mud , mud ,Mud , MUD !!!
A very strange corner of the odd that I have come
across is that of bizarre entities that seem to have the ability to
cloak themselves to some extent in order to become practically
invisible, often specifically described as being something like the
creature from the science fiction The Predator films. It is a
phenomenon that seems to not be really remarked upon in the common
literature, and which is on the surface completely absurd, but there are
many cases of this, such as I have covered here before.
Yet there are plenty more odd accounts out there as well, and it seems
that these weird accounts are etching out their own niche in the realms
of the paranormal. Here we will look at some more completely outlandish
accounts of beings from beyond our understanding that seem to have the
Predator-like ability to cloak themselves from being seen as they go
about their unknowable agendas.
Eminent researcher, author, and collector of humanoid accounts Albert Rosales
has personally provided me with a selection of very curious encounters
with such enigmatic entities. One of these reports comes from 2009, with
a witness in a rural wooded area near Thornville, Ohio, who had stayed
up late on her computer in a detached room that served as her office. At
one point she looked out over the lawn that spanned between the office
and her house, faintly illuminated by a porch light and that was then
something very strange caught her attention. There walking along the
lawn at a rapid clip was an “invisible, human-like creature,” which was
transparent but had a slight shimmer around the edges, and which she
specifically likened to the creature from The Predator films. It apparently made its way across the lawn and into the woods, and the frightened woman rushed to her husband.
Another eerie report comes from MUFON (Mutual
UFO Network), with a witness in Brighton, England. She claims that one
evening in July of 1988 she awoke to a very strange sensation like a
spasm in her body, and she soon found that she was completely and
utterly paralyzed, unable to barely move even a finger. As the
frightened woman lay there unable to move a muscle, she says that it
felt as if something crawled on top of her to sit there heavily on her
chest, as well as the sensation of hands around her throat. There was
then what seemed to be something breathing in her ear and a noise like
low growling and she desperately moved her eyes to the side trying to
discern what this thing was. The bizarre report explains what happened
next:
The curious witness then moved closer to the strange anomaly and was surprised to see that branches were snapping and bending as if brushing up against a solid object, but still he could see nothing there to explain it. He blinked his eyes and intently peered at that spot, and suddenly he could see the vague outline of something, described as standing 8 feet tall and with an oval head, the whole of it completely translucent and only visible through a certain angle of light, almost as if it were a faint hologram. The terrified boy then allegedly shouted out in surprise and the entity crouched down into an “attack stance” and stared at him for a few moments, issuing some otherworldly sounds before making a dash for the wooded tree line, crushing brush and bushes as it went. The witness would claim that he would hear those bizarre guttural noises in the surrounding forest near his house on occasion after that, and that a few years later he witnessed a black triangle-shaped UFO with three orange/red lights fly over his house and then shoot into the sky at breathtaking speed.
It is unclear what connection this UFO sighting had to the witness’s strange invisible entity sighting, but a few of the reports Rosales sent along do involve UFOs. One of these is the report from two boys by the names of Denilson and Rafael, who in 2008 were out playing in the Sebastian’s Chapel Square of Jardinopolis, Sao Paolo, Brazil, when they spotted some bright, rotating red and blue lights move over the square towards a nearby field, where they seemed to descend. Gathering some others, the boys warily approached the field, where the anomalous lights could be seen hovering in the air, but even stranger than this were what appeared to be several transparent entities crouched in the field beneath. The report, which comes from Milton Dino Frank Junior, Presidente do Centro de Ufologia Brasileiro, explains of these unearthly creatures:
Moving on to other sources, Lon Strickler’s always excellent site Phantoms and Monsters has quite a few reports along these lines. One was related to Srickler by paranormal author Rosemary Ellen Guiley, and is an account by a witness calling himself simply “Ben,” who had quite the odd tale to tell indeed. Ben claims that he had been living in a house in rural Western Washington State when his odd experiences began in 2016. It all started when he had been out on his property armed with a rifle with the intention of warding off trespassers, possibly drug dealers, who had been prowling around the area at the time. At one point he says he dozed off, and when he woke up he did so to see a humanoid figure 15 feet up in the air in some trees. Guiley would write of Ben’s experience thusly:
