Sightings and an Expedition

Here's a quick list of sightings I've gathered recently:

Another black panther/lion around Fort Gibson;
A 16-18 foot rattlesnake found at Camp Gruber, near Greenleaf Lake, in the early 1900s (the longest variety of known rattlesnake in North America, the Eastern Diamondback, only gets up to seven feet);
The area of Rocky Point is home to ongoing light phenomenon--lights in the shape of a ferris wheel rises off the hill several nights a year. There are also black panther/lion sightings in the area;
And a particularly interesting report of falling crawfish in Gans, Oklahoma, in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Also the Bigfoot Field Researchers Association is launching an expedition next week, September 24-27, in LeFlore County in Southeastern Oklahoma, by far the area with the most Bigfoot sightings (18 official sightings and many many legends). Here is the expedition page link:
http://www.bfro.net/news/roundup/oklahoma.asp

Unfortunately yours truly will not be attending, but here's hoping it's a fruitful expedition.

Heads up

Hey readers--
Back at University for the year, and this semester's going to be a crazy one, so I'm giving you a heads up that I may not be posting very often. If something huge happens, like a UFO crashes or a Bigfoot walks into the campus library and checks out a book, I'll jump on it, and of course I always welcome e-mails and comments, either sharing sightings or just discussing, but for the most part I'll be buried under a stack of books and homework.
Until later,
Y

Ghost Animals

Well, friends and readers, you came very close to losing your Yards this summer.

This post isn't about Oklahoma, for once; it's about our close neighbor Missouri, where I've spent a while wandering around the wilderness.

To make a long story short, I'll skip the part about the hippy commune and almost drowning in a cave (that's the "very close to losing" part; would also like to point out that said cave is connected to a sinkhole called Devil's Well, if you're one of those who is interested in strange happenings at "devil" places) and go straight to what I learned about the state's strange critters. In my inquiries into local folklore I was surprised to discover that a lot of ghost stories in Missouri revolve around animals. If a ghost animal isn't the definition of Fortean Zoology, I don't know what is.

Pevely, Missouri, in the eastern part of the state, is home to a ghostly white fox that has been shot at (to no avail) and has been seen to shape shift into a skunk and a white dog with a stubby tail. Interestingly, Pevely is also home to a goat-man--he reportedly frequents Fountain Creek.

Ghost pigs inhabit several places in Missouri--in Stoddard County they reportedly guard an abandoned house, rushing anyone who tries to disturb it. In Jane, Missouri, almost the exact same legend exists--ghostly swine guarding an old residence. One wonders if these pigs have anything to do with the legend of black boar death omen that appeared in southeast Missouri during the Civil War.

A farm in Kearney, Missouri, is home to phantom hoof beats, and, even stranger, a slaughterhouse in Southwest City, Missouri, is said to be haunted by--wait for it--ghost cattle.

The thought of ghost animals or animals having spirits is not a new one.

Hinduism contains a cow heaven and a Cow Holiday. The Ainu people of Japan give honor to the spirit of hunted bears, just as a similar Japanese cult honors whales and even gives them headstones in cemeteries. Alaskan tribes also perform rituals over whale bones to help the animal's spirit return to the sea.

In Thailand and Cambodia, white elephants are sacred, and after death it is believed their souls can either bring luck or harm to a village. In ancient American cultures, snakes, dogs, and ravens were all considered links between this world and the afterlife; the Aztecs and Mayans believed dogs guided the spirits of the dead.

(Vaguely off-topic--on Easter Island the Tangata Manu cult worshiped "bird-men"...sound anything like Owlman or Mothman?)

Another age-old practice where belief in animal spirits is important is shamanism--mediating between the living world and the spirit world.

Wikipedia article on shamanism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamanism

So, in addition to countless people who feel the presence of their pet after it has passed on, we've got malevolent animal ghosts and a long human history of acknowledgement of animal spirits. A deeper study of ghostly critters could yield interesting information. Anyone up for it?

