"OWLMAN"

Below are excerpts from From: Jonathan Downes new book "the Owlman and Others" of which Jon has kindly given me his permission to include on this site. If you would like to purchase this book then here is the link: http://www.cfz.org.uk/publicat/owlman.htmof my book "The Owlman and others" and

… To Wit to Woo

"If you are going to tell a lie make sure it`s a big one"
Josef Goebbels

One of the most terrifying investigations with which I have ever been involved was the search for the grotesque Owlman of Mawnan. What makes it even more terrifying is that all the events recounted here took place within the United Kingdom. In 1996 I wrote a book called The Owlman and Others (1) which described the case at some length. Many things have happened on the case in the five years since the book was written, and some of these things have forced me into changing my mind from my original conclusions. We will get to the new evidence in due course, but I should first, I think, give a brief overview of the events which led to my involvement.

In April 1976, Tony Shiels, a friend of mine whom I introduced to you all in chapter two, who is known to many as 'Doc' and sometimes as 'The Wizard of the Western World' wrote a letter:

"A very weird thing happened over the Easter weekend. A holiday-maker from Preston, Lancs. , told me about something his two young daughters had seen … a big, feathered bird-man hovering over the church tower at Mawnan (a village near the mouth of the Helford River). The girls (June 12, and Vicky, daughters of Mr Don Melling), were so scared that the family cut their holiday short and went back three days early. This really is a fantastic thing, and I am sure the man wasn't just making it up because he'd been told I was on a monster hunt. I couldn't get the kids to talk about it (in fact, their father wouldn't even let me try), but he gave me a sketch of the thing drawn by June.

There have been no reports, so far as I know, of anybody else seeing the Bird-Man … even if it turned out to be just a fancy dress hang-glider, you'd think someone else would have spotted him … but Mawnan is not a place for hang-gliding! I really don't know what to think … its as if a whole load of weirdness has been let loose in the Falmouth area since last autumn!" (2)

Although, if you read any of the books on general mystery animals such as Alien Animals by Janet and Colin Bord, or indeed any of the contemporary copies of Fortean Times the claim that Cornwall had been particularly weird at the time is often made, it is not until you visit the Cornish Studies Library in the back streets of Redruth, sit yourself down at one of their microfiche machines, and physically examine twelve months or more's issues of The Falmouth Packet, The West Briton and The Western Morning News that you can see quite how strange the time actually was. For a period between the late autumn of 1975 and the early spring of 1977 it seems that Southern Cornwall was seized by a period of collective madness.

Much of this is chronicled in some depth in my book The Owlman and Others but even there I think that I failed to give a true picture of quite how strange the area had become.

There were dramatic extremes in the weather - droughts and floods - heatwaves and frozen wastes. The local animal life went (figuratively and literally) crazy; one unfortunate woman was imprisoned in her house by hordes of attacking birds which literally beat themselves to death against the walls of her house, which was dripping red with their blood. Another woman was similarly imprisoned by a mob of feral cats, dog attacks trebled, swimmers were attacked by dolphins (who also saved other swimmers from drowning), and there were reports that cattle belonging to local farmers had developed the power of teleportation. Most interesting to the fortean were the burgeoning numbers of UFO sightings and the reports of three entirely different sets of mystery animal in the region; Morgawr (the Cornish Sea Serpent), the Cornish mystery big cats and the Owlman of Mawnan.

The first reports of these 'creatures' in print were in an obscure booklet entitled Morgawr-the monster of Falmouth Bay by Anthony Mawnan-Peller. He gave a brief description of the events of Easter Saturday: "During the Easter weekend, the two young daughters of a holidaymaker … Mr. Don Melling, from Preston, Lancashire … saw a 'huge great thing with feathers, like a big man with flapping wings', hovering over the church tower at Mawnan. The girls … Vicky, 9, and June, 12 … were so frightened that the family holiday was cut short by three days".

It has been stated on many occasions that Anthony Mawnan-Peller didn`t exist and that he was nothing but a pseudonym for Tony Shiels who was manipulating the whole affair in order to capitalise as much as he could on the whole affair. This is quite simply not true. Anthony Mawnan-Peller is a pseudonym, but not of Tony Shiels. Tony drew the illustrations but the author was a local journalist who wanted to remain anonymous purely because he was `moonlighting` on the Morgawr project and didn`t want his boss to find out. Again and again within the field of forteana we find what seem to be gloriously peculiar examples of fortean chicanery, and they usually turn out to have equally mundane explanations.

Although not widely read outside Cornwall, this booklet was available extensively throughout the county and was read by many people including two young girls of fourteen, Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry, who in early July 1976 were camping in the woods by Mawnan Old Church when they, too, saw the Owlman.

They met Tony on Grebe Beach, below Mawnan Old Church the day after their sighting. Sally, who was from Plymouth, had been staying with her friend Barbara, (who would only admit that she lived 'quite near the river'). Sally approached Tony and said: "Are you Doc Shiels? We've seen the bird monster"

Sally described what they had seen: "It was like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing. At first, I thought that it was someone dressed up, playing a joke, trying to scare us. I laughed at it, we both did, then it went up in the air and we both screamed. When it went up you could see its feet were like pincers"

Her friend added some details of her own: "It's true. It was horrible, a nasty owl-face with big ears and big red eyes. It was covered in grey feathers. The claws on its feet were black. It just flew up and disappeared in the trees". (3)

Although as Tony admitted at the time - it is possible that the two young ladies were trying to hoax him, he is convinced that they were genuine.

