Happy St. Cryptids Day
Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 17th, 2006
Where have all the green monsters gone?
Yes, there are little people*. But Leprechauns mostly live in the lore and in the movies.
Walt Disney visits Ireland to recruit a Leprechaun for a forthcoming movie.
This week in Mobile, Alabama (hardly a focus of Irish culture), locals, according to The Anomalist Newsline, were reporting a Leprechaun sighting, creating traffic jams around the location:
A dead end street in Mobile has become very busy the last couple of days because of people flocking to look at a tree. The street is Lecren Street off of Bayshore Avenue. The crowds started gathering around sunset. You could hear many people talking.
One said, "It’s sitting ,uh, its sitting right up there, its right there. It’s a face, a face, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the frowning mouth." Another says, "A leprechaun, it looked like, last night it looked just like a little leprecaun. Its still up there."
The people who see the "leprechaun" say you can see it better at night. And that’s when the crowds really start coming out. One bystander says, "Now step back so you all can see it. If you just look right there in the middle you see it, right there, you see it, do you see it? Y’all see it?" Another person says, "Looks like he’s smiling right now." Still another says, "I wanna see it. If its here, I wanna see it. When’s it supposed to pop up?"
Ricardo Thomas lives across the street from the tree. He says, "Actually, my brother came in from Atlanta last Sunday night and we were standing out, standing around, and he said, ‘you’re not going to believe this, but it looks like a man is up in that tree."
…Another person said, "I thought he tipped his hat."
But this Leprechuan was not green, and, well, not very cryptozoological, I suppose.
Yes, there exist green creatures too. Merbeings, real, imagined, and fictional, live among us, perhaps unappreciated in cryptozoology, but a force to deal with, nevertheless.
As to green species of roaming Bigfoot, well, I’m afraid these only dwell in the realm of photoshopping magic. But wait, have you heard of the stories from Florida, in the 1960s, of Skunk Apes sighted covered in glowing green algae? True indeed, from the Holopaw and Brooksville area.
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*Footnote
As to finding proof of the little people, don’t forget, Peter Brown and his team did…in a cave in Flores, Indonesia! Take a yard or meter stick. Hold it on the floor next to yourself. That’s how tall the little people really are.
National Geographic’s representation of Homo floresiensis, otherwise labeled "Hobbit" by the media. Of course, the first type specimen is not shown well above, for LB1 is not a man. Richard Klyver’s drawing (below) of a female floresiensis may be closer to how she appeared.
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.
Oooo, and I was this close to giving Bigfoot some pinchies!
Dear Loren–The Mobile, Ala. “Leprechaun in a tree” story reminds me a bit of the glowing winged man seen in a tree in Houston, Texas on the night of June 18, 1953. The Irish Leprechaun strikes me as having a very close family resemblance to the Mayan/Yucatan _alux_, like the one seen by the caretaker Xuc in the Mayapan ruins one night in 1077, as described in _The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide_. Irish folklore also features another “fairy,” the _grogoch_, a naked hairy red dwarf 3 feet tall who reminds me an awful lot of the Flores Island “Hobbits” and _ebu gogo_, making me wonder if by any chance some _Homo floresiensis_ made it all the way from Indonesia to Ireland? Also check out Martin Kottmeyer’s _Anomalist_ article some years back on the history of the phrase “Little Green Men” as a flippant designation for UFO aliens.–T. Peter