Creepy-Crawlies
Ninety-five percent of the documented species in the animal kingdom are invertebrates—creatures without backbones that swim, slither, crawl, or fly throughout the planet’s diverse environments. For the most part, we humans have an extreme unease when it comes to these assorted bugaboos. A centipede or cockroach crawling across the bathroom wall sends an intense shiver down our spines, and the tiniest spider can sometimes cause a burly man to shriek like a little girl. This aversion becomes readily understandable when we ponder the strangely alien nature of these creatures. Take for example the bloodsucking leech, a slimy, inky, little vampire that lurks in the swamp, waiting patiently to latch onto an unsuspecting victim. Then consider the disgusting and lowly maggot, which nestles itself lovingly amidst putrid, decaying flesh. Or even the sinister scorpion, which stealthily slinks across the bedroom floor prior to inflicting its deadly, venomous sting.
While most invertebrates seem tiny in comparison to humans, there are most definitely exceptions to this rule. Because some of these life-forms do not have the restrictions of a bony, internal skeleton, their growth potential is not limited. For example, squids in the deep ocean are capable of reaching gargantuan proportions. During the time that I camped along the Amazon River, I encountered ants that were an inch and a half long, cockroaches over twice that size, snails as big as my fist, and tarantulas as large as a dinner plate. In the jungles of Borneo, a species of walking stick insect (Phobaeticus chani) possesses a body two feet long. The Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi), the world’s largest known arthropod, boasts long, spindly legs that can stretch a dozen feet in length. The largest known invertebrate, the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), can reach lengths of forty-six feet and can weigh over half a ton, but because it lives deep in the ocean, it was completely unknown to science until 1925.
Like most animals, invertebrates grew even larger in prehistoric times. An order of dragonfly-like insects from the Paleozoic Era had a wingspan of three feet across. They were the size of modern crows. Some of the ancient sea scorpions called eurypterids grew to over eight feet in length. Mollusks, specifically cephalopods, may have once grown to inconceivable dimensions. Because these creatures are primarily composed of soft tissues, they do not necessarily make good candidates for fossilization, so we would have no inkling if such monsters had even ever existed. Furthermore, when contemplating the deep ocean trenches, unexplored cave systems, and impenetrable jungles and swamps of the world, it is not impossible that some abominations remain undiscovered.
Georgia’s Gigantic Spider
It would be difficult to list a life-form that is more maligned and feared than the spider. This is quite understandable when we consider that we are talking about creatures possessing an external skeleton, eight legs, four sets of eyes, and in some cases a fatal, venomous bite. Some strategically spin immense, sticky webs that we can stumble into face-first. Regardless, spiders are one of the most successful orders on the planet with some 40,000 species efficiently inhabiting virtually every terrain imaginable for some 300 million years now. And while most would argue that any spider is too big, the largest South American tarantula, commonly called the Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), boasts a leg span of about a foot and can weigh over six ounces. As its name suggests, this stout arachnid has been known to take down birds and even small mammals on occasion. By comparison, one of the largest known North American species, the Carolina wolf spider (Hogna carolinensis) is barely an inch long.
Accounts of monstrous spiders are rare, so I was admittedly shocked when I was contacted by a man from College Park, Georgia, who described an encounter with a nightmare-sized specimen. The witness, Christopher Williams, has an impressive background, having worked as a fireman and EMT for the past fifteen years. As Williams tells it, he was mowing his grass early one summer morning a few years ago, and when he bumped his lawnmower into the side of a tall pine tree in his front yard, the impact caused something to move. Out of the corner of his eye, Williams detected something that was brown in color easing slowly up the tree. As he turned to look, he was horrified to realize that the object in question was in fact the father of all wolf spiders and in his own words was at least eleven inches long, “as big as a house cat.”
