Brad Steiger - Monsters Among Us

For the skeptics who believe that the only monsters which exist are the ones that terrorize the kids at the drive-in movies, it may come as some surprise that between February 1975 and December 1976 more than sixty separate sightings of Bigfoot-type creatures were reported in the New Jersey counties of Morris, Warren, Hunterdon, and Sussex.

Thats correct. Just forty or so miles northwest of New York City, through the clustered megalopolis of cities and suburbs that make New Jersey our most densely populated state, monsters are prowling the marshes and the undeveloped forestland that exist an hour away from the Big Apple.

Dr. C. Louis Wiedemann, an officer of Vestigia, an organization that investigated the reports in New Jersey, wrote that they accumulated individual sightings of hovering UFOs, seven-foot-tall hairy manbeasts and a frightening reptilian humanoid with bulging, froglike eyes and a broad, lipless mouth.

Before shrugging off the New Jersey monster reports as a bizarre madness due to stress, commuter-living and pollution, consider these recent accounts of similar phenomena from around the world:

Lumberton, North Carolina: A sheriffs dispatcher disclosed that half a dozen sober, responsible citizens had reported seeing a strange, unearthly being wearing a silver spacesuit.

Maysville, Kentucky: A Mason County family stated that a seven-foot creature with long, white hair and glowing animal eyes tried to make off with some of their roosters.

Mineral Point, Wisconsin: Police officers attempted to capture an elusive vampire, a huge person with a white face, wearing a dark cape, who was frightening people in the local cemetery.

Sitting Bull Falls, New Mexico: An eight-foot tall Bigfoot with eerie white eyes and jet-black hair terrified a group of campers with its hair-raising screams.

Morenci, Arizona: A crew on a cooper smelting plant and one hundred members of the high school marching band all got a good look at a massive UFO with flashing red and white lights.

Charleston, South Carolina: A strange, unexplainable light, which appeared almost nightly in the barracks of a famed military academy, drove the cadets to seek other lodging.

Camaracu Island, Brazil: A farmer testified that two humanoid beings emerged from a glowing flying saucer to interrogate him about the people in the nearby village.

Brookfield, Connecticut: In court, an attorney alleged that his client was innocent of murder because he had been possessed by a demon.

Granger, Wyoming: Several law-enforcement officers described a mysterious brilliant blue light that illuminated the countryside and looked like the light from a giant spotlight.

Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona scientists announced that a color photograph of the Lake Champlain, Vermont, lake monster appeared to be authentic.

Menemonee Falls, Michigan: Numerous eyewitnesses expressed their belief that the spooklight that has been haunting Michigans Upper Peninsula comes from the lantern of a ghostly engineer who died in a train wreck.

Gansu Province, China: The head of Chinas official UFO investigating committee told his government that they had spotted the UFO believed responsible for the mysterious disappearances of Australian aviator Frederick Valentich.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Several residents, pilots and air control officials reported a gigantic fireball, simultaneous sonic thunder and immense cigar-shaped objects.

Bophubatswana, South Africa: Officials of a professional golf tournament called upon a well-known local sorceress to curse away the impending rain that would have spoiled the event.

This small sampling of reports, all of which occurred in recent months, prior to the writing of this book (March 1982), clearly indicates that monsters, vampires, ghosts, UFOs and spooklights are still very much a part of the collective consciousness of contemporary men and women. Such weird and eerie entities are by no means relegated to the pages of horror novels, the illuminated celluloid of motion pictures or the superstition-riddled, scienceless past.

It has been fashionable for at least the last fifty years to discard all such sightings and accounts as being due to psychological aberrations, intentional or unintentional hoaxes, or the misinterpretation of natural phenomena and perfectly natural animals. I wish to make clear at the outset of this book that I certainly recognize that one or more of the above factors could explain at least 90 percent of all alleged monster reports.

That point declared, I want to get on with the business of what constitutes the remaining 10 percent, for I have come to believe that a good many creature reports exist in a reality external to the percipients who reported them. That doesnt necessarily mean that I fear all those monsters among us out there in the darkness, but I do maintain that there may exist various levels of reality that interact with our own from time to time.

It has long been observed that anything is possible, and I am of the opinion that more impossible possibilities are being realized each day. The laws of our physical universe are being modified, adapted, amended and restructured with each passing year. Respected physics of professors speak of parallel universes, in between universes, and effects preceding causes in strange echoes of physics professors who previously inhabited only science fiction movies. Therefore, I think it is also quite possible that as yet unidentified creatures and as yet unexplained phenomena are very much a part of life on this planet.

Because I have been collecting data about monsters and strange, unexplained phenomena and pursuing both in one way or another for more than a quarter of a century, I have, quite understandably, developed a number of theories about what monsters and their kind could really be. At the same time, I have been mindful of the theories of other researchers in this admittedly far-out field of endeavor.

Some years ago, I compiled a list of the most popular theories that had been formulated to explain the UFO phenomenon. In what is not at all an unusual coincidence, I am able, with modifications here and there, to present several of the same hypotheses explaining the wide range of monster, creature and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night phenomena:

Monsters as Archetypes : Bigfoot, sea monsters, werewolves and the like, may be quasi-real creatures that are manufactured by the human collective unconscious.

Educator-author John White interprets Jungian archetypes as energetic thought fields accessible through dreams, meditations and altered states of consciousness. He suggests that there may be large, previously unrecognized dimensions of physical events in which there may be highly evolved entities, existing to influence and guide human affairs.

There may also be a host of nightmarish entities, which intrude upon our human attempts to order reality.

Monsters as Players from the Magic Theater : Monsters, as well as other entities, such as elves and fairies, may be members of a paraphysical tribe that have coexisted with us on Earth as a companion species.