Do dogs believe in monsters and aliens?

Sharing the sofa with my best friend, I experience that inseparable bond between man and canine. The loss of a pet is a traumatic experience. One can only imagine the shock and horror that households suffer as beloved four-legged family members die and disappear in the tragic aftermath of encounters with Transient Anomalies.

Then consider the misery and financial burden generated by the savage and senseless killing of domestic animals, poultry and livestock. Over the years, mobs of angry farmers and ranchers have formed posses to hunt down fearsome monsters and watch for mysterious lights in the sky.

Transient Anomalies take many forms. Glowing eyes are everywhere. There are foul-smelling, three-toed, hairy "manimals." Huge cats leave non-catlike clawed tracks in their wake. Hellhounds and winged creatures are seen. They are often characterized by abnormal violence and butchery not motivated by self-defense or hunger. These things typically haunt a location for a short while, are witnessed by sincere and bewildered locals, wreak all kinds of havoc, and then disappear without a trace. Allow me to offer five classifications, with examples, for Anomalous Animal Cruelty.

.....At least forty persons witnessed a shadowy entity near the rural community of Roachdale, Indiana during August of 1972. Randy and Lou Rogers, a young couple, spoke for the record. "We tried to think of a rational explanation, maybe an ape had gotten away from a zoo or circus. It would stand up like a man, but would run on all fours. Even bent over on all four feet, it was still taller then my husband. And it stank, like rotten garbage." They added, "The funny thing is that it never left footprints, even in mud, and when it ran through tall weeds you couldn't hear anything. And sometimes when you looked at it, it looked like you could see through it, like it was a ghost or something."

The sightings culminated in a grand finale around 9 P.M. on August 22. Carter Burdine and his uncle, Bill Burdine, discovered the gruesome remains of more than sixty chickens scattered from the chicken coop to the front yard of his farmhouse. None of the fowl had been eaten, just savagely torn into pieces and dropped.

Later that evening, Carter and Bill found the perpetrator standing in the chicken coop doorway. "The thing completely blocked out the light in the chicken-house," Bill said. "The door is six feet by eight, its shoulders came to the top of the doorway. It looked like a gorilla with long brownish colored hair. I never saw its face, but it was making an awful groaning sound."

Bill blasted away four times with a pump shotgun as the thing fled into a nearby field. The pellets had no obvious effect. This time the intruder had ripped apart one hundred and ten chickens. Out of two hundred poultry, Carter Burdine lost all but thirty.

.....The "Missouri Monster" or "Momo" scare began on the afternoon of July 11, 1972, when eight-year-old Terry Harrison and his younger brother, Wally, were playing with their dog in the woods at the edge of their yard on the outskirts of Louisiana, Missouri. Their older sister, Doris, 15, was inside the house and heard them screaming. She looked out the bathroom window and saw a black, hairy manlike creature, standing by a tree.

The manimal stood nearly seven feet tall. Doris and Terry agreed that its face could not be seen because of the mass of hair that covered its body. The creature was flecked with blood, likely from the dead dog that it carried under its arm. The smell was horrendous. The Harrison's dog's eyes grew red and it vomited for hours afterward.

Investigators interviewed witnesses and took plaster casts of three-toed footprints that began abruptly and ended mysteriously. The "Momo" panic lasted only two weeks, but it triggered a media frenzy.

.....When Barbara Sites of Wantage, New Jersey went to let the dairy herd into pasture on Wednesday, May 11, 1977, the cows seemed reluctant and she heard a sound in the distance "like a woman screaming while she was being killed." Then Barbara found the solid, wooden barn door torn from its heavy hinges. Inside, several of the family’s pet rabbits lay dead or dying of horrible wounds. The heads or legs were torn from their bodies. None appeared to have been used for food.

Certain that some kind of predator was responsible, the Sites brightly lit the yard between the house and barn in an effort to see the animal or keep it away. They were surprised to see a seven foot tall hairy something with big, glowing red eyes prowling about the next night.

On Friday night, Mr. Sites was ready for their strange visitor. Friends and family positioned themselves in the farmyard, armed with shotguns and rifles. The creature did not disappoint them. He and the others "opened up" on the thing, firing more than 30 rounds. The weapons, he said, included a .410 shotgun, a 12-gauge shotgun and two .22 caliber rifles. They were sure they had hit it, but found no traces of blood that would have confirmed their hit. The beast escaped through the apple orchard.