He separated the two girls and had each of them draw a picture of what she had seen. The two pictures are dissimilar enough to rebuff suggestions of collusion but have enough points in common, both with each other, and with the other accounts of the 'creature' to be considered as a significant piece of evidence.

Both girls made brief additional notes underneath their pictures. Sally's read: "I saw this monster bird last night. It stood like a man and then it flew up through the trees. It is as big as a man. Its eyes are red and shine brightly".

And Barbara wrote: "Birdman monster. Seen on third of July, quite late at night but not quite dark. Red Eyes. Black Mouth. It was very big with great big wings and black claws. Feathers grey"

The two girls agreed on most points with their pictures although Sally thought Barbara had "done the wings wrong". At the same time as Sally and Barbara were talking to 'Doc' on Grebe Beach, two other girls also saw what Tony refers to as 'his Owliness':

"It has red slanting eyes and a very large mouth. The feathers are silvery grey and so are his body and legs, the feet are like a big, black, crab's claws. We were frightened at the time. It was so strange, like something out of a horror film. After the thing went up, there were crackling sounds in the tree-tops for ages. Our mother thinks we made it all up just because we read about these things, but that is not true. We really saw the bird-man, though it could have been someone playing a trick in a very good costume and make up. But how could it rise up like that? If we imagined it, then we both imagined it at the same time".

Two years later, a young lady called 'Miss Opie' saw 'A monster, like a devil, flying up through the trees near old Mawnan Church'. A few days later Tony Shiels wrote to Janet and Colin Bord of the Fortean Picture Library: "The owlman is certainly back in business, it seems. I poked around his area, around Old Mawnan Church, a couple of days ago, and the atmosphere was positively crackling with 'odd presences', if you know what I mean.

As soon as anything really exciting happens, I'll let you know. It would be terrific if I really could get a picture of our feathered friend, but, he only seems to pop up for young girls … and I ain't one!" (4)

The Owlman, as it was now generally known, (it appears that Tony coined the name in late 1976), was seen again on the 2nd August by three young, unnamed French girls. The landlady of the boarding house in which they had been staying told Tony that the three girls had been frightened by something "very big, like a big, furry bird with a gaping mouth and round eyes" This was all that the landlady could tell him, so Tony left a message for the girls to contact him, but as always seems to be the case he never heard anything further.

Many commentators on the case have questioned Tony's role in the affair. As recounted at some length in Chapter Two of this book, one investigator, Mark Chorvinsky of Strange Magazine even claimed that because so many of the sightings were connected with him, that Tony had made the whole thing up.

Such people do not understand the reticence of the Cornish people. They do not like to talk to outsiders, and I am convinced that if it had not been for Tony's presence in the area as a trusted 'local' the affair would never have been made public. The case of the French girls for example:

Tony wrote to me in 1995 explaining how he had become involved: "The French Girls were students (at Camborne Tech - now known as Cornwall College), lodging in Redruth. I think they were on some sort of 'summer school' course. Their landlady 'phoned me about this sighting. Remember, at the time, I was getting quite a lot of media coverage. People reported weird shit to me"… Two years later the creature re-appeared when, "an enormous, bird-like creature" was seen flying "over the Helford River and into the trees near Grebe Beach". (5)

At Hallowe'en 1986 Tony was at the centre of a media storm when the Bishop of Truro, and the local newspapers accused him of having committed unspeakable acts of blasphemy inside Mawnan Old Church whilst attempting to invoke the Owlman. The affair was somewhat of a 'five minute wonder' in the press and the actual sequence of events remains obscure. Ten years or so later Tony told me: "I did a few bits and pieces inside the Church … There was a lot of misreporting that I was throwing out challenges to God, and saying I'd smack him in the gob. I don't think God has a gob, and I wouldn't do that anyway to the deity. He'd give me a harder smack back wouldn't he?" Eventually - more by luck than by judgement - I pieced together the true story. (6)

He had indeed visited the church with a local radio team, but the "huge crowd of people" turned out to be ONE rather shy bloke called 'Dave'. He told me that there was no blasphemy, no swearing, no naked witches and no cigars, and that the wizard had entered the church, muttered a few things under his breath in a foreign language and then left again. It turns out that the radio team had approached my friend and asked him what he had planned to do to celebrate Hallowe'en. He said: "Buy me a drink and I'll show you. "

This the radio people did, only to find that like many wizards, my friend has a legendary capacity for the stuff. Finding at the end of the evening that they had nothing to show for their severely depleted expense accounts, I have a sneaking suspicion that someone decided that it would be a good idea to concoct a bizarre tale of blasphemy and psychic mayhem.

Unfortunately Dave Shenton, the only other witness to the events of All Hallow`s Eve 1986 died whilst we were putting the finishing touches to this volume. Like John Gordon whose death was covered in Chapter Two he was a nice guy, as well as being a pivotal part of one of the more bizarre bits of forteana to take place during the closing years of the 20th Century and he will be sadly missed. (7

In 1989 a young man called 'Gavin' and his girlfriend 'Sally' (not their real names), encountered the Mawnan Owlman. This was perhaps the most important sighting to date from a cryptoinvestigative point of view, because it is the only sighting that cannot in any way be linked to Tony 'Doc' Shiels.

I have interviewed 'Gavin' on a number of occasions and am convinced of his veracity. This is his story in his own words:

"We had a torch and I was shining its beam across trunks about fifteen feet off the ground. I am fairly sure that the animal was standing in a large conifer tree and the illustration we made after the sighting (but not till we got home actually) does depict the animal in a conifer tree, but I'm not that sure now.