She could just make out a large long head next to her own face, and as the spasm like feeling started to wear off, a tiny bit at a time, she could see that this figure that was on top of her was like a lizard/newt-like creature. It was like blending in with all that was around it, or maybe invisible, the witness was not sure, but she could see it more clearly as the seconds passed. It was reptilian, the witness thinks she growled at it, and bared her teeth at it and she could feel that it could read her mind, and she began swearing at it and shouting all sorts of vengeance at it. She felt violated and used. The next thing, which was very quick, it was off her and was standing to one side of the bottom of her bunk bed, which she had at the time, a light came through the thin gap which was made by the curtains. The light was of different shades of a golden light which also had very small particles inside it, like dust or very small starts which moved around like little bright lights.What was going on here? In another bizarre case provided by Rosales from MUFON, the 10-year-old witness and his friends were out playing with what are described as “air soft guns” along a river in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in the summer of 2001. It was sort of like a paintball game, a battle, with both of the boys trying to track each other down and shoot each other, and so the witness found himself hunkered down in some brush waiting to ambush the friend. Listening intently to his surroundings he then heard the crackling of twigs and leaves, and assumed this to be his quarry, yet when he looked he only noticed some branches waving about as if something was going through them. It was odd, since the day had been calm and windless, so the boy could not figure out how the grass and branches could be moving about like that when no one really seemed to be there.
The reptilian creature stood there, it was about 6 ft high, and the witness could feel that it was either proud or happy, maybe both. She tried to sit up as best she could and she spat at it, but the spit just went down her chin, and through her mind she swore again. The creature walked forward and stepped into the light beam, as it did, the feet, then the legs vanished into the light; the more the creature moved forward towards the window, the more or it vanished. When it was gone, the witness felt relaxed, but she could still feel where she was held around her throat. She felt she was raped by the horrendous reptilian creature.
The curious witness then moved closer to the strange anomaly and was surprised to see that branches were snapping and bending as if brushing up against a solid object, but still he could see nothing there to explain it. He blinked his eyes and intently peered at that spot, and suddenly he could see the vague outline of something, described as standing 8 feet tall and with an oval head, the whole of it completely translucent and only visible through a certain angle of light, almost as if it were a faint hologram. The terrified boy then allegedly shouted out in surprise and the entity crouched down into an “attack stance” and stared at him for a few moments, issuing some otherworldly sounds before making a dash for the wooded tree line, crushing brush and bushes as it went. The witness would claim that he would hear those bizarre guttural noises in the surrounding forest near his house on occasion after that, and that a few years later he witnessed a black triangle-shaped UFO with three orange/red lights fly over his house and then shoot into the sky at breathtaking speed.
It is unclear what connection this UFO sighting had to the witness’s strange invisible entity sighting, but a few of the reports Rosales sent along do involve UFOs. One of these is the report from two boys by the names of Denilson and Rafael, who in 2008 were out playing in the Sebastian’s Chapel Square of Jardinopolis, Sao Paolo, Brazil, when they spotted some bright, rotating red and blue lights move over the square towards a nearby field, where they seemed to descend. Gathering some others, the boys warily approached the field, where the anomalous lights could be seen hovering in the air, but even stranger than this were what appeared to be several transparent entities crouched in the field beneath. The report, which comes from Milton Dino Frank Junior, Presidente do Centro de Ufologia Brasileiro, explains of these unearthly creatures:
The creatures were crouching in a horseshoe or U-formation and appear to be “communicating” with each other. The boys were extremely frightened, since they had never seen anything like that before. The boys were convinced that the creatures were not animals, since their behavior was totally different from that of typical farm animals that abounded in the area. The boys explained that the creatures were well-defined but when they changed their viewing angle they were able to see four and up to five creatures, giving some the creatures the appearance of being “invisible” and only becoming visible when the struck by the light rain that was falling at the time. When Cristiano shone his scooter headlight directly on the creatures they disappeared. They could only see the creatures when it was dark. In the darkness they still see the contours of their bodies. The boys estimated the creatures to have been about 1.20 meters in height, with large black oval-shaped eyes, lacking noses or ears, they had a round mouth and their color was dark gray. They hands with fingers but were unable to count how many fingers on each hand. All four youths gave identical description of the creatures.The boys would claim to have watched these bizarre invisible entities for a full 40 minutes, after which a “red laser point” appeared on one of the boy’s shirt and they could see it was a red beam of light coming from a cylindrical object out on the field, which also happened to have smoke wafting off of it. The terrified boys then perhaps wisely hastily got out of the area, only to come back a few days later to find that all of the bushes and brush in the vicinity of the sighting had turned brown. Many thanks to Albert Rosales for these particular reports.
