*(Emily Wayland / Singular Fortean Society)*

Updated 8/18/19

Three reports that came out of Chicago in 2011 were eerie precursors to the recent slew of flying humanoid sightings. The sightings were reported to UFO Clearinghouse that same year.

The first sighting was inadvertently captured by a man taking a photograph of a local landmark.

I'm from the southwest suburbs of Chicago. My wife and me travel into Chicago to take care of some business. On the way back we took a cruised thru my old neighborhood just to check it out and to see what has changed.

We were going down 63rd St. going west and were coming up to Pulaski Rd.

I then remembered about a giant Indian that is on the roof of this tobacco store (that's what it was when I was a kid it's something else now) on the northwest corner of 63rd and Pulaski Rd in Chicago. One time when I was a kid I was on the CTA bus going east on 63rd St. when the bus came to a stop at Pulaski. I was looking out the window and notice three teenage girls standing on the sidewalk right next to the bus. Two of the girls were pointing up at this Indian trying to show the third girl something and they all giggling. So I was wondering what they pointing and laughing at.

So some time went by and then one day I went to the currency exchange right over there. On the way out I decided to walk over by the Indian to the same spot where I seen these girls laughing and pointing to see what it was they thought was funny. Well it turns out that if you look at the Indian from this exact spot his left thumb is sticking out and it looks like his thing is sticking out his pants. So when my wife and me were going by this Indian on August 22nd 2011 at about 2:00pm I decided to get a picture of this. I just got new smartphone and I wanted to check out how good the camera would work. So I got out of the car and went to the spot and took about four pictures of this Indian. So we left and went home and later on that night I went to look at the pictures I took. When I was checking these photos out, in one of the pictures I notice the object that was on the backside of Indian. At first I didn't think nothing of it, I figured it was plane or something. But just for the heck of it I enlarged it. It looked something similar to a bird or a bat, but then again it doesn't. So I have no idea what it could be. I was reluctant to send it in because I figured there was some explanation for what it is. But then I thought it still qualifies as UFO, because I never seen anything like it before and don't know what it could be.

An enlargement of the above picture that shows the winged object relative to the statue.

Recent analysis of this photograph by Emily Wayland leads her to believe that it could very well be a butterfly flying through the frame when the picture was taken.

A question mark butterfly. (Emily Wayland) — A question mark butterfly. *(Emily Wayland)*

“I think this photo has a good chance of being a butterfly,” she said. “Notice the wing shape and coloration compared to a comma or question mark butterfly. It could be forced perspective making a relatively close object appear far away that has caused a butterfly to be mistaken for the Mothman.”

The fact that the photographer didn’t see the object when he took the picture makes sense since a butterfly fluttering past would be unlikely to arouse suspicion, and its relative blurriness was in all likelihood due to the camera focusing on the statue, she added.

The second report details an encounter with a glowing-eyed creature fond of peeping through people's windows.

These are the events as they happened on Friday, September 30, 2011 in the area around Miller Park in the University Park neighborhood in Chicago , Illinois . Approximately 1 block from the main campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Things began like any normal Friday night, I and a couple of friends were going to go out to have a few drinks at a local bar. As I got to my apartment, I jumped into the shower to start getting ready while my roommate went to her room to get ready. I finished and walked out of the bathroom to my room and started to get ready to head out for the night.

As I started to get dressed I heard my roommate scream loudly, I dropped what I was doing and ran to her room to see if she was alright. I walked in to see her cowering in the corner of her room, white as a ghost and shaking. She was babbling hysterically, saying that something was looking in at her from the window. I looked toward the window and didn’t see anything but the light coming from the other apartments across the court yard. I asked what she had seen and tried to tell her that she might have been mistaken, we live on the third floor of a five story apartment building and there is nothing outside the window but a 30 foot drop straight down to the courtyard below.

My roommate was hysterical and scared out of her wits; I took her to the living room and sat her on the couch. I then went to my room to put on a robe or a nightshirt on since I was only in my underwear. My roommate didn’t want to be left alone and actually followed me to my room and waited there as I put on a robe and joined her in the living room. After about 20 minutes of calming her down, she finally told me what she had seen in her window.

She stated that she was getting dressed and when she turned to face the mirror on her dresser, she saw a pair of orange eyes staring at her from the window. She turned around to see two brightly lit orange eyes staring out at her; these eyes were attached to a creature that was staring back at her through the window. My friend lost it and started screaming hysterically and backed herself into the corner. She said she was filled with this overwhelming feeling of complete and total terror, she felt like the creature was looking at her as though she was prey. She said she felt like a rabbit that was about to be pounced upon by an eagle.

