- Dear Mr. Know-It-All,
- Friends were recently telling me about the ghost stories
at John Stone's Inn in
- Ashland, but wasn't there a report of a UFO in this area
a while back? -- T.W., Westborough
- Methinks you're referring to the mysterious Dover Demon,
- Let's set the stage. The year is 1977. Jimmy Carter is
in the White House. "Stars Wars" makes its debut. Elvis permanently
leaves the building. The Yankees win another World Series. And an alien
visits the tony town of Dover. Maybe.
- To describe what allegedly transpired, we turn to the
book "Creatures of the Outer Edge," penned by cryptozoologists
Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark.
- The bizarre tale begins at 10:30 p.m. on April 21 as
three 17-year-olds, Bill Bartlett, Mike Mazzocca and Andy Brodie, are driving
north on Farm Street. Bartlett, who's behind the wheel of a Volkswagen,
spots something creeping along a low wall of loose stones on the left side
of the road. At first he thinks the image is a dog or a cat until his headlights
shine on it and he realizes it's nothing he's ever seen before.
- The figure slowly turns its head and stares into the
light, its two large, round, glassy, lidless eyes shining brightly "like
two orange marbles."
- Its watermelon-shaped head, resting at the top of a thin
neck, is the size of the rest of its body. Except for its oversized head,
the creature is thin, with long spindly arms and legs, and large hands
and feet. The skin is hairless and peach-colored and appears to have a
rough ure. "Like wet sandpaper," Bartlett subsequently tells
- Standing no more than 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall, the figure
is shaped like "a baby's body with long arms and legs." It had
been making its way along the wall, its long fingers curling around the
rocks, when the car lights surprised it.
- Unfortunately, neither of Bartlett's companions sees
the creature. The sighting lasts only a few seconds and, before Bartlett
can speak, the car leaves the scene.
- "I really flew after I saw it," Bartlett recalls.
"I took that corner at 45, which is pretty fast. I said to my friends,
'Did you see that?' And they said, 'Nah, describe it.' I did and they said,
'Go back. Go back!' And I said, 'No way. No way.' When you see something
like that, you don't want to stand around and see what it's going to do.
- "They finally got me to go back and Mike was leaning
out of the window yelling, 'Come on, creature!' And I was saying, 'Will
you cut that out!' Andy was yelling, 'I want to see you!'"
- But the creature is gone. Bartlett drops his friends
off and goes to his Walpole Street home. Visibly upset, he walks through
the door and his father asks him what's wrong. Bartlett relates the story
and later sketches what he's seen.
- The creature then makes another appearance.
- Around midnight, 15-year-old John Baxter leaves his girlfriend
Cathy Cronin's house at the south end of Millers High Road (we assume the
authors mean Miller Hill Road). Anyway, Baxter starts walking up the street
on his way home. Half an hour later, after he has walked about a mile,
he observes someone approaching him. Because the figure is short, Baxter
assumes it's an acquaintance of his, M.G. Bouchard, who lives on the street.
- John calls out, "M.G., is that you?"
- No response.
- But Baxter and the figure continue to approach each other
until finally the latter stops. Baxter then halts as well and asks, "Who
is that?" The sky is dark and overcast and he can only see a shadowy
- Trying to get a better look, Baxter takes one step forward
and the figure scurries off to the left, running down a shallow wooded
gully and up the opposite bank. As the figure runs, Baxter hears its footsteps
on the dry leaves.
- He follows the figure down the slope, then stops and
looks across the gully. There, he sees the creature, standing in silhouette
about 30 feet away, its feet "molded" around the top of a rock
several feet from a tree.
- The creature's body reminds Baxter of a monkey's, except
for its dark "figure-eight"-shaped head. Its eyes, two lighter
spots in the middle of the head, are looking straight at Baxter, who after
a few minutes begins to feel uneasy. Realizing he has never seen such a
creature before and fearing what it might do next, he backs carefully up
the slope, his heart pounding. He then "walks very fast" down
the road to the intersection at Farm Street.
- There, a couple passing in a car pick him up and drive
- The next day, Bartlett tells his close friend Will Taintor,
18, about his sighting.
- Can you guess what happens next?
- Around midnight, Taintor is driving Abby Brabham, 15,
home when an encounter with the creature takes place. As they pass along
Springdale Avenue, Brabham spots something in the headlights on the left
side of the road. The "something" is a creature crouched on all
fours and facing the car. Its body is thin and monkeylike but its head
is large and oblong, with no nose, ears or mouth.
- The creature is hairless and its skin tan or beige in
color. The facial area around the eyes is lighter and the eyes glow green.
Brabham insists this is the case, even after investigators tell her that
Bartlett had said the eyes were orange.
- Taintor sees the creature only momentarily and has the
impression of something with a large head and a tan body. He doesn't know
what it is but he does know that it's not a dog.
- Frightened, Brabham urges Taintor to speed up so they
can get away. Taintor claims that only after they leave the scene does
he recall Baxter's sighting. His own had been so brief and unspectacular
that he probably would have thought little of it if Brabham had not been
- He asks her to describe the figure, deliberately phrasing
misleading questions about aspects of the creature's appearance he knew
not to be true in order to check her story against Bartlett's, which he
did not mention to her. Abby sticks to her story.
