The New Jersey Devil

The New Jersey Devil seemed to be a silly little legend that became a popular bit of local folklore for the area.  It even became the name of the profession hockey team for the state.  The reason it seems so ridiculous is due to the descriptions witnesses have given of the creature.  The first recorded sighting goes way back to 1778 and describe it as a large winged creature similar to a gargoyle with a long horse-like head, red eyes, and bat wings.

The most compelling encounter however happened back in when a woman and her 14 year old son went out on a snowy night to unplug their Christmas lights from a utility pole.  The woman noticed her son frozen in fear looking up into a nearby tree.  Following his gaze she saw what appeared to be a large bat winged creature looking down on them.  She grabbed her son and ran for the house as the creature swooped out of the tree, flew over her head and landed on the roof.  The two ran inside and heard it walking on the rooftop.  The next morning her husband went out and saw footprints on the roof and took several pictures on of which is shown here.

The interesting thing about it is that to hoax these footprints a person would have to be on the roof leaving your own footprints.  The only way this could have been hoaxed would be to be suspended above the roof or created using a long pole of some sort.  Regardless the witnesses were interviewed on the third season of Monsterquest and subjected to a polygraph exam, which found them to be telling the truth.

More information can be found at The Devil Hunters

Is Science Smarter Than You?

The bigfoot phenomenon is a classic cryptozoologic debate between scientists and researchers.  It always boils down to what a witness sees verses what scientists tells them they are seeing.  Scanning through the Monsterquest program on the History channel there are many episodes about bigfoot with each region calling it a different name.  bigfoot, sasquatch, hairy man, grass man, skunk ape, all talk about the same creature.  On one particular episode about bigfoot in New York State a Professor of Anthropology Dr. Phillips Stevens Jr. at the University of Buffalo said all the bigfoot sighting are proof that humans have a ingrained need to see humanoid creatures in nature and called it anthropomorphism.


I am a skeptic and don’t know that I believe in the existence of bigfoot but even I not only found this ridiculous but insulting.  Anthropomorphism is a form of storytelling that depicts animals, plants, and even forces of nature in a human form for the purpose of the story such as the north wind blowing out breath with a human face.  It is not a psychological delusion that overwrites what a person is witnessing.  To state that the witnesses are all seeing hairy humanoids out of a psychological need to fill a subconscious human psychosis to see such things is ludicrous.


I can understand under certain light and weather conditions a bear can be mistaken for a sasquatch.  I’m certain misidentification account for a large amount of sightings.  But I do not think the sasquatch is a hallucination created by the witnesses unknown desire to see a humanoid creature in nature.  That blanket statement to me sounds very pompous and I hate it when groups use statements like these to lift themselves above the masses and their “simple” minds.

- C

Definition of Anthropomorphism