing white reptile resembling a bipedal chameleon stopped them. The chameleon either told the entire family something, or told Luke this thing specifically - he can’t recall, due to his memory of the event having ‘faded a lot’. He says that the only reason he ever recalled it in the first place was because, on the day after it happened, he told his mother and grandmother something that he ‘was not able to or shouldn’t have been able to know’. They apparently got upset over this, and demanded to know how Luke knew it, and so he told them - his five-year-old self not thinking it was odd at all - that the glowing chameleon told them last night. He was confused as to why they didn’t remember. They were both there and so they should’ve known about it, according to Luke.

Obviously they didn’t believe him, and Luke doesn’t really believe it either, but he still can’t work out how he knew what he did and why his mind would’ve invented such an elaborate and bizarre story, which he can still see in his mind in just the same way he sees all his other memories. He has never had an imaginary friend or ‘anything like that’, and only ‘a handful of odd things’ have happened to him elsewhere in his lifetime. Luke assumes that this bizarre event must have been ‘some twisted type of recall showing exactly how fallible human memory is’ - perhaps a screen memory for something even more aberrant?
Either that or ‘a giant glowing chameleon was overly interested in our family personal business for some reason and wanted me to know…that’s why I don’t talk to glowing chameleons anymore…’

Source
https://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2018/11/woman-in-black-glowing-white-bipedal.html

Vengeance of the Djinn Orbs

Rosemary Ellen Guiley and Philip J. Imbrogno received a letter 'several years ago' from a woman who had grown up in Turkey. She told a harrowing story about the time when her husband and quite a few of his friends had decided to contact the djinn as something fun to pass the time. They didn’t believe that the djinn actually existed at this point, and so was just wanting to do something to mess around. They went about this by seeking out a man who was apparently capable of calling to the djinn - it would, predictably, end very badly...

Orbduction! 

Photoshopped rendition of this case

One of the husband's friends had a friend who was 'quite religious' and lived off in a nearby mountain village. This took place sometime in the late nineties on a summer evening in Istanbul - and the group of partygoers decided to visit the supposed djinn summoner.
Apparently some pre-Islamic Arabic rituals exist which can be used alongside readings from the Quran to achieve contact with the djinn and bring them into our plane of reality. The man was reluctant to use his abilities to summon the nebulous spirits forth from whatever bizarre realm they had originally emanated from, but ultimately the others - none of which really believed that the djinn were real - were eventually able to persuade him to perform the rite.
The man started chanting Islamic prayers, reading out the incantations from the Quran for several dramatic minutes before the windows were suddenly blown open by an invisible force and three 'glowing orbs' flew into the room. The orbs shone so dazzlingly bright that the men had to shield their eyes against the solar glare. These odd light-forms were also able to easily phase back and forth through the glass window panes. These alleged djinn were apparently 'very angry' that they had been interrupted by the summoning, and requested to know why the man had done so. It is unclear if they actually spoke or if this communication was telepathic and only between the djinn and the summoner. The men (plural in the source article, thus suggesting that it was possible that the djinn had actually spoken) had no idea what to say to this - and so the entities only got angrier.
The house's lights started flickering on and off, and loud banging noises could be heard on the walls and door. The carnage briefly seemed to subside when the djinn left the scene - allowing the terrified men to regain their composure. However, they hadn't realised that the one of the men had vanished during the commotion. Perhaps in denial, the other men concluded that he must've simply been frightened by the admittedly-horrifying manifestation and had chosen to run somewhere and hide there. His fellows 'looked everywhere' but were completely unable to find him.
Hours later, the solemn party heard someone crying out from their balcony. When they got there to investigate, they discovered the formerly-missing man in the foetal position, dripping with sweat and hysterical with fear. He told them that the djinn had stolen him away to their world as punishment for the unnecessary summoning. He said that the djinn's world was a 'terrible place' and that he was so utterly traumatised by the experience that he wouldn’t say anything more about it. Suffice to say, all members of the party now believe that the djinn are definitively real, and 'want nothing to do with them ever again'.

Notes on the Nature of the Djinn
It is of course interesting to note that this event would've been filed as being extraterrestrial or perhaps even demonic activity if it had occurred in a different cultural region - but seeing as it occurred in an Islamic region, it was described as being a manifestation of the djinn. Perhaps the same can be said for the aforementioned demons and extraterrestrials - what they appear as just depends on who is seeing them and what their beliefs are. It is no more correct to call these entities aliens than djinn or faeries, in my opinion.

Source 
'The Vengeful Djinn' by Rosemary Ellen Guiley and Philip J. Imbrogno

Venusians on a Plane

The title was a 'Snakes on a Plane' reference, if you didn't catch that. Anyhoo - today I have a bizarre story to tell you, which was initially related to UFOs Northwest by the main witness to the event in question. The witness in question was just going about her duty as a flight attendant, but her job became a lot more complicated when three exceedingly odd passengers boarded the plane during a routine stop. What happened next would convince the witness that these people were anything but human...

