Dover Demon

The Dover Demon is a creature reportedly sighted on April 21–22, 1977, in Dover, Massachusetts, a town about 15 miles (24 km) southwest of downtown Boston.

Bill Bartlett's original sketch of the Dover Demon

Sightings

17-year-old William "Bill" Bartlett claimed that while driving on April 21, 1977, he saw a creature "about 4 feet tall with glowing orange eyes and no nose or mouth in a watermelon-shaped head" on top of a broken stone wall on Farm Street in Dover, Massachusetts. 15-year-old John Baxter reported seeing a similar creature on Miller Hill Road the same evening. Another 15-year-old, Abby Brabham, claimed to have seen the creature the following night on Springdale Avenue.^[1]

The teenagers all drew sketches of the alleged creature. Bartlett wrote on his sketch, "I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature."^[1] According to a local news report, "the locations of the sightings, plotted on a map, lay in a straight line over 2 miles [3.2 km]".^[1] The sightings were not made public until the first half of May.^[2] At that time, a local "investigator of unexplained phenomenon" noted similarities to creatures in the Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter of 1955.^[2] Even though none of the witnesses reported seeing a UFO, the sightings were also investigated by the Mutual UFO Network and associated groups.^[3]

Possible explanations

A snowy owl, carrying prey

It has been suggested that the creature may have been a foal or a moose calf.^[1][4]

Skeptic Joe Nickell believes the creature was likely a snowy owl,^[a] based on size and plumage, which would have reflected in the yellow headlights of older cars as the peach color described by Bartlett. In addition, the "long spindly arms" and fingers of the supposed creature could be the partially opened wings and the splayed feathers at the wingtips of a snowy owl.^[5]

Police told the Associated Press that creatures reported by the teenagers "were probably nothing more than a school vacation hoax."^[6] Skeptic Ben Radford has suggested the sighting may have been influenced by the pop culture of the time, as 1977 was the year Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were released.^[4]

In popular culture

In 2009, the Dover Demon was featured in an episode of the American horror television series Lost Tapes, which aired on Animal Planet.^[7]

The Dover Demon appears as a character in the American comic book series Proof, which features various other creatures. In the comic, it is a creature able to see into the future. It appears in another similar comic book series called The Perhapanauts.^[8][9] The Dover Demon also made brief appearances in the comic books The Pound: Ghouls Night Out and Hack/Slash: Entry Wound.^[10] A Dover Demon also appears in the webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court.^[11]

The manga and anime series Dandadan features an alien character called a Dover Demon. Its appearance is significantly different from the original sightings, being a bipedal crustacean-like alien with the ability to transform into a stronger form resembling a mantis shrimp.^[12]

Notes

1. One proposed explanation of the aforementioned Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter is a great horned owl.