The 10 Strangest, Most Terrifying Creatures Ever Found
Montauk Monster Washes Up On A New York Beach
Hype: The story goes that local youths just found it, photographed it, then sold it to papers (yay, humanity!) Now, this happened near Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which brought up theories about the government doing weird experiments. Its dinosaur beak was pointed out along with the speculation that it could be a previously undiscovered prehistoric mammal.
Other possible identifications of the creature included a dog and a turtle without its shell (but turtles don't have teeth).
Reality: Larry Penny, the East Hampton Natural Resources Director, along with other experts, confirmed it was nothing more than a decomposing raccoon carcass, which matched dental and skeletal points but was missing its upper jaw.
Since the case of the Montauk Monster was solved, other carcasses have been found in the same area. A website called montauk-monster.com is dedicated to following up on these cases with photographs and insists that the similarities between all of the beasts means they are coming from Plum Island.
It seems like another one has washed ashore, this time on the other side of the country. A deformed creature was found on the shore of Seal Beach, California. It has been noted that it looks a lot like the original Montauk Monster. Could it be another raccoon? Or something different?
Eerie Monster On Deer Cam In Berwick, Louisiana
Video: YouTube
The Hype: On December 10, 2010 NBC 33 reported a picture that an anonymous hunter had found on his deer cam after coming back to his destroyed camp in Berwick, Louisiana. It was reported in news outlets around the world, illustrating the fact that if it's printed somewhere in "letters," local TV news will pick up news of the biblical apocalypse being here. The hunting picture shows a thin, gangly, fast-moving, seemingly nocturnal creature that can most likely swallow your soul with one backwards-sounding howl.
What's really the creepiest part of this whole thing is how powerful and mobile the creature looks.
Reality: The mystery hasn't completely been solved, although many believe it is a photoshopped hoax.
Two different companies tried to exploit this by saying the creature is part of their viral marketing campaign. The first was a report for J.J. Abram's Super 8, released in June of 2011. Movieweb.com linked the creature to the film because in a video, Cameron Marie Saunders, who worked on Super 8, talks about running into a "zombie" and having to cry in the scene. There was no further evidence that the creature was part of Super 8's viral marketing campaign.
Then Playstation claimed that the creature was a Grim from their Resistance 3 game and part of the marketing campaign. Insomniac Games posted an update to their Twitter that read "Whoops...looks like one got out. If you see a Grim on the loose...please return to Insomniac Games," which further convinced people that the truth had finally been revealed. This, of course, also isn't true because if Playstation/Insomniac Games had actually been behind this, they wouldn't have made the image so sad.
Some say that it's the same creature from a popular night vision video that is to this day unexplained. It's supposedly a "fallen angel" captured in the woods.
After that, two people on Reddit debated the very pixels in the picture, reaching no conclusion. Captainpremise basically disproved the picture using one side of pixel analysis in this post. The strongest counterpoint was then given by the user atavus68 in this response, so really, it's all up in the air.
Alien Corpse In Thai Ceremony
Hype: A series of images depicting a ceremony for an alien-looking creature held by Thai villagers in 2007, complete with incense and baby powder, resurfaced in 2010 through social networks. Speculators suggested it was anything from an alien with its large, globe-like head and gray skin to a satyr with its tiny hooves and tail.
A debate over the nature of the ceremony also took place with some believing it to be a respectful funeral rite for the creature, treating it as a human. This idea came from the apparent grief on the villager's faces. Others said the ceremony was performed to dispel themselves from the evil surrounding the creature. There were even some who said the Thai villagers were worshipping the creature as a deity.
Reality: Apparently, it's a cow. Many guessed that the creature was a deformed cow, a fact that the villagers may have known all along, but it was so terrifyingly humanoid that a proper ceremony was given to it. Speculators point to the rising number of weird births of animals around the globe, going as far as suggesting that aliens are conducting experiments on animals.
Tiny Humanoid Found In Chile
Hype: While vacationing with his family in Concepcion, Chile, Julio Carreno found a tiny humanoid creature measuring 7.2 centimeters in a bush on October 1, 2002. The creature, which has a large human-like head was alive and opened its eyes before dying eight days later. It had fingernails and slanted eyes. Its originally pinkish color turned darker, and the corpse stayed warm before quickly mummifying itself. The family suggested that maybe this had occurred because they were keeping it in a first aid kit box in the refrigerator.
Several rumors spread about the story, such as people saying that the creature had made telepathic contact with the mother of the family. Others said the being had stood up, but the family denied that this had happened. Speculation of the creature's identification included the possibility of it being a wild cat's fetus or an alien.
Reality: The corpse was studied by veterinarians in Santiago, who are still divided over the creature's identity. They confirmed that the creature was neither a fetus nor the remains of a feline. Some matched the creature's physical characteristics to a mouse opossum, a common animal in Chile. Others disagreed because the creature did not have the small, pointed teeth or tail of a mouse opossum, and its head was double the size of one.
Chupacabra Sightings In Texas
Hype: The creature people have called the Bigfoot of Latin America has been sighted several times in Puerto Rico and the U.S, particularly in Texas. The legend behind the creature is that it kills livestock and drinks their blood. The name chupacabra literally means "goat sucker."
The Elmendorf Beast, or the real Chupacabra, was a twenty-pound dog or coyote-like creature that was shot and killed in August 2004 by farmer Devin McAnally in Elmendorf, Texas after having mauled 34 chickens. The creature had no hair and blue-graying skin. Its DNA was sent to UC Davis, where scientists concluded it was a coyote with mange.
In Cuero, Texas, in August 2007, Phylis Canion found the carcasses of three coyote-like creatures similar to the Elmendorf Beast. She took pictures of the corpses and froze one of their heads. She connected the beasts to the chupacabra legend because thirty of her chickens had bled out in the past few years without being eaten or carried away. DNA testing determined that the animal was a hybrid wolf/coyote with mange.
