The Batman Of Cave Creek
Posted by: Loren Coleman on February 15th, 2007
It’s just one of those interesting little stories that we looked into but we couldn’t find anyone.Sgt. Mark Clark, Scottsdale Police Department
In these days of Homeland Security alerts and school shootings, reports of what I sometimes like to call “Fortean Critters” – like the Bunnyman mentioned yesterday – are being treated much differently than they were 50 years ago. Fear drives today’s reports, that’s for sure.
For example, take the bizarre events from Valentine’s Day, 2007, coming out of Arizona. Three schools in the north Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek were on lockdown for about 45 minutes on the morning of February 14, 2007, after a student at Desert Arroyo Middle School reported seeing what seemed like a person dressed as Batman run across campus, jump a fence and disappear into the desert. (No jokes about Batman looking for his Bat Cave near Cave Creek have been heard yet from the media, thank goodness.)
The student described the “Batman” as 6 feet 3 inches tall and possibly male. It being a male and having a mask on seem to be assumptions. How a student knew that the height was exactly 6′ 3″ was not explained.
A police search of the area turned up no one. Nothing was shared in the media about other evidence, such as footprints, being found or not found.
Without diminishing the reality of our era’s evil, nevertheless, the rush first to lockdowns and police action is real. Such reactions seem to reflect how the darkside appears to construct how these reports are being processed today.
Is the Valentine’s Day 2007 event related to the above pictured winged weirdie, the subject of a 2006 Texas encounter? For more on this incident, see near the end of this blog.
How was an even earlier sighting of a Batman handled, also from the nearby state of Texas? Simply put, it was discussed more with wonder than a threat.
There exists in the Fortean literature a rather famous case, filed under the name “Houston Batman.” You may have heard about it before: a huge winged man-thing was seen in a pecan tree near the center of Houston, Texas, on July 18, 1953. The incident occurred while Mrs. Hilda Walker was standing outside her home at 2:30 in the morning. (Please note the “23” time.)
Walker was talking with a teenage girl at the time when they both spotted an odd “figure” flying toward them. As it came closer, these two eyewitnesses were able to see that the figure was actually appeared to be a man with bat wings growing out of his back. The creature landed in Mrs. Walker’s pecan tree, during which time the witnesses were able to get a better look at their otherworldly visitor.
Mrs. Walker subsequently described him as “…a man with wings like a bat,” dressed “in grey or black tight-fitting clothes.”
The figure was about six and a half feet tall (about the same height as the Cave Creek Batman, please note). The Houston Batman of 1953 remained perched for about half a minute. A halo or “aura” seemed to radiate about him. The glow faded, reported the witnesses, and the Houston Batman gradually appeared to vanish into thin air.
BTW, despite the poor mythmaking on the part of the motion picture The Mothman Prophecies (2002), which said that the Houston Batman served as a warning for the famous Galveston Hurricane, this is pure cryptofiction time-traveling. The famed hurricanes in Galveston occurred in 1900 and 1915, long before the Houston Batman was seen in 1953.
Do not let open the floodgates, at all, on the Springheel Jack tales. That’s a whole other can of worms, er, or bats in the belfry.
However, we should at least consider these January 2006 drawings (one above, two below) from a sighting that occurred 4.4 miles north of Dickens, Texas, at Turkey Crossing.
Batman appears to be alive and well in the Southwest USA.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
To quote a long-used catch phrase from the Ain’t It Cool New movie site:
MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT!
Goofball playing a prank. I have no idea why it’d be anyone else. Kids wouldn’t say ‘guy in a mask’ if it was really ‘demon-looking man-bat with wings’.
As an aside, there is a news report from Italy of bats that are hunting and eatiing birds as they migrate at night across the Mediterranean. So, who knows what a large batman might eat ?
Drawings look more like a gargoyle. Gargoyleman…that could have been a more menacing term..lol
There is also a case of a bat-like humanoid, this time female from 1969 Vietnam. There were 3 military personnel who observed this event. In this case they also reported a glow to it as it flew over them.
I never know what to make of this “Fortean” stuff that kind of pops out of nowhere (aside from cataloguing it into the “guy in a cape theory”) and then disappears again without any other back up.
The information is always vague and odd, and unless Loren is onto a pattern–like it wakes up every decade, goes prancing through town and disappears–then there is nothing really to do other than keep logs of things over time.
times sure have changed. Everyone seems extremely careful about these things. If I had said that at that grade I would have gotten, “Yeah, sure, whatever you say, and you can think about it over detention.” Now they have to investigate anything having to do with someone not belonging on campus as a potential bad guy. The no evidence tells me the kid was just playing around. Probably succeeded in getting out of doing anymore work for the day. I pretty sure I would know the difference between some geek in a batman costume and something mentioned from Texas.
Relatively speaking I don’t think Texas is that far from Mexico, especially if you can fly?! There’s a report from 2004 about a police officer in Monterrey getting attacked by a winged creature – this time it was Bat Woman though.
These reports seem to crop up quite frequently – is there a pattern to the sightings does anyone know?
Ahh, how time has flown. That Texas “Chupacabras” sighting was one of my very first posts, although I had been lurking for a few weeks before that. That sighting still has potential, although it may certainly have a rational explanation, such as the owls everyone mentioned.
This new account, however, seems less CZ in nature. Shumway may have it right in thinking it’s just a prank either by somebody in a Batman costume, or some kid contriving the whole thing for attention or whatnot.
Then again, some of the 1953 Texas accounts seem to indicate nothing short of a man “wearing” wings. Had it been the 1960’s, perhaps he would have been reported as a man in a Batman costume (Grey, tight-fitting clothes, a la Adam West), but Batman was a bit less of a cultural icon back in the 1950’s.
It will be interesting if this flap continues, but right now it’s little more than a relatively explainable incident.
If you search You Tube, using the keywords flying humanoid, I believe you’ll find footage of something that may or may not relate to that policeman’s encounter that MBFH mentions. There’s also an interview with the officer in question, I believe. It’s all in Spanish, I’m afraid, so I’m not too sure what they’re talking about, except that they call the thing a Brujah, which basically means witch. The flying thing is strange, but the image isn’t clear enough to really say much about what it might be.
This all seems like Goblin Universe stuff to me, but it is interesting to see those drawings again as they came up here on Cryptomundo awhile back. I can’t seem to locate the original blog, but there were lots of theories that this could have been a large owl or vulture, I believe. I always try to sift through the more mundane possibilities with these things and how these things could have appeared the way they were reported. These kinds of accounts I really don’t know what to do with because they are so bizzarre and don’t seem to me to be possibilities for a biological entity of the natural world. Still love reading about them though!
Mystery_man says: “I can’t seem to locate the original blog.”
If there is an underlined word in a sentence, that is a link. Most of these are placed in our blogs to refer you back to the sources or other blogs detailing part of what we might be writing about.
Therefore, in this case, the link to the “original blog” that mm is asking about is right there.
Click on the links, folks, and you will discover the hyperlinks to most referenced material or deeper information of a related nature. 🙂
Right, Loren! I didn’t notice the underlined link part, so thanks for drawing my attention to it.
Bats and primates are fairly closely related. The idea that a somewhat human-like bat might exist does not seem implausible to me. Neither does the possibility of giant bats a meter or more tall seem implausible.