The Blood Harvester of Rivesville, West Virginia: A Chilling Encounter from 1968

Frederick had been hunting for woodchuck that evening, unsuccessfully. The sun was nearly gone, and the shadows had started to stretch long and thin across the ground. Even though he was empty-handed, it was time to head home.

Suddenly, he heard a noise. It sounded like a high-pitched jabbering, much like that of a tape recorder running at exaggerated speed. Then he realized he was hearing a voice... or at least words.

Ok. He didn't actually hear these words. - at least not in the way voices are supposed to be heard. He felt the words coming to him. As if they were coming from his own mind. 

You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend.

The words came fast and smooth against the sounds of nature. Almost mistakable, but still, definitely there. The voice sounded like something was trying to mimic human speech but it was missing  something. Maybe the rhythm? Still the words resonated. 

We know of you all. I come in peace. I need your help.

The woods around him remained perfectly still. There was no movement in the trees, no shape stepping out from the shadows. Just a sudden mental intrusion, like a signal cutting through static, dropping directly into the mind of Frederick as he stood beneath the maple trees on the edge of his father’s property in Rivesville, West Virginia. 

Puzzled, and slightly disoriented, he felt sweat building on his brow. He reached for his handkerchief and that’s when the pain hit. It was sharp and sudden.

At first, he thought it was a briar - a wild thorn catching his wrist. But when he pulled his arm back, whatever had him didn’t let go. It tightened.

And then he looked down. Wrapped around his wrist was something that shouldn’t exist. A thin, flexible appendage - green, almost plant-like - no thicker than a coin. At the end of it was a hand. But not a human hand. It wasn't anything close. But there was no other word for what he was looking at. 

On the hand, there were  three long fingers. They appeared to have needle-like tips where finger prints would normally be. And if that were't frightening enough, it also had suction cups. 

It moved with intention. The suction cups took hold and gripped hard. And then the needles pierced. Everything was happening very fast. 

Frederick heard it before he fully understood it - a faint, wet pulling sound. Horrifically, he realized his blood was being drawn. 

Panicked, he turned. What he saw standing behind him didn’t belong in the woods of West Virginia - or anywhere else on this planet.

It stood upright, but barely resembled a man. The face carried just enough familiarity to be confusing. It had slanted yellow eyes, pointed ears, and features that hinted at humanity, but twisted away from it at every angle. 

The body was worse. This creature wasn't flesh and bone.  It stood tall like a stalk -  green, thin, vertical, and unnatural - like something grown rather than born.

Frederick stood and watched in terror. He struggled to understand what was unfolding around him... to what he was seeing... to what this creature was doing to him - This creature wasn't a product of the classic horror films, and most certainly, this creature didn't belong in West Virginia. Yet, there it was harvesting blood like a giant mosquito. To Frederick, nothing was making sense. 

Then, it got even weirder. Suddenly, the creature's eyes started to change. Yellow turned to red. The eyes began to spin. Orange rings spiraled outward from the creature's eye sockets, turning slowly at first, then faster - then too fast to follow. This actually WAS like those scenes from the sci-fi classics. Spinning, hypnotizing eyes. 

And just like that… the pain stopped.

It was replaced with nothing. There was no fear and no panic. There was no resistance. For the first time in several seconds, Frederick felt a calmness. 

He stood frozen, held in place not by fear -  but by the force of this creature's hand. It quieted everything inside him. 

The “transfusion,” as he would later call it, didn’t last long. Maybe a minute. "But it felt like something was being taken, and then it ended."

The grip released and the thing turned and sprung away. 

The gait didn't resemble that of an animal, but not like a man, either. In fact, "gait" is probably not the correct word. The creature launched itself away. One leap, then another. It covered distances no living thing should be able to, twenty-five feet at a time. It cleared a five-foot fence like it wasn't there. And just two or three seconds later, it was gone, disappearing into the trees at the crest of the hill. 