Here is the actual sighting as written down in my diary:

"Every couple of hours we would walk along the fringe of the wood. This was the third time that evening and it was beginning to get dark. From a distance trees looked black but closer up the branches and trunks could be seen. We saw the animal at about 9. 30 P. M. It was standing on a thick branch with its wings sort of held up at the arms. I'd say that it was about five feet tall (but please read on). The legs had high ankles and the feet were large and black with two huge 'toes' on the visible side. The creature was grey with brown and the eyes definitely glowed. On seeing us its head jerked down and forwards, its wings lifted and it just jumped backwards. As it did its legs folded up. We ran away".

"We had a pretty good idea what it looked like. We didn't know what to do about it, and essentially vowed never to tell anyone. I last saw Sally about two years ago and talked about it then. She was as unkeen to share the information then as she was earlier, and I promised I wouldn't tell anyone about her involvement, but I could 'do what I liked' with my interpretation. I respect this and have never disclosed any information about her". (8)

To date the most recent sighting of the Mawnan Owlman, took place, allegedly, at the end of the summer of 1995 and is chronicled in a letter sent to Simon Parker, the night editor of the Western Morning News in Truro. It reads:

"Dear Sir, I am a student of marine biology at the Field Museum, Chicago, on the last day of a summer vacation in England. Last Sunday evening I had a most unique and frightening experience in the wooded area near the old church at Mawnan, Cornwall. I experienced what I can only describe as 'a vision from hell'. The time was fifteen minutes after nine, more or less, and I was walking along a narrow track through the trees. I was halted in my tracks when, about thirty metres ahead, I saw a monstrous man-bird 'thing'. It was the size of a man, with a ghastly face, a wide mouth, glowing eyes and pointed ears. It had huge clawed wings, and was covered in feathers of silver/grey colour. (sic). The thing had long bird legs which terminated in large black claws. It saw me and arose, 'floating' towards me. I just screamed then turned and ran for my life.

"The whole experience was totally irrational and dreamlike (nightmare!). Friends tell me that there is a tradition of a phantom 'owlman' in that district. Now I know why. I have seen the phantom myself. Please don't publish my real name and address. This could adversely affect my career. Now I have to rethink my 'world view' entirely. Yours, very sincerely scared… 'Eye Witness'. "

We have her name and address, but we have respected her wishes and kept her anonymity. We have tried a little piece of covert investigation into this particular eyewitness but have drawn a blank whenever we tried to investigate further. I think that it would be unwise to wholeheartedly accept this account as genuine, but it is included for the sake of completion.

I quite understand the unwillingness of researchers like Mark Chorvinsky to accept such a bizarre tale purely on the evidence presented by such a notorious figure as 'Doc' Shiels. After all, by his own admission he is a 'charlatan' and a 'thimble rigger', and he has even told me not to "invest belief in anything" especially him! (and this is a man I count as a close and dear friend). The discovery of 'Gavin' and his succinct and believable eyewitness testimony provided an invaluable corroboration to the vast body of 'Shiels-channelled' evidence, and has persuaded even some noted sceptics that there is something to the story after all.

Graham McEwan has suggested that such 'creatures' are quasi-animate thought form manifestations created by the unconscious mind of a lonely traveller. The veteran explorer and mystic Alexandra David-Neel writing in With Magicians and Mystics in Tibet (1931) tells how certain Buddhist monks can create living thought forms called tulpas. She claimed that she managed to create one of her own, the image of a fat and jolly monk who was seen on at least one occasion by an independent witness. She warns, however: "Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to play the part of a real being it tends to free itself from its makers control". In the case of her tulpa this happened and she described how the monk became thinner and less jolly and how slowly "his face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly, malignant look. He became more troublesome and bold. In short he escaped my control. " (9)

In my more frivolous moments I wonder whether Mark Chorvinsky was sort of right after all. Maybe 'Doc' had made the whole thing up, perhaps after he had been reading John Keel's classic The Mothman Prophecies (about a similar apparition in West Virginia during 1967), and had decided in a spirit of genuinely surreal mischief that it was perhaps time that Cornwall had something similar to counterpoint its very own sea monster. Perhaps this very act of creation helped form a tulpa which then got out of hand. If so then I suspect that Tony was as surprised as anyone else when other people started to report sightings of the creature.

Another theory that I have adopted at various times is linked with the sex of the witnesses. With the one exception - the young man who has asked to be identified only as 'Gavin' the only people to have seen the creature have been young women. Even 'Gavin' was accompanied by a young woman at the time. Could the owlman be a sort of three dimensional, feathered poltergeist? An apparition 'invoked' by the peculiar hormonal and emotional changes which affect young women at this time?

Maybe the combination of these conditions - which as anyone who has ever shared a house with a teenage girl will know can be quite devastating, with something inate in the psychical infrastructure of the area surrounding Mawnan Old Church has a synergistic effect, producing the apparition that has become known as The Owlman of Mawnan.

My attitude towards the Owlman has changed greatly over the years. When I finished the main body of my investigations in the late spring of 1996 I was convinced, although I didn`t usually say it in public, that "Doc" had after all made the whole thing up originally and that he was as surprised as anyone else when the animal he had created in his own image suddenly started to materialise in front of people.

