Enfield Monster

 The Enfield Monster refers to reports of an unidentified creature around Enfield, Illinois, United States in April 1973. The reports were covered by the news media at the time, with some suggesting that it may have been caused by a wild monkey or an escaped kangaroo.

Sociologists cite this episode, used as a case study for a 1978 article on social contagion, as an example of collective behavior where a group or crowd can be affected by the spread of "group emotions" such as "panic, hysteria, collective visions, and extreme cases of suggestibility .”

News

At about 10:00 PM on the night of April 25, 1973, Henry McDaniel heard scratching at his front door. He looked outside and saw something he thought might be a bear. Taking his gun and flashlight, he headed outside into the strong wind and saw the creature between two rose bushes. He later said: “It had three legs, a short body, two small short hands and two pink eyes the size of flashlights. It was four and a half feet tall and grayish in color.” He later added that it was “almost like a human body.”

McDaniel fired four shots at the creature, one shot hitting it and causing it to let out a hiss "much like a wild cat" before fleeing toward a nearby railroad embankment, covering 50 feet in three bounds. McDaniel called local authorities, who discovered footprints in the soft ground near the house that McDaniel described as dog-shaped, with six pads. Police considered McDaniel to be "rational and sober" when he reported the incident. In a later press interview, McDaniel said, "If they find it, they'll find more than one, and they won't be of this planet, I can tell you that."

Investigators who interviewed nearby residents were told that Greg Garrett, a 10-year-old neighbor of McDaniel's, claimed he encountered the creature half an hour before McDaniel and that the creature stepped on his feet and tore his sneakers to shreds. The boy later told researchers at Western Illinois University that his message was a hoax "to tease Mr. M. and have fun with an out-of-town reporter."

Two weeks later, on May 6, McDaniel called radio station WWKI and claimed to have seen the creature again at 3 a.m. that day. Railroad trestles were being negotiated near his home, and McDaniel said, "I saw something moving on the railroad tracks and there it was. I didn't shoot at it or anything. It started down the tracks. It wasn't going anywhere."  A search party including WWKI News Director Rick Rainbow scoured the area later that day and reported observing an "ape-like" creature standing in an abandoned building near McDaniel's home. They claimed to have made a recording of the creature's screams and shot it before it could flee. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman investigated the case and the audio recording.

Two days later, the day after McDaniel was interviewed on local radio, the local press reported that police had been called to investigate reports of a shooting and arrested five young men from out of town who had come to Enfield to photograph the creature with shotguns. and rifles "for protection", the men claimed to have seen the creature. The White County Sheriff dismissed reports of this "monster hunting expedition" as exaggeration, saying the men were just "out drinking and raising hell", mentioning the monster only briefly during questioning.The men were charged with violating hunting regulations.

Reaction

The incidents were widely reported in the press at the time—appearing in newspapers across the state on April 27, 1973, and on May 7, there was an interview on radio station WGN, Chicago, and articles in the Chicago Daily News, Moline Dispatch, Champaign-Urbana Courier, and Alton Telegraph . There were earlier articles in the Carmi Times and an updated summary of the events appeared in the Reading Eagle of Pennsylvania in August 1973. After the arrest of five men who had come to hunt the creature, Enfield residents expressed concern that press coverage would lead to more "monster hunters" who might inadvertently shoot citizens or livestock.

It has been suggested that the creature may have been a kangaroo that escaped from a nearby zoo, which would explain the "three-legged" description, as kangaroos' tails look like a third leg. McDaniel was adamant that the creature "wasn't a kangaroo", having owned such a creature as a pet during his military service in Australia and noted that kangaroos have narrow faces and tracks that leave traces of claws. After media coverage of the creature, an Ohio man contacted a local newspaper and said the creature might be his pet kangaroo Macey, who had been lost or stolen a year earlier.

A few days after the event, United Press International quoted an anthropology student who suggested the creature might have been a wild ape, noting that such animals had been reported throughout the Mississippi area since 1941.

University studies

In 1978, Western Illinois University researchers led by David L. Miller investigated and analyzed the incident and published it as a case study of social contagion. The researchers found that there were no more than three first-hand reports that were subsequently exaggerated by news reports and local gossip into an "epidemic." According to the study:

In this area of ​​southern Illinois, it is not unreasonable to assume that Mr. M or the radio news crew actually saw the animal. The people we interviewed framed recent events in these terms. Their reports allowed for the possibility that large dogs, calves, bears, deer and wild cats were seen. Some images suggested that the catalyst for the monster reports was an exotic pet such as a monkey or kangaroo. Finally, some people tactfully suggested that Mr. M. had a notoriously overactive imagination and was probably shooting at shadows. In any case, we only interviewed one person who agreed with Mr. M's claim that he had actually seen a "monster from outer space."