Moving on to other sources, Lon Strickler’s always excellent site Phantoms and Monsters has quite a few reports along these lines. One was related to Srickler by paranormal author Rosemary Ellen Guiley, and is an account by a witness calling himself simply “Ben,” who had quite the odd tale to tell indeed. Ben claims that he had been living in a house in rural Western Washington State when his odd experiences began in 2016. It all started when he had been out on his property armed with a rifle with the intention of warding off trespassers, possibly drug dealers, who had been prowling around the area at the time. At one point he says he dozed off, and when he woke up he did so to see a humanoid figure 15 feet up in the air in some trees. Guiley would write of Ben’s experience thusly:
It was not solid, but looked like rippled air, similar to the cloak of invisibility portrayed by the alien entity in the Predator films. Its head, neck, and shoulders were outlined, but the rest of it fell away into nothingness. As he stared at this shape, an overwhelming dread seized him, penetrating to the core of his being. He was deathly afraid to move in the slightest way. At last he took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt, and put them back on. The shape was still there. Ben counted down in his mind from five to zero, and at zero grabbed his belongings and dashed for home. Nothing pursued him, or showed up at the house.Ben would then go back to the site of this encounter some time later, to find that the whole area was infused with a dark feeling of dread. It was at this time that he would find an L-shaped hole in the ground, as well as some anomalous gashes in the earth, although what connection this had to what he had seen was not clear. Ben would patrol the area on several other occasions and always find that pervading sense of dread, as well as that the temperature always seemed to be significantly lower than the surrounding terrain, but he has yet to see that glimmering entity again. Also from Phantoms and Monsters is a spooky report from a witness in Mission, Texas, who says this happened when he was just 7 years old. He had been living at a mobile home park surrounded by orange groves, lending it a very rural, isolated ambiance. He says that one morning he woke to a strange noise outside his bedroom window, and thinking it was coyotes he glanced outside, yet he did not see anything out of the ordinary. Then a wave of bizarreness would hit all at once, of which the witness says:
I then noticed motion to my left and turned to see a figure standing next to my mothers car. It was an “outline” of a large being, it had to be huge as it was several feet taller than the car. I would guess maybe 6.5 to 7.5 feet. The figure was big and bulky, the shoulders very wide and the legs very thick, but all clearly humanoid shaped. The inside of the outline was very dark shimmering-like light couldn’t escape (the best way I can describe it) but the outline was clearly visible. It turned towards me, and we just stood there looking at each other for several seconds. I don’t know how I knew it could see me, but I did. At this point I did not feel any fear, I was just stunned, trying to understand what I was seeing. It then slowly turned and walked off into the darkness.The podcast Expanded Perspectives also has some very strange accounts that seem to fit the theme of some sort of invisibility cloaked humanoid entities. One such account comes from a witness living out near Grand Paris, Louisiana, in a small, backwater town where everyone knows each other. He says that he is an avid bow hunter, and at the time of his brush with the unexplained he had been out on a bow hunting trip with a cousin in the Kisatchie National Forest. At the time they were camping deep in the woods in August far from any trails, scouting for their quarry in a designated hunting area. It was as they sat around the fire one night that odd things would begin to happen, starting with the witness and his friends hearing things out in the brush and seeing a strange glimmering of light that seemed to be circling the camp. They wrote it off to tiredness, and headed out the next morning to continue their hunt, but things would get real strange real fast. The witness explains:
At this point I jumped from my bed and ran to my parents room, I woke up my mother and tried to tell her what I had seen, but she insisted it was a “bad dream”. I knew it wasn’t. She got up and continued to get ready for work. She tried to laugh it off but I kept insisting and did not want her to go outside because the big, invisible man would get her I feared. At that point she didn’t want to hear anymore about it. I think I was somewhat in shock and traumatized by the experience. So I said nothing else about it. However, several days later, there was a small article in our local paper “The Monitor” about a local woman who had seen the same EXACT thing I saw, only she reported it to the police. As I recall the article made the woman out to be a “crazy lunatic”. My mother read this article to me, and we both just sat there stunned. She then questioned me about it again and told me not to tell anyone. I suppose she didn’t want to expose me to ridicule. To this day she refuses to talk about the ordeal.
