People Think There Are Giant Winged Monsters Flying Around Chicago

There are a lot of scary things out there, but most of them fall into normal categories. Like you know if they're a human or an animal when they run at you from out of the dark. The good people of Chicago have been experiencing something that can't quite be identified this summer. The Chicago Reader reports that as of the second week of August, there have been 29 sightings of "flying humanoids" in the city. These sightings aren't coming from the same person, or they wouldn't be taken so seriously. One of the people who claims to have seen them is a police officer, another a journalist.

But what could it be? Mothman? Goliath??

Most reports say the creature just hovers in the air, but one person claims they saw a winged humanoid figure leap off Sears tower. Another sighting involved TWO of them together flying over Adler Planetarium.

"They flew figure eights around each other," a witness told the Chicago Reader. "It looked like they were dancing in a strange sort of way. It was actually quite beautiful, considering how freaking strange it was."

Whether or not you believe in supernatural beings that fly around downtown, these reports are clearly an alarming trend:

The Chicago Reader spoke with a man named Lon Strickler, who has made wing humanoid sightings his life's work. Stickler claims to have seen Bigfoot and winged humanoids in six different instances. His first encounter took place in the eighties near his house, while camping with a group of Boy Scouts. They heard some strange noises and decided to investigate.

"We all had flashlights," Strickler explained. "It shot out of the creek like a rocket. One thing all of us noticed was the bright red eyes. It was six foot tall, with wings behind its back. It just shot up. As it started flying away, we heard the screaming sounds. It was pretty dramatic. But it wasn't a harbinger thing. I believe that it's something that lives around the creek."

That's one of the things that concerns Strickler—that people consider winged humanoids a harbinger of bad things to come, probably because of stories like the Mothman Prophecies, in which horrible stuff happens following a sighting of a winged monster, which was based in part on true events. Strickler claims that these sorts of sightings are neutral. They don't mean anything! Except maybe that the world is a terrifying place full of things we don't understand. But I knew that before. 

Fly on, winged humanoids!