Immediately aware that he was looking at something that wasn’t supposed to exist, Williams backed up slowly and headed into the house in order to retrieve either his camera or cell phone. He was admittedly concerned that such a move could place him in danger, as it might motivate the enormous arachnid to pounce on him. By the time Williams returned a couple of minutes later with camera in hand, the thing had disappeared. All I can add to this perplexing mystery is that, despite the extraordinary nature of his claim, over the phone Williams came off as an impressively sincere and credible eyewitness.
Now, while there have been some intriguing accounts of gargantuan spiders from the largely inaccessible jungles of the Congo, Papua New Guinea, and South America’s Amazon basin, it is hard to imagine that an unknown arachnid of immense size could exist anywhere in temperate, suburban North America. There is one report from Leesville, Louisiana, circa 1948, when a man named William Slaydon, along with his wife Pearl and three grandsons, supposedly observed a black, washtub-sized spider emerge from the brush while they were all walking to church one evening. This particular incident came to light via Slaydon’s great-grandson, documentary filmmaker Todd Partain.
In a related thread on the website Cryptomundo, a reader posted that they had twice witnessed foot-long spiders in eastern Iowa and that these arachnids were very rare and typically appeared in garages and barns. On yet another cryptozoology site, a woman referring to herself as “Lady Green Eyes” chimed in with this:
[Where] my oldest was living out in Land O’ Lakes FL, they had a real problem with wolf spiders. [She saw] some big ones, and she kept telling me that there was a HUGE one that hid in this one corner. You could hear it, but I thought she was exaggerating until it came up the wall one day. This sucker was as big as a sandwich plate (like the Corelle kind, in between the dinner plates and the bread-n-butter dishes)! Never heard of a wolf spider that big. Tossed a board at it, and I know I hit the thing, and I swear it must have bounced off.
A more dubious spider story appeared on a less credible website during December of 2013. An anonymous man in Lexington, Missouri, alleged that he spotted a five-foot arachnid while he was out fishing.
Despite these intriguing stories, readers with arachnophobia will be relieved to hear that according to biomechanical laws, there are extreme physiological limitations on a spider’s size. For one thing, rather than lungs, arthropods utilize something known as a tracheal respiratory system in order to breathe. This arrangement relies on a complex system of tubelike structures to absorb and disperse oxygen to the cells. If a specimen were to become gigantic, such a respiratory system frankly wouldn’t be efficient enough to support it. Similarly, arachnids’ circulatory systems may have size restrictions, and monster-sized ones would be vulnerable to desiccation (drying out). Finally, since spiders utilize an exoskeleton, there are mobility issues that arise as their theoretical mass increases. Their muscles literally would not be able to support the weights of their heavy bodies. Taking all of this into account, we can never completely discount the miraculous force that is evolution. Provided that nature has found a way to overcome these functional obstacles, the super spiders are not a total impossibility.
She’s Got Legs: Colossal Centipedes of the Ozarks
If the notion of spiders the size of frying pans is not enough to make you check under your sheets, imagine an elongate, multilegged creature over a foot long and capable of inflicting an excruciating, venomous sting by way of its two, huge mandibles. Now picture the thing crawling out of a hollow tree trunk right in the middle of the American heartland! Like spiders, centipedes are segmented arthropods. However, they belong to a completely different subphylum with a lineage dating back some 400 million years to the Silurian Period. Most, of course, are tiny. But the largest specimens of the genus Scolopendra can grow to be twelve inches in length and an inch wide, though these are only found in the tropical jungles of South America and the Caribbean. One species that is native to parts of North America (Scolopendra heros) is known to top out at around seven inches, though there are accounts that indicate something twice as large.
Silas “Claib” Claiborne Turnbo was one of Arkansas’s most prolific chroniclers of the late nineteenth century. Born in Taney County, Missouri, on May 26, 1844, Turnbo was the oldest of eleven children and later went on to serve in the Civil War. He was also known as a bit of an esoteric wanderer, who spoke to many residents of the Ozark Mountains throughout the course of his life, recording the colorful stories that he heard. Turnbo documented several cases where individuals allegedly came across monster-sized centipedes in the forests of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas and in one case had even preserved the specimen in a giant pickle jar.