Almost immediately, the pain came back to Frederick's hand. Again it was sharp. There was no doubting what had just occurred. The pain provided proof that this moment was real. Honestly, Frederick was having his doubts. 

He stood there, staring into the woods where the thing had vanished, trying to convince himself that it hadn’t actually happened. But the pain and marks on his hand said otherwise. 

Suddenly he heard a low hum. Then a rising wine, as if whatever it was that he was listening to was gaining propulsion. He imagined something mechanical, like an engine spinning in the dark. Later he said it sounded like something lifting off. 

Frederick made it home. He cleaned the wound and wrapped it. Then, for many years, he tried to pretend this occurrence never happened. 

Because what do you tell people after something like that? That something in the woods spoke directly into your mind? That it asked for help? Then it took your blood?

Though the wound convinced him he was sane and had actually expereienced the horror, he doubted anybody would believe him. So anybody who asked, he told them it was a scratch from a briar. He never sought the care of a doctor, for fear of disclosure. 

Somewhere outside Rivesville, in the hills and trees where the light fades quickly,  something seized an opportunity that night. Frederick couldn’t shake the bitter irony - he’d gone out hunting and returned empty-handed, only to find himself the one being preyed upon. His rifle hadn’t drawn blood, but the marks on his hand told their own story. Somewhere along that dark stretch of land, the hunter became the game.

Source: Humanoid Encounters 1965-1969 by Albert S. Rosales, Gray Barker 

Now Playing: "Vampire Blues" - Neil Young 

The Thing in the Hallway: A Late-Night Encounter at the Newton HIgh School

It was the kind of night custodians know well - quiet, fluorescent-lit, and empty in a way that makes every sound feel louder than it should be. On Monday, March 30th, 2026, at around 11:00 PM, Larry was doing what he had done countless times before - cleaning bathrooms in a quiet wing of the high school in Newton, Iowa. 

The building wasn’t dark, every light was on. Nothing should have been hiding.

But something was.

When Larry stepped out into the hallway, he didn’t hear anything unusual. He didn’t feel a chill or sense a presence. But he saw it.

A black, humanoid figure drifting silently down the corridor.

It wasn’t walking or running. It was floating. It moved with a steady, unnatural glide - hovering just above the floor. 

Larry stood frozen, watching as the shape passed through the artificial glow of the hallway lights. It was completely black, darker than the shadows around it, almost as if it were absorbing the light instead of reflecting it. 

The only part of it that wasn't black, was the face, which Larry described as being gray. He didn't see eyes or a mouth, but says the being did seem to have a long nose. "It also could have been the angle I was seeing it from," Larry told me. "It was hard to focus in on it. It was almost as if it was blurry."

The figure was human-sized, and appeared to be wearing tattered clothing that hung loosely, frayed at the edges. For a moment, Larry thought of feathers. Not clean, soft  ones - but ragged, broken feathers, like something that had been worn down over time. 

On it's head sat what Larry later described as a round-topped, wide-brimmed hat. "It resembled the hats that the Amish wear," Larry would later say. 

But the strangest detail wasn’t the clothing. It was the posture and lack of obvious support.

The figure leaned forward, as if bracing against wind that wasn’t there, or maybe urging itself forward. But beneath it - nothing. No legs or anything else holding it up. It gave the unmistakable impression that it was riding something… like a witch astride a broomstick - except that in this case - there was no broomstick.

Larry watched as it drifted past him. It didn't disappear as Larry turned his gaze to it - as so many shadows do.  This "thing" allowed Larry to watch it for what is a paranormal eternity, 20 to 30 seconds. 

There was no sound, and no interaction. It didn't acknowledge Larry's presence. It just passed silently through the hall. Larry said that he didn't feel fear at this point, just wonder. He couldn't take his eyes off of it. 

Every custodian who works at the high school has their own ghost stories - the school definitely has it's share of haunts - but what Larry witnessed is next level. 