.....During a spate of Bigfoot sightings, Curtis Mitchell discovered the mutilated bodies of four dogs on Sunday, October 12, 1958, about five miles south of Eureka, California. "They looked as if they had been ripped apart," Mitchell said, noting that the bodies were still warm when he found them. "One of them had apparently been slammed against a tree."

.....Something huge and intensely lighted dropped out of the sky and landed outside of Durango, Colorado on Christmas Eve, 1960. "At the top of it you could definitely see a circle or dome," Wade Folsom told the Durango Herald, "and every foot or so were lights..." The next day, while children elsewhere opened presents from Santa Claus, the Folsom family watched as their pet dog rushed panic-stricken into the house and died at their feet. A dog belonging to one of Folsom's neighbors disappeared on the night of the sighting and was never seen again.

.....On July 18, 1972, a collie was found dead under mystifying circumstances at a farm near Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania. The family insists on anonymity. Their pet was discovered lying on its back, crouched and snarling as if frozen in time. Nearly every hair on the dog’s body was arranged in a tight circle around the animal. The few hairs that remained slipped easily from the flesh. There was no sign of wounds, burns or evidence of any attack. Despite recent rainfall, no tracks were visible. A circular depression of grass whipped in a counterclockwise direction was found forty feet away. The dog was last seen alive five days earlier, about the same time that a neighbor reported that their two cats disappeared. It was assumed that the collie had been dead that long, since the family felt their pet would not have stayed away from home, if alive.

.....On an April evening in 1996, Terry Sherman was outside with his three loyal, but aggressive, cattle dogs, relaxing at his 480-acre Uintah County ranch situated between Vernal and Roosevelt, Utah. He tensed at the return of this latest enemy. The softball-sized orb of intense blue stalked his pasture, airborne less than ten feet off the ground. Aware of the anomaly, his dogs barked furiously.

Losing his patience, he set his dogs loose. The trio chased and leaped at the orb. It responded by dropping down within easy reach only to dance away at the last second. As if deliberately teasing the enraged dogs, the glowing ball lured them just out of sight to a copse of trees that bordered the field. Sherman heard unmistakable yelps of anguish and then terrible silence. After a couple of heartsick hours of waiting, he decided not to look for them until morning light.

Sherman discovered the stench of burned flesh and three circles of shriveled vegetation. In the middle of each ring was a blackish greasy mess. Proper forensic analysis and DNA sampling could have confirmed this case as an Animals Harmed - Perpetrator Identified classification. Two things were certain. The dogs were never seen again and this incident convinced the family to sell the property.

.....In 1975, reports were made of people experiencing unexplained phenomena and family pets disappearing and sickening in Clapham Wood, West Sussex, England. Initially, two dogs were said to have disappeared without a trace, a third to have vanished but later reappeared suffering from an unidentified illness for which it had to be put down. After news of the three cases became public, other dog owners came forward claiming that their pets had experienced agitation in the woods or had become inexplicably aggressive.

.....On the evening of November 6, 1957, John Trasco, of Everittstown, New Jersey, went outside to feed his dog and saw a luminous egg-shaped object hovering in front of his barn. Mrs. Trasco, at the kitchen window, heard the dog bark furiously, looked outside and saw the object. Because of the shrubbery, she did not see the "small man" that her husband met.

The entity was three feet tall with a "putty-colored" face and large protruding eyes like those of frogs. With a voice that was "sharp and alarming" and in broken English, the being said, "We are peaceful people. We do not want any trouble. We just want your dog."

Mrs. Trasco, still inside the house, could hear the sound of the voice. She also clearly heard her husband tell the visitor to "Get the hell out of here!"

With negotiations failed, the being fled into the object and immediately departed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert A. Goerman is a native of New Kensington, Pennsylvania. As an investigative scholar of the unknown and unexplained, he has been fortunate enough to have his research and writings featured in various magazines and serve as source material for many books and television shows. Look for valuable investigation tips and techniques at http://robertgoerman.tripod.com