In one instance, a hunter named R. M. Jones claimed that he shot a foot-long centipede as it was posturing to attack one of Turnbo’s younger brothers at the base of a bluff. On still another occasion Clear Creek resident William Patton stated that he killed a gigantic specimen that crawled into a hollow tree near the village of Powell. After extracting the thing’s carcass, Patton was able to estimate its length at fourteen inches. According to Turnbo, the grandfather of all centipedes was caught by a man with the colorful name of Bent Music at a place called Jimmies Creek in Marion County, Arkansas. When stretched out on a table and measured, it spanned an unbelievable eighteen inches. The monstrosity was placed in a large glass jar filled with alcohol and put on display in a drugstore in the town of Yellville, where Turnbo as well as many others ultimately saw it. Turnbo recalled, “It was of such unusual size that it made one almost shudder to look at it.” Unfortunately, the remarkable specimen vanished during the chaos of the Civil War, and no one knows its current whereabouts.
Arkansas apparently is not the only state where these vermin are found either. In neighboring Texas, where (according to the locals) virtually everything is bigger, a newspaper article from the Dallas Morning News printed on April 30, 1903, chronicles a similar account: “PARIS—Conductor E.S. Lowrance of the Frisco came in on his run this morning with a monster centipede ten inches long in a big pickle jar. A fisherman at Buck Creek tank, in the Territory, made him a present of it.”
While the idea of something as exceptional as a foot-long arthropod eluding the far-reaching scope of American entomologists seems unlikely, it has been estimated that there may be as many as 5,000 undocumented species of centipede.
India’s Gold-Digging Ants
Considered the father of written history, the ancient Greek luminary Herodotus chronicled many events that painted a romantic picture of the Old World. While he is credited with many great accomplishments, some of his accounts are viewed as a tad whimsical. Such is the case of his so-called gold-digging ants. Writing about the sandy wastelands of India he asserts,
Here, in this desert, there live amid the sand great ants, in size somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes. The Persian king has a number of them, which have been caught by hunters in the land whereof we are speaking. Those ants make their dwellings under the ground, and like the Greek ants, which they very much resemble in shape, throw up sand-heaps as they burrow. Now the sand which they throw up is full of gold. The Indians when they go into the desert to collect this sand take three camels and harness them together. … When the Indians therefore have equipped themselves they set off in quest of the gold, calculating the time so they may be engaged in seizing it during the most sultry part of the day, when the ants hide themselves to escape the heat.
The possibility of prospecting ants seems rather far-fetched to say the least, but the notion of them being dog-sized conjures images reminiscent of an Atomic Age Saturday matinée. Fortunately, for any Indian picnickers, there is a rational explanation. During 1996, a French ethnologist named Michel Peissel was exploring a high plateau called the Dansar plain, which overlooks the Indus River. While doing so, he spoke with many of the isolated Minaro people from both India and neighboring Pakistan, who informed him that their ancestors used to collect gold dust from sand that had been dug up by burrowing rodents called marmots (Marmota himalayana). Apparently, these large ground squirrels possess a local name that translates essentially to “mountain ant,” no doubt due to the fact that, like their six-legged counterparts, they are fond of digging holes in the ground. It would seem that Herodotus merely made an assumption based on what he had heard from his Indian contacts, and there are likely no gold-digging arthropods in India.
