It has been said that all of us, at least once in our lives, see something on the borderlands between the familiar and the alien. This is about the evening when that happened to me.

Close Encounter

I’ve written before of how much I enjoy walking at the local city park. It takes the better part of an hour to wend my way around the pond at the center of the park. The trail begins on the upstream end of the pond, beside one of the town’s busiest roads. It passes by ball fields, picnic pavilions, and a playground. On the downstream end of the pond it crosses the pond’s spillway and passes through a wooded area, then skirts the edge of a subdivision, and rejoins the road on the upstream end. Along the way the trail offers a number of views across the pond’s little coves and inlets.

The trail is also a good place to view wildlife. I’ve seen the ubiquitous deer and squirrels, raccoons, foxes, baby armadillos, turtles, owls, wood ducks, egrets, and grey herons. The latter are my personal favorites. In recent months I’ve seen less of them; the abundant rains this year have given them their choice of wetlands to fish in the region. In drier years it’s not unusual to see from one to three of them at the pond every morning. I never tire of the sight.

They’re huge birds. Where the take-offs of smaller birds involve a blur of fluttering wings, the heron ascends by giving a couple of beats of its great span and rising into the air in what looks almost like an act of slow-motion levitation. In flight they appear gawky or majestic, depending on the angle. Their pterodactylous appearance while flying makes it easy to believe that today’s birds are indeed the living descendants of avian dinosaurs.

The stream that feeds into the pond has its own points of interest. It flows below the busy road that borders the park, and runs upstream, its banks bordered by reeds and tall grasses, through a stretch of open fields in back of one of the local schools. Beyond the school it passes within sight of another school, the municipal auditorium and pool, the public tennis courts and farmers’ market, before flowing beneath Main Street on the edge of downtown. Here the stream passes the town’s largest church and a small retail strip.

Beyond these it flows through several residential blocks. For much of the way through this neighborhood it is bordered by walking trails and sidewalks. There are some sections where it may only be glimpsed from the streets and alleys that cross it. The stream passes the street where I live six or seven blocks down from my house. A couple of blocks farther on it disappears into the pipeline cut and thickets where the town’s streets abruptly end.

I’ve walked nearly the whole length of the stream. There’s something fascinating about watching a stream, even if it’s only a glorified drainage ditch, as it flows through fields and along paths and the boundaries of residential yards. I almost wish it flowed by my yard.

My favorite part of the stream is the part that runs behind the school. A walkway from Main Street connects the street, the auditorium, and the school. It crosses the stream, and a small tributary, on a pair of little foot bridges. On weekends, when there wasn’t anybody around, I used to like sitting on or near the bridge across the main stream and watching the early morning or sunset light. I say “used to” because construction for a new school building has recently rendered the spot inaccessible. While it’s good to see the much-needed school being built, I do regret the spoiling of the view.

It was at this spot, where the bridge crosses the stream behind the school, that I had my strange encounter.

On a mild evening the year before last I decided to walk to the bridge from my house and view the evening sky. I took off in that direction a bit later than intended. By the time I arrived, the sun had already set. The western sky was turning a twilight purple. I didn’t mind. The sky still looked quite beautiful on that clear evening. I supposed that I would sit on the bridge and watch the twilight deepening for a bit before starting back for home. There was little traffic moving on either the road or on Main Street. The spot promised to be quiet and solitary.

I could not see the bridge until I had passed a bend in the trail as it led by the auditorium. I was not many yards away when it came into sight. It was then that I saw that I was not alone.

Something stood on the bridge. It stood on two legs, but it was clearly not human. Its limbs, neck, and head were unnaturally long and slim. Judging from the scale of the bridge and the vegetation along the stream bank, it stood perhaps three or four feet tall. It was grey in color beneath the twilight sky.

I froze and stared. The thing looked for all the world like an alien “grey” of the sort that appears in so many movies and alien abductee accounts. I’ve always read these accounts with skepticism. Yet here I was, seeing something that looked very much like what many abductees have described.

As I stared, something seemed to click in my head. The grey alien was gone. In its place stood a grey heron, drawn up to its full height, its neck extended above its body instead of undulating out in front. I had never seen a heron in quite such an upright posture.

The bird spread its wings, and with a couple of beats rose into the air in that almost-levitating manner that I had seen whenever one let me get unusually close before flying. It headed downstream toward the pond, skimming along the stream’s surface. I had seen herons flying downstream before from where the stream met the road. This was the first time I’d seen that sight from upstream.

This sighting occurred during a period when I had been accustomed to seeing grey herons on almost a daily basis for months—really years—on end. I had probably seen more of the birds than almost anybody else in town. How had I mistaken such a familiar sight for something literally alien?

It came down to an unfamiliar context. I was accustomed to seeing herons at the pond in the morning, not upstream at twilight. I had virtually always seen them either flying, wading in the shallows, or perching in a tree, not standing on a solid surface directly in front of me. I had normally seen them in a somewhat hunched posture that made it easy to underestimate just how big these birds were.

Seeing this familiar bird at an unfamiliar time and place, in an unfamiliar posture, transformed it into something that my brain did not immediately recognize. Thrown for a loop, it reached for an image from popular culture that sort of fit what it saw—the image of the alien grey. Fortunately it didn’t stop there. It kept subconsciously searching through its files, until it realized what it was really looking at. I had been confused for no more than a second or two.