Thankfully not one of the ghosts,
~Y

(Thanks to Vance Randolph's "Ozark Superstitions" and multiple locals for tips on the legends.)

Big Cats and Little Musings

Big cats are not new to Oklahoma. Mountain lions have been documented in the state since 1852 and listed as a game species since 1957. The Oklahoma Wildlife Department describes the cats this way:

“Its tail is more than half the length of the body, it has black tips on the tail and ears, and is primarily tan in color. The size of these animals varies by sex. Males average seven feet long (from nose to the tip of its tail) and weigh around 140 pounds, while females average six feet in length with a body weight around 95 pounds.”

The Oklahoma Wildlife Department also states that the best place to see a cat is extreme western Oklahoma; and yet, some of the most dramatic sightings have taking place in extreme eastern Oklahoma.

Ray Harral Nature Park in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma (near Tulsa) closed in 2005 after a mountain lion reportedly took up residence there. Local schools were closed, authorities surrounded the park, and traps were set, but the cat was never caught. And even though this incident was reported in the Tulsa World newspaper--

"They saw a large, 100-pound cat-type animal," Pruden said. "They saw it come out of the woods, grab the dog and go back into the woods, making screeching, meowing sounds."

--no tracks, kills, or other signs of a physical animal were found in the park. The same year a “lion” terrorized the Battle Creek housing edition, also in Broken Arrow, reportedly devouring household pets. There was no speculation or confirmation on whether or not the same animal was responsible for both incidents. Like the Ray Harral lion, the Battle Creek cat was never caught.
In July 2007 goats, sheep, and chickens were attacked in Commerce, Oklahoma. A mountain lion was suggested as the culprit, but a cat was never seen.

While mountain lions are relatively rare, mountains lions in city areas like Broken Arrow even rarer, and lion attacks the rarest of all, these few out-of-place reports don’t necessarily point directly to paranormal activity.

Other reports, however, do.

In addition to the mountain lion, Oklahoma has bobcats and house cats roaming its hills. But report after report surfaces of cats that seem to be none of the three accepted species.

In March 1961 two “lions” were seen in Craig country and Vinta, Oklahoma. Not mountain lions—lions. African, one assumes.

Also in the 1960s, in the wilderness near Tulsa, a girl went to draw water from her well and was confronted with two “black panthers”, which sat and stared at her calmly.

A friend sent me this report via e-mail:

“Here is the description of the big cat that my mother saw the summer
before last (2007). If there is any details that I didn't include, just call
me and I will ask her!

It was a summer evening around 4 or 5pm in 2007 when Sandra Coppin
saw the big cat. She said that she stepped outside because the dogs
were barking. The cat was sitting calmly under some trees around 50
to 60 feet from the house. It was a stereotypical big cat in that it
was around 4 or 5 feet in length with a 2 inch tale as long as or
longer than its solid black body. She went back inside to tell her
husband that there was a huge cat outside. She looked back outside
just in time to see the cat stand up and walk into the nearby wooded
area.”

And then there is the thing I saw in the winter of last year (2008).

A friend and I were driving home from a bookstore in Broken Arrow—she was driving, I was in the passenger seat. It was dusk, but there was still enough light to see relatively clearly. The road was two-laned, with forest on one side and a school with a creek behind it on the other side. Something came out of the forest on the right side of the road—something I first thought was a dog, but it didn’t move like a dog. Its legs were thicker, its belly closer to the ground, and its stride more powerful than a dog. It crossed the road, and these were my impressions for those few seconds in the failing light: it was brown or tan, with very thick, long legs, a tail a little less than half the length of its body, and very, very long ears. It was definitely feline. And it was taller than the hood of the car (a Honda Accord). It loped across the road and vanished into the creek. My friend had also seen it, and she verified the details.

After the sighting we spent about an hour looking through pictures of the world’s known species of big cats. What we saw was not represented. The closest thing to it was a lynx, the big cat of Canada, and while a lynx in Oklahoma would be news in itself, the thing we saw wasn’t a lynx. It was only close to a lynx.