After it glided down a small stairway into a lower hallway,  it began to fade. Not instantly in a flash, like one second it's here, and then the next it's gone... but SLOWLY it dissolved into nothing. It broke apart into the air itself - like smoke evaporating out - until there was nothing left. No trace of the entity remained. Just empty hallway.

The hallway from which the entity appeared

To this day, Larry is struggling with what he saw. He's a religious man, and this experience has placed him on the edge of what he's always understood about God's natural world. "This wasn't natural," he told me. "I don't feel that this was one of God's creatures." 

In a brightly lit school hallway, in a building that should have held nothing but silence, something passed through, as if it belonged. It gave every indication that it had been there before; and it gave every implication that it knew where it was going. Natural or supernatural, it wasn't waiting for an invitation. It forced it's presence, and it wasn't worried about being witnessed. 

Larry finished his shift. 

The experience happened over a week ago but Larry says it remains on his mind constantly. 

Whatever he saw that night didn’t belong to the world we understand. It certainly didn’t need the lights to find its way through the dark. 

Or maybe, what Larry saw WAS the darkness.

Now Playing: "Shadows" by The Electric Prunes

Kentucky Fried Strangeness: The Lizard People of Western Kentucky

There appears to be something in the water in Kentucky. 

There are places where the land feels thin - like whatever separates our world from something older, something stranger, has worn down over time. Western Kentucky is one of those places. Rivers twist through limestone, creeks vanish underground and resurface miles away, and entire cavern systems stretch beneath your feet in darkness that has never seen sunlight. If something wanted to move unseen… this would be a good place to do it.

Long before anyone started using the term “cryptid,” there were whispers in western Kentucky.

In 1878, buried in the pages of a Louisville newspaper, a strange report surfaced about a captured “Wild Man of the Woods.” It wasn’t just another backwoods curiosity. The thing stood over six feet tall, its eyes described as unnaturally large, and its body - most disturbingly, was said to be covered in scales. That particular detail reads almost like a misprint, something that shouldn’t belong in a human description.  And yet, there it is. A fragment of something that wouldn’t fully make sense until much later. Nearly a century passed before the stories began to echo again.

In 1955, along the Ohio River near Evansville,  woman named Mrs. Darwin Johnson felt something grab her from beneath the surface. 

It didn't just brush against her. Or bump her. 

It grabbed her. 

She described it as a hand-clawed, and powerful. It pulled her her under the water as if it intended to keep her there.  

She fought, kicked, and broke free… only to be seized again. Whatever it was stayed just out of sight beneath the murky water, but it was there, reaching for her. When she finally made it to shore, she wasn’t just shaken - she carried physical marks, scratches, and something stranger: a green, palm-shaped stain on her leg that lingered for days, as if whatever touched her had left it's mark.

An “Air Force colonel,” according to later accounts, visited the family, took notes, and warned them not to speak about what happened. Whether that detail is truth, embellishment, or something in between, it fits a pattern that shows up again and again in these kinds of encounters - something happens, and then some overlord entity shows up and  quietly tries to force one to behave as if nothing happened. 

Interestingly, just one year prior, the sci-fi horror classic 'Creature From the Black Lagoon' hit theaters. This is not to suggest that Mrs. Johnson made up her story based on the movie, but it does provide an avenue for speculation. The similarities are obvious. 

In the early 1970s, across the water in Ohio, two police officers reported encounters with something that defied explanation.

 It wasn’t just an animal or a trick of the light. One officer watched what he thought was a weird-looking dog stand upright on two legs, its eyes reflecting in his headlights before it vaulted over a guardrail and disappeared toward the Little Miami River. He described it as small - three to four feet tall - but with a face that was "unmistakably wrong."  

He described the face as frog-like... reptilian... Something that definitely seemed out of place on the side of the road at one in the morning. 

