August 4, 2009
One day in June of 1873, a farmer in Bonham, Texas, USA, looked up from his work and was astonished at what he saw. There appeared to be an enormous flying snake, banded with brilliant yellow stripes, writhing and twisting in the sky above him. Other people in the Bonham vicinity also witnessed this strange apparition, which was said to be at least as long as a telegraph pole. According to a report in the local newspaper, Enterprise, the bewildered eyewitnesses watched the creature coil itself up, and thrust forward its enormous head as if striking at something.
In my 1985 book Curious Encounters, I wrote of a similiar “Sky Serpent” seen not long afterwards above Fort Scott, Kansas, by members of the U.S. Cavalry stationed there. A hissing serpent in the sky was seen in 1888 over South Carolina, a shining snake wriggled vertically through the skies of Scandinavia in March, 1935, and two separate sightings told of sky snakes over Cruz Alta, Brazil, in December, 1935, and then again in July, 1937.
What are all of these “Sky Serpents”?
Jerome Clark, in a new article in the July 2009 issue of Fortean Times, examines the issue of Sky Serpents in some depth.
See Clark’s great treatment on this interesting phenomenon, online, here.
In an exclusive to Cryptomundo, Jerry Clark responses to those who say that the historical, global sightings of “Sky Serpents” are merely due to “serpent kites”:
The kites look nothing like what are described in the various sky-serpent reports.
If you’re looking for prosaic explanations for at least some sightings, more promising avenues of inquiry are auroral phenomena (e.g., the Texas serpent that circled the sun), meteoritic trails (for the very rare nocturnal cases), and (most productively) good old-fashioned hoaxes.
As for the rest: well, they’re as likely to have been caused by kites or meteors as Sasquatch reports are by guys in gorilla suits. It all depends upon how much you want or need a conventional solution and to what lengths you’ll go to conjure one up.
Me, I suspect that neither reductionist explanations nor literal interpretations — flying snakes in the zoological sense — will do. The simple fact of the matter is that people have strange experiences of all kinds. As long as you don’t confuse experiences with events and you can live with paradox and ambiguity, you need not lose sleep trying to make up propositions, prosaic or extraordinary, for which you can’t provide evidence.
Jerry Clark
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.
Filed under CryptoZoo News, Eyewitness Accounts, Folklore, Winged Weirdies