I’ve spent considerable time at Sequoyah State Park’s mini-zoo watching their resident caged bobcat, and the “cat that crossed the road” last year wasn’t a bobcat, either. It was also substantially different from a mountain lion.

An interesting note on black cats:

According to Wikipedia, “all-black coloring has never been documented on cougars…’black panther’ refers to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.”

But jaguars and leopards don’t live here, or in the northeastern United States, Europe, or England, where large black cats are reported frequently. A completely black mountain lion has never been documented…and yet, 15-20% of cougar sightings are black (Gerry Parker, The Eastern Puma, 1998 via Loren Coleman’s Mysterious America, 2007).

Here is where I muse a little. Recall the infamous “Men in Black” written about by John Keel and others. They look like men, but their clothing or cars are fifty years out of date (but look brand new), or they are wearing clothing that hasn’t yet come into fashion. Or they speak strangely—a record speeded up or slowed down, or they don’t know how to use forks…or there’s just something off about them.

In addition to them we have cats—cats where there should not be, cats that are black and cats that leave tracks with claw marks (the only cat that walks with its claws out is the cheetah). Cats that fade away without a trace. Giant black grinning Cheshires.

Men who are not quite men. Cats that are not quite cats.

Connection?

Charles Fort would say, “one measure a circle, beginning anywhere”. Sherlock Holmes would say, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.

But then again, he’d also say, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment."

~Y

Giant and out-of-place reptiles in Oklahoma

An ice storm, the flu, and a computer virus have kept me out of the blogsphere for a while—when it rains, it pours (and in this case it rains ice). But one good thing came out of trekking twice a day to the only outlet still serving food: about two days into the storm one of my fellow refugees approached me during dinner with a very strange story.

Adam Meirs of Kansas, Oklahoma (another in a long line of creative Okie names) had an encounter of the slithery kind in the summer of 2005.

Kansas is a small town in Delaware County, just off the Cherokee Turnpike. It has a population of 685, according to the last census. Meirs states:

“I was riding my four-wheeler at dusk behind my uncle’s house where there’s a lot of trees. Back behind his house there’s a dip that leads to a pond that he also owns and before you reach the pond there’s a turnaround point.”

It was dusk, and Meirs began to get spooked. He continues:

“I turned around and right at the dip my four-wheeler immediately shuts off. I’m trying to pull-start it, and I started getting a little more freaked out because I heard some rustling off to the side. I look over and see a human-like shadow standing off to the side, but instead of being a normal human he had a snake-like head.”

The being approached Meirs, who struggled more and more frantically to start his vehicle:

“I gave one final pull on the starter while pressing on the gas at the same time and my four-wheeler starts, and I haul out of there and go tell my friend Joe what I seen.”

Joe took the four-wheeler and returned to the site, but headed back to the house after hearing a noise that “did not seem normal”.

The most interesting thing about Meirs’s snake-headed humanoid is the resemblance it bears to the Seminole tribe’s “human snakes”, legendary malevolent creatures that lived in dens full of giant snakes. I asked Meirs if he was familiar with the legend, and he said he was not. Human snakes are either half-snake half-human or can shape shift between the two.

Human snakes aren’t the only breed of strange snake the Native Americans believe in. The Cherokee tribe tells of Ukena, giant horned reptiles that live in the water, and perhaps most interesting are the Creeks’ tie-snakes, strong, dark snakes that live in caves alongside riverbanks and are capable of pulling unsuspecting humans to a watery death.

Of the forty-six species of known snake native to Oklahoma, only a few are aquatic, and none are powerful enough to prey on humans. The Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake and the Coachwhip hold the title of OK’s largest snakes, both clocking in just shy of seven feet long.

But could there be monsters hiding in the forests and lakes, as the Native legends hold?

Snake Creek, near Tenkiller Lake, appears to have been named for good reason. Edna Stubblefield recalls in the Stubblefield memoirs that sometime in the 1890s she and her family spotted a snake at the Creek that “looked like a big old fence post” crawling across the road.

