A little while ago, there in my mailbox was the usual roundup of headlines at Phantoms and Monsters… this one though, had a flying creature report from the very gung ho guys at the Centre for Fortean Zoology!
I love flying Cryptids! One of my life goals, in fact, if you don’t know is to capture, (on film at least), both a Thunderbird and a Pterodactyl. [Please Note: The imagery in this post is suggestive or illustrative only as no images were captured during the reported sightings.] Checked it out… here’s what it said…
Flying Cryptid Reported in County Durham, UK
This was reported at CFZ:
We saw a Thing the other night. Not sure at all WHAT it was, but both myself and Gareth saw it. We were driving back from Darlington to home at about 10pm on Wednesday 7th October, and just west of Harperley roundabout on the A698 to Wolsingham, when “it” flew in front of the car.
Whatever it was, was not a bird, and was not a moth or bat. It was approx. 3 feet long, about 1ft wide at the head, tapering down to a short tail. It was white and almost see-through – like a cloud, perhaps – pear-drop shaped, and moved very fast.
It rose from a hedge (or from the ground close to the hedge), which borders the road. Then it sped across the road at about 30ft high. Not sure how fast it was going, but a few mins later we saw a tawny owl flying across the road, and the Thing was much faster than the owl.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I am not suggesting that the Thing and the owl were connected in any way. It was incidental and only serves as an indication of air-speed.
The site we saw it at was close to the POW camp, which has recently been put up for sale on ebay. There are no street lights nearby, and it is a remote area of the high north Pennines. Very few dwellings, not much human activity, other than the fairly quiet A689. There was very little wind, and it was quite dark as it was cloudy/overcast. No rain.
Ideas?
And in response to that post, a short while later a person sent this report in to Phantoms and Monsters…
I read the article you had listed entitled “Flying Cryptid in County Durham UK”. I live in the USA, and saw something very similar to what was described in the article. My sighting occurred in a rural area of Henderson, West Virginia, approximately 20 years ago (1989). I had been visiting a friend with my daughter and was on my way home in the afternoon. The day was partly sunny with clouds in the sky, but not rainy or misty. We were traveling down an incline in the car and we saw something strange go across the road (from the left side to the right side of the road). I’m not good with distances but it was probably no more than fifty feet from us. The thing described in the article was much smaller than what my daughter and I saw. I watched it disappear and asked my daughter if she had seen anything, and she confirmed that she had seen it also.
What we observed was approximately horse or cow sized and it had a white, translucent appearance, without identifiable head, tail, or appendages. It was just a big oval shaped airy “blob” that you could see through! This thing was like watching a tiny cloud or a mass of fog move on its own. It was flying or gliding quickly across the road and just disappeared on the other side of the road. It moved straight and did not weave or bobble. We only saw it for maybe 5 seconds. I had never seen anything like it before and haven’t seen another one since. I never reported it but I always remembered my sighting and was immediately struck by the similarity of what was reported in the UK.
Thanks for your website…it is extremely interesting.
Pat Queen, Ohio
It’s exciting!
And the reason it is so, to me, is because, as a Fortean and big fan of both on and off-world cryptozoology, it is my humble opinion that these two sightings are appearances of a “new” form of life that I’ve recently rekindled my interest in and have become very hot on… the Critter, or, the Plasma Lifeform.
Not really new, though, to those immersed in such things – interest started a long time ago within the scientific community following renowned plasma physicist Dr. David Bohm’s discovery through repeated laboratory observations that plasmas, more often than not, act just like living things; and there’s always researcher Trevor James Constable’s infrared photography to peruse, wherein he managed to regularly capture these “critters” back in the late 50s, and coined the term we still use for them. But surely, this concept is not something the majority of people have ever thought about.
The idea is that there are perhaps as many species of plasma creatures as there are “regular” creatures, with the same diversity as all our known life… replete with the same diversity of intelligence endowment, too.
As Mr. Constable noted, due to their rather exotic makeup, most of the critters would normally be invisible to us; his photos, after all, were in the infrared spectrum. They’d possibly become visible during certain interactions with the environment… while passing through localized electrical fields in search of food, namely the electrons that gives plasma life, (Bohm’s original observation), maybe, or perhaps through other phenomena; perhaps light can catch some qualities of their amorphous bodies in certain situations.
Many UFOs, perhaps up to 80% of good sightings, a great deal of the things usually deemed to be “spirits,” aerial BVM apparitions, shadow people and indeed lots of other oddly intangible sightings may in fact be plasma critters… who are, for whatever reason, occasionally visible to us at certain places, at certain times.
Clearly the two featured sightings here were real enough, but also were clearly not animals in the sense of flesh and blood beings… nevertheless, I do feel that these two sightings represent living creatures, or rather, critters… and as living things, these fabulously different critters should not be cast by cryptozoologists into the abyss of the paranormal. What’s needed is a broadening of the playing field, to think in terms of all that’s out there; to include all living things, not just those that are like us.
That may be asking too much, I’m not sure. Critters not made of flesh and blood may be too radical a departure for biologists, who have enough on their plate already. Maybe a special branch is needed… not sure who they might be, though. I suggest a multi-disciplinary approach… after all, this is radically different from our norms. But it should be done… they are alive… they are all around us… even in space… we should know all there is to know about them.
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