Lair of the Beasts: Little Bigfoot

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Lair of the Beasts: Little Bigfoot
February 27, 2012
by Nick Redfern
Mania

omments, observations and incidents relative to Bigfoot are commonplace in my Lair of the Beasts articles. But: what about Littlefoot? That’s right: Not all of the hairy, humanoid creatures said to inhabit the darker corners of our world are large, lumbering monsters of 7 to 8 feet in height. Some of them are literally dwarfish.

Over a six week period in the summer of 1996, at Churston Woods, which is situated close to the English holiday resort of Torbay, fifteen separate witnesses reported seeing what they could only describe as a green faced monkey, running through the woods.

Granted, some of the descriptions were quite vague, but most of the witnesses told of seeing a tailless animal, around four to five feet tall, with a flat, olive-green face that would run through the woods and occasionally would be seen swinging through the trees.

Of course, Britain is not home to any sort of indigenous monkey of a minimum of four feet in height! And needless to say, the mysterious matter was never resolved.

And, there’s one more case worth noting from the U.K.

In November 2008, an extremely strange story surfaced from Wanstead - a suburban area of the borough of London, England. According to witness testimony, a small Bigfoot-type creature was supposedly seen wandering Epping Forest, a 2,476 hectare area of forestland which, by name at least, was first referenced in the 17th Century, but that has existed since Neolithic times and which, in the 12th Century, was designated as a Royal Forest by King Henry III.

Neil Arnold – the author of The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: London - describes how the story first began:

‘The animal was first sighted during early November by eighteen-year-old angler Michael Kent who was fishing with his brother and father in the Hollow Ponds area of Epping Forest, on the border of Wanstead and Leytonstone. The teenager claimed that while walking towards his brothers swim, he heard a rustling in the bushes and saw the back of a dark, hairy animal around four-feet in height, that scampered off into the woods.’

Moving away from Britain, let’s now take a look at a wild case from Venezuela that even brings UFOs into the mix!

Donald Keyhoe was a UFO researcher and author who penned a number of Flying Saucer-themed books from the 1950s to the 1970s. Interestingly, Keyhoe’s path crossed with that of a number of UFO cases involving sightings of “hairy dwarfs”.

One case that particularly intrigued Keyhoe was investigated at length by the UFO author Frank Edwards. It involved two teenage boys, Jesus Gomez and Lorenzo Flores, who, in late 1954, had been hunting rabbits along Venezuela’s Trans-Andean Highway, between Chico and Cerro De Las Tres Torres, when something distinctly unearthly occurred.

Edwards reported that: “They had only one old shotgun, unloaded as they started home as they had used all their ammunition. As they trudged along the edge of the highway they noticed some sort of shiny object in the brush alongside the road and only a short distance from the highway proper. They told police they though it must have been an automobile which had gone off the road and they went into the brush to investigate. The boys found themselves only a few feet from an object which resembled two shiny wash bowls stuck together at the rims. They estimated that it was probably ten feet in diameter and could see, they later told police, that it was hovering about three feet off the ground and it was ejecting fire from the bottom.”

Lorenzo Flores himself took up the story from there:

“Then we saw four little men come out of it. They were approximately three feet tall. When they realized that we there, the four of them grabbed Jesus and tried to drag him toward the thing. I could do nothing but take my shotgun, which was not loaded, and I struck one of them with it. The gun seemed to have struck something as hard as rock-it stung my hands, and it broke the gun in two pieces. It was too dark to see features of their faces, but we did notice the abundant hair on their bodies and great strength.”

Of course, in the British cases, we can never rule out the possibility that an exotic pet had escaped from a privately-owned menagerie. But, the Venezuelan saga is far more problematic in nature. Of only one thing can we be sure: Bigfoot appears to come in all shapes and sizes, and – given the UFO link – is one seriously weird phenomenon!