Masterful photo editing, me

The Man in Seat 23D
On an undisclosed date somewhere between 1985 and 1989, the anonymous witness was a flight attendant working for a passenger airline on a flight going from Palm Springs, California to Portland, Oregon. She had been employed with the unnamed airline company for 29 years, and requested that she maintain her anonymity and that the company maintained theirs due to her fear of repercussions if the story got out. She made it abundantly clear that she did not want any sort of payment or publicity from her story, and she also struck the researcher tasked with interviewing her as someone who 'knew things' that only a flight attendant could've.
On its way to Oregon, the plane ended up briefly stopping in San Francisco. Among those who boarded the jet during this period were three characters who 'seemed quite unusual'. One of them was a man who the witness estimated to be about 30 years old, one was a child of roughly 8 years, and the third and final individual was only described as being middle-aged. The witness and her fellow crew members thought that the 30-year-old was bizarre in both appearance and demeanour. He was said to have 'very piercing eyes and an unusual forehead'. All three of the odd passengers were dressed in what the witness described as 'Sears Roebuck' work clothing, and boarded the plane with no carry-on luggage of any kind.
The 30-year-old sat in seat 23D, and got the attention of the witness after the plane took off - asking for details about the mass and velocity of the aircraft. It is implied by both the source material and common sense that the witness didn't know the answer to this, and she found it to be 'a very strange question'. When the time came to order food and drinks, the weird man didn't seem to know what the attendant was referring to when she talked about the names of various items, and was only able to choose after she listed everything that was available. The man in 23D would repeat all of this information to the other two members of his party, both of whom were completely silent throughout the entire duration of the flight.
Later on in the flight, the man in 23D started to talk to the passenger seated ahead of him. Desperate to hear what was being said by the bizarre character, the flight attendant chose to sit next to someone she knew - and didn't like - so that she could eavesdrop. She said that the man 'asked some very unusual questions' and that he repeated everything that was said to him the rest of his three-man posse. Eventually the man asked for the restroom, and the flight attendant pointed it out to him. After this, while he was setting about returning to his seat, the curious witness approached him and asked him how old he was. He dodged this question by telling her instead that he 'had been to other planets'.
Once the flight, which must've felt like the longest the attendant had ever been on, finally landed in Portland - the attendant disembarked with the passengers. Outside the plane, it was now the man's turn to approach the flight attendant - asking her why she would sit with someone she hated. This alarmed her, because it seemed as if the man had somehow read her mind. She alleged that the weird passenger then went on to provide her with an even weirder answer to her previous question - 'You asked how old I am - I am light-years old'. The witness felt that this was 'no joke' and that he was being completely serious, likely due to the extremely odd behaviour and apparently psychic abilities that the man had already demonstrated. She later saw the three odd passengers enter a limousine with darkened windows. She noted that this was very unusual 'for three people dressed in work clothing'. The witness concluded her statement by saying that she had not experienced anything else like this before or since, and that her fellow crew-members were also very disturbed by the event.

Analysis
Okay so I can tell you one thing for nothing - our mystery man is not light-years old. Light-years are used to measure the distance that light travels in one year as opposed to any sort of period of time, and so this minor twist could be used to perhaps cast doubt on the story as a whole - or at least on the suggestion that the mystery man was as alien as he said he was. However, I don't actually see it this way - seeing as there are innumerable cases of ostensibly-alien entities making bizarre and obviously-bogus statements like this one, and some of those cases even involve physical evidence attesting to something anomalous having actually been there despite its blatant absurdity. Also, the chances of the mystery man having been a human prankster are significantly lowered, in my opinion, by his apparent ability to read the flight assistant's mind.
While speaking to the investigator who initially recorded this story, she also stated that she was married to an Air Force Serviceman who was involved in top secret projects. Although he never outright admitted this to her, he also never denied that he 'had stints of duty at Area 51', which his wife suspects might be the case. This is backed up by the long periods he has spent at Nevada air bases throughout their marriage. This provides the witness with at least a tangential link to the UFO phenomenon outside of this occurence.

Source
UFOs Northwest - Flight Attendant Recalls "Unearthly" Passengers on Aircraft

The Vanishing of Alfred Beilhartz

Photograph of the missing boy

It was July 2, 1938 - and the Beilhartz family had decided to go camping deep within the Rocky Mountain National Park as a summer vacation. On the day in question, they were going to Estes Park to do some fishing - and were hiking along a trail close to a creek by the name of Roaring River at approximately 8am. Their son, Alfred Edwin Beilhartz, was roughly 4 years old at the time, and was walking along at the back of the line formed by his family. His parents would eventually realise that he had seemingly fallen severely behind and was now no longer anywhere they could see him. This would begin a desperate 10-day-long search operation throughout the region - but Alfred Beilhartz would never return...

