I never posted about it, but there has recently been some UFO activity in Stephenville, Texas where a number of residents reported seeing anomalous aircraft in the skies.

Why is this important?

Well, it turns out that ol’ Lykaon grew up just a mere 30 miles from Stephenville. Whatever those folks saw may have well been visible to my hometown and all of its residents.

The original article on the sitings was posted up on January 17, 2008 and told of the accounts. At the time, the Air Force denied having any aircraft in the area, fueling speculation that the townfolk really did see a UFO.

This morning, however, the Air Force has backpedaled into this statement:

In the interest of public awareness, Air Force Reserve Command Public Affairs realized an error was made regarding the reported training activity of military aircraft.

So, now the Air Force is saying that they did in fact have aircraft flying over Stephenville in the form of a number of F-16s.

I’m not going to jump on a conspiracy band wagon here and say the Air Force is trying to cover something up.

I’ve had enough experience to know that, more than likely, they really did just fudge it up and fail to realize that they had multi-million dollar fighter jets flying around.

The problem, of course, is that this is how UFO conspiracy theories are born. The Air Force failing to check its facts will cause decades of UFO talk in Stephenville, ultimately hurting the credibility of the US Government (and probably Stephenville as well).

It’s sad that they couldn’t have been a little more thorough when releasing their first statement.

Or maybe it really was a UFO cover-up…

In all of my reading and watching of the paranormal, I’m always on the lookout for mundane explanations for extraordinary things.

It’s not that I’m completely unwilling to believe in UFOs and Ghosts, but I require some evidence that can’t be explained away with science.

One of the more recent and interesting scientific explanations for a paranormal encounter is the idea that sleep paralysis is responsible for people believing they have been abducted by aliens.

When your body enters REM sleep, it ‘paralyzes’ your muscles so you don’t get out of bed and try to live through your dreams, ultimately hurting yourself or others. It’s a defense mechanism that is incredibly important.

Occasionally, however, it can happen that your mind awakes from REM but your body doesn’t wake up with it. This leaves your body in this funky state where you’re completely aware but cannot move your body.

This can be slightly terrifying to say the least, but it gets worse with a high chance of hallucination occurring during this time as well. Many people who experience sleep paralysis report seeing strange things in the room with them, and more commonly, figures around the bed.

Another common theme of the hallucinations is the feeling that something is weighing on you, such as someone sitting on your feet or chest.

Since the hallucinations are usually unreasonable and unearthly, most people report bouts of sleep paralysis as a dream, easily chalking up their visions to an overactive dreamstate.

A common theme in alien abductions is waking to aliens standing near your bed and being unable to move, followed by being taken to an alien ship.

Sounds an awful lot like sleep paralysis to me, and so far is one of the most interesting theories for such a widespread phenomenon that I’ve heard.

To my delight, I believe I encountered sleep paralysis last night (or I was abducted by aliens).

I was dreaming about being on vacation at a lakehouse that I’ve never seen before. On the lake there were two piers. I was on one with my wife, and some friends of ours were on the other.

We were yelling across the water at each other, waving and having fun, when a UFO popped out of the water on the other pier and started flying circles around our friends. I had a camera with me and tried to snap a photo when the other pier collapsed, our friends falling into the water.

I awoke, a bit winded and scared. My cats were sleeping on my feet (as they are prone to do). I couldn’t move, and I remember thinking how heavy the cats seemed and how strange it was that their weight was preventing me from moving.

Then I saw someone standing in the doorway of our bedroom. Just a shadowy figure. I couldn’t tell you if it was human or not. I could really only see it out of the bottom of my eyes since I was laying down.

Strangely, I wasn’t scared. I felt one of the cats methodically bathing himself. I thought to myself, “Ok, Lykaon, if there was someone in the bedroom with you, the cats wouldn’t just be bathing themselves. They’d be freaked out.”

I looked again and the figure was gone, and I drifted back to sleep.

I’m not sure how awake I ever really was. The fact that the figure in my doorway didn’t really scare me is a bit odd. I hope I don’t react that way if someone ever really is in my bedroom!

I also now question whether my cats were really on my feet at all. Since one of the symptoms of sleep paralysis can be the feeling of something on your feet, I wonder if I just assumed it was my cats. It was certainly too dark to see.

