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Atmospheric beasts |
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Atmospheric beasts are the strangest flying monsters of cryptozoology. According to eyewitnesses, they’re things that seem like living creatures, but they break all the usual rules that we apply to living things. They fly without the need for wings and their bodies are only semi-solid, even invisible. Many atmospheric beast sightings were originally classified as unusual UFO reports. Noted Bigfoot author Ivan T. Sanderson devoted an entire book to the theory that many UFOs are actually extremely low-density animals native to the clouds. One of the most famous atmospheric beasts is the Crawfordsville Monster, sighted in Indiana in 1891, which some researchers classify as a dragon. In various eyewitness accounts, atmospheric beasts can change their density, becoming smaller, harder masses that are usually metallic in color, or they can become larger and cloudlike, to the point of invisibility. In some reports, they may glow. Atmospheric beasts may roughly resemble whales and are sometimes called air whales or cloud beasts. Believers think that the atmospheric beasts' normal habitat is high in the air, and they might die if they ever touch the ground. Atmospheric beasts that resemble clouds may engage in behavior that is thought to be impossible for a real cloud, such as being far too mobile and animate for witnesses to believe it was just a patch of fog. The more solid kinds of atmospheric beasts are said to have mouths, eyes, flippers and other features, but these body parts are generally arranged and shaped in a fashion that looks utterly alien, more like an ocean invertebrate's body plan than any animal we are used to seeing on a daily basis. It is said that when atmospheric beasts die, they fall to earth as a gelatinous mass that may resemble a green, purple, gray or iridescent jelly that evaporates into nothing within minutes, hours, or, at the longest, a few days. This is supposed to explain a type of anomalous event, pwdre ser, that puzzled scientists for some time before they decided that pwdre ser did not exist. Pwdre ser is Welsh for "rot from the stars." This phenomena, also known as gelatinous meteorites or star jelly, and reports of it come from around the world, Gelatinous meteorites are not always connected with the atmospheric beast theory; they are actually easier to find among collections of Forteana that include reports of many different odd things falling from the sky. In the later decades of the twentieth century, the atmospheric beast theory had been almost forgotten. But, today, interest in atmospheric beasts has been growing, mainly because they now seem more plausible after the recent discovery of what might be a related cryptozoological animal: air rods. People have begun to comb through older reports of miscellaneous random unexplained stuff, a place where a few atmospheric beasts often lurk, and they have also re-examined some of the weirdest UFO reports, which sometimes sound a great deal like the witnesses are actually describing atmospheric beasts. - entry provided by Lolita, jadefox_ford@yahoo.com
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