Bloodhounds and the Damned Dam
His parents briefly performed a preliminary search to try and find their missing son (he was just one son of apparently ten children in the Beilhartz family), and when they had no luck they decided to call in the park service for assistance. The rangers were operating under the assumption that Alfred may have fallen into the nearby creek and drowned, and so they proceeded to dam the river. This dam consisted of a fence line adorned with barbed wire - there was no way that his body could be carried downstream and not be instantly found by the team of rangers searching for the unfortunate child. When this returned no results, they dragged the bottom of the river for good measure, but also found nothing to indicate where Alfred had gone. After five days, they gave up searching the river.
His parents told the rangers that they were certain that he must have been abducted. They knew that their son wouldn't just leave his family - and they were (unsurprisingly) unconvinced that he had fallen into the river. At this point, the rangers called in some bloodhounds from the nearby Colorado State Penitentiary. According to David Paulides (one of the usual suspects when it comes to discussing cases such as this) claimed that the bloodhounds were able to follow the boy's scent '500ft uphill' from where his parents had been when he vanished. This is obviously exceptionally bizarre, seeing as he disappeared when he was behind them as opposed to in front of them as the scent trail suggested. More bloodhounds were apparently called in, and followed the same paradoxical trail, only to lay down in defeat when they reached a fork in the road. The search was eventually called off after a total of 10 days spent looking for the missing child.

Devil's Nest and the Mystery Man
Meanwhile - on July 3rd - William J. Eells and his (unnamed in the newspaper report) wife were also hiking in the Rocky Mountains National Park. They had made it quite far up the Old Fall River road when they got tired and decided to stop for a rest. While resting, they decided to look up at the beautiful slopes of Mount Chapin - only to see a young boy sat on a rock in a section of the mountainside known as the Devil's Nest. This spot was six miles west of where Alfred Beilhartz had intially vanished from, and Mr. Eells expressed his disbelief that any child could have gotten up to that spot without assistance.
The child - presumed to be Alfred at this point - apparently made a 'shrill noise', walked out to look over the ledge and then left the scene. Paulides says that it was as if he was jerked back out of view, but Wikipedia instead asserts that he simply walked out of sight. The Eells decided to retreat to the carpark, where they heard the news about the missing boy. Upon returning home, they checked the newspaper and confirmed that the photograph of Alfred Beilhartz within it matched the child they had seen in the Devil's Nest. They promptly drove back to the park and talked to the rangers, but the rangers stated that it would've been 'totally impossible' for Alfred to have made his way up to the slope in question - and that the rangers themselves couldn't even manage it themselves in under two days and without carabiners and ropes. They did eventually send a group of over 150 men to search Devil's Nest, but they came back empty handed.
The next development in this increasingly-bizarre case came on July 8th, when the FBI announced that it was performing forensic tests on a piece of 'soiled' bandage that had been found in an abandoned cabin in the park. The disclosure of this finding was prompted by the insistence of the boy's parents that their son must've been kidnapped. Apparently Alfred had a blister on his foot at the time he had vanished, and his mother had bandaged it using similar material. It is unclear what came of this test, but I can be fairly sure that nothing did - otherwise there would be information available about it.
On this same day, a woman by the name of Mrs. CA Linch who lived in Big Spring, Nebraska, allegedly saw Alfred and a mysterious man walking along a highway together as she and her husband were driving from Big Spring to Ogallala. She told her brother-in-law WB Linch (of Lincoln, Nebraska) about her sighting, and he then went to speak to a Denver detective sergeant by the name of Fred Renovati two days later on behalf of his sister-in-law. He said that she 'was positive the boy was the one whose picture she saw'. Seemingly nothing came of this odd lead either.

Held to Ransom? 

A photograph of the Beilhartz family with an arrow indicating Alfred

Alfred Beilhartz had been missing for five months when his father was given a ransom note in November. It contained instructions for leaving $500 (equivalent to $8,900 as of 2018) in a tin can one block away from the Beilhartz family home in return for the safe return of their missing son in 24 hours, and also ominously said that 'the boy doesn't take to us'. However, by the 29th of that month the police were fairly certain that this was a hoax. This belief was all but confirmed by another police announcement announcement a day later saying that they had investigated two possible suspects - who were accused of attempting to extort money from the family. The suspects were not named and were apparently not being held, but here is where the trail of information about the Beilhartz disappearance stops - and so it is difficult to know what happened next. I imagine that it would've been announced if the suspects were confirmed to be guilty, but the ransom note was also never confirmed to not have been a hoax.

Sources
Disappearance of Alfred Beilhartz on Wikipedia and all of the newspaper clippings provided as sources for that page. Some of the stranger details of this case were, of course, pointed out by David Paulides in an interview he did for MUFON on the 19th of February 2013 - which can be enjoyed here.