Monsters Among Us

186 Pages·2007·0.87 MB·English

by  Brad Steiger

Monsters Among Us
Monsters Among Us

Brad Steiger

2006
Galde Press, Inc.
Lakeville, Minnesota, U.S.A.
Monsters Among Us
© Copyright 2006 by Brad Steiger All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition 1982 Para Research, Inc.
First Galde Press edition, 2006

Galde Press, Inc.
PO Box 460
Lakeville, Minnesota 55044–0460
Contents
Chapter 1 The Pursuit of Monsters
Chapter 2 Giant Reptiles, Sea Monsters, and Lake Longnecks
Chapter 3 The Abominable Snowman and Wildmen Around the
World
Chapter 4 Curse of the Werewolf
Chapter 5 Monsters from the Hollow Earth
Chapter 6 The Horror of Vampires and Ghouls
Chapter 7 Phantoms
Chapter 8 Zombies, Mummies, and Other Victims of Curses
Chapter 9 Monsters and Robots from UFOs
Chapter 10 Tomorrow’s Monsters
Chapter One
The Pursuit of Monsters

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.
That’s 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 sheriff’s 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 Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
comes from the lantern of a ghostly engineer who died in a train wreck.
Gansu Province, China: The head of China’s 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
doesn’t 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.
Somehow, humankind participates with these creatures according to some
as yet unglimpsed evolutionary design.
Monsters as Supernatural Beings: The frightening creatures are the same
entities as the demons, which are described in the scriptures of many world
religions as the messengers and legions of Satan.
The more malignant of these entities seek to do harm to humankind, while
the more benign are content to provide frightening harassment.
Monsters as Unknown Terrestrial Life: The wide variety of monsters may
actually be unrecognized and unidentified life indigenous to Earth.
They could be plasmic, electrical, nearly pure energy forms which possess
the ability to assume a variety of guises.
Or they may be exactly what they appear to be—bizarre animals.
Monsters as Inhabitants of the Hollow Earth: According to this theory, the
Earth is honeycombed with vast underground caverns and the creatures that we
term “monsters” are the fauna—or the citizens—of this interior kingdom.
Monsters as Creatures out of Time and Space: The giant reptiles are
victims of time warps. As they lumber about their primeval world, they are
transported into modern historical periods where they appear decidedly out of
place.
The same may be true of the Bigfoot, perhaps a missing link in our own
evolution, which walks the corridors of time into the present.
Monsters from Other Dimensions: The ghosts, ghouls, and long-legged
beasts originate in an adjacent space-time continuum, which actually coexists on
Earth with us. Because they share this planet with us, but on another vibrational
level, we can see them—and presumably, they, us—only under extraordinary
circumstances and conditions.
Monsters as Manifestations of a Planetary Poltergeist: A poltergeist is a
noisy, destructive “ghost,” a chaotic collection of energies, usually centered
around a child entering puberty, which proceeds to make shambles of a home.
In this theory, monsters are seen to be the result of some as-yet-unknown
physical law that can at times activate (or be activated by) the unconscious mind.
The law—or energy—might not itself be intelligent, but it would be able
to absorb, reflect and imitate human intelligence—and human fears.
Monsters as Answers to a Psychic Need: Researchers Jerome Clark and
Loren Coleman have speculated that certain of our basic psychic needs are able
to tap psychokinetic and other psychic energies and fashion fairies, apparitions
or holy figures, UFOs and abominable creatures—archetypes that we can
experience only as images and symbols.
The forms these manifestations assume are ancient in the sense that they
always have been intrinsic parts of the human psyche, yet they remain modern in
the context of contemporary ideas, which the conscious mind has acquired.
Monsters as Extraterrestrial Experiments: Certain theorists have
suggested that the various kinds of bizarre creatures have been planted here by
extraterrestrial scientists and psychologists who are interested in observing our
reactions to such entities.
Others theorize that the strange animals might have been placed here to
test our atmosphere and to gather miscellaneous data about our planet, as if they
are living biocomputers.
Still other UFOlogists have stated their concern that the monsters are only
distractions devised by extraterrestrial intelligences to provide a “cover” for
undisclosed activities on Earth.
Monsters as Programmed Deceit and Delusion: This hypothesis maintains
that the eerie creatures are not actually real in the physical sense, but are
something similar to holographic projections or elaborate special-effects created
by some unknown agency for an ulterior, and probably sinister, motive.
Monsters as Genetic Misfits from Atlantis: It is a popular bit of
metaphysical folklore that scientists from the lost continent of Atlantis had
mastered genetic engineering.
The “sleeping prophet,” Edgar Cayce, channeled information that several
new species were created from the animals of Atlantis, and Mother Nature was
violated in numerous ways that wantonly spawned grotesque mutants. Cayce
said that the pig was one of the animals that had been fashioned by the
Atlanteans, and the monsters of mythology were some of the less productive
experiments.