Over the years I met more witnesses whose testimony had not appeared in my original book. At the Truro UFO Convention in August 1998 I met a middle aged woman who told me that she had seen the creature "flapping around in the woods" during the high summer of 1978. Her description of the creature was far more bird like than any of the other descriptions that I had encountered, and if it hadn`t been for the fact that she described an entity with a five foot wingspan and red, glowing eyes I would have been tempted to dismiss her sighting as that of a large bird.

Various researchers, including noted westcountry naturalist Trevor Beer have suggested that the sightings of the Owlman are nothing more than sightings of an escaped Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo) - a northern European species which supposedly became extinct in Britain about 10, 000 years ago. However both this species and other gigantic Strigiformes from Europe and North America are kept widely as pets and as exhibits in public aviaries and it is not uncommon for them to escape. They are also strong fliers and it is not impossible that an Eagle Owl could have been blown in a gale from either central Germany or the Pyrexes to make its home in the dense woods of southern Cornwall. However, it is highly unlikely that if this were so then it would only ever come out to be seen by adolescent girls.

We should, I think, look elsewhere for an explanation.

Over the years as my reputation grew, and with it the fame of His Owliness, I began to receive letters and e-mails from people all over the world who claimed to have seen similar things. One, taken almost at random from my files was from a young man in Ohio:

Jon,

What has been seen here in Ohio, USA, is a little different than the Owlman
of Mawnan has been described. It was seen in the mid to late 60s in a
desolate area of land in North Eastern Ohio called the Grand River Valley.
There is about 150 sq. mi. of untouched land there, all which is extremely
densely covered in brush.

A road called Hoffman Norton met another called Hyde Oakfield in the south-eastern corner of the territory before its bridges collapsed and were torn down. two men saw this 3-4 ft. creature walk across the dirt road in front of their car, pause, look in at them, and continue walking to the other side of the road. they described it most closely as having the "body of a monkey and the face of an owl, " with bright yellow-gold glowing eyes, long thin arms, a sloped beak, and hair or feathers which appeared to be pulled back from its face. the men swore it was the devil, and one will not speak of the event to this day - he only says that he fears every day that it will come back for him.

Recently, another man has claimed that he saw the "owlman, " - as my friend and I have called it, even before we learned of your book or other similar creatures. This man was 8 years old, and riding his bike in another fairly remote region across the town. he always referred to it as "the little demon" after it sat low in a ditch and watched him ride by on his bicycle.

Several years later, in the early 70's, a series of cattle mutilations took place, whereas coyotes were blamed, until people began reporting seeing the profile of a small, thin, manlike being, escaping the pastures. the being was said to have had small pointy ears near the top of his head (like a horned owl's feathers?). the farmers were dismissed as "crazy" and the whole investigation was dropped.

I don't know what is here (or was here), but it was real. it could still live
there or have offspring. i have heard that due to its remoteness, the grand
river basin was the site of different animal testing projects. could
something have gone wrong?.

thanks for the reply.
Mike

It is interesting to compare these descriptions by `Mike` not only with the other reports in this chapter of the Cornish Owlman, but with the accounts of the Puerto Rican chupacabra which appear elsewhere in this book. It is also important, I believe to note that the same explanations for the creature are also included in Mike`s e-mail. He alludes to shadowy `Black Projects` carried out by the United States Government in genetic engineering and gene manipulation. The same social paranoias have been expressed in Puerto Rico, and indeed in other parts of the world. I believe that it is a mark of the society in which we, in the western world, all live at the beginning of the 21st Century that people are so ready to believe ill; of their elected Governments and to blame a frighteningly wide range of paranormal occurrences on the Government rather than on these events being just part of the natural way of things.

In my investigations across the world, although I have come across hints of Government cover ups, they have invariably been (as recounted elsewhere in this book) at a low level in order to obfuscate misdoings by a Government official of low rank and experience. There has never, as far as I am aware at least, been any more sinister motive. The rest is just paranoia on the part of those who are interested in such things.

Something which may also be mere paranoia, but which I am convinced is very real is the phenomenon of psychic backlash. This is a series of inexplicable and horrific outbreaks of bad luck that can overtake the hapless seeker after monstrous truth on his way to his goal. I never believed in it until, during the months that I was working on "The Owlman and Others" two of my pet cats died suddenly, two computers blew up (as did two cars) and my wife left me. I also encountered psychic backlash while investigating the links between animal mutilations and crop circles which are described elsewhere in this book

In the spring and early summer of 1997 I was involved in an experiment to see whether corn taken from crop circles had different growth rates to corn taken from other parts of the same field. We asked listeners to our Weird about the West Radio Show to help with our experiment and grow some grain from a crop circle at home. We sent out about ten small packets of oats. . and sat back to await results. Two days later I got a telephone call from a worried lady who claimed that she was picking up 'terrible psychic emanations' from the corn seeds. She also claimed that she had experienced similar phenomena causing headaches and a feeling of general illness when she had visited a crop formation last summer.

The same morning I received a telephone call from a colleague who said that he had received unconfirmed reports of a formation one of the first of the year - in a field next to the site of a serious car crash. We are not in the position of trying to make capital (financial or otherwise) out of other people's misery so the names and places have been deliberately with-held. According to another one-time colleague called Pete Glastonbury, in 1992 at Berry Pomeroy in south Devon, a formation in the shape of a dumbell with scythe attachment appeared in a field of barley. It was the first formation of the year in Devonshire. Shortly afterwards there were three simultaneous motorcycle accidents involving green Kawasakis. In each case the driver was relatively unharmed but the passenger on the pillion was killed. Pete vouched personally for one of these accidents which occurred when the bike in question crashed into his garden wall.

