Recently Monster Quest aired an episode about humanoid and "monster" bird sightings, mainly in Mexico and California.(Terror in the Skies.) It was an all right episode; though why they threw in that poor dead skinless,diminutive creature is a mystery. The connection between teeny monkey-like critter and large flying creatures is a very thin one.
Sometimes Monster Quest thinks it's a good idea to bring on a skeptic, and this episode had debunker "skeptic" Joe Nickell. He of the Owl Theory. (Nickell is famous for his explaining away Mothman, Flatwoods and the Hopskinville entities as misidentification of "owls.")
Nickell was not introduced as a skeptic, but as a "paranormal researcher" (or investigator, forget which. Either way...) While technically it's a true enough label, since after all, Nickell does "investigate" these things, it's also disingenuous. Anyone who is a member of CSI and writes for Skeptic Magazine is a skeptic, almost always a debunker, but not a paranormal researcher. He doesn't get to appropriate the term.
Monster Quest showed video of the weird gliding humanoid figures seen in Mexico and Santa Monica, California. Nickell decides to try out ways these things could be hoaxed, or, mistaken... so he gets himself lots of black balloons, and says, paraphrasing here, that "a celebration goes on, balloons get released, and people see things." My first thought, unless I'm missing something cultural, is what kind of "celebration" is it if there are black balloons?
He lets the balloons go, not a close match. Too spread out. He tightens the bunch of balloons; a bit better, but, still not good enough. He then tightens the balloons, getting them together in a few bunches, binding them tightly in black plastic, like giant Hefty bags. He releases that, and it bobs weirdly, slowly, heavily. . . Pretty close, Nickell decides. Mystery solved.
Another attempt to solve the mystery: analysis of footage in Mexico, and deciding that, based on the high boulders in the area, the thing was on a guide wire and the gliding humanoid was a gondola bringing something from the mines to somewhere else.
Okay, but it wasn't made at all clear if there were active mines, and if gondalas were used. Where was it going? Was there something at the end of this wire nearby that it went to? No idea. And how does this explain the sighting of a similar object in Santa Monica California?
So we didn't find out anything, except some people like to party with black balloons.
Here's a clip from the Monster Quest episode:
And here's a YouTube link (embedding disallowed) that shows a similar thing:"jet powered trash cans."
Now, that one is very interesting. No date given for this, but it seems like it's at least twenty years old. It's possible these "humanoids" are an improved version of the "flying trash can." The fact that the flying humanoids were seen in the same region; Northern Mexico and Los Angeles, is telling. Very possibly the government is testing some kind of drone/surveillance thing, maybe to do with the borders, who knows.
That doesn't answer the question of what happened to the police officer, who was very upset by the whole experience. Could a staged UFO event -- mind control -- be part of the flying trash can humanoid scenario? That's possible as well.
None of these ideas occurred to skeptic Nickell or others. There were either "true believers" or debunkers. Meanwhile, our skies are full of weird things, affecting us in very weird ways.
