The strange tale of Clarita Villanueva

When I was a kid, I was big fan of books with names like Strange True Tales of the Supernatural and World of the Weird.  These books often had seriously nightmare-inducing cover illustrations, stories that were (to a twelve-year-old, at least) pantswettingly terrifying, and that important little word on the spine: "Non-fiction."

I still enjoy many of those stories, all these decades later, but now it's solely for their entertainment value.  (I've recounted a number of them here, as long-time readers of Skeptophilia know.)  Some of the most memorable ones have all of the hallmarks of a great Tale For Around The Campfire -- a scary monster or ghost, an innocent victim, brave people trying to combat the forces of evil and bring order back to the world.  

One of the ones of that ilk that I still recall to this day is the story of Clarita Villanueva.

According to the best-known version, Clarita was a young Filipina girl in her upper teens, living in poverty in Manila in 1951.  One night in May, she was found on the street by a policeman, having an apparent seizure.  The policeman took her to the local jail to "sleep it off" (you have to wonder why the words "seek medical attention" didn't occur to him).  But during the middle of the night, the girl began to shriek, claiming that a "bug-eyed man" wearing a hooded black cloak had floated through the bars and was biting her.  The policeman ran to her cell, and found the girl writhing on the floor, and bite marks -- surrounded by saliva -- were appearing on her arms, and in one case, on the back of her neck.

Whatever was biting her, though, was invisible to everyone but Clarita herself!

The policeman got the girl calmed down, and summoned the medical officer on duty in the jail, one Dr. Lara.  Dr. Lara arrived just in time to see the girl go into hysterics again, this time saying that the bug-eyed guy in black had returned, this time bringing a friend.  The doctor, too, saw bite marks appear on her skin.

The doctor, in an understandable state of fear, had the girl transferred from jail to a local hospital, where he saw to it that her wounds were treated.  She gradually relaxed, and the attacks weren't repeated.  She remained at the hospital for six weeks, gaining strength, and her fear of the strange creatures diminished.  Eventually, she was released, and (as far as the story tells) led a completely normal life thereafter.

The reason for the attacks, and who the mysterious creatures were, were never explained.

So, anyway.  See why this one scared me?  Everything about it is classic backbone-shivering horror, even down to the fact that no one ever figured out who her attackers were.  But now, fifty-odd years later, I've come to think of this as the perfect example of why skeptics should not rely on anecdotal evidence.

Because if you do a search for "Clarita Villanueva," you'll come up with (literally) hundreds of different versions of the tale.  The one I've related was the one popularized in those books I was so fond of as a child, but it's not the only one.

You have your religious versions.  Those seem to have been launched by a Christian evangelistic minister named Lester Sumrall, who had worked in Manila and probably heard the story there, but who claimed he actually saw, and treated, the girl.  In his version, Clarita Villanueva was a prostitute whose mother had been "a fortuneteller by vocation... holding seances, communicating with the dead, and using clairvoyance to predict to sinful people what they could expect in the future."  In his account, Clarita was not just being tormented by the monsters, she was (more or less) possessed by them; at one point, she shouted out "in a cold and inhuman voice" at one of her jailers, "You will die!" and the guy obligingly dropped dead four days later.  Dr. Lara finally called in a minister -- in Sumrall's original version it was Sumrall himself, but in others it's a Catholic priest -- and the minister after a "three-day confrontation with the devil inside her" expelled the evil spirits, and she fell to her knees with a smile and said, "The evil one is gone."

Then you have the "Reptilian Alien" version of the story, in which Dr. Lara is female (her first name is given as "Marianna"), doesn't work for the jail but for the hospital where Clarita ended up, and the creatures are "interdimensional aliens from another world."  Cautions are given that these extraterrestrials are "non-emotional creatures intent on performing acts that are considered by humans as evil or malicious."  In this version, no religious folks of any kind were involved; the attacks subsided on their own, presumably when the aliens decided that unwashed human doesn't taste all that good, and buggered off to their own "dimension."

A third version takes a psychic angle on the whole thing.  Here, Clarita Villanueva was a vagrant who was arrested for living on the street, and only experienced the seizures and attack (or whatever they were) once she was already in jail.  It occurred in 1952, not 1951, as the other versions claimed, and the attending doctor was male again -- "Dr. D. Mariano Lara."  In this version, she also was given an exorcism, but before that was apparently receiving information as well as bite marks from the creatures -- prior to the exorcism she was speaking in English, but afterwards didn't understand the language at all!

