Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings

ONE A World Filled With Ambling Nightmares No matter where you live on this planet, someone within two hundred miles of your home has had a direct confrontation with a frightening apparition or inexplicable "monster" within the last generation. Perhaps it was even your cousin or your next-door neighbor. There is a chancea very good onethat sometime in the next few years you will actually come face to face with a giant hair-covered humanoid or a little man with bulging eyes, surrounded by a ghostly greenish glow. An almost infinite variety of known and unknown creatures thrive on this mudball and appear regularly year after year, century after century. Uncounted millions of people have been terrified by their unexpected appearances in isolated forests, deserted highways, and even in the quiet back streets of heavily populated cities. Whole counties have been seized by "monster mania," with every available man joining armed posses to beat the bushes in search for the unbelievable somethings that have killed herds of cows and slaughtered dogs and horses. Over the past hundred years, thousands of intriguing human interest items have appeared in newspapers all over the world, describing incredible encounters with awesome creatures unknown to science. Canallthese items be hoaxes and journalistic jokes? Can we believe that the major wire services, whose very existence depends on their reliability, employ men to concoct and circulate irresponsible tales about hairy giants and helmeted pygmies stepping from circular flying machines? Can we conclude that the millions of badly frightened people who have reported such encounters to the local police and authorities are merely pathological liars and lunatics? We know that our little planet is infested with remarkable animals and insects that defy common sense. Have you ever considered the total absurdity of the giraffe? Or that inane rodent, the lemming, swarms of which periodically march across miles of ice in the Arctic to drown themselves in the sea? Scientists had a good laugh in 1856, when Paul du Chaillu returned from the Congo and described his encounter with a hairy giant. "He stood about a dozen yards from us, and was a sight I think I shall never forget," Du Chaillu reported. "Nearly six feet high, with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely glaring large deep gray eyes...he stood there and beat his breast with his huge fists till it resounded like an immense bass drum." We know now that Du Chaillu was the first white man to meet a gorilla in Africa. Gorillas did not exist in 1856 simply because the desk-bound scientists of London and Paris said they did not exist. People are still seeing things that do not exist scientifically. They are seeing them in Nebraska, in England, in Siberia, in South East Asia, and in national parks everywhere. A Reuters dispatch from Malaysia on August 15, 1966, reported that an ape twenty-five feet tall was on the loose. Residents of the little village of Segamat were quoted in theMalay Mailas describing a shy, harmless giant who blundered about in the bushes, leaving huge eighteen-inch footprints in his wake. The report speculated that perhaps the giant ape was on the move because of the pressure of advancing civilization and the loss of feeding grounds. An ape twenty-five feet tall is a biological impossibility. But that does not mean that one cannot exist. Berwick, Nova Scotia, sounds exotic and faraway. Actually it is on the Canadian peninsula lying just off the coast of Maine. In April 1969 a giant eighteen-foot-tall figure was seen by many residents on the outskirts of that little town in the Annapolis valley, according to theEvening News. It was allegedly a "tall, veryKeel, John A. is the author of 'Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings', published 2002 under ISBN 9780765345868 and ISBN 0765345862.