A Whopper of a Wasp
Personally, I have no quarrel with the spiders, centipedes, or most other large arthropods of Earth. Generally speaking, they do not bug me much. On the other hand, place me in the flight path of an aggressive, winged insect that can either sting or bite, and you are apt to see hysterics the likes of which you’ve never witnessed before. True, I have been swarmed by a nest of angry hornets, had deer flies (Chrysops) in Canada bite me so hard that I yelled like an air horn, and had some baseball-sized “thing” (shudders) dive-bomb me on the Guatemalan border. But my irrational distaste and fear of flying insects dates back to my early childhood. Consequently, the following report gleaned from the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization website represents a personal hell of sorts. The writer, an anonymous Marine stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, during 1992 explains,
Our Light Armored Vehicles were parked on a huge area of desert land (we called the ramp) that is either concrete or sand, several acres in size. One day while resting in the shade during lunch, several of us Marines noticed something about the size of a small dog, maybe 6 inches tall and about 18 inches long, very skinny; it was darting back and forth along the ramp, under and between the vehicles, at very high speeds, covering hundreds of yards in seconds. A few of us decided to investigate and we were amazed to find that when we got close to the thing it was a giant insect! It appeared to be a giant wasp, black and red. It was [too] long to catch with a five gallon bucket, because believe me we tried to catch it for about an hour. It moved so fast, that you could not see if it moved at top speed at distances of about 10–30 [feet per second]. One second it would be in front of you and then it would dart away so fast you could not see it, and then it would be 15 feet to your left. It was over 18 inches long, about 6 inches tall, and its head was a little bigger than a golf ball but more football shaped. It had wings but never did fly. When running at top speeds over the sand it threw sand in the air like a boat leaves a wake. It made noises and appeared threatening. It was so intimidating that more than six Marines decided not to mess with it anymore after trying to catch it made it very mad. I’ve seen big insects in Africa and other places I visited while in the military, but never anything this big and ugly and mean and fast, it was truly amazing.
It is worth noting that the largest tarantula wasp species only grows to be about three inches long, so unless we are willing to concede that the military is secretly engineering a breed of super-sized wasp-weapons, there is no accounting for its estimated girth. Continuing along this line of speculation, we have an account that seemingly takes this concept to the next level.
Attack of the Mantis People!
In the 1997 science-fiction film Mimic, monstrous mutant insects take on the appearance of humans as the result of a genetic experiment gone awry. This scenario is highly improbable, of course. However, there are indications that something beyond diabolical is underway in the high deserts of California. My first and only clue came via e-mail from a man named Daniel, who wrote,
My coworker John told me a story of something he had seen and had not talked about since he was in high school. He says one night when he was alone at home, he went to the front door to open it and get some fresh air. When he did so, he had a feeling come over him to look to his side. When he turned his head, he saw something on the adjacent building on the wall. It was about the size of a man. He took notice that it looked like it was armor plated, and it immediately gave him the distinct impression that it was an insect. It was dark in color. When it looked up at him, it took a few steps up the wall backwards, facing him. John says it then blended into the wall and disappeared. It scared him so much that he went inside, locked the door and closed all the blinds. Then he turned off the lights in fear that it would see him. It scared John so bad that he stayed up all night until the sun came up. He only told a few people, including his sister, his girlfriend, and me. John hasn’t seen anything since, but it left that image burned in his mind.
According to Daniel, the situation got even more interesting when he heard about a seemingly corroborating encounter that involved one of his other coworkers.
Troy’s encounter came in the middle of the night when he and a friend were going to investigate an alleged haunted house. As they were pulling up to it, he turned off his lights, and he says it was then that something jumped into the back of his truck, a raised F-150. It was so heavy it had dipped the truck, as if a 500-pound man jumped in the back of it. Troy looked to see what had happened. Then he just caught a glimpse of it jumping over to the front end of the vehicle. It landed in front of the hood, facing the truck but still hunched over. It slowly stood up. It looked armor plated and dark in color, with long, strange-looking hands or mandibles and long, animalistic hind legs, but it was bipedal. Troy said he had to bend over the steering wheel and look up out of his windshield to see the top of it. Just when he did, he says it jumped thirty to fifty feet to the side and started running. Troy tried to keep up with it in the truck and noticed it was running about thirty to sixty miles per hour, turning into a dried-up riverbed and running faster than them. Troy tried to keep pace, but he was on a dirt road. He had to stop because the road ended, and he lost sight of it.