Another policeman, days later, would see something similar. This time it didn’t flee immediately. It crouched in the road as if it was attempting to hide.  When the officer approached it, it moved with sudden, unnatural speed. 

The lawman fired a round. The creature vanished into the river.

During the summer of 1975, something strange slipped through dimensional cracks in Trimble County, Kentucky. 

Along Canip Creek, near the small town of Milton, multiple witnesses reported an encounter with a massive, 15-foot reptile resembling a monitor lizard. To locals, it would come to be known as the Milton Lizard, or depending on what side of the creek you saw it on, the Canip Monster. The sightings came in a sudden burst, as if the creature had briefly surfaced from another dimension. 

It vanished just as quickly.

One of the most detailed accounts came from Clarence Cable, manager of the Blue Grass Body Shop, a junk yard that sat north of town. He described watching the creature emerge from behind a line of wrecked vehicles, hissing as it moved. What he saw stuck with him - he called it a "lizard-man."  It had huge, bulging eyes like a frog’s, a long forked tongue flicking through the air, and a body patterned with black-and-white stripes crossed by small, quarter-sized speckles. Beneath its mouth, he noted an off-white coloration that made its features all the more unnatural. It stayed low to the ground, almost serpentine, but when it was approached by Cable, it raised up on it's hind legs and darted into the woods. 

Just as suddenly as it appeared, the creature was gone. 

After that summer, the Milton Lizard was never seen again, leaving behind only a cluster of chilling eyewitness reports and a mystery that still lingers in the shadows of Canip Creek.

And then there’s Stephensport.

A nine-year-old boy wakes in the middle of the night to something slamming against his house. At first, there’s nothing there, just noise in the dark. But when he pulls back the curtain at the front door, he comes face to face with it.

What he saw standing there would haunt him for the rest of his life. 

Roughly six feet tall, covered in dark, scaled skin, it stood upright -  and nothing about it made sense. Its hands and feet were webbed. Its eyes were small and black. And its face - it's horrible face - was lined with flared gills that opened along the sides of its head like something that belonged underwater, not standing on a doorstep in the middle of the night.

For a moment, the two just stared at each other.

Then the creature turned and ran - on two legs - straight toward the nearby creek, vanishing into the darkness. 

That creek feeds into Sinking Creek.and it does something strange. It disappears. 

For miles, it travels underground, moving through unknown channels, eventually reconnecting with a vast network of submerged caverns - part of the same system that includes Mammoth Cave. It's a hidden world beneath the surface, carved out over millions of years.

Remember at the beginning of this piece when I said that western Kentucky is "one of those places?" 

Maybe now it'll make sense... The underground void that Sinking Creek flows into would be the perfect habitat for a reptillian (or amphibious) creature to survive, unnoticed to the overworld.  Water. Caves. Remote stretches of cavernous passageways. This is what western Kentucky is.  

Visibility drops and eventually, human curiosity ceases to exist. There are passages that humans will never enter and there are passages that light can't get to.

But most definitely, something lurks in those shadowy depths. Every once in a while, it comes up for air.

Now Playing: "Love Me Like a Reptile" - Motorhead 

Sources: Kentucky Bigfoot Research Organization and Charlie Raymond,  

                 'Humanoid Encounters  1965 - 1969' by Albert Rosales  

The Others Among Us: Inside the Musical Mind of UFO Archivist Albert Rosales

Albert S. Rosales is a man who wears a coat of many colors.  Born in Cuba in 1958, his family migrated to Spain in 1966. A year later his family moved to America - first to New York City but eventually to Miami, where today he lives as an official resident of the United States.

The Humanoid that is Albert Rosales

Besides English, he speaks fluent Spanish and in most cases, he can get through a conversation speaking Portuguese and can read Italian. He has said that he learned to speak English from watching television as a child, while growing up in New York City. He's a translator, an ex service member in the US Navy, a retired police officer, a book collector, and a well-known, highly regarded UFOlogist. 

