Dover Demon
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The Dover Demon was sighted on three separate occasions in the town of Dover, Massachusetts, in April 21st-22nd, 1977. It has remained a subject of interest for cryptozoologists ever since. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman was the one who named it the Dover Demon, which the press picked up on, and the name stuck. Coleman was accompanied by three other investigators: Joseph Nyman, Ed Fogg, and Walter Webb.
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History
It was first sighted at night as three seventeen-year-olds drove through the Dover area, when the car's headlights illuminated it. Bill Bartlett, the driver, reported that he saw what he thought at first was a dog or a cat, but upon closer inspection realized that it was a bizarre, unearthly-looking creature.
Bartlett continued to watch the creature, and he reported it to have a disproportionately large, watermelon-shaped head and glowing orange eyes, like glass marbles. It had long, thin arms and legs with slender fingers, which it used to grasp onto the pavement. It was hairless and had rough, fleshtoned skin, described as tan and sandpaper-like. The creature's appearance was very plain, with no nose or ears, and no mouth was seen. The witness drawings portray its head as having a skull shape, forming the contour of a circle on top with a more elliptical ending projecting down to include where the nose and mouth would be.
It is also reported that the creature was sighted an hour later, by John Baxter as he was walking home. The next day, Abby Brabham is claimed to have seen a similar looking creature on the side of the road. Her description matched Bartlett's and Baxter's descriptions, except this time it had glowing green eyes. She approximated its height as "about the size of a goat".
Bartlett, Baxter and Brabham all drew sketches of the monstrous sight shortly after their sightings. On the piece of paper that includes Bartlett's sketch, he wrote "I, Bill Baxter, swear on a stack of Bible's [sic] that I saw this creature".
Possible identity
There is no real evidence to suggest that the creature existed, and there is speculation whether the creature was an alien or some sort of mutant hybrid, perhaps one created as a result of a human experiment and escaped. Some have pointed out its resemblance to the description of the Greys, with the speculation that this could be a Grey or even a closely related species. No one has been able to prove that this was a hoax either. Some theorize that it is really a being from another dimension, accidentally transferred into our world through a dimensional warp. One possible answer is that it was a newborn moose, as all sighting incidents except for the sighting in which it was followed up a tree were only for a few seconds, and the description of the creature's head matched that of a baby moose. One fatal shortcoming of the moose explanation is that the descriptions of the Dover Demon clearly discerned fingers, while all moose, being artiodactyls, have only hooves.
As Coleman first pointed out, the Dover Demon bears similarity to the Mannegishi creature, which is native to the mythology of the Cree Indians in Canada.
During the spate of sightings in Dover in 1977, all the witnesses were teenagers. This has been pointed out often in analyses of the Dover Demon sighting phenomenon. Writers with a new-age or spiritual bent often write of it as a poltergeist-type being, something with a strong field of spiritual energy that naturally connects it with the young. This reflects a recurring theme from the annals of cryptozoology, this being one of many entities whose sightings all befell witnesses from the same age group, such as Owlman.
Questions of credibility
Because all the witnesses were teenagers, many believe it to be a nasty hoax to be dismissed offhand, and suspect a group of high school classmates from collaborating to make up this story. These accusations curiously evoke the comments from a group of young witnesses of an early Mothman sighting, whose plaints were that nobody believed them because people always thought teenagers were up to no good.
In investigating the sighting, the Dover police asked adults from Bartlett et al's high school whether these kids were known troublemakers. The faculty members, however, said that this was not a group of troublemakers, and described them as "average students".
One of the witnesses was a known fan of science fiction, and it was suspected during the media frenzy in Dover that he may have perpetrated a hoax inspired by a creature in a science fiction novel. However, no creature created in a work of science fiction was ever found that met the description of the Dover Demon.
In his investigation of the case, Loren Coleman gave the Dover Demon a credibility rating of 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. However, it is interesting to note that Mr. Coleman left the Dover Demon out of his Cryptozoology A to Z (Fireside, 1999)and generally declines to speak about the case.
Recent sighting
May 2004: In Chile, a civil engineer named Germán Pereira was taking photographs of two mounted Carabineros (Chilean national police), and found a strange creature that closely resembles the Dover Demon in one of the photos.
Major Reference
- Loren Coleman, Mysterious America: The Revised Edition (NY: Paraview, 2001, ISBN 1931044058)
External links
- Is Chile Creature a Dover Demon? (http://www.rense.com/general53/chile.htm)
- The Demon of Dover (http://members.aol.com/soccorro64/doverdemon.htm)
- The Dover Demon (http://www.qsl.net/w5www/dover.html)de:Dover Demon