cut to a few years later.
though late to it (i'm technologically retarded) i am finally hooked up to the internet and using it to it's full advantage; mostly looking for stupid stuff and old comics on ebay and doing searches for all manner of cryptid/paranormal/extra-dimensional info. i'm being bombarded with tales of the unknown, stories of strange creatures, and reports of some really weird stuff.
and loving it.
every two weeks or so, i jump onto ebay and type in my regulars--chupacabra(s), mothman, loch ness monster, jersey devil. i skip bigfoot because it's just too huge an entry, but i will search sasquatch every now and then to mix it up. at one point, fairly recently, someone was auctioning off a chupacabra embryo, really cool looking special effects prop. i woulda bid if it hadn't gone for, like, a ka-billion dollars.
anyway, very early on in this game, i found that there was a company in hong kong or china that put out several series of small (3 to 4 inches tall) plastic figures of all our favorite cryptozoological pals as well as a couple of unexplained artifacts! bigfoot! mothman! the flatwoods creature! and, dude...a chupacabra! it looked so cool, so vicious, so alien! man, i gotta get the chupacabra! i gotta!
so i bid.
and i bid.
and i bid.
and i won! i got it for like $3.00--shipping included!
man, i could not WAIT for it to get here!
i'm pretty obsessive when it comes to stuff like this and i remember this little chunk of plastic was, truly, my main source of excitement for about a week and a half. really. simple minds, i guess...
so it shows up in the mail one afternoon and i'm not only thrilled about how cool it looks on my desk, but that inside there's a brief history of the chupacabra (in chinese so i have no idea what the #^@% it says...) and a reproduction of the original eyewitness sketch of the chupacabra by jorge martin during the '95 flap in puerto rico. awesome!
and so after i've put the tiny figure on my desk where it can watch me write spider-man or tellos or whatever, and i'm putting the fold out insert back into the box...
...there on the side of the box is a picture of exactly the thing i saw float over my jeep on that february night 4 years before.
it's called a skyfish and that's not the cool part.
here's the cool part.
so i go online and immediately start my search for the skyfish. it's a bit of a disappointment at first 'cause if you check it (and maybe you will) it seems that, in the past three or four years, 'skyfish' has also been commandeered as the name for another bizarre phenomena down in the jungles of brazil; small, darting, not-as-cool-as-the-thing-i-saw, little insects being caught on film but, because of their incredible speed, invisible to the naked eye. big deal. dude, mine was, like, 12 feet long!
anyway, desperate to find a connection to what i saw, i continued to search throughout the listings for the skyfish and finally found reference to something a little bit bigger than a few inches.
skyfish: first reported and named sometime in the late seventies. list of some names and dates of folks who've purportedly seen it. but--here's the cool part--last reports of skyfish sightings: 17 sightings in the mid-hudson valley in the winter/spring of 1995 between the towns of staatsburg and pawling.
i was stunned.
there is no cooler thing than getting confirmation, even on such a tenuous level, about something that most people you tell are skeptical about. i don't need anyone to believe me. i know what i saw. but it's cool just the same.
so that's MY story.
tell us yours.
if you've got a story of the bizarre or the strange, the scary--or even funny--thing that happened to you, send it in!
and who knows--if it's weird enough maybe the perhapanauts will go and check it out...
ya never know...