What he might be best known for, however, are the books he's written, based on the the vast file of events he's catalogued throughout his life that pertain to encounters with otherworld humanoid figures. 

From an early age, Rosales devoured UFO magazines and books, developing an early fascination with unexplained aerial phenomena. Over time, however, his curiosity narrowed toward something more specific: Not the craft itself. But whom (or what) the occupants are.

“I figure whoever is driving the things are more important,” he told me. “I think that is the crux of the matter.”

Through decades of research, he has catalogued over 30,000 cases involving encounters with strange humanoid entities reported across the globe. Rosales IS the utmost authority on this topic, and the books he's written are the pinnacle source for researchers, podcasters, writers, the curious, and anybody else who has a reason to tap into the mysterious world of odd humanoid Forteana.

Each case Rosales documents is carefully classified using a structured system drawn from his Humanoid Contact Database, assigning encounters into categories based on proximity and interaction.

Close Encounter Classifications:

Type A: Entity seen inside or atop an unidentified craft

Type B: Entity entering or exiting a UFO

Type C: Entity near a UFO

Type D: Entity seen where UFO activity has been reported

Type E: Entity observed without UFO activity (such as bedroom visitations)

Type F: Psychic or telepathic contact without visual sighting

Type G: Direct interaction or abduction involving witnesses

Type H: Alleged crashes, recoveries, or captured entities

This system transforms thousands of strange stories into a searchable historical record.

Rosales’ monumental bibliography spans human history itself through his Humanoid Encounters: The Others Amongst Us series, covering reports from 1 AD through the modern era in meticulously organized volumes.

Among his notable works:

Humanoid Encounters: The Others Amongst Us (1 AD–1899)

Multiple chronological volumes spanning the 20th and 21st centuries

UFOs Over Florida: Humanoid and Other Strange Encounters in the Sunshine State

Together, and as a complete volume, they form what many researchers consider the definitive reference archive for humanoid encounter reports.

Interestingly, Rosales’ journey into the unknown has always had a musical backdrop. Born in Cuba, he was exposed early to Latin pop, salsa, and merengue - though he admits those styles never fully shaped his tastes. Growing up in America during the late '60s and early ’70s shifted his musical compass toward rock and pop.

The artists of that era became lifelong companions. He said the first album he recalls buying was “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” by Steam. Among the songs he says he has listened to the most during his life are Uriah Heep’s “Lady in Black,” many songs by Jethro Tull, and distinctive Beatles classics like “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away" and "Let it Be." 

When writing today, music remains essential. “I listen to a playlist that includes all sorts of music - mostly '60s through '90s, classic rock, some Latin ballads - especially Raphael from Spain” - he points out - “A lot of Led Zeppelin, classic rock, some 80’s tunes.” For Rosales, meaningful lyrics matter - songs that tell stories, much like the encounter reports he documents.

He even admitted to me that he associates eras of UFO sightings with musical periods, giving a special nod to '70s classic rock. “Music will always have a special place in all that is mysterious," he noted.

My latest copy of 'Humanoid Encounters'  - Just one in a
volume series of 15. The chronicles expand from 1 AD - modern times 

The mystery hasn’t diminished. If anything, it has deepened.

A decade has passed since Rosales last published a Humanoid Encounters book, but fans of the series may still have more to look forward to. Publishing challenges have slowed recent releases, but Rosales hopes to continue the work, beginning with volumes covering 2016–2020. Given the pace at which new reports continue to emerge, his archive remains very much a living project.

In a field often dominated by lights in the sky and debates over technology, Albert Rosales has spent a lifetime reminding researchers to look closer at the witnesses - and the beings they claim to meet. 

Because, as his work suggests, the real mystery may not be unidentified flying objects.

It may be the intelligence behind them.

Now Playing: "Waiting For The UFO's" by Graham Parker & The Rumour