I tried to rationalize with her what she had seen, telling her it could have been an optical illusion, or maybe it was the jitters from a week of hard studying. She dismissed everything, saying that she had seen what she had seen. As I sat there comforting her, my cell phone rang from my room. I got up and ran to my room and snatched it from my dresser top and answered it. It was my boyfriend and one of his buddies and they were talking a mile a minute, it sounded like they were out of breath, as I tried to get him to slow down, I walked past my roommates open door and to my absolute horror, I saw…a pair of glowing red eyes, looking through the window right at me!!

They stared at me for about 3-4 seconds before what ever it was abruptly left. Like my friend, I totally lost it and screamed at the top of my lungs and sprinted to the living room. My boyfriend was now screaming into the phone “What’s wrong, what’s wrong!”

Within 2 minutes, he and his best friend were pounding on the door to our apartment, followed shortly thereafter by one of our neighbors who had heard us screaming.Once we assured the neighbors that we were fine and that they did not have to call the CPD for us, we shut the door and I immediately lost it when my boyfriend held me.

We told him what my roommate had seen in the window and that what ever it was had come back again, that’s when I had seen it. He then began to tell us that he and his buddy were on their way to our apartment to pick us up when they had seen what they describe as a large bat with large glowing eyes. It was perched on top of a basketball hoop in the neighborhood park. They stated that it saw them and had alighted into the air with an audible whoosh.

He states that there were about 6 people in the park and all of them had seen it when it had taken off. He states that there was no way anyone could have missed it, it was about 6-7 feet tall, dark grey to black and those eyes glowed with the intensity of two glowing embers.

He says that they saw it easily when it took off and headed away from the park due to both the lights of the city as well as the nearly full moon that night. They lost sight of the creature after about 5 seconds, that’s when he picked up the phone and called me. He says that when they heard me start screaming, they sprinted the block and a half to the apartment.

Needless to say, none of us went out that night and my boyfriend and his buddy stayed with us through the weekend. My roommate refused to go back to her room till it was well after daylight, she closed and locked the window and drew the blinds shut. She says that it’s the only way that she felt secure to be in there after dark.

I’m still weary about coming home or going out after dark; even though I know I have to do it for both school and work. I hope that what ever it was, was sufficiently scared off by two insanely screaming college students and that I hope that I NEVER see it again. I don’t think that neither I nor my roommate will ever be the same again after this.

There is one interesting fact; my boyfriend told me when I saw him on Tuesday that a few students around the campus (UIC) had been talking about a large bat that some people had seen on Friday night. A lot of the people who spoke about it were spooked by it. I never figured that anything like this would or could be seen in a city as large as Chicago , or a campus as busy and bustling as UIC.

It totally makes me wonder what it truly was and if it meant us an harm.

The same sense of overwhelming fear felt by this witness was reported in the very similar case from April of this year, and the glowing eyes is a common thread in sightings of flying humanoids, including the other recent reports from Chicago. Overall, descriptions of the creature and its interactions with witnesses is remarkably consistent among all reported instances of contact.

The first of the above reports took place approximately 12 miles away from the more recent sightings, and the second was around 6 miles. So far, all of the reported cases from 2011 to present have taken place along the eastern edge of Chicago, within a few miles of Lake Michigan.

A third sighting of a similar creature took place in Washington Park near the University of Chicago on October 14, 2011.

I am currently attending university in Chicago, Illinois and I wanted to respond to the informational flyers about recent events involving the large bat-like creatures. I was enjoying an evening with my girlfriend and taking a well deserved break from my studies. We decided to go out and enjoy the unusually warm weather that we were having and go for a walk. As we walked toward a community park near the campus, we were talking about our classes when a commotion amongst a group of people caught our attention. As we looked toward the group of about 4-5 people, something caught my eye and I looked up to see this thing fly overhead.

It looked like a man; it looked like a man with wings! He flew about 10-12 feet above us and was perfectly silhouetted against the evening sky. In all honesty, it looked like an immensely oversized Sugar Glider, the kind I would see back home in Tasmania . It had the rough shape of a sugar glider, but its eyes were nothing like the soft eyes of a glider. They glowed red! We saw it for about 4 seconds before it disappeared from view. At first I thought I saw a man in a hang glider, but it was those bloody eyes that made me thing otherwise!

I at first thought of ringing someone, but I didn’t want them to think I had gone crazy. To say that I was Gobsmacked would have been an understatement.

This report shares the general shape of the creature from the modern sightings, along with its red, glowing eyes.

To report a sighting reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

You can view a timeline of the sightings so far here, and an interactive map here.

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Recent Flying Humanoid Reports in Chicago Reminiscent of 2011 Sightings