Thirty