The Gralien Report

Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer when it comes to reports of creatures like Bigfoot, one thing is for certain: mankind’s fascination with creatures that bridge the gap between humans and beasts has persisted for as long as we’ve been able to differentiate ourselves from what we label “the animal kingdom.” In the world today, stories constantly circulated in the paranormal community, as well as the various theories and arguments supporting existence of Bigfoot and other mystery primates, tend to detail this fascination in the modern sense.

Outside of specific references to Bigfoot and cryptozoology, the idea of the human-ape hybrid has been a reoccurring literary theme and reference in pop-culture throughout the last several decades, having appeared in everything from obscure stories by writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs, to popular films like Planet of the Apes. Although most fiction of this sort has little to do with any scientific probability that humans could be genetically similar enough to allow cross-breeding with other primates, it does illustrate an extension of man’s curiosity as to the great question of “what if”.

Richard Lydekker’s 1893 “Profile of a Chimpanzee.”

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While scanning the web looking for various links to videos of “monsters” in Latin America recently, I came across the following video of a purported “witch” filmed in mid flight over Monterrey, Mexico:

Click the image above to view the video

Though I first came across the video several months ago, it was nice to stumble across it again (and to see something other than the typical UFOs and Chupacabras for which central America is best known). True, the shape of the flying object in the clip might be considered witch-like, though in my opinion the resolution of the video makes it too difficult to really say what it could actually be. My initial impression was that it could be some kind of kite or balloon tethered to a moving vehicle.

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Greetings everyone,

One of the readers brought to my attention that those of you subscribing to the Gralien Report via RSS Feed had been recieving an “Untitled” feed in your reading programs. This issue should now be under control, and when the feed appears in your reader in the future, it should appear with the title “The Gralien Report.”

 Best,

-Micah

While driving around one day I ended up playing a “thought game” with myself where, in an effort to brainstorm ideas for short horror stories, I considered what things scared me most. The first things that come to mind for many of us involve sickness and disease, as evidenced by the growing number of films today which revolve around humankind being introduced to foreign strains of bacteria and infections, often leading to bizarre malformations and eventual death like in Danny Boyle’s film 28 Days Later, as well as the Resident Evil series based on the popular video game.

But as I began to consider what really scares me deep down, I was able to relate my fears to my long-time interest in cryptozoology, and touch on something that I find both truly strange and fascinating, yet nonetheless terrifying. My own greatest fear, at least along the lines of a “what if” basis, would have to be strange creatures living deep within the earth.

Jeff Long’s novel The Descent, upon which the film of the same name was loosely based

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Just a quick note… as a result of cryptozoologist extrordinare Nick Redfern linking my recent post on “Giant Skeletons” to his popular blog “There’s Something in the Woods…” the other day, The Gralien Report has gotten more hits in the past week than ever before. In fact, we may have gotten more hits than all the days combined since I launched the blog, as Nick’s post lead to a hit on the popular website The Anomalist, who is moderated by my pal Patrick Huyghe with Anomalist Books (you can learn more about them by clicking the link to “The Anomalist” on the sidebar to the right of this blog).

Either way, none of this would have been possible without Nick Redfern, one of the best researchers in the game today, as well as a good friend of mine and an all-around great guy. Please check out all of his excellent blogs when you get a chance:

There’s Something in the Woods…

Man-Beast UK: In Search of the British Bigfoot

UFO Mystic

Nick Redfern’s Celebrity Secrets

Over the last few months my colleague Mobius, an engineer with the L. E. M. U. R. Paranormal investigation team, and I have been pursuing various links between UFOs and psychic phenomena, even exploring parallels between ghostly manifestations and the ways they can relate to UFO activity. Our article Ghostly Receptors in the February 2008 issue of FATE Magazine dealt in-depth with such parallels, exploring topics like the eastern “tulpa” phenomenon, as well as UFOs appearing in accordance with subconscious thought patters and the like.

The other day I receieved an interesting report from my friend and fellow researcher Patrick Green which draws many similarities to the studies which Mobius and I have taken interest:

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There may be far more than meets the eye when considering this strange, somewhat ghostly-looking photograph, depicting two somber-looking gentlemen staring at their reflection in an antique mirror. Who are they? What about this mirror could hold their attention so intently?

