Having written as I did above, I have to confess there are some genuinely puzzling reports of cryptids, and though they are seen at night, under stressful (creepy) circumstances, the details given by witnesses are so fine that one is left wondering what was actually seen.

The so called “Beast of Bray Road” falls into that category. I’ve read eyewitness accounts that go into extreme detail, describing the color of fur, the shape of ears, etc. The descriptions are so detailed that it’s difficult to propose any known creature that might account for the sighting, even given the aura of creepiness surrounding the encounter.

So you’re stuck with either a hoax, a hallucination, too much booze, or witnesses describing things not yet known and cataloged. Who knows? Maybe my wife DID see a Werecow!

By the way, FYI (yourself and others), Nick is absent in postings and comments for a while because of a family medical situation that has come up over “across the pond” in the UK. He will be back in action as soon as the situation resolves itself.

Bill

My post wasn’t meant as an ad hominem argument; merely to point out that perfectly honest and forthright people who see ordinary things in unfamiliar circumstances can and do easily mistake them for mysterious things, be they lights in the sky or shadowy figures scuttering of into the night.

A further logical fallacy that nearly all of us fall victim to is in making an automatic association of one thing with with another. A man’s livestock are being killed. The man hears a previously unheard roaring sound. A man sees a shadowy figure running away into the woods. These are three separate pieces of information that may or may not be in any way related to each other, but the automatic presumption by many is to link all three facts as being examples of a single phenomenon. Other than that they were all new and strange to the men who reported them I can’t see anything in the account that connects those three dots into a single picture.

Some years ago my wife and I went out one night around 9pm for a walk. It was well after dark. We were in a very sparsely populated area, walking along a dirt road that lead between stands of trees and fenced in cow pastures. As we aproached on stretch of trees (which was within one of the fenced pastures,) my wife and I heard the sounds of ground cover cracking and breaking, as though someone was walking on twigs. My wife suddenly freezes in her tracks and points toward the nearest stand of trees. She tells me that she saw a tall, dark shape that moved among the trees. It was very dark out at that time of night and all one could see of the trees were just silouhettes of the trees themselves that were only slightly less dark than the night that surrounded them.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was raised on a farm and we had many such stands of trees on our property. Cows love to bed down in them at night, and they do walk about some, breaking and snapping twigs, dried leaves and other deadfall on the ground. I explained this to my wife, but she was certain she had seen something tall, dark, and moving. So I jumped the fence, walking into the trees and had myself a little look-see. There was nothing. Just some cows who were in fact laying down sleeping or quietly standing there.

But I couldn’t convince my wife, even after I checked things out first hand. When I returned with my report her comment (in a somewhat irritated tone,) was, “Well, then I guess there must be such things as Werecows because what I saw was NOT a cow!”

From her perspective she heard twigs snapping, which she is unaccustomed to hearing at night like that. Then she saw or thought she saw a large, tall moving silouhette. In her mind she linked these two facts together as having one and the same cause and…presto! Werecows.

But my wife is not a nut case (at least I don’t think she is.) She’s an attorney, with a Doctor of Law degree, and one of the most savvy people I personally know. She wasn’t making things up or intentionally distoring her story. She simply connected a few unfamiliar dots under unfamiliar circumstances and came up with a fantastic conclusion. I don’t think any of us is beyond making that kind of error given the right set of conditions.

Unless the SciFi channel’s “Mansquito” has come to life, I’m unaware of any animal that drinks blood and is large enough to consume the blood of an animal as large as a cow or even a goat. I was raised on a farm and have butchered my share of cows and pigs. We’re talking about quantities of blood in the “several gallons” range. Every try to drink even a single gallon of water at a single sitting? That would have to be a SERIOUSLY large animal to pull it off, unless it hunts in packs and shares the same puncture marks for sucking on with its hunting mates.

The most common sentiment put forth vis-a-vis’ the “It can’t be a human,” argument is that there are rarely any markings on the ground that can be identified as footprints or tire tracks, etc., so how was the bloodless carcass carried to its final resting place, or else if it was killed on the spot, where are the ground markings that would give away the perpetrators who did the evil deed.

There are schools here in the States that teach hunting, tracking and stalking skills. Tom Brown Jr., for one, operates such a school. He learned his skills from an old Apache tracker. I can’t speak for Puerto Rico, but here on the mainland we have no end of “survivalist” and self-appointed “militia” groups that get seriously involved in learning para-military skills like these. I dare say that Tom Brown Jr. could probably butcher and bleed a whole herd of cows and not leave even the slighest telltale sign he had been there.

The Moca V, or at least the “shadowy form” that the farmer saw running away may or may not have been involved in the animal killings, but his description implies that he really didn’t get any kind of substantial look at whatever or whoever it was. Kind of falls into the category of “unexplained lights in the sky.” Just because they look different than what we are accustomed to seeing doesn’t make them ET spaceship, and a shadowy form seen late at night after staying up until after midnight on high alert doesn’t make for a very convincing monster.

Nick, it seems to me this sort of thing Bill refers to is a standard manoeuvre of all ‘enforcement’ agencies the world over: rather than admit their own impotence and, indeed, their own barely suppressed hysteria over their impotence, they switch the emphasis to the victims’ ‘hysteria’ - yet the victims, as often as not, are individuals who, in comparison, are actually conducting themselves cool-headedly, in spite of facing pressures that amount to the economic equivalent of life and death.

Not is this solely a ufological or paranormal concern: we see exactly the same hysteria in the antics of the likes of Blair and Bush with regard to terrorism, while at the same time claiming they’re merely carrying out the demands of their supposedly hysterical electorates.

But in all reality, I don’t recall any government oficials getting involved. Then again I lived in one of those rural areas where TV and newspapers was a rarity. I recall all the commotion and some of the rumors. Many things were happening at that time. I can’t recall the exact date, even though I coould look it up, but I believe it all started happening after Hurricane Eloise.

Searching for something like that I would rather get trackers from the African continent or from an Indian reservation in the US. Puerto Rico has never been a hunting place so therefore the populace really can’t track animals. The people that have ever shown up have no idea that maybe two thirds of the island is forrest/jungle. Very hard to track anything unless you are trained for it. And as we can see, even in the African Continent they have not been able to track Mokele Mbembe. Puerto Rico is thousands of times tinier and they still can’t locate these phenomena.

A few weeks ago I found a video on YouTube of an old Chupacabra documentary that says …

“When the Chupacabras scare hit Mexico in the Spring of 1996, one of the most vivid images of the alleged creature was the one that appeared in this clip. While it was explained away as “the carcass of a cat set on fire”, the video voiceover says that the state of Sonora’s veterinarians decreed that it was the carcass of an unknown species of giant bat…”

For what it’s worth…

SMiles