Colorado Vampire Sighting
Posted by: Loren Coleman on July 2nd, 2010
What are we to make of this? Did she see a Mothman?
Vampire Sighting Leads to Backroad Single-Vehicle Crash
Jul 01, 2010
FRUITA, COLORADO – “A woman says a vampire caused her to crash in a canal near Fruita Sunday night,” reports Channel 11 TV News.“According to Colorado State Patrol,” according to the report, the woman was “heading down a dirt road near 20 and K roads late Sunday night” and “told emergency responders she saw a vampire in front of her. Troopers say she put her SUV into reverse and backed into a canal.”
The woman’s husband picked her up at the scene and took her home. “Inspectors do not suspect drugs or alcohol to have caused the accident,” and said, further, that “they saw no sign of a vampire.”
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.
first off how did she know it was a vampire ? was it wearing some campy red and black cape with a tuxedo and with its hair slicked back?
…drugs and alcohol may have not been involved but i think she needs to be medicated..or have her medication changed
I blame twilight.
Sounds like somebody was driving home after seeing the new Twilight movie. I’m guessing she’s Team Edward.
Assuming the lady is sincere, I wonder if some Twilight-inspired kid with the brain of a bat was trying a jole with a cape and ran like hell when he caused an accident.
Just a coincidence that the new Twilight movie came out the night before?
I’ll vote for the freakazoid dressed like a vampire in the middle of the road theory.
Interesting excuse for doing something totally boneheaded. Next kids will say the jersey devil ate there homework.
Hahahahahaha……That must have been one scary looking kid in a costume!
I find her report less interesting than the fact that the police stated, “they saw no sign of a vampire.” Really? What type of sign did they expect to find? Provided you don’t have a drained corpse in a ditch, EXACTLY what other type of “sign” would a vampire leave behind?
(Note: For the record, I too blame Twilight)
This “vampire report” obviously has no teeth.
Fangs very much
One expects such reports to increase dramatically with the popular movie trilogy. Sadly taking away from the real events of Mothman.
However the supernatural has as much place here as World Cup soccer results, zippo!
It appears that “lukedog” misses the analogy that the Colorado situation is being treated as a “sighting” by law enforcement, and there are many cryptozoology lessons to be learned from this incident.
As to any link to World Cup results, actually, I am not interested in any “supernatural” aspects of this report or how it might relate to football or soccer.
I think if the data were examined, we would often find patterns between the release of films/television programs and reported sightings of various phenomena. I once did an analysis of reported Bigfoot sightings juxtaposed against the release of movies/TV shows. My hypothesis was that I would discover a spike right around the time of the film/show’s release. However, what I began to see was significant spikes well BEFORE the release of anything. So well ahead, in fact, that it made me revise my hypothesis. It seemed art was actually imitating life and not the other way around. That said, I don’t think this woman saw a vampire. I think she is either delusional or fantasy-prone or just looking for attention.
I concur with the first comment up there. How does this lady know this was a vampire? What was it about the entity that made her come to that conclusion other than a vivid imagination. It’s hard to say with so little information.
I think stand alone sightings like this pertain very much to cryptozoology in illustrating the effect that popular culture can have upon an individual’s interpretation of what they are seeing. So where this lady sees a “vampire,” I may see something completely different, and someone from another culture may see something different as well. Folklore, culture, upbringing, individual biases, these all can have an influence on interpretation of what we are seeing.
Also, this illustrates the importance of having some sort of consistency among sightings reports. This is one of the ways I feel we can sort of weed out the more outlandish claims, when they deviate wildly from what is typically seen in other far flung repots of the same alleged creature. If for instance someone saw a sasquatch, we have tomes of reports with definable characteristics by which the sighting can be held up to. If someone sees a green haired sasquatch in Hawaii, well, we can more confidently rule it out as any sort of possible real creature. That is not to say that the vast body of coherent reports are necessarily real, but having that consistency and that body of sightings helps us to find points of comparison and therefore more accurately come to conclusions on just what is going on.
Similarly, perhaps if there was a vast body of data on vampire sightings with certain features that are found across the board, perhaps some idea of what the appearance and/or behavior of any supposedly “real” vampire should conform to, we could more adequately home in on what was seen in this case, and indeed whether to even begin taking it seriously at all.
If there were vampires out there, how are we to know when we are actually seeing on without some template or range of consistent features across many sightings? This is precisely the problem that plagues sightings of strange creatures that have never been really sighted before or are unknown previous to that sighting. We just simply don’t have enough to go on in order to make anything even approaching an accurate identification of what was seen. Without consistent data, we can’t really make any hypotheses.
There is no database of such sightings that I am aware of, and so there is nothing that I know of that we could hold this sighting up to for comparison. Indeed, there is very little detail in this report at all in the first place. This makes it extremely difficult to make this worthy of further investigation.
As it is, I feel we have no choice but to regulate this to an odd one-off sighting of what could have been anything.
Steele was correct in his thoughts. The Denver Post is reporting that the woman may have missed taking medications that morning .
From the very first report, the law enforcement officials used the line that some “medications” may have been missed. On one end of “solving” this case, such an explanation might hold water. However, on the other “it-was-a-circus-train-wreck” end of things, we have to be skeptical. There is no testimony from the woman or her husband that medications were even involved.
This “official” rationale for the sighting is no more valid than the numerous ones we all have heard before that the lake monster encounter was due to too much drinking or the Bigfoot sighting was the result of hippies smoking weed.
We have to be careful about how a tongue-in-cheek or offhanded comment to a local reporter evolves through the media process and ends up in a big city paper as “the explanation.”
I’m in a little late, and the points made pretty much sum up my perspective.
With that vague information, there’s no way to conclude anything. She saw a “vampire.” What does that mean? Without details, it could have been anything from a guy dressed in a cape to a large bird to a hallucination. I don’t think this report even falls into the Fortean unless more details were to come to light (which isn’t good for a vampire) that might actually give some detail.
The other problem with sightings of possible cryptids, IS when people make a blanket statement–I saw Bigfoot, or I saw Nessie. They are saying that they saw an archtype–a word used to embody the entire range of sightings of a particular cryptid, but it’s a vague description because there are so many variations as to what people may be talking about when they make a statement like that. For instance with BF…I saw BF, well what about the “thing you saw” made you think it was bigfoot? Did you see a humanoid that was large, or hairy, or some other characteristic that’s associated with bigfoot?
The same rule applies to this sighting. She immediately knee jerked to “vampire.” But what about the thing she saw made her think it was a vampire? Was it a caped figure, fangs on a human, etc? And I think in the wake of the Twilight movies, whatever she supposedly saw may well have been influenced by her involvement with those movies–now whether she actually saw anything crypto-related, who knows…I doubt we’ll ever know, but for purposes of cryptozoology this is a waste of time unless more sightings occur that can some how be quantified with details leading us to believe that some creature is indeed afoot.
That was the long answer…my short answer is that she saw something in the dark that moved fast and since she or the reporter or the cop are into the Twilight series, vampire was a convenient buzz word to get people to read the article.
Moving on…