- Nothing could have prepared night watchman
José Padrón for the sight that confronted him on the night
of August 30, 1967. An enormous shape was heading in his direction, taking
prodigious strides. The monstrous being had wings which Padrón would
later compare with those of a small airplane. The sound it produced was
apparently made by the creature's claws as it tried to take flight.
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- Padrón had been getting ready
to go to sleep within the cramped interior of the tin shack serving as
guardhouse for the construction area on Mexico's Route 57. At around 1:00
A.M., he had been awakened by the sound of something large stumbling around
the motor pool. Fearing vandalism, the watchman had shaken himself awake
and gone to investigate.
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- Padrón ran back to the shack,
cowering fearfully inside until daybreak, when supervising engineer Enrique
Rueda arrived on the site. Rueda listened carefully to the badly shaken
watchman and proceeded to measure a series of fresh footprints found near
the shack. The prints measured a little over one foot wide and had a depth
of six inches. The engineer's computations showed that whatever had made
the impressions on the soil had weighed more than 600 pounds. Photos of
the strange prints later appeared in the El Sol de San Luis newspaper.
Fortean researcher Godofredo de la Fuente subsequently made plaster casts
of the footprints. He deduced that the creature had traveled in a northeast-southeast
trajectory, bordering a barbed-wire fence several hundred feet from the
highway.
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- This incident, which would have made
a great X-Files episode, drew international attention to the city of San
Luis Potosí in Mexico's minerals and metallurgy belt. But unlike
many sightings of "winged weirdos," the San Luis creature graced
the construction site with its presence a second time. It returned the
following night with a similar creature -- possibly its mate -- and both
entities left a considerable number of footprints. The watchman, while
understandably scared, observed them carefully. He said the creatures appeared
to be headed toward the San Miguelito Mountains, adding a curious detail:
The ground trembled as the creatures flew off.
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- This renewed visit caused the supervising
engineer to increase the number of watchmen. Godofredo de la Fuente would
later write in his journal, "Next to the last of the twelve footprints
we noticed a broken mesquite branch which appeared to have been forcefully
snapped off due to the passage of the swift mystery creatures. Only something
having considerable physical strength could have snapped off a solid, spiny
branch of the mesquite tree. Our inspection of the area did not yield any
samples of hair nor feathers." Fortunately, the story of the gryphon-like
creatures did not rest solely on the testimony of the frightened night
watchman. On September 1, 1967, a number of American tourists who had parked
their campers at San Luis's famous Cactus Inn claimed to have seen strange
creatures with tremendous wingspans flying overhead. The Cactus Inn was
less than a quarter mile from the construction site.
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- A Chilling Discovery
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- Hector Urdiales, a member of Mexico's
Cosmos A.C. paranormal research foundation, decided to lead an investigation
during Easter week, 1984, to a seldom-visited area located behind Monterrey's
Cerro de la Silla, an enormous, irregular-shaped hill dominating the city.
Stories of a monstrous winged being prowling the area had come to Urdiales'
attention. Accompanied by a friend, the explorer stopped at a roadside
general store on the road to San Roque, where he interviewed the owner,
who was among the many witnesses to the creature. They followed his indications
as to where to camp and mount their watch.
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- Nothing unusual happened during their
first day and night in the area. On the following morning, while combing
the banks of a stream running through a copse of savin trees, Urdiales
and his companion made a chilling discovery.
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- The grass at the base of one of the trees
by the stream was covered in the blood and entrails of an animal. Closer
inspection revealed that the savin tree's entire trunk was streaming with
blood flowing from above. Hesitantly they followed the trail of blood with
their eyes until they came upon a surreal sight. Twenty feet off the ground,
a large boar had been split open and spitted to a tree limb. Fear washed
over the re-searchers, since they realized that the tall savin lacked the
strong lower limbs which would have assisted a human to deliver the grisly
cargo to such a dizzying height. Their minds couldn't conjure up any feline
predator strong enough to drag a 200-pound boar up a tree. Only a carnivorous
winged predator having the wingspan and talons needed to attack that kind
of prey could have possibly been responsible for the carnage.
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- On July 20, 1994, a farm worker at Rancho
El Sabino in Monterrey was heading back to his house to have lunch at around
11:00 a.m. As he walked past a nearby graveyard, the farm worker noticed
something emerge from another footpath at a distance of 100 feet. As he
got closer, he realized that he was looking at a half-human, half-avian
creature which was indifferent to the startled human's presence. The creature
continued to walk, chicken-like, down the footpath until it reached a crossroad.
The birdman then flexed its enormous wings and turned down another path.
By the time the farm worker reached the intersection, the figure was half
a mile ahead of him. Then he lost sight of it altogether.
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- Five days later, a woman who had gone
to decorate one of the tombs at the graveyard came upon the same creature
and notified the authorities. News of the case prompted researchers Marco
A. Reynoso, Ernesto Estrada, Esteban Guzmána, and Leopoldo Zambrano
to investigate the site on July 29, 1994. Reaching the graveyard around
midnight, they fanned out to cover all corners of the site but were unable
to stumble across the gryphon-like presence.
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- Later on the following day they were
able to videotape an interview with the farm worker, who gave them a comprehensive
description of the entity sighting: the creature had been covered in grayish
feathers and was human-looking from its head down to its torso, with bird-like
attributes of wings, feathers, and talons below. The farm worker added
that he didn't pursue the creature for fear that it might attack him.
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- Find out more in the October 1998 issue
of FATE.
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- Scott Corrales is a frequent contributor
to FATE. He is the author of Chupacabras and Other Mysteries (Greenleaf,
1997) and Flashpoint: High Strangeness in Puerto Rico (Amarna, 1998).
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