The weirdness didn`t end there however.

During the very first journey I had made after carrying the corn samples which I had sent out, my car engine had suddenly overheated and seized. In 1992 exactly the same thing happened to a Mini Metro owned by Pete Glastonbury. To confound the situation further, last summer, I had been photographing crop circles and on my journey home the self same thing happened to my transit van. A coincidence? I hope so. To make it even stranger, the two incidents involving my vehicles took place on the same stretch of road and within five hundred yards of each other. As I jokingly said at the time I was beginning to wonder whether crop circles should carry a government health warning!

During the summer of 1998 I was revisiting the area around Mawnan Old Church on almost a weekly basis. The second edition of The Owlman and Others had come out and I was hitting the publicity trail in earnest. As part of the publicity machine I attended invocations to the Owlman carried out in the woods around the church at midsummer 1998, Samhain 1998 and Bealtaine 1999.

Immediately my luck started to change. Things began to go wrong and we my little household found itself locked into a cycle of psychic backlash so grotesque that we had to do something to escape from it.

Although I was brought up (and confirmed) within the Church of England I have always had a leaning towards Roman Catholicism. My faith is a very private one and is not something I talk about very often. If there is such a thing I suppose that I am a pantheistic Catholic because I also believe (to a certain extent at least) in the principles of Wicca and I see no real difference (on an emotional level if not a theological one) between the twin Celtic deities of Cernunnos (the horned God) and The Mother Goddess, and the twin Christian figures of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. On New Year`s Day 1998 I had my house blessed by a very wise friend of mine who is a third degree witch, and that magickal protection that she placed around me and my belongings protected us to some extent at least for the next few months. When I was in Mexico, I also began to experience psychic backlash in the form of severe physical illness and for the first time ever, and with no training I attempted to carry out a spell of protection - by myself - and without attracting the ridicule of my fellow travellers.

When I decided to carry out this ritual we were in the middle of the Puebla Desert, parked in a tiny layby next to a small roadside shrine to the Virgin Mary. It was festooned in strings of small plastic flags which fluttered gaily in the wind like the prayer flags on a Tibetan monastery. Indeed, friends of mine who are much better and more devout Catholics than I am have told me that for certain people in Central Americas they serve much the same function. Each time, or so they believe, the flag flutters in the wind it send up a tiny prayer to heaven. God and his Angels can see the flags fluttering far below them on earth and they act as a reminder to the Almighty of his subjects on this planet.

My personal brand of Christianity is far less concrete than this but I found it a comforting and oddly touching belief, and whatever your school of thought on the matter, and indeed whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs, the sight of these tint, gaily coloured flags fluttering bravely in the middle of the desolation of the Puebla Desert is a sight to warm the hardest of hearts.

A few feet away from the shrine was a concrete bunker on which a number of pieces of political graffiti concerning Subcommandante Marcos and the FZLN Separatist Guerrillas had been painted. We have mentioned Marcos and his political movement several times in this narrative, but the time has come, I believe to examine him as a man, or at least the image which he has so carefully cultivated for the world outside. In a similar move to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, the guerrilla leader has become the slightly romantic poet figure, and like Adams in Ulster he has attracted a great deal of attention from people who would otherwise have little or no interest in his political beliefs.

Half way between the shrine to the Blessed Virgin and the ugly concrete bunker daubed with paens of support to the pop-politician (who has also, or so I have been informed, recorded some of his own revolutionary songs and has a burgeoning career as a pop singer in front of him), I acquired a cactus stick of the type that the Hopi Indian medicine men once used as magic wands. It caught my eye immediately - I had to own it, and so it joined the flotsam and jetsam in the back of the car. But it wasn`t just that I wanted it. I knew that one day I was going to own one like it and when I saw it for the first time, I knew that something I had been told many years before and many thousands of miles away in a pub in Cornwall had finally come to pass.

In 1976 Mike McCormick (see chapter two) gave Tony Shiels the core of one of the giant cactuses which twenty two years later were towering all around me in the middle of the Puebla Desert. The Hopi Indian shamans had used them as magic wands, and I asked Tony what had happened to his one. He laughed and told me that one day I would have one of my own, and several years later between monuments to the two great cultural influences in the Mexican psyche, and in a deserted spot in the middle of the Mexican desert his prediction came true. It was as if I had been given a present by the desert.

As I was taking something away I had to give something in return and in what turned out to be pretty well my last act as a neophyte "Sorcerer`s Apprentice" I made a sigil out of stones in the very place where I had found the stick. The sigil that I made was Tony`s own - a sign that he has described as a Nnidnidiogram and which he claims with some justification is a powerful and potent magickal symbol which has been of great use to him in summoning up monsters.

Tony Shiels is probably the most powerful and the wisest man that I have ever met. He has the power to summon up monsters. Although I go looking for them, I would never attempt to emulate him in his invocatory activities because by the laws of magick once you cause something to happen you have to be responsible for the consequences, and whilst I can deal with the consequences of looking for something like the chupacabra and even of chronicling its activities and drawing some tentative conclusions as to its nature I cannot take the responsibility for summoning it to appear before me like a rabbit out of a hat. Indeed, I very much doubt whether I have the power to do so.

