Strange animals spotted from Texas to Maine ....
   Mystery creatures stir the imagination
   By Murray Montgomery
   
  Recently I came across a story from Fox News that really got me to thinking about all the things in this old world that cannot be readily explained; even by modern science or the so-called experts. This particular article was headlined, “Maine mystery beast possibly killed by car.” Anything with the word “mystery” in it gets my attention right away.

It seems that this particular creature is believed to be responsible for frightening residents, killing dogs,

 and being the subject of local legend for half a generation. According to Fox News, for the past 15 years residents in Androscoggin County have reported seeing and hearing a mysterious animal with chilling monstrous cries and eyes that glow in the night.

A woman saw the beast in her yard and told a Maine newspaper that it looked liked a hybrid mutant of something. “It was evil, evil looking. And it had a horrible stench I will never forget,” she said. “We locked eyes for a few seconds and then it took off. I’ve lived in Maine my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like it.” The woman’s husband said it looked “half-rodent, half-dog” to him.

Other folks who saw the animal described it as being charcoal gray, weighing between 40 and 50 pounds with a bushy tail, a short snout, short ears and curled fangs hanging over its lips. One man said it looked like “something out of a Stephen King story.” And to think this thing was reportedly hit and killed by a car while chasing a cat. Don’t you know that cat is having some bad dreams?

Without even seeing the beast, wildlife officials in Maine have decided that it’s a rare wolf-dog hybrid. However, at this point no one is really sure.

Now you’ve got to admit this is some mighty interesting stuff. So interesting to me that I decided to do a search on the Internet for more stories about mystery creatures. And it seems that just a few days ago, Fox News had this headline on one of their articles: “Eleven-Hundred Pound ‘Hogzilla’ Killed in Georgia.”

They report that this hog which was killed in the suburbs of Atlanta was even bigger than the near-mythical “Hogzilla” caught in rural south Georgia a few years ago. A team from National Geographic confirmed that south Georgia’s “Hogzilla” was indeed real. It was seven and one-half to eight feet long and weighed 800 pounds. That means the hog killed near Atlanta a few days ago is 300 pounds bigger. An editor with Georgia Outdoor News said, “Nobody keeps official records. But it’s one heck of a hog.”

Not to be outdone, Texas also has its share of mystery creatures. One of the most famous being the “Chupacabra.” Although considered mythical by most, there are many people who believe that this creature does exist. The first reported sighting was in Puerto Rico in 1947 and since then it allegedly has been seen in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and the United States. According to one online dictionary, the Chupacabra, which means “goat sucker” in Spanish, has also been spotted in Maine as well as Texas.

Once again, however, the so-called experts say that the Chupacabra is only legend, although many in the Latin American communities believe it to be real. I wonder, how do you claim something isn’t real or doesn’t exist if you’ve never seen it? Evidently some folks have seen something they can’t explain; that doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong.

And consider this, recently the NBC affiliate in Dallas/Ft. Worth, Channel Five, ran a story about a mystery creature found in the Lufkin area. On their website, they are also running a close-up photo of the animal’s teeth which include large fangs.  “Some people in the southeast Texas town say the creature is a Chupacabra – a mythical creature sporting large fangs that sucks blood from its prey,” the report stated.

Last year a rancher in South Texas shot an animal that had been killing his livestock. The description of which is very similar to the beast found in Lufkin. I also came across the same kind of reports from Maryland and elsewhere in the United States.

Unexplained things do exist and there are many instances where the so-called experts are too quick to call a considerable number of people, “liars.” They might not be quite as cocky if they happened to be lost on some dark, foggy night in southeast Lavaca County and made a face-to-face encounter with the “Wild Woman of the Navidad.”