Ferrer writes that "it was covered by glossy black skin, very clean and hairless. It appeared as though it had recently emerged from the water, but without being wet. It had a large head and a small beak, presenting a sort of crest which was apparently missing a piece from a fight. Its eyes were immense and completely black, but sparkled brilliantly. They thought it was a prehistoric being, since its wings had a strong resemblance to those of pterodactyls or bats, featuring bone-like protuberances which form the skeletal frame of the wings. Its legs were sturdy and had powerful claws like those of a carrion bird, but much stronger."

The Paranormal Angle

Earlier it was mentioned that these creatures are often described as being "headless" - a description offered a few times in the Mothman reports of 1966-67. In fact, some sketches depict the entity thus. It is curious to note that the rituals of the ancient Coptic church (one of the oldest branches of the Christian faith) contain explicit prayers against the presence of "headless demons", such as the one appearing in the Zereteli-Tiflis collection, described as "a text containing a spell to provide protection against headless demons and powers that are bothering the person invoking angels and archangels". Another such amulet invokes the virgin Mary's protection against a headless dog: "because I am having a clash with a headless dog, seize him when he comes and release me..." (Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power, Princeton: 1999). One wonders if this orison would have worked against the bat-winged, headless "Mothman" of West Virginia or a similar entity seen landing on a field in Britain in 1965. Or even the Iberian Peninsula: Salvador Freixedo mentions a 1963 case from the Andorran town of Comarruga involving Mr. Sesplugues, a hotelier, who was driving toward Tarragona with his wife on a cold November evening. The drive was uneventful until "they saw a creature crossing the road at a distance of one hundred fifty meters, which they described as being generally man-shaped, but headless."

Even the oceans are not safe from these visitations: on August 10, 2004, Puerto Rico's El Vocero tabloid ran a story about castaways from the Dominican Republic. Seventy-nine people boarded a fragile vessel in the hopes of reaching the Puerto Rico, and after twelve days at the mercy of the wind and the waves, only thirty-seven survived to tell the tale...a tale of the horrors of the elements, and of the supernatural. When interviewed by the newspaper, one of the undocumented survivors told reporters that a "monster" with vast wings appeared before them. Filled with panic and fear, they began to read a book of the New Testament they carried aboard their yowl, but that the pages of the holy text vanished mysteriously from their hands.

Chilean researcher Osvaldo Muray covered a story of apparent demonic possession in the high-rise community of Juanita Aguirre outside of Santiago de Chile. A young lay preacher known only as "N.U." became the subject of this possession event following a strange occurrence: one evening in the early 1990s, a friend stopped by to visit N.U. and spoke to her from the street level, while N.U. looked out her window. According to Muray, the friend noticed something very strange: a very strange bird was watching their conversation from the topmost branches of a pine tree close to the building. Between the light and the shadows, the person on the ground realized that the bird was not a bird at all, but a winged human. When interviewed, the friend told Muray that his "sixth sense" told him something was seriously wrong, and he advised N.U. to close her window and go to bed. He himself raced back to his automobile and headed home.

Conclusions

This is by no means an exhaustive listing of cases that have occurred in Latin America involving "winged weirdoes", and they represent but a fraction of the recorded cases in the Americas. What are we to make of these entities? Are they real in the sense that a horse or a bear are real, or are they merely physical manifestations of something that comes in ("when the stars are right", of course) from another level of reality? One can well ask what is it about our dimension that compels these entities to appear, and speculation on the subject ranges from an inevitable attraction to places where tragedies have occurred, entities that appear as byproducts of black magic operations and are unable to "return" to their place of origin. It has been argued that they "slip in" with the UFO phenomenon, perhaps swept along as these lights or objects enter and leave our dimension. The mystery remains.

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