Following instructions that I had been told many thousand miles away from the little stone image in the middle of the Mexican desert I grasped my new magic wand, and cast a protective circle around me, my Nnidnidiogram and my companions. I mentally consecrated each of the four points of the compass to the four sons of Ometecuhtli and Omecíhuatl and as I faced west I repeated as much as I could remember of the Aztec hymn to Quetzacoatl, the winged serpent and Aztec Dragon God, and the deity that most resembles the beneficent creator of western religions.

Back in the UK things slowly began to recover and did so until, at Bealtaine 1999 we were stupid enough to stir the whole affair up again. In 1978, 1980 and 1986, Tony Shiels had carried out magickal rituals either at Bealtaine or Samhain (Hallow`een) to invoke `His Owliness` and partly as an intellectual discipline and partly out of sheer mischievous caprice we decided to emulate him on then last Walpurgis Night of the 20th Century.

Various members of the Exeter Strange Phenomena Group decided to come along for the ride, and we were also accompanied by veteran Australian cryptozoologist Tony Healy co-author of a remarkable book called Out of the Shadows. (10) Tony had arrived in Exeter that afternoon. We had met him at the Unconvention, and as is our custom we had invited him to stay with us for as long as he wanted.

One of the less well publicised roles of the Centre for Fortean Zoology is that it acts as a flop house for visiting forteans from around the world and at various times one can find several well known members of the fortean and cryptoinvestigative communities wrapped in blankets or sleeping bags on my sitting room floor.

Tony was not the only minor celebrity to accompany us on our magickal quest. One of the party was a long haired and bearded young man wearing a ragged Medieval Court Jester`s outfit. Perhaps appropriately, he answered to the name of `Jester`.

In 1994 sixty-five miles of improvement work began on the A30 and the A35 between Exeter, Devon and Bere Regis, Dorset. The road was let to an Anglo-German road building consortium called, "Connect", under a "Design, Build, Finance, Operate" (DBFO). The consortium who financed and built the road, is to be paid by the government in the form of "shadow tolls". These tolls involve the final bill for the tax payer, depending upon the amount of traffic using the new road. The thirteen mile by-pass between Honiton and Exeter, is part of this road improvement work, and is estimated to cost around sixty-five million pounds. (11)

Three small protests camps were set up along this part of the road construction work. The two protest camps at Allercombe and Trollheim, were cleared by the authorities on the 27th December 1996, and 12th January 1997 respectively. However, the protest camp at Fairmile still remained.

The camp at Fairmile was unique. Not only did it contain the usual tree houses, or "twigloos", but it also had an elaborate network of underground tunnels. Five protesters barricaded themselves in these tunnels, behind steel and wooden doors in excavations of thirty to forty feet deep. The last tunnelling protester, Daniel Needs, or "Swampy" as he is known, emerged from the tunnels on Friday, January 31st, after spending six nights underground. He explained: "I stopped digging because I felt we had made our point and by coming out it was safer for all concerned". He said he would be prepared to do the same again, even if it meant arrest. He told television and newspaper reporters: "It is the only way to get a voice these days. If I wrote a letter to my M. P. , would I have achieved all this? Would you lot be here now?".

Whilst Swampy achieved a modicum of national fame as a result of his road protesting activities, most of the people involved in the road protest camp remained relatively obscure. One of the few members of this itinerant though well meaning community to reach a level of notoriety in the national press was `Jester`. Clad in his eponymous costume he had spent the months leading up to the evictions as a merry maker and a jester whose role was to keep the spirits of the beleaguered protesters uplifted and to bait the oncoming forces of law, order and destruction. As a result of his activities he was charged with several public order offences but that, like so much hinted at in this book is undoubtedly another story!

When the road protest finally finished `Jester` hung up his cap and bells and returned to his studies of folklore and the occult and, more by luck than by judgement ended up at one of the meetings of the Exeter Strange Phenomena Group in early 1999, where he soon became a fixture.

Richard, in the guise of Muzzlehutch the Magician, accompanied by Jester carried out a strange and highly theatrical ritual to summon the Owlman. As I am no magician (the ritual in the Mexican desert was the only one I have ever tried to carry out) I have asked Richard to explain what he did, and what he was trying to achieve in his own words:

The elements were called on once more. Their visual embodiments are different according to what is being summoned. Instead of the four dragons of the four quarters I called upon winged humanoids from differing cultures.

· The north was the Skovman a form of Scandinavian elf that could take the form of a giant owl.
· The east was the Tengu of Japan, grotesque bird deamons.
· The south was Popobwa a bat winged baboon that anally rapes sleeping men in the folklore of Zanzibar.
· The west was Mothman the red eyed, winged horror that terrorised Point Pleasant, Virginia in the 1960s.

Into a silver brazier of hot coals I poured a mixture of certain herbs and oils. An ugly red cloud of foul smelling gas billowed up like an Arabian genie. I snorted in its noxious vapour and began to rant like a madman speaking in tongues. Jester clad in motley capered about the circle as I brayed my incantations. His presence had twin purpose: As a jester he was the embodiment of chaos, without which order is totally impotent. He also reflected the essentially absurd nature of the ritual, the phenomenon, and the universe in general.

The letters G and S, so important in the whole case were uttered in the incantation. "Great Strigiform, Girl Scarer, Goat Sucker". I bid the beating of wings and the insidious churring to come galumphing from the inky branches. Yet even as the verbal deluge poured from my lips like tallow from a candle, I knew the most important component of the spell was missing - there were no young women present.

However, we left Jester there for the night and when he returned to us in Exeter a few days later he told us how his dreams had been bedevilled with strange winged entities and how at one point during the long, cold night he had felt something strange and heavy clinging onto his back.