About lunchtime, we stopped and started having some freeze-dried backpacker food, where you just have to add the water. I was using my jet-boil to get the water boiling. It is pretty loud for a pocket stove, so you have some left-over roaring noise in your ears when you turn it off. I shut it off, and poured it in our packets, and then we sat there about to dig in. That is when my life changed forever. My cousin jumped straight up, and freezes, standing there. I looked up from what I was eating, kind of startled, and asked him: “What the hell are you doing?” He didn’t, or rather, couldn’t reply. He just stared at that little clearing about sixty yards from us. I was starting to get that weird feeling that something wasn’t right.He says that as they made their retreat, the entity persistently followed them through the wilderness, always remaining at a distance of around 50 feet away, and never making any noise except for its disruption of the vegetation. The man continued their mad dash towards their truck, finally reaching it and speeding out of there. Oddly, it would turn out that his father had seen something very similar in the same area, of which the witness says:
After that night, and all the noises I heard, I could feel all the warning bells going off in my body. Like when you see a snake that you didn’t know was there. Except this feeling was just lingering. So I asked him a second time. He tells me in a shaky, whispering voice: “I see the predator.” Now, at this point I should have laughed or something, but it never crossed my mind. I jumped up and looked with him. No joke man, there it was. Not like in the movie, where you can see the alien thing, but like this man-shaped shimmer. It was about ten or twelve foot up in a tree and it was crouched down. You could clearly tell it was a guy’s shape. I wheeled around and started throwing my lunch stuff in my pack while my cousin kept staring at it. I am really glad he did, because when looking back, if was had been alone, I would have just run and left everything. The packing took me less than sixty seconds.
I had my backpack on and was holding his backpack. I walked back over to where he was, and this thing was still crouched on a limb. So I started thinking “Maybe it is nothing, and we are freaking ourselves out.” Because it hadn’t moved an inch. At that moment, it was like it was reading my thoughts. This thing stands up and drops down off the limb unto the ground. My f…ing heart stops. It was about five feet tall at max, and it was man made exact. When it hit the ground, you could hear it making a sound, like if any of us would jump out of a tree. It then steps back and against the tree it came out off for about five seconds, and then here it came. It moved towards us with a fluid movement of an animal and it covered about ten yards in no time, and slipped behind some small brush and stopped. We grabbed each other and took off.
He tells what he saw looks like stacks of Reynolds wraps, that clear, clean plastic stuff, except that it was in the shape of a man. It was moving along the shoreline, opposite the river they were hunting on. What he saw was man shaped between five and six feet tall, clear or see-through, except it had distortion along the edges, and the center was noticeable more clear. This phantom thing was moving like it had a purpose. The moment my dad and his friend started watching it, it somehow recognized that, that it was being observed, and it froze in place. It squatted down and watched them back for a bit. Their dogs were acting really strange, super nervous. They were whimpering and wining, and were getting antsy.Another case from Expanded Perspectives comes from a witness named Daniel Velazquez, a construction worker from Seattle, Washington. In August of 2018, he says he was riding in a truck with his boss and another worker on the way to work on the I-5 freeway, and at first it was just a regular commute. That is, until something very surreal caught his attention. He says:
My dad and his buddy stood up, holding their guns, and started to go back to the truck. This phantom thing then slid off into the water, and went under. They didn’t know what to say or what to do really. They bee-landed back to the truck, loaded the dogs, and their gear. They were about the head out, when my dad saw the thing in a tree about twenty yards from the truck, just watching them. He hadn’t heard anything, and the dogs had chilled out when they back to the truck. So they had not reason to worry. However, at that moment he got scared, and they hauled ass out of there. He and his buddy didn’t talk about it afterwards.