And so on.  Some versions call her "Carlita," "Carla," "Carlotta," or "Clara," not "Clarita."  The girl's age varies from 15 to 23.  The outcome differs wildly, from her returning to her poverty-stricken existence, to her finding Jesus and devoting her life to religion.  Even the inimitable Jack Chick took a crack at the story, in his bizarre über-Christian "Chick Tracts:"

All of this is why anyone who is interested in more than a quick scary story -- i.e., fiction -- needs more than anecdote to be convinced.  Human memory being what it is, not to mention the human capacity for embellishment and outright lying, a story by itself proves nothing.  In order to believe something -- or even to determine if there's anything there to believe -- we need hard evidence, something beyond the vague reports of one, or ten, or even a hundred people.

And the problem goes deeper than that, because (of course) these aren't all independent reports.  A researcher, with adequate time and energy, might be able to track all of these versions backwards and see where they'd come from, developing (as it were) a cladistic tree for this odd urban legend.  Ultimately, we might find the Last Universal Common Ancestor (the urtext, if you prefer a musical analogy) of all of the versions of the Clarita Villanueva story, and see what form it took.  (Regular readers might recall that I wrote a few years ago about some anthropologists who published a lovely piece of research doing exactly that, creating a family tree for the story of Little Red Riding Hood.)

But even if someone did find out where the story started and what form it originally had, there's no guarantee that it was true in the first place.  There may have really been a girl named Clarita Villanueva who lived in Manila in the early 1950s and had some bizarre experiences; but if she did, my bet is that she was either epileptic or schizophrenic, and everything else about the story (including the bites on the back of the neck) were later additions to add a nice frisson to the tale.  The fact that it's still making the rounds, seventy years later, doesn't tell you anything about its truth or falsity.

As author Gary Taubes put it, speculations and assumptions do not become the truth simply because they are endlessly repeated.  And anecdotes, however much they are embellished, and however often they end up in "non-fiction" anthologies, remain tall tales without much in the way of real value to skeptics.  In science, we need more than just a good story to convince us.

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The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to scare myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, four and a half decades later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this. In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes.  He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

  

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to frighten myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, forty-five years later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this.  In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

**************************************

I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The strange tale of the disappearing soldier

I've been interested in the paranormal for a long time.  It started with my uncle's scary stories about the feu follet and loup-garou, told in French, which were sufficient to scare myself and my cousins into the near pants-wetting stage, and yet which for some reason we demanded again and again.  Later I graduated to books with titles like Twenty Terrifying True Tales of the Supernatural, Real Ghost Stories, and Bigfoot: Legend Come to Life.  I supplemented this with my fiction reading, including Lovecraft and Poe, and watching shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  (With all of this, it's no wonder that I developed serious insomnia as a teenager, an ailment that continues to plague me today, forty-odd years later.)

Anyhow, all of this is meant to underscore the fact that I've read a lot of supposedly true paranormal stories.  So it always is with a bit of pleasant surprise that I run into one I've never heard before -- something that happened yesterday, when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link telling the tale of Gil Pérez, the 16th century Spanish soldier who supposedly teleported from the Philippines to Mexico City.

The story goes like this.  In October of 1593, a man showed up in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, disheveled and disoriented.  He was questioned by authorities, and said that moments before, he'd been on guard duty, had felt dizzy, and leaned against a wall and closed his eyes.  He opened them to find himself in Plaza Mayor...

... but moments earlier, he'd been in Manila.

Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, where Gil Pérez appeared out of nowhere [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The authorities at the time were deeply Roman Catholic, and anything like this smacked of witchcraft, so they locked him up, charging him with desertion and consorting with the devil.  Pérez said that he had no idea how he'd gotten there, but it had nothing to do with Satan -- and as proof, he said that they had just gotten word that day of the assassination of Philippine Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas by Chinese pirates, and that proved that he'd just been in Manila.

Of course, back then, there was no way to verify such information quickly, so poor Pérez was confined to the jail for two months until a group that had come from Manila showed up in Mexico City.  Sure enough, one of the people in the group not only recognized Pérez, but said his uniform was the correct one for the Philippine guard -- and Pérez had indeed been there, on duty, when Dasmariñas was murdered two months earlier, but had disappeared without a trace and had not been seen since.

At that point, the authorities let Pérez go, he joined the Philippine delegation, and eventually found his way back home.  Why the charges of black magic were dropped is unknown; after all, even if he hadn't deserted, there was still the problem that he seemed to have gone halfway around the globe in seconds.  But maybe they were just as happy to make him someone else's problem.  In any case, what happened to Pérez afterwards is not recorded.

The problem, of course, is that these sort of folk legends usually have a rather unfortunate genealogy, and that certainly is true here.  The version of the story I've related above comes from a 1908 issue of Harper's Magazine, written by American folklorist Thomas Allibone Janvier.  Janvier said he got the story from a 1900 collection of Mexican tales by Luis Gonzáles Obregón, and Obregón said that he learned of it from the 1609 writings of Philippine Governor Antonio de Morga, who said that "Dasmariñas's death was known in Mexico the day it happened," although he didn't know how that could possibly be.

