Truth Behind 1994 Batsquatch Sighting
Buried among the books on a shelf in my home sat a copy of Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker’s Mysteries Of Planet Earth: An Encyclopedia of the Inexplicable. When my wife was cleaning, she stumbled on it and left it out of the gardening and cooking books it had shared its shelf with, wanting me to add it to my collection of UFO, cryptozoological, and other weirdness books that live in my office. I opened it up and thumbed through to a chapter called “Weird Encounters on the Wing”. The first line of this chapter mentions a much loved and incredibly under documented cryptozoological beast, Batsquatch.
According to Shuker’s Batsquatch story, on April 19th, 1994, at 9:30 AM, 18 year old Brian Canfield was driving a truck near Buckley Washington, in the foothills of Mount Rainier. Canfield’s truck came to a sudden and abrupt stop as a mysterious creature appeared no more than 30 feet in front of him.
The creature was described at 9 feet tall, with blue-ish fur. It has a wolf like face, yellow eyes, tufted ears and a large mouth filled with sharp white teeth. Its feet were described at bird like and on its back were two wings, attached to the shoulder.
After an undetermined length of time, the creature unfolded its wings and took off with such force that Canfield’s truck shook with the disturbance of air. The truck started again, as abruptly as it had stopped and Brian Canfield drove home. Canfield later returned to the site of the encounter with his mother and a neighbor in hopes of finding some sort of physical evidence of the encounter, none was found.
Local newspaper reporter C.R. Roberts of the Tacoma News Tribune interviewed Canfield and was convinced of his sincerity.
I presume this is the source of the mock article posted on www.batsquatch.com that I declared a total hoax on a previous post because of fictional information in the report. It seems the owner of batsquatch.com, a Yelm Washington resident, adapted Canfield story, mocking the young man’s report.
Canfield’s creature description is a mix of cryptozoological beings, physical size of sasquatch, the unexplained stopping of the automobile has an alien abduction flavor, with hints of The Beast of Bray Road or The Michigan Dogman in the wolf like face and the creatures wings and flight are quite MothMan like.
What did Brian Canfield see that morning in rural Washington State?
Is this the origin of Batsquatch or will more reports surface in the future?
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