In May of last year, motorists in Washington County, Pennsylvania traveling along a major route suddenly pulled over to watch what many described as a “huge dark-colored flying creature” flying low as it passed over the cars. Prolific researcher Stan Gordon noted at his website how witnesses to the event agreed that the creature looked “more like a giant bat than a bird.”

Indeed, of all places, giant bat-like creatures are often described over America’s skies, though generally speaking, many of this country’s best known cryptozoological mystery-monsters host bat-like traits. Take for instance the membranous wings of the Northern The Jersey Devil; or perhaps most famous of all American cryptids, the Mothman of West Virginia, with its large wings and glowing red eyes that inspired the film The Mothman Prophecies. Elsewhere in the world, England’s “Owl Man”, essentially a British counterpart to America’s Mothman, is joined by an infamous “vampire” said to have haunted Highgate Cemetery in North London for several decades. Regardless, both of these mysterious European entities bear similarities to America’s most famous fluttering beast, a number of which are indeed bat-like.

In general, Bats have long been associated with strange phenomenon in almost every culture around the world. Sparring the already widely-known European notions of vampires in association with bats, one significant source for this prevailing belief that bats are somehow supernatural creatures may indeed have stemmed from ancient observation of the way bats pollinate the silk-cotton-bearing Kapok or “ceiba tree”. In addition to providing a vital source of timber used in ancient times for constructing native canoes and a variety of structures, in many locales this tree was also considered  to be sacred. Several cultures referred to the ceiba as the “World Tree”, a central figure in the mythologies of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, especially that of the Maya civilization.

The Mayas believed that a central “world tree” connected the planes of Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld, with the terrestrial realm and the skies above. Mayan art often depicted the trunk of a ceiba in representations of the enigmatic world tree. Not surprisingly, the Mayans also related the transit of bats between the land of the living and that of the dead to their pollination of the ceiba, and witnessing bats roosting in this tree no doubt helped convince the ancients that these dark-dwelling creatures indeed had dealings with the netherworld. To this day, among the descendants of the Mayans who live in the highlands of Guatemala are the Zotzil uinic, a name meaning “bat men”. It is widely believed among them that long ago their ancestors had discovered a giant stone bat, which they adopted as their god.

ABOVE: A funerary urn from Oaxaca, dating back to AD 300-650, which depicts a “bat god”. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.

In spite of the supernatural traditions involving bats of normal size and orientation, cultures the world over also describe bat-like manifestations, often of gigantic proportions, which haunt various indigenous people in their locales. For instance, the Ahool of Western Java (named so for a similar sound it is alleged to make) is described as a large, bat-like creature roughly the size of a young child. The Ahool is a grayish color, sporting a monkey-like head, large claws, and of course, bat-like wings. According to one of the most popular “classic accounts”, what was believed to have been an Ahool supposedly flew over Dr. Ernest Bartels’ head as he explored a waterfall on the slopes of the Salek Mountains in 1925.

Bartel’s encounters with the Ahool eventually made their way to naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson, thanks to his associations with the “father of cryptozoology”, Bernard Heuvelmans. Ultimately Sanderson, author of books like Things and More Things: Myths, Mysteries and Marvels, would write about his own encounters with strange winged beasts of peculiarly gigantic proportions, as described in the following recollection from one of his early visits to the African Congo in the 1920s:

“And I looked. Then I let out a shout also and instantly bobbed down under the water, because, coming straight at me only a few feet above the water was a black thing the size of an eagle. I had only a glimpse of its face, yet that was quite sufficient, for its lower jaw hung open and bore a semicircle of pointed white teeth set about their own width apart from each other. When I emerged, it was gone. George was facing the other way blazing off his second barrel. I arrived dripping on my rock and we looked at each other. “Will it come back?” we chorused. And just before it became too dark to see, it came again, hurtling back down the river, its teeth chattering, the air “shss-shssing” as it was cleft by the great, black, dracula-like wings. We were both off-guard, my gun was unloaded, and the brute made straight for George. He ducked. The animal soared over him and was at once swallowed up in the night.”

The giant bat-like creature Sanderson witnessed was variously called “Olitiau” or “Kongamato”, by the African natives he traveled with, the latter being it’s more popular name meaning “breaker of boats”. Making our way back to the states, it is amazing that an entire world (and nearly a century) away, sightings of strange creatures like the “giant bat” witnessed by motorists in Pennsylvania last year continue to occur. I often wonder what Sanderson would have thought of this sort of encounter, especially with the state in question’s history of alleged “Thunderbird” sightings; this, of course, considering that Sanderson was the one man in the history of Forteana who had sworn to ownership of that damned photograph… and yet even the mighty Ivan Sanderson was eluded by the mysterious Thunderbird photo. Did it indeed ever exist? Could Sanderson have been mistaken, or could he somehow have imagined the entire affair? It seems unlikely… but for now, it must remain only one of many encounters he claimed to have with gigantic winged monstrosities the likes of our beloved giant bats.

Is our humble Earth indeed still home to bat-like creatures of gigantic proportions the likes of “something prehistoric”? If so, how and where might these creatures exist? Are they supernatural entities, cryptozoological wonders, “cave demons” that exist here only to haunt and torment mankind, or something else altogether?

Bats!: Strange and Wonderful