In September 2009, CNN reported on a taxidermist in Blanco County who had preserved the body of a coyote-like creature that people were calling a chupacabra. The creature had been poisoned after being discovered in a barn and its body was later given to the taxidermist Jerry Ayer.
Reality: University of Michigan scientists believe that the origin of the chupacabra legend began with these very, very diseased coyotes. Its ability to suck chickens and goats dry, though, remains unexplained.
Alien Baby Drowned By A Farmer In Metepec, Mexico
Video: YouTube
Hype: On May 11, 2007 Mario Moreno Lopez found this creature in the steel trap he had put out for his rats. He had to drown it three times in order to kill it. The creature is tiny (the farmer described as being 70 cm. long) and has an elongated head, which led to the possibility of it being an alien baby with a high level of intelligence. Skeptics stayed closer to home, calling the creature a reptile or skinned squirrel monkey to explain its tail and spine, and large head and eyes.
Mario Moreno Lopez mysteriously died in a car fire (the fire was at an unusually high temperature for a normal fire) some time after having drowned the creature, leading UFO enthusiasts to believe that the alien baby's guardians had sought revenge against Lopez.
Supposedly, there have been many reports of UFO sightings and mysterious crop circles in Metepec.
Reality: Mexican UFO specialist Jaime Maussan was the first to discover the story, buy the corpse off Moreno for $32,000 and say it was not a hoax, which further convinces skeptics that the so-called alien baby had been a scheme.The alien baby was investigated by History Channel's "MonsterQuest."
The Metepec creature has so far stumped scientists, who found that its teeth are not rooted like human teeth. To disprove the initial possibility that the creature was a skinned monkey, forensic scientists found that the creature still had a unique kind of tissue and had not been tampered with.
UPDATE: It's fake. The man responsible passed himself off as a veterinary assistant named Angel Palacios Nunez in the news but really was Urso Moreno Ruiz, Mario Moreno's nephew and a taxidermist.
"I must say I didn’t claim it was real. That was Maussán who claimed it was real. He believed it. All the show was a hoax that got out of control, but after four years I’m happy to see one of my creations going around the world and through many scientists and tests and they still haven’t figured out what it is. I may have fooled science! LOL," Ruiz said in an Internet forum.
Alabama Boy Kills Giant Boar
Hype: On May 3, 2007, an 11-year-old named Jamison Stone shot a huge boar, which weighed 1,051 pounds and measured nine feet four inches, with a .50 caliber pistol near Delta, Alabama. This meant Stone had shot himself a pig bigger than Hogzilla, the famed boar that had been killed in Georgia in 2004.
Stone – who killed his first deer at age 5 – was hunting with his dad Mike Stone on the day he killed the boar. He had to shoot the boar eight times and chased it for three hours. When the pig finally went down, trees had to be cut down to get it out of the woods. The father and son had the boar's head mounted to keep as a prize and made around 500 to 700 pounds of sausage from it.
"It's a good accomplishment. I probably won't ever kill anything else that big," Stone told the Associated Press. He was later offered a small part in a horror movie based on Hogzilla.
Reality: Stone wasn't able to enjoy his fame (his dad even put up a website called monsterpig.com for him) for long before he received death threats for having led the boar to suffer a long and painful death as he repeatedly wounded him. 800 people signed a petition world-wide advocating for the boy's prosecution on charges of animal cruelty. Skeptics believe the whole story was a hoax, and the boar was really a farm animal fattened up to make a sensational story (according to this website, the image was an obvious Photoshop job). Charges were never pressed because too much time had elapsed from the day of the crime before an investigation was conducted.
Yeti Trapped By Hunters In China
Hype: In April 2010, a group of hunters trapped a hairless possum-like mammal that was described as looking like a bear with a kangaroo-like tail and making distressed cat noises. The creature became a media sensation, being dubbed the "Oriental Yeti." According to legend, the Yeti was a bear-like figure that towered well over the height of men. This creature was only two feet long.
Reality: Bigfoot researcher Loren Coleman dismissed the Yeti speculations as "media madness." "If the Asian press starts using the word 'yeti' for every unidentified animal, it's going to muddy the waters of cryptozoology," said Coleman. He believed the creature was a palm civet with a serious case of mange. The beast was shipped to Beijing for DNA testing, but the results were never released in the media.
Crab-like Creatures Found In A Trench In Russia
Hype: Crabs have been called the cockroaches of the sea, and this creature frighteningly makes that saying very literal. These creatures, which were found in an abandoned foundation pit in Chelyabinsk, Russia, have a hard shell, several stacked appendages, and a tail poking out of their shell. People hypothesized that the creatures were huge triops, horseshoe crabs, a facehugger from Alien, or trilobites, which were extinct even before the dinosaurs lived.
Reality: Apparently, the crustaceans were an absolutely amazing species that are 200 million years old and have somehow not evolved at all for that amount of time. These triops are not actually as large as purported, but they do exist and are basically always around.
The Blue Hill Horror In Cerro Azul, Panama
Video: YouTube
Hype: Around September 17, 2009, four adolescents playing in Cerro Azul, Panama, claimed they saw the rubbery E.T. look-alike run out of a cave. According to them, it started chasing them, so they threw rocks at it until it was dead. They then pushed its body into the water.
The UK tabloids called it Gollum (the creature from the Lord of the Rings) because it was living in a cave, while other papers gave it the name "The Blue Hill Horror."
Reality: It was a dead sloth. Scientists found that the adolescents' tale was false because the sloth had been decomposing before that day. Its long decomposition in the river had removed its hair and given it its bloated and rubbery skin.
