Was The “HORRID LITTLE THING” An Alien?

Was The “HORRID LITTLE THING” An Alien?

By Bill Knell

If you have followed my articles you know I grew up on Long Island in the 1960s. My suburban town of East Meadow was just a twenty minute drive from New York City. I became interested in UFOs and the paranormal because those things surrounded me. The Island is filled with supernatural events and always has been. Well known places like the “Amityville Horror” house, the Montauk “Project”, “Mary's Grave”, Mount Misery, the Kissena Park “UFO landing”, the Queens Zoo “animal mutilations” and the historic “Noon Inn” occurrences tend to stand out, but those are just a drop in the bucket.

Every Long Island town has had its own share of notable UFO, paranormal and unexplained events. East Meadow was no different. Once I began speaking and doing interviews about these things on Long Island, I challenged people to try an experiment I often tested live. Find 10 random people and ask how many had UFO encounters or experiences with other unexplained phenomena. The result was almost always 7 out of 10.

At age nine I began reading nonfiction books about these subjects and learned the commonalities involved. Having that mental database was especially useful in the summer of 1966. I was age 10 and it seemed like stories of flying saucer sightings were everywhere. Our very own town pool, just two blocks from my house, had already been the scene of a major daytime UFO incident in 1965. Now people were reporting something new and even more terrifying.

It was around eleven at night when I heard our phone ring. I was in bed, but got up to see what was happening. My parents were watching TV in the living room and my mom got up to answer the phone in the kitchen. It was our neighbor, Mrs R. She lived in the house behind ours with our backyards separated by a fence. My mom quickly let our dog out into the yard, then turned on the backyard lights.

Mrs R told my mom that when she went into her kitchen she looked out her back window and saw a “horrid little thing”. She thought it might be someone planning to break into her house. By the time her husband and two teen boys got up to check it out, the thing was gone. My dad checked our yard and there was no one out there.

Mrs R later offered a more indepth description of her interloper as a “short, grayish, horrid goblin-looking sort of thing” when she came over to tell us about it the next morning. I wrote everything down so that I could include it in my personal journal and free monthly report of odd Long Island happenings. I had a few hundred subscribers. By that time the “Pennysaver” (a free local ad booklet) had already seen and published one of my other articles.

Over the next several weeks people in my area began to report similar sightings, but these went on for months. I heard about them from a few of my subscribers and some Nassau County Police Officers who sometimes stopped by our Volunteer Fire House. First responders were my best resource for information because they were trained observers who were out on the streets at all hours.

By the time I published my monthly report I had collected twenty-seven separate sightings of the “horrid little thing” first seen by Mrs R. Many of these encounters occurred in conjunction with the appearance of large, round, self-illuminated objects in the sky. Seven people also said they saw disc shaped objects hovering above their backyards or homes. All these sightings occurred between two and four in the morning in August 1966. All told, the incidents continued to be reported through December 1966 in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

Given how negatively the media treated witnesses to the pool incident, none who saw the strange creature had any interest in reporting it or the UFO sightings to Project Bluebook (official U.S. Air Force investigation into UFOs). A few called police thinking it might be a prowler, but no evidence ever supported that conclusion. Whatever the “thing” was, animals (dogs and cats) avoided it completely by hiding in basement window wells or wherever they could quickly find shelter.

Looking back on these incidents I would say that at least ten children and seven adults had evidence of long term alien abductions. Our area was suburban, but congested, so that didn't surprise me. The problem was that, at the time, I had a very limited database of knowledge about Alien Abductions. Even the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction report did not provide enough of a backstory to be especially helpful.

One thing that really caught my attention came from Mrs R's son. He was my age and we were friends. After I became interested in UFOs he backed off from me. Even before that he would go home anytime me and my other friends listened to a dramatised recording I had of “War Of The Worlds” by H.G. Wells. He also had a tremendous fear of doctors. He hated his required yearly health exam needed to attend school.

Another boy I knew lived in our neighborhood. We became friends in fourth grade. Once I became interested in UFOs he also backed off from me. He had strange dreams and was sure he saw friendly animals coming to play with him in the middle of the night. This is called “masking”. Aliens appear as friendly animals, or sometimes deceased relatives, to calm children down during examinations or implant sessions.

As with everything in life, I could close my eyes and ignore the world around me or choose to dig deeper and attempt to find the truth. I chose to dig and had the perfect starting point right in my own backyard.

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