As we were exiting the freeway, I was just sitting back in my seat and as I looked to the right I seen this “Predator” figure moving to its right. I jumped up in my seat and said to my boss “Oh my God do you see that? Look”! I was absolutely stunned! There was a little outcropping of trees and beyond that there were three to four homeless people just going about their business. They seemed to be clueless about the “figure” that was walking about twenty yards in front of them. I was absolutely shocked and did not know what to say or do. I only saw the figure for about four or five seconds, and when I turned to my boss to ask if he is seeing this, and then turned back to where I saw the figure, it was gone or I lost sight of it. It was exactly like the “predator” figure in the movie, not the alien form but the cloaked version. In my 40 years I have never seen anything like that!What was this thing, if anything? From the forum Hernando’s Hideaway comes a incredible account from commenter claiming to see what he describes as a “cloaked Bigfoot.” The witness says that he has always been an outdoorsman, and would often go hiking in the woods around rural area where he lived, often going to relax at a secluded log out in the forest. The witness describes having gone out to that log numerous times and never having felt anything but peace and quiet, but on this day something would be different. The witness says of the outlandish experience he would have:
This particular day, as I sat on the log, I heard some rustling in the bushes. I felt an uneasiness come over me… as if I was being watched. I could sense the direction it was coming from too. So I stood up and walked slowly to get a better view when I noticed a very large creature that I could see through standing between two trees. I would say it was at least 8 foot tall, maybe more. The body of this creature had a wavy pattern flowing through it, like heat waves that come up from a hot road surface. I could see the forest behind it… through it! The wavy pattern is how I was able to make out it’s form. (There wasn’t anything causing a heat wave anywhere else.)Lastly we have a report from Reddit, from a user called “QueenOTheSea,” which seems to have happened not out in some rugged wilderness, but right out in the middle of a busy street. She says that she was 15 years old at the time and being driven to school up a fairly busy road, when she saw what looked like the silhouette of a man just walking along. She says of what happened next:
It just stood there looking at me. I froze for a moment in pure fear that encompassed my entire being! But out of pure fight or flight adrenaline, I finally made my legs move, and I walked a safe distance… then I ran!! I was afraid if I started out running, it would chase me, like they say animals will do. I made it safely back home, and I don’t remember EVER going back into those woods alone after that! I missed going to “my spot”. It was my place to find peace and talk with nature. That “thing” stole it from me!! Since that encounter, I’ve often wondered if this is how Big Foot is so good at avoiding being captured?
It looked like the silhouette of a man, but as if he was invisible, as if I could only see him because he was reflecting light and color around him. It’s so strange to describe, it was as if he was made of glass or mirrors, but barely distinguishable from his surroundings, as if he was invisible, but not quite. I remember pushing my mom to force her into turning the car because I was afraid of hitting him. She had gotten back control really quickly and we only swerved a little bit. She had lectured me about it on the way to school. I don’t know why I’m thinking about it today. I looked it up online, trying to describe what I saw best I could, but couldn’t find anything relevant (just a bunch of English reflections on the book The Invisible Man, lol). Perhaps I was young and never actually saw anything, although I remember it very vividly.It certainly seems that these sorts of reports deserve almost their own category in the world of the weird. What are these cloaked, invisible beings and what are they up to? Are these ghosts, aliens, interdimensional entities, or what? There seems to be no real solid explanation for what these things could be, but the reports are out there, leaving us to wonder what could be behind it all. Are there cloaked humanoids watching us from the shadows with inscrutable purpose, or is this all just tall tales and exaggeration? The answer remains unclear, but it certainly seems to be an area of the paranormal that deserves more attention. Next time you are out in the wild, keep an eye out for any slight shimmer, because you never know what might be watching you.