I’ll never know for sure if I experienced true sleep paralysis, but it was a delightful experience nonetheless, and not nearly as frightening as I would have imagined.

I really thought I had heard of and read about all of the major big cryptids that are theorized.

I don’t know how I missed it, but I didn’t know a lick about Orang Pendek until my TiVo did me the service of taping an episode of “National Geographic’s Is It Real?” all about the little fella.

In the remote jungles of Sumatra, there is a legend of a bipedal ape-like creature that has been roaming the area for centuries.

The farmers of the land seem to treat it as if there is no myth whatsoever, but science has yet to capture or otherwise prove its existence.

The locals call it Orang Pendek which reportedly means “short person” in Indonesian.

My first thought when starting the episode was “Oh great, another bigfoot. Woohoo.” It seems like every area has their own bigfoot and all of the stories always seem the same.

Orang Pendek is no bigfoot, though. Orang Pendek is tiny — reportedly never more than 3 or 4 foot tall. He’s covered in fur, and has been known to rummage through and steal the crops of the local farmers.

There have been a number of expeditions to try to recover the creature, but other than a few compelling eye-witness accounts there has been no body or even photographic evidence of the creature.

What has been found, however, is a few tracks and a few hairs. The hairs were sent in for DNA analysis but only returned human DNA.

My first thought was that it was because it was human hair, but the scientist conducting the tests warned that it could be from improper handling of the hairs.

The tracks are odd things, too. The big toe is off to the side of the foot, instead of pointing forward like in humans. This is interesting, since it would be bipedal motion that isn’t quite like our own.

National Geographic is funding a study for which they have placed numerous cameras around the Sumatran jungle that will take pictures of any animals that walk by. Only time will tell if they catch the elusive Orang Pendek on film.

What do you get when you cross X-Files with Harry and the Hendersons?

Give up?

The answer is a new comic by Image Comics called Proof.

Apparently this new comic is going to detail the exploits of a duo of cryptid hunters as they traipse around the globe searching for cryptids for an undisclosed government agency.

The first story arc is reportedly going to be called ‘Goatsucker’ and we can all guess what that’s going to be about.

But wait — there’s a twist. It turns out that one of agents, John “Proof” Prufrock, is a little bit odd.

So odd, in fact, that he’s not even human. He’s Bigfoot himself.

The driving motivator for the main hero is to discover other hairy bipeds out there that may be related to him.

It sounds like the premise for the comic is pretty solid, but the article linked above mentions all of the cryptids they’ll be running into in the first six issues and I seriously worry that they may run out of cryptids way too fast.

There are a lot of alleged cryptids in the world, but if they hit all of the major ones too early, they’ll have to fall back to the really boring, rare, or unlikely ones and that won’t be any fun for anyone.

But if you’re into comics and you’re into cryptids, this is going to be the book for you. I’ve been out of the comics loop for a while, but maybe this is a reason to get back in.

As is and will always be the case with all things cryptid, Cryptomundo has already reported this story.

I gotta post about something on Fridays, though, and I think it’s safe to assume that there isn’t 100% overlap with our respective readerships.

So basically there’s a lady in Texas who has found herself a Chupacabras — as roadkill no less.

Being a smart one, she’s preserved the specimen and it can be viewed in its horrifying detail through a number of photos.

Take a look at the picture on the right here and you’ll see that there is little resemblance.

The creature that Ms. Canion has on her hands looks an awful lot like a dog to me (or at least some member of the family Canidae).

At any rate it seems to be an odd breed of dog. A lot of folks seem to be pointing towards the Mexican Hairless Dog as the culprit, but it is also pointed out that this breed of dog is exceptionally rare and wouldn’t be expected to just be found as roadkill in the middle of Texas.

Stranger things have happened.

It remains to be seen whether DNA testing will be done on the specimen. I hope that it is because it’s always nice to end these things definitively.

Whether it’s a new breed of dog or some coyote with mange, it’s just not freaky enough to be a Chupacabras in my opinion.

I’m gonna hold my breath for a sexier specimen somewhere down the road.

(Look Loren, I learned to spell it right!)