During the next few months we received more reports of sightings from the Cornish woods - they were mostly inconclusive, but three or four groups of young women reported seeing strange, grey, feathered objects fluttering around through the upper branches of the trees above them.

However, I for one should have known better. The psychic backlash that I had managed to dispel a year before returned severalfold and things at the CFZ were getting particularly bizarre. We had outbreaks of poltergeist activity as well as a horrible run of bad luck and I determined that not only was I going to have to do something to end it all, but that this time I would have no further involvement with the Owlman or any of his kin.

My attitude towards my investigations (and I hope towards my life) is that humour is an invaluable asset. As my mentor Tony "Doc" Shiels also pointed out "humour is our greatest weapon against psychic backlash" and I have always used humour which is one of the reasons that, perhaps, I have survived, when others who started out alongside me, and who might seemingly have been expected to achieve greater things than me had fallen (figuratively and literally) by the wayside.

We decided that the best way to dispel the malign miasma of despair into which everyone involved in the Bealtaine ritual (but especially Richard, Phil and me had fallen) was to do something which involved the Owlman but also involved the three of us in a humorous manner.

After some soul searching we made the now notorious Owlman film. Billed as a cinematic adaptation of my book it was in fact no such thing. A homage to Tony Shiels and to another great inspiration of mine film-maker John Walters, the movie which was eventually shown for the first time at the 2000 Unvonvention at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington High Street, London was like nothing else ever made in the annals of forteana. One of my friends from America told me, after she saw it that "It sucked worse than any other movie I have ever seen" and was somewhat nonplussed when I told her that this was after all the reason I had made it in the first place.

What I was not prepared for was for the film to be a success. Much to my surprise it was. One review read:

A co-production with Limited Talent Productions, it's a pseudo-documentary loosely based on the book of the same name by Jon Downes and is a blackly comic romp that sees the author and his girlfriend retrace the investigative steps in the book. Involving sea serpents, gay cowboys, wizards, mad lemonade selling tramps, transsexual nazis, inbred yokel mobs, lesbian witches, and other assorted perverts and nutters, it is a trash cinema classic in the same league as Phil Tucker's Robot Monster, Edward D. Wood JR's Bride of the Atom and John Walter's Multiple Maniacs. (12)

Other reviews were equally enthusiastic and compared the film favourably with the horribly over hyped Blair Witch Project which had no jokes and cost nearly 50 times as much to make, despite being the cheapest budget hit film on record. Unfortunately our plan to make a silly movie that would detract from all the attention that had been given in recent years to the Owlman phenomenon failed badly. By CFZ standards at least it was a great success and gave us even more media attention which was ironically the very last thing that we had been looking for.

It was essentially just a very silly spoof art movie with little relevance to the main body of the research that the CFZ both collectively and individually has carried out into the Owlman Phenomenon. What it did do, however, almost as an afterthought, was provide my first (and only until this book) public claim that Tony Shiels had been responsible for all the original sightings and that the phenomenon proper had not started to appear until some years later after people had started to believe in the stories that had originally been produced as a joke.

Our ridiculous film has gathered a fair amount of press coverage, and as a result the Owlman is back in the public eye again. Also in May 2000 we made contact again with our old friend and mentor Tony "Doc" Shiels who told us, (quite possibly tongue in cheek or maybe not) that the feathered monster had been seen again.

In early July, we received the following e-mail. In view of the history of hoaxing and surrealchemical shenanigans surrounding his Owliness I include it here with no comment apart from the obvious one that IF it is true it turns much of what I have written and said publicly about the phenomenon in recent years completely on its head.

My Experience of 3/7/1976
Sally G

Pembroke, Wales
July 2000

To whom it may concern,

Writing this down isn't going to be the easiest thing that I've ever done, so I'll try to get it over with as quickly as possible. I have reluctantly decided to speak on my experience, for reasons that I won't go into here. This is the first time that I have thought about any part of what happened during that summer in years- It took me quite a while to really forget about what I saw, and I suppose you could say that it had a definite effect on the way that I lived my life for a number of years following the event. I am a 38-year old career woman who has quite enough going on in her life without dredging up a very upsetting incident that happened 24 years ago. This is certainly the first time that I have written any of this down, and probably the first time that I have wilfully remembered it in any detail since I was a teenager. I recently mentioned it in passing to someone whom I am very fond of, and he suggested that I contact you, having found you on the net. I am aware of some of the bits and pieces that have been written about my experience in the intervening years, and by-and-large I have no complaint. I remember Mr Shiels as being quite concerned about my friend Barbara and I at the time. He seemed like a nice man.

I have read the essay on your website concerning the incident. There are a couple of indiscrepancies that you weren't to know about that I should probably clear up. My name wasn't really Chapman at the time- it was W***, although I told Mr Shiels that it was Chapman. Babs gave her real name. You'll probably understand why I did this. I was still VERY upset when Babs and I were walking on the beach the next day. Babs was much more grown-up than me at the time (and probably still is). She was calming me down, trying to make me laugh, because I hadn't slept a wink the night before. She walked up to Tony and told him what had happened. I have no idea how she knew of him, but I gather he was a bit of a local character. I didn't really know that part of Cornwall at all.