A nine-foot Burmese python turned up in a Tulsa driveway, and on October 25, 2001, another Burmese python, this one seven feet long, appeared in a Stillwater neighborhood. And according to this article, more giant snakes may be on their way to Oklahoma.
http://newsok.com/article/3207429

While we’re on the subject of out of place reptiles, how about rampaging alligators? The official range of the American alligator is restricted to extreme Southeastern Oklahoma, particularly Choctaw and McCurtain counties, and yet they just seem to keep turning up in other parts of the state.

In August 2002 a South American caiman, of all things, was netted in Lake Tenkiller. Another caiman, this one two to four feet long, appeared in a Tulsa backyard in February 2004. And in July 2006 animal control officers spent two days trying to capture a four-foot-long alligator that appeared in the Battle Creek Golf Course in Tulsa. The gator was never caught, and apparently vanished. (Note of interest—the Battle Creek housing edition was also home to another out-of-place creature in 2005—a “mountain lion” reportedly terrorized the neighborhood, preying on household pets. It was also never caught and eventually just faded away.)

And of course the strange case of the “fugitive” gator. In the summer of 2003 a 350-pound reptile dubbed the Truck Traveling Alligator was caught in a pond, sent to a breeder, and then sent to Safari Joe’s, a wildlife sanctuary in Adair. The gator promptly vanished from its pen and reappeared in a pond just south of Interstate 44, and then turned up in yet another pond, this one behind the Big Cabin Truck Plaza, where he was finally recaptured. He was relocated to prime gator habitat in McCurtain County.

Granted, giant reptiles are nothing new to Oklahoma. The Sam Noble Museum in Norman hosts the world’s largest Apatosaurus (http://www.rareresource.com/images/apatosaurus.jpg)—93 feet long—found in the Panhandle. And if that’s not big enough for you, the world’s largest dinosaur to date also once called Oklahoma home. In 1994 fossils that were first thought to be tree trunks were discovered. The “trunks” turned out to be neck bones, each four feet long. The sauropod the bones belonged to stood an estimated 60 feet and weighed 60 tons, and was dubbed Sauroposeidon—the “earthquake God lizard”.

This monster went extinct 110 million years ago, but perhaps some of the God lizard’s smaller cousins stuck around.

Sequoyah County "Booms"--Bombs?

For almost a week residents of Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, have been reporting window-rattling rumbles. The “Sallisaw Booms”, as they’ve come to be known, began last Tuesday and have continued every day at noon. On Friday the Boom was felt as far away as Arkansas (roughly 35 miles).

The Sequoyah County sheriff’s office has reportedly checked every mining facility in the county, along with nearby military bases (the National Guard in Fort Smith, Arkansas and the Army Ammunition Depot in McAlister, Oklahoma), and no blasting or weapons testing was conducted on the days and times of the Booms. The Oklahoma Geological Society states that there has been no seismic activity in the area.

Article here.

So what could the Booms be?

On Friday this article was published in the Sequoyah County Times, stating that, despite what was released earlier about the lack of boom-causing activity at nearby military bases, the Booms were indeed caused by routine deploys from the Army Ammunition Depot in McAlister. However, not everyone is satisfied by this explanation—several residents are asking: if it’s just routine, why is it only now affecting us to this degree? The reader’s comments at the end of the article best express local uneasiness with this report.

This case is eerily similar to an occurrence last year. In November 2008 Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 33 miles from Sallisaw, experienced its own case of the Booms. For about three weeks a rumble like thunder was heard every Wednesday night at approximately seven-thirty p.m. There were no storms in the area.

In addition to the strange noises a UFO was sighted recently in the creatively named Okay, Oklahoma (20 miles from Tahlequah, 40 miles from Sallisaw). Further information on the sighting is pending investigation.

So what, if any, connections exist between these cases? Are the booms simply misidentification of something normal, or perhaps the beginning of a long-running phenomenon?