No, these individuals aren’t ghosts captured in the mirror’s reflection, staring at us from another realm; nor are they a couple of drunks who stumbled in off the streets from someplace for a chance photo-op. Truth be known, the mysterious gentlemen in this photograph are none other than (left to right) yours truly, gazing alongside a rather ominous-looking Joshua P. Warren into none other than the mirror once owned by renowned psychoanalyst and researcher Dr. Raymond Moody.

Moody, a psychotherapist and pioneer in the field of implementing the ancient Greek ”Psychomanteum” along with modern psychological grief counseling, is one of the most well-respected researchers in the field of near-death-experiences and contact with deceased loved ones from beyond the grave. His books, including Life After Life document his inquiries into the nature of human contact with the dead, and this past February Joshua and I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Moody at an event attended by the likes of Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Mark Nesbitt, and Ray Buckland.

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“Night Hags”, in the literal sense, are a particularly strange brand of phenomena. The term itself is most often associated with sleep paralysis, but the “hags” I’m referring to in this blog are a bit different. In fact, I’ve come across many instances where people have claimed to awaken from sleep and see a physical entity either sitting on their chests, or standing elsewhere in their bedrooms watching them. Aside from sleep paralysis itself, this notion could also be linked with paranormal reports involving things like alien abduction.

On one occasion, I asked my pal Joshua P. Warren about what, if anything, scared him most (since he and I have spent years upon years hunting paranormal anomalies with this guy, and seldom encounter anything truely frightening I might add)!

After some thought, Josh replied, “I always get reports from people who have woken up to find a ghost or apparition standing over them, watching them sleep.” He described one occasion he had been told of where a woman experiencing various aspects of a haunting in her home had also awoken very early every at a specific time over several consecutive mornings, unable to find a cause for her sleepless nights. Someone suggested that she set up a video camera to film the bedroom around the time she had been waking up. She did, and reviewing the footage, she saw a tall shadow-like “apparition” enter the room, stand over her bed and watch her for several moments, then leave. Just after its departure, the woman woke up! Right there in the video she claimed that the clock in her bedroom read the same time she had consistently awoken on the several previous evenings. Based on this idea, Josh’s most frightening scenario dealt with “why they watch us while we sleep.”

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UFOs are all the buzz in the American south right now; especially since Stephenville, Texas began making headlines as the “new Roswell” with all these reports of triangular UFOs (to see an actual photo of one of the alleged Stephenville UFOs taken by an anonymous peace officer while patrolling the area, click here).

However, strange aerial phenomena has been witnessed elsewhere in the south. Below is an odd report I received from a resident of Arden, North Carolina late this week. Apparently, the witness and his company had been travelling near the Asheville Regional Airport, one of the largest in Western North Carolina. Still, what they saw didn’t match any conventional aircraft. Here is the report:

‘The first thing that entered my mind (and exited my mouth) was “what the hell was that?” It was one of those moments where you know you just saw something, but you still have trouble convincing yourself that what you’ve just seen had actually happened.

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The mystery surrounding reports of “giant skeletons” has always intrigued and fascinated me. Specifically, how it seemed to be a common ocurrence that human-like bone remains, often of giant proportions, were known for popping up everywhere in the mid-to-late 1800s, as featured in reports like these:

• During an 1879 excavation of an Indian mound near Brewersville, Indiana, a nine-foot eight inch skeleton was found buried within.
• Around the same time, George W. Hill, M.D., also unearthed a skeleton said to be “of unusual size” while excavating a mound in Ashland County, Ohio.  
• In 1880, American Antiquarian, volume three, reported that a Doctor Everhart allegedly found another large skeleton “reported to have been of enormous dimensions” in a strange clay coffin along with a sandstone slab marked with unidentified hieroglyphics near Zanesville Ohio.
• In 1881 in Medina County, Ohio, a succession of nine bodies were found below the cellar of a house, buried as though the corpses had been “dumped into a ditch.” Albert Harris, one of the residents, was twenty years old at the time of the grave’s discovery, and removing one of the large skeletons, said that he could literally fit the piece over his entire head and allow it to rest on his shoulders like a large helmet, even while wearing a cap underneath!  

Above: the exhumation of the alleged “Cardiff Giant” in October 1869, which turned out to be a hoax.

 Still, we’ve all heard of how even well known authors of the era, including Mark Twain, contributed to the telling of “whoppers” in their day; that is, many writers who got their feet wet as newspaper writers for dailies would occasionally cook up tall tales when local news just wasn’t doing it (see a great example of this here). Eventually, I decided to try and find out if there might be any reports that could be verified with more certainty, and after some digging around in public domain archives, I found a couple.

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