It has sometimes been suggested that well-known sightings of bizarre alien creatures are actually misidentifications of unfamiliar birds. For example, skeptics have suggested that the famous “Mothman” sightings in West Virginia in the 1960s were actually sightings of a huge sandhill crane that had wandered from its normal migratory routes. Witnesses spotting the unfamiliar, huge-winged creature, glimpsing it only momentarily in twilight conditions, imagined that they had seen some winged semi-humanoid monster.

Such explanations are often ridiculed. My own encounter with the “alien” heron suggests to me that such a misidentification is entirely plausible. If even somebody so familiar with a large species of bird can momentarily misidentify it so badly, then it is easy to see how those who have rarely if ever seen one might do so—and not quickly recognize their mistake. Had I not been so very familiar with herons, I probably would not have done so. I might well have come away from my close encounter convinced that I had seen a “grey,” or perhaps some winged humanoid Mothman-like being.

I’m not the least bit disappointed that my alien encounter proved to have a mundane explanation. As a teenager I felt, a bit like Japan’s Haruhi Suzumiya, that the ordinary, everyday places and people in my life were a bit on the dull side. I devoured everything I could find about UFOs and cryptids, mysterious disappearances and Fortean phenomena. I didn’t actually want to see such things for myself—I wasn’t that brave—but I loved to read about them. Surely a world with Bermuda Triangles and Sasquatches in it had to be more interesting than one that lacked them.

As I grew a little older and read more broadly, I came to see that the evidence that these anomalies actually exist by and large does not amount to very much. Most weird phenomena and Bermuda Triangle incidents have ordinary explanations if one looks at the cases carefully enough. The evidence for alien visitors and cryptids rests almost entirely with eyewitness accounts—and if there’s anything the experience I’ve related here demonstrates, it’s just how fallible our perceptions of what we see can be. Weird stuff is still fun to read about, but I can’t really believe in it now.

Yet this “mundane” world we live in just keeps getting more and more fascinating. Given a choice between seeing Mothman and a heron, I’ll take the heron every time. Is Mothman really any more amazing or wonderful than looking up and seeing a living dinosaur flying by, practically in my own back yard?

Of course I’m fortunate to live near a park where there is such good wildlife viewing. And to have an actual back yard where I can sit when I have time and watch the bluebirds and mockingbirds, the buzzing grasshoppers and prowling neighborhood cats, and the occasional escaped chicken (some neighbors keep them) wandering down the alley. I remember, though, that even when I lived in a little basement apartment in the city I could still see the birds and squirrels and chipmunks, watch an urban hawk stalking its prey, see the wildflowers in overgrown lots each spring and the colors of each fall, and walk the banks of a creek inhabited by tiny, flitting fish for which that little stream was the whole world.

The fact is that even now some kind of experience of the world of nature is open to us all. Only yesterday I saw an interview with a polar bear expert in which the interviewer asked whether the expert thought that Arctic cruises to see polar bears would increase the travelers’ appreciation for nature. No, the expert said, the voyagers were simply wealthy folks using their advantages to have the experience of seeing something that less-favored people could not, and no doubt going home to talk about it to anybody who would listen. He went on to say that anybody who really wanted to appreciate nature could go to the nearest nature spot and take a good, careful look at whatever creatures lived there.

I’m perfectly content to do that. God has put us in a world that he has richly supplied with more in our own neck of the woods—wherever that might be—than we could ever fully appreciate or understand. So let’s go out and take a regular look at it. And do everything we can to take care of it.

Next time I find a book about UFOs or Mothman or such I’ll probably take the opportunity to have the fun of reading it. But when I’m done with that, I’ll go outside and see what those little feathered dinosaur descendants out there are up to. And thank God that I’ve had the chance to see them.

I was the same as a teenager. I'm still the same, although much more critical these days. I still like to believe there are weird things in the world, though. It's part of my belief that we really don't know everything we think we do, and that much of what we believe is based on assumptions. We often believe what's convenient, and ignore what isn't. Not you personally; I mean people in general (but especially me).

People sometimes see things they cannot explain - it may be a flaw in their perceptions (which is most likely), but there's always the possibility that more is going on in the world which we have no idea about because it isn't useful, convenient or comfortable to think about too much.

It's why I still read about Yowies. I'm convinced there's something to it, although precisely what they are is anyone's guess. I doubt they're apes at all (not here in Australia, anyway), but who can say? There are any number of areas where nobody ever goes and which have only been mapped from the air. If there was/is an intelligent creature living in the wilderness, avoiding human contact at all costs would be the ultimate proof of its intelligence.

I'm a hypocrite, though, as I discount UFO's, Dogmen, Lake Monsters, Ghosts, etc as being fictional. I can accept an intelligent cryptid, but not an alien or a poltergeist. This is why it's a belief, I suppose, and an assumption. It's based on my own personal prejudice.

I would also prefer not to see a Yowie. Most of the encounters people have seem to be extremely confronting. I know that Aboriginal legends speak about them as something to be avoided and feared. There are places you simply don't go for fear of attracting their attention, etc, according to many indigenous stories. Sixty thousand years worth of accumulated knowledge, and their accurate descriptions (backed up by science) about the changing nature of the land near the Great Barrier Reef, as well as several species of animal which weren't recorded by science until the late 19th Century, have convinced me that there's something to their stories, many of which were lost due to the indiscriminate slaughter of so many people when the British colonists decided they wanted these people off 'their' lands, etc.

I don't blame you. I've seen pictures of the Yowie. I'd rather meet a Sasquatch!

Well, the Sasquatch does seem less threatening.