Others have noticed similarities between the tale and Washington Irving's story "Governor Manco and the Soldier" which appeared in Tales of the Alhambra in 1832.  So it's entirely possible that an offhand, and unsubstantiated, comment by de Morga was picked up and elaborated by Obregón, then picked up and elaborated further by Janvier, with some help along the way from Irving's (fictional) tale.

In any case, it's an intriguing story.  I'm always more fond of these open-ended tales -- the ones where everything gets tied up neatly in the end always seem to me to be too pat even to consider accepting them as real.  But this one -- Pérez's mysterious disappearance and reappearance were never explained, he vanished into obscurity afterwards, and nothing more came of it -- those are the ones that captivate interest, because that's usually the way reality works.  It's why my all-time favorite "true tale of the supernatural," the story of Nurse Black, still gives me the shudders every time I think about it.

Not, of course, that I think that the story of Pérez is true; it's simply that the more realistic a tale is, the more likely I am to be interested in it.  And after all of these years steeped in the paranormal, to find one I'd never heard of before was a lot of fun.

Cryptid menagerie

It's been a busy week, here in the cryptozoological wing of the Skeptophilia research offices.  We're currently tracking three stories about alleged spine-chilling, bizarre, non-human life-forms, and we're not even talking about the cast of Jersey Shore.

First, we've got a story from The Examiner about an old man in the Philippines who was attacked by a shape-shifting monster called an "aswang" or "manananggal," which attacks humans and eats their livers.  The still photographs show, lo and behold, an old man being confronted by someone who looks like he's wearing one of the rubberized monster heads from the movie Alien:

So, anyway, the story goes on to say how there's a video of the incident but it "hasn't been released yet," which sounds kind of fishy right from the get-go.  Also a bit sketchy is the lack of detail; the victim wasn't named, although it does say that the victim's brother "José" filmed the entire incident.  Which raises the question of why he didn't run to help, instead of standing there with a video camera while his brother had his liver eaten.

Then, I noticed that the guy who went to the Philippines to gather information for the report was none other than Blake Cousins, who appeared in Skeptophilia just last week -- as the "investigative reporter" who did the video clip about the 12-year-old boy from Australia who made himself an "Atlantean copper headband" that allowed him to talk to spirits from inside the Hollow Earth.  In fact, even the site Phantoms and Monsters, not generally the most skeptical of sources, called this story "possible buffoonery."  (Here)  So given those two strikes against it, this story is almost certainly a non-starter, especially considering the credibility Cousins has, or the lack thereof.  So let's move on to our next story, which takes us to the dry hillsides of Utah.


The UK Daily Mail is reporting on a story about some hikers near Ben Lomond Peak in Weber County, Utah, who saw... a goat man.

In fact, one of them, Coty Creighton, took a photograph of Goat Man:

Creighton told reporters at the Utah Standard Examiner that he "...thought it was a deformed goat. It was clumsy, not nimble…  He was on his hands and knees, crawling along the mountainside."

In a separate communication with Salt Lake City's CityWeekly.Net, Creighton said, "I was racking my brain trying to figure out what other type of animal it could be.  An albino bear?  A honky Sasquatch?"

At this point, I had to stop for a moment to clean the coffee spatters off my computer screen.

Creighton, however, got out binoculars and took a closer look, and found out that it was none of those things.  It was...

... a guy in a custom-made goat suit.

Creighton stared at the guy for about five minutes, and at some point, the Goat Man realized he was being observed, and stopped moving -- and just stared back.  Creighton got creeped out, and said he wasn't going to get any closer, because "Something was definitely off with that guy."

I'd say that's a major understatement.  So if you're going to be in Utah any time soon, make sure you keep your eyes peeled for Goat Man.


Our third report comes all the way from the Moon, via MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and the site Ghost Theory.  (Source)  It shows a still photograph, and a video clip, of a pulsating, cloudlike "anomaly" hovering over a lunar crater.  Scott McMan, of Ghost Theory, writes, "The person who submitted the video seemed as confused as I was because he could only make the following statement: 'I don’t know what to make of this object.'"  People who've analyzed the video say that the "entity... moves in a lifelike fashion."

Well, I'm a bit at a loss myself, but my initial reaction is that it looks like a stationary object whose image is being distorted by the passage of the light rays from it through the Earth's atmosphere.  This effect, similar to the heat shimmer you see above a hot roadway on a clear day, is caused by light bending as it passes through media with different indices of refraction, warping the image, and (if the medium itself is moving) making it appear that the object itself is moving.  I'll admit, though, that it's pretty bizarre-looking.  And even though I strongly suspect that this has a perfectly natural explanation that has nothing to do with an alien entity moving in a lifelike fashion, at least it doesn't shout out "hoax!" to me.

Which is more than I can say for the "aswang" photographs and the Utah Goat Man.