Posted by The Dover Demon is a humanoid creature with a huge head and orange eyes that three teenagers said they saw on 21 and 22 April 1977 in Dover, Massachusetts, about 24 km from Boston. It was never seen again. Police called it a hoax; others think an animal was mistaken for a monster.
The Dover Demon is a strange humanoid creature with a very large head and a spindly body. It looks a lot like the so-called “grey” aliens, but its skin is pink/orange rather than grey. Although it is a mysterious creature, cryptozoologists tend not to take it very seriously, perhaps because the sightings were so brief.
Sightings
The first person to report seeing the Dover Demon was 17-year-old William Bartlett who, on the evening of 21 April 1977, was driving with some friends. At one point he saw a figure on a low stone wall at the side of the road. What he first thought was a dog or cat lying there turned out to be a frightening creature.
Bill lit it up with his headlights and was terrified: in front of him was a strange creature with an enormous hairless head and two eyes glowing orange. The sighting lasted only a few seconds, the time it took to speed past the wall. Unfortunately only Bill saw the strange creature; his friends noticed nothing.
After dropping everyone off, Bill went home, where his father, seeing him shaken, asked what had happened. Bill told him and made a sketch of the creature.
That same night, 15-year-old John Baxter also saw the Dover Demon. He was walking home when he saw a figure walking towards him. He thought it was a neighbour and said hello, but got no answer. John got closer and closer until he could make out the creature’s features, and at that point he ran away in fright.
The following evening a third person, 15-year-old Abby Brabham, had an unpleasant encounter with the creature. All the sightings took place in the town of Dover, Massachusetts, in the United States.
Characteristics of the Dover Demon
According to Bill, who left us the sketch you see above, the Dover Demon is a humanoid creature with a very large head, as big as the rest of its body, oval like a watermelon. It has no nose, and its eyes are large and an intense orange. Its limbs are spindly, as are the fingers of its hands or paws. Although Bill saw it on all fours, other witnesses say it could also walk upright.
Its skin colour, uniform all over its body, was peach or pale orange. Bill said the creature’s skin looked like “wet sandpaper”. It was no more than about 1 to 1.2 metres tall.
The description of the Dover Demon is very reminiscent of the Mannegishi, a trickster creature from Cree folklore, that is, of some Indigenous peoples of North America.
Theories
The first cryptozoologist to investigate the phenomenon was Loren Coleman, who coined the name “Dover Demon”. He soon asked colleagues for their opinion: Joseph Nyman, Ed Fogg and Walter Webb.
Digging deeper, Coleman discovered something rather odd: the Dover area seemed no stranger to unexplained events. There had been sightings of the Devil on horseback, and there were legends of hidden treasure. But there was more. Apparently, as far back as 1972 a teenager had witnessed a strange creature in a wood in Dover. The police had investigated at the time, but nothing came of it. And as for the Dover Demon, there were no sightings before or after those of 1977.
The police dismissed the case as “probably nothing more than a school vacation hoax”. Many believe it was just a prank, others that the teenagers simply mistook some animal for a strange creature, since the encounters happened at night, in some cases from a car, and always lasted only a few seconds. Animals suggested include a foal and a moose calf, while sceptic Joe Nickell proposed a snowy owl, whose plumage, lit by the yellow headlights of cars of the time, could have looked peach-coloured. Not everyone is convinced: as sceptic Brian Dunning pointed out, it would be odd for four people to mistake one for a monster within just 24 hours.
Even so, the witnesses still insist they saw something that night, something humanoid, not an animal, not a person, not a dummy, but something whose true origin we may never know.
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