Crawfordsville monster

What it is

In September 1891 people in Crawfordsville, Indiana, said they saw something travelling through the air above the town. The local paper called it a strange phenomenon: a white, shroud-like mass roughly eighteen feet in length and eight across, with no clear head or tail, a row of fins down each side, a single blazing eye and a wheezing, mournful noise. It flapped and twisted as it moved. Interviews gathered years afterwards put the crowd at hundreds, some of whom said they felt hot breath as the thing passed low. The case sits with early reports of unidentified flying objects, and it is remembered as a sighting that was explained.

Where it comes from

The first account ran in the Crawfordsville Journal on 5 September 1891. Two men delivering ice said the shape hovered over them and left them frightened, and a Methodist minister and his wife reported something similar. Copies travelled: the Indianapolis Journal reprinted the story, and papers elsewhere did too, among them the Brooklyn Eagle. Mail poured in to the Crawfordsville postmaster, and readers split between mockery and belief. Two townsmen, John Hornbeck and Abe Hernley, trailed the shape through the streets and found a flock of several hundred killdeer, a plover common on open ground. The Journal's own reading was that Crawfordsville's recently installed electric lighting had unsettled the birds and kept them circling, with their pale underwings doing the rest.

Peoples and places

The sightings belong to one town in Indiana, in the United States, and to the autumn of 1891. Crawfordsville residents supplied the reports: the ice carriers, the minister and his wife and, by later reckoning, a much larger crowd. Newspaper readers far beyond Indiana met the story through reprints, and the town's postmaster was said to have been swamped with correspondence about it. Reaction ran both ways, with ridicule on one side and firm believers on the other, in Crawfordsville and in the cities that carried the tale.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Jerome Clark, a writer on strange aerial reports, rated the case very high among the oddest of them, and it fed early speculation that some UFOs might be living creatures of the air. The paranormal investigator Charles Fort came across it through the Brooklyn Eagle's article. Vincent Gaddis, a Crawfordsville reporter and Fortean Society member, went back years later to interview people who remembered the nights. The sober explanation printed locally, a flock of killdeer thrown off course by new electric lights, is the one that has lasted, resting on the birds' pale under-feathers and their habit of hovering.

Compare and confuse

The monster is usually set beside other early American aerial oddities and later UFO lore. Its nearest double is not another apparition but the bird flock that, on the Crawfordsville Journal's account, produced it: killdeer with white underwings, circling above electric lights. Jerome Clark treated the report as a specimen of the fantastic in UFO literature rather than as a creature with a name of its own elsewhere.

Today

The story has been carried into games and television. The d20 Modern game system lists a Crawfordsville monster as a fantasy creature of the ooze kind, shaped like an amoeba. The History Channel programme MonsterQuest devoted an episode to the case. A 1972 Gold Key comic, UFO Flying Saucers, used the incident in its third issue, in a tale built around the idea of UFOs described as alive. The original newspapers and the later interviews remain the base of every retelling.

Questions people ask about Crawfordsville monster

Good reading and sources

• Crawfordsville monster on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data