- On April 28, Coleman, then living in neighboring Needham,
visits the Dover Country Store where a store employee, Melody Fryer, tells
him about Bartlett's sighting and sketch. She promises to get him a copy
and two days later provides him with two drawings. The next day Coleman
interviews Bartlett. On May 3 he questions Baxter and Brabham and on the
5th talks with Taintor.
- Two weeks later, Coleman asks Walter Webb of the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization, Joseph Nyman of the Mutual UFO Network
and Ed Fogg of the New England UFO Study Group to join the investigation.
Although none of the witnesses had reported seeing a UFO in connection
with the Dover Demon, the ufologists are struck by the creature's apparent
resemblance to humanoid beings sometimes associated with UFOs.
- So is the Dover Demon a hoax? The investigators conclude
that's possible, but express doubts. There's nothing in the witnesses'
backgrounds to suggest they might be pranksters and much to suggest they
were honest, upright individuals.
- As Webb observes, "None of the four was on drugs
or drinking at the time of his or her sighting so far as we were able to
determine.... None of the principals in this affair made any attempt to
go To The Newspapers or police to publicize their claims. Instead, the
sightings gradually leaked out. Finally, the teenagers' own parents, the
high school principal, the science instructor and other adults in Dover
whose comments were solicited didn't believe the Dover Demon was a fabrication,
implying the youths did indeed see 'something.'
- "As for the idea the witnesses were victims of somebody
else's stunt, this seems most unlikely, chiefly due to the virtual impossibility
of creating an animated, lifelike 'demon' of the sort described."
- But if the Demon was real, what was it? A UFO being?
Perhaps, but then nothing precisely similar has ever been reported before,
according to Ted Bloecher, who has collected more than 1,500 UFO accounts
for the Center for UFO Studies.
- On the other hand, maybe the Demon is a member of a curious
race known to the Cree Indians of eastern Canada as the Mannegishi, the
authors write. The Mannegishi, naturalist Sigurd Olson says in his book
"Listening Post," are supposed to be "little people with
round heads and no noses who live with only one purpose: to play jokes
on travelers. The little creatures have long spidery legs, arms with six-fingered
hands, and live between rocks in the rapids...."
- This report comes via the BookRags.com Web site.
- The Unexplained Mysteries Web site, meanwhile, opines
that "like many sightings of this nature, it seems unlikely that this
is some form of undiscovered natural species, but more of a genetic mutation
or hybrid of some sort. There is also the possibility that what these people
saw was some kind of alien being, as the case bares striking resemblance
to many reports of such creatures at the sites of UFO activity. Unfortunately,
there is really no way of finding out for sure."
- The Eye's Behind Web site notes that Martin Kottmeyer,
an expert on UFO stories, claims that the Dover Demon witnesses simply
saw a baby moose and misidentified it. "While misperception may have
played a role in what they saw, it is hard to imagine mistaking a moose
for the creature that they described," the site states.
- According to Coleman, 1977 was an unusually eventful
year for strange occurrences. UFO and creature sightings were abnormally
frequent and often seemed to be connected; they often occurred in closely
related times and places. Many of the creature sightings involved mysterious
monsters with human-like forms. People wondered if some of these creatures
were from outer space.
- In a 1996 article in the Needham Chronicle, John Horrigan,
a debunker of the paranormal, said that while some people took the teen's
reports seriously, later investigation threw strong doubt on their credibility.
- By the way, a local newspaper dubbed the creature the
From Loren Coleman
- Letters to the Editor, MetroWest
- Subject: The Dover Demon
- Dear Editor:
- Mr. Know-It-All takes on the Dover Demon.
- Well, since I discovered, investigated, and initially
chronicled the story, I thought I would pop in to say a word or two.
- First of all, I must comment on the fact that we seem
to be in the midst of a virtual media flap of Dover Demon articles. Did
you realize there was a column about this cryptid published Friday in a
Southern college newspaper?
- The fingernails-against-the-chalkboard, Friday, May 6,
2005, article, "Dover Demon haunting nighttime story tenuous,"
by student Aaron Sakulich, is archived at
- Now, two days later, comes Mr. Know-It-All's much more
factual and delightful item. Too bad neither one of these writers read
the updates of the case in my recent book, Mysterious America: The Revised
Edition (NY: Paraview Press, 2001). For one thing, I go over the various
wrong-headed skeptical arguments, and demonstrate, for example, the Dover
Demon could not have been merely a physically impossible bipedal baby moose!
I know my zoology and moose and obviously farmer Martin Kottmeyer does
not. Also, perhaps someday the media will get their facts straight on
who coined the "Dover Demon." It wasn't the newspapers, dear
Horatio, for it was I.
- As I note in Mysterious America, the Metro West's unique
Dover Demon has become an international cultural icon, with comic books
spawned and structurally correct, well-made Japanese miniatures created
of the Dover Demon. That little April 1977 encounter in Dover, Massachusetts,
is today discussed in hundreds of books and on thousands of web sites around
- Loren Coleman
- Cryptozoologist, Author, Media Consultant
- Portland, Maine