While there is no definitive evidence that 500-pound, manlike insects actually exist, within UFO circles there are descriptions of aliens with insect-like features. Sometimes referred to as “insectoid” extraterrestrials, they are depicted as resembling the praying mantis insects of Earth, displaying an upright posture and obtaining heights of eight to nine feet. According to some experts, these beings are at the top of the extraterrestrial hierarchy and often oversee abductions and examinations of unwilling human victims. Though I’m personally not inclined to endorse such suggestions, I offer one here as a possible explanation, provided we are willing to acknowledge that we are not alone.
Missouri’s Metallic Blob
I readily admit that when it comes to accounts of amorphous blob-like creatures slithering about the ground, my files are pretty scant. Consequently, I was flabbergasted to receive the following correspondence from a woman named Kourtney.
About ten years ago, after moving into my new house in Missouri, I walked out onto the front porch. I was standing there quietly looking around. I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I assumed immediately it was a mouse. There on the porch was a silver mass about the size of my hand. It looked like melted silver to be truthful. Yet it moved with purpose of direction, like liquid. Moving and turning, and I swear it seemed to notice me. Then it kind of shot under and up one of the plastic porch beams. Crazy, I know. I assume it could have been a deformed animal/insect. I don’t know. I’ve tried finding out what it could be, but nothing I’ve read about is similar to what I know I saw. Is this something you’ve ever heard of ? It’s totally crazy, right?
Rest assured, Kourtney—in my line of work, nothing is totally crazy. I’m constantly contacted by normal, everyday people who claim to have had experiences that go against everything we think we know about the world and universe that we live in. That said, I really am at a loss to offer an explanation for animate, terrestrial blobs without sounding like a science-fiction movie. Obviously, the oceans are teeming with an array of gelatinous life-forms well suited to living in that particular environment. I encourage any reader with a similar experience or insight to get in touch with me.
Invisible Insects?
An e-mail that I received from a man named René years ago inspired a thought-provoking abstraction. Obviously, our planet is a complex ecosystem, literally overflowing with a diverse abundance of microorganisms that make up the foundation for all life on Earth. Though these creatures surround us, we are not able to see them without the aid of a microscope. Similarly, there are species in the animal kingdom (arthropods and insects) that are so incredibly tiny that we are not easily able to perceive them, essentially qualifying them as “unknowns.” Might some exceptionally diminutive types have evolved with the ability to alter how they are affected by the light spectrum, thus rendering themselves completely invisible to us? René ponders this dilemma.
Is it possible that there are certain types of creatures … insects … that exist outside our visual range? I experienced something one day while visiting at my mother’s house. We were outside on the patio, and it was a sunny day. I was sitting at a stone-top table and was kind of bored. So I saw some very small insects about the size of a pinhead. They were red in color, and even though I have seen them all my life, I never bothered to find out what they were. I took a metal rod about half the size of a pencil, half as long; maybe it was a type of aluminum nail. So I crushed the bug. Or at least I thought I did. I couldn’t find its crushed carcass. So I did it again to another one that was close by, and … same thing. After I would crush it, the body would not be there. And now the other bugs were gone. I couldn’t see them anymore. So from this I figured or thought—Is it possible that this insect can change the way light reflects off its shell so that it no longer appears in our visual spectrum?
My best guess is that the insects René encountered at his mother’s house are commonly referred to as red spider mites (Tetranychus urticae), which are barely visible to the naked human eye, and that his act of crushing them evacuated their internal body contents, which are brightly colored. Since all that remained was their transparent outer body wall, they became impossible for him to see with his naked eye. If, however, nearby mites that were fearful of being crushed by René actually managed to turn invisible in a desperate act of self-preservation, I’m at a loss to explain it.
Nature, in all its strange splendor, has produced specialized animals that are capable of creating electricity and of glowing via bioluminescence, and some are even capable of camouflaging themselves relative to their surroundings by altering the color and texture of their skin. Would it be totally unexpected to ultimately find insects capable of going into Predator mode by somehow superficially simulating invisibility? I think not.