Insects of the Giant Kind
Posted by: Nick Redfern on June 27th, 2013
“A self-confessed ‘flying saucer junkie,”’ Danielle was a woman I met a few years ago and who lived in the town of Aztec, New Mexico – the alleged site of a crashed UFO in March 1948. It’s a controversial story that has as many believers as it does disbelievers. Danielle told me that living in a town with its own crashed UFO legend was “a dream.” At least two or three times a month, no less, she would head out to Hart Canyon.
“This is the impact point where the UFO allegedly came down, along with its crew of small, humanoid entities. Danielle would stroll around, ‘dig the ground up in case there’s anything still there’ and ponder upon that most controversial of all tales from the long-gone ‘Golden Age’ of Ufology.”
The two paragraphs above are from my latest Mysterious Universe article. You may wonder what on Earth (or off it) they have to do with Cryptozoology. Well, that all depends on how you view the words of the aforementioned Danielle. Frankly, I’m not impressed, but, such is the engaging nature of her tale, I really wish I was!
About Nick Redfern
Punk music fan, Tennents Super and Carlsberg Special Brew beer fan, horror film fan, chocolate fan, like to wear black clothes, like to stay up late. Work as a writer.
I read your account of Danielle and your visit with her in one of your books. Very trippy! Love your work, by the way.
Giant insects are more common in the Southwest than people realize. I saw huge dragonfly-like insects around sundown near Terlingua TX once. I estimate they were eight feet long or so, with about the same wingspan. They had some sort of long whip-like appendage at their posterior end, a little longer than their bodies, that arced upward. I saw three of them over a two-hour time span.
@PoeticsOfBigfoot did you say you saw eight feet long dragonflies in Texas? More likely 8 inches… The maximum size for these creatures today. The biggest dragonfly ever, know only from the fossil record is Meganeura, but at 25.5 inches this giant insect would look puny beside the 8 feet long ones you claim you saw.
Poetic, I wish I’d been there to see what you saw. The systems a dragonfly uses for gathering and transporting oxygen, blood circulation, etc., are just too inefficient to work in a body more than a few inches long. The prehistoric two-footers could only work because the oxygen content in the atmosphere was much higher. So I don’t know what to suggest you could have encountered. I hope you have a camera next time.
Regards
Matt Bille