He had some paper and pencils on him, and had us draw it. He helped me so much that day without even realising it-I remember him making me giggle a bit, and he was so cheery that he really snapped me out of it. I don't think either drawing was particularly good- I'm not really sure that it was as OWLLY as our pictures suggested. I've just realised that I've been stalling actually describing what happened when we were in the wood that night. This thing STILL has an effect on me all these years later. It was probably around 9. 45pm when we saw it. We had made tea with a little camping stove, and I seem to remember that we were talking about school and boys. There was a boy at home that I was very interested in, and Babs wanted to know all about it. Neither of us had had boyfriends before at that point. It was still light. I seem to remember that it hadn't rained for ages, and the woods were very dry and crunchy, if that makes sense. The noise was so abrupt in the quiet of the woods that we both jumped up together. It was a kind of hissing. I don't know, I can't really remember. It was loud and sudden. We both looked over into the wood, and there it was.

I had been to see a horror film in Plymouth a few months before, a werewolf film with Peter Cushing. This was the first thing I thought when I saw it, I thought it was the werewolf. The face wasn't really like an owl, thinking back. It was like a frowning, sneering black thing. The eyes were burning, glaring and reddish. I don't know if it had fur or feathers, but it was gray and grizzled like the werewolf in the film. I remember hearing Barbara start to laugh, but it was a sort of choked, panicked laugh. Tony Shiels did us a great favour by playing down our fear when he talked about what happened to us later on. I think when we saw him that day on the beach that he must have known how upset we really were.

I knew right away it was REAL. It wasn't like a monster in the films that look rubbery and fake. It just looked like a very weird, frightening animal, as real as any animal in a zoo. It looked flesh and blood to me, but there is simply no way it could have been. It couldn't have been something that was born and grew. No way. I have no idea what it was. My head hurts even thinking about it.

It was more frightening than I can really describe. I remember blood rushing to my head, making it pound. It just stood there for what might have been a minute. I'm not really sure how long. Barbara was laughing, but it was more like a sort of breathless hysterical sound by now. I wanted to run but couldn't. It was so EVIL, intensely so. When it moved, that nearly did it, I nearly started running. It's arms or wings or whatever went out, and it just rose up through the trees. Straight up through the evergreens, it didn't flap, it didn't make a sound. Then, weirdly, I thought 'costume' for the first time, because the legs looked wrong. They looked like a kind of grey trouser material, certainly unnatural. I can't be entirely sure now. And then the feet. Black, hooking things. I have no idea how it had managed to stand up on them. They were like an earwig's tail-piece.

It's difficult trying to remember exactly what happened next. The wood was quiet, but it felt as if it, the thing, could appear again at any second. I think I had nearly fainted at one point. Babs was the same. We were shaking like leaves. I was thinking that someone was going to come out of the woods laughing at their trick, but really I knew that it couldn't possibly have been a trick. On one level, my mind simply wasn't accepting it. It still doesn't in a way. That's how I got over it, I think. By pretending that it hadn't really happened. As I mentioned earlier, in some ways I lost a lot of years to it. Somehow, shaking and crying a bit, we got packed up. That was the worst time, waiting for it to come back. I don't think that I could have coped seeing it again. My mind was POUNDING, ballooning. I don't know how it could have disappeared like it did. The woods weren't that thick. Not thick enough to hide what I can only think of as a monster. I know that sounds silly, but it is perhaps the most apt way to describe it. It seemed to just vanish, like a ghost.

We were originally going to walk back to Babs' home, near Gweek, but it was pretty much dark by now. Obviously as an adult you question why you stayed out, but that's what we did. We moved camp to a place where the woods were thinner, as I recall. I didn't sleep a wink, and neither did Babs I suppose. Yet somehow I knew it was gone for good. The atmosphere was lighter somehow, there were bird noises coming out of the trees, calls and the like. The night crawled by, and eventually it started to get light. We made tea at about six or so, and went for a walk down on the beach around nine. We met Tony Shiels, and told our story.

I really don't know why I decided to write all this down, after so many years. As I have said, someone close to me thought that I should come clean. Actually, doing so has affected me less than I thought it was going to. Reading over it, I feel a little embarrassed. It doesn't seem possible now. I have no idea why or how it happened. I never expect to.

I moved with my family from West Hoe in Plymouth in 1980 to Surrey, and then on to Pembroke to work in a creative role in 1989. I believe that what happened in July '76 shaped my life for years afterwards.

My good friend Barbara emigrated with her husband to Australia in 1987. I haven't spoken to her in many years, but I think that I would hear if anything had happened.

That's about it, really. For what it's worth, I haven't been to Cornwall since I was a teenager. Whatever happened that July is firmly in the past, and I intend to leave it there.

I know exactly what she means!

Our bad experiences with psychic backlash continued apace throughout the year 2000. Toby my old dog, to whom this book is dedicated, and his two feline friends Isabella and Carruthers all died suddenly within a month of each other. Despite a string of media appearances and successful books we were dogged with financial and emotional problems and by the end of the year we had definitely had enough. On New Year`s day, together with two very powerful witches from Yorkshire, I took part in a nine hour ritual to break the spell once and for all. . At the time of writing at the very end of January 2001 the spell seems to be working but one thing is certain.

Although it is certain that the story of the Owlman of Mawnan ain`t over yet, my investigations into His Owliness ended with writing this chapter. I await further developments with interest but like Sally G my involvement "is firmly in the past" and I too firmly intend "to leave it there".

Contributed by: Johnathan Downs
The Centre for Fortean zoology 

This is a picture of Mothman which is the work of and copyrighted by: Bill Asmussen's Hominid Artwork and would be quite similar in appearence to our UK's Owlman

If you have any information regarding these or any other sightings, then you may contact us: Here