The Triangle

Issue date: 5/6/05 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: The Triangle Sakulich

Until my hate-mail inbox clears up, I think I'll stay away from writing about alien abductions and UFOs for a little while. On the other hand, it seems that that's what people want to read: Between my last two articles I've received over 50 e-mails and gotten listed on Fark.com.

But enough bragging (how many of you can say a grammatically-poor essay you wrote while sitting on the john has been read by 25,000 people?) for now. Instead, I'd like to honor the request of layout staffer Pat Xin and look more closely at the tale of the Dover Demon.

April 1977: the town of Dover, Massachusetts. Three 17-year-olds driving along a lonely road. Little did they know that they would be making a pit stop ... in terror! A fellow named Bill Bartlett noticed a creature near a wall of stones. The thing turned and looked into the headlights with large, shiny eyes "glowing brightly like orange marbles."

It had a large oval head that was easily as large as its body atop a spindly neck. The body was, like mine, quite lanky, and it had large hands and feet. Also similar to myself, the creature was hairless and appeared to hate rough, pale skin similar to the texture of sandpaper. It was only in view for a few seconds, and while no one else in the car saw the little beastie, they all agreed that Bill was "genuinely distraught."

When he returned home that night he drew a picture of the monster, later to be dubbed the Dover Demon by a local newspaper, when his father noticed that he was rather upset.

Over the course of the night two more sightings occurred before the thing ambled back into the mystery from whence it came. A 15-year-old named John Baxter sighted the Dover Demon while walking home from his girlfriend's house, at first mistaking it for a very short friend of his (accounts state that the creature was less than 4 feet tall).

Baxter, being about a billion times braver than I, got a good look at it (I would have run screaming into the night). It had long toes and fingers that it wrapped around a tree trunk and rocks as it stood, perhaps observing Baxter in return.

The next night a young man, Will Taintor, was driving a friend of his home when she spotted the creature. It was described as being down on all fours, hairless, and having glowing green eyes. The witness stuck to her guns even after it became known Bartlett had described the eyes as orange.

What explanation is there for such a creepy little monster, prowling the streets late at night? Well first, there are some things that should be noticed. In one case the eyes are described as glowing orange and in another as glowing green.

If these witness as reliable and not the victim of a crazy hoax, it would seem that the creatures' eyes were not glowing of their own accord, but were rather reflecting the headlights of the two cars. Glowing eyes is a mainstay of modern monster stories and at first glance seem so bizarre that the only explanation could be that the creature is an alien life form.

Generally speaking, that is the conclusion that the community of people interested in such things draw: that the Dover Demon was an alien stranded, for some reason, on earth temporarily. They even go so far as to identify monsters sighted in other parts of the world as "Dover Demons." However, there was no "UFO activity" in the area on the night in question.

Media Credit: www.rense.com The Dover Demon, walking the streets late at night.

Had there been strange lights in the skies reported from in and around Dover that night, the Dover Demon-as-alien argument might hold some water (to some extent) but that didn't happen.

None of the things that UFO enthusiasts normally point to as "proof" of alien contact occurred in this case, with the exception of people seeing something really weird.

All of the witnesses to this creature have been reported as "credible" witnesses and none have ever altered their stories. Perhaps it is due to a bitter lifetime of having jerks for friends, but I'm a little stingier with who I will and will not call credible. I'm not saying that they made it up, I'm just saying that the judicial system has proven eyewitnesses to be ridiculously unreliable.

That's as true in felony murder cases as it is in creepy backwoods monster folklore. I'm not, as the young people say, "hating on" the witnesses, I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, so what other explanation could there be? One skeptic claimed that they had seen a baby moose and mistook it for a crazy alien. I'm not sure that makes sense, since some reported seeing the thing walk on four legs and other said it walked on two.

On the other hand, I wasn't there, so I'm not qualified to guess at exactly what sort of thing they saw. Maybe it was an albino monkey escaped from a eugenics lab. (Second most popular theory to explain the Dover Demon other than UFOs: a government-run genetics experiment gone horribly awry.)

But ask yourself the following question: Which is more likely? That a bunch of teens saw some sort of deformed animal, or that aliens conquered the nontrivial challenge of interstellar travel and decided to take up the hobby of giving rural teenagers the jibblies?

I'm not saying that the UFO community is choosing the less-likely option, I'm just saying that Occam is spinning around in his grave screaming. Be seeing you.



Aaron Sakulich is a senior majoring in materials science and engineering. He can be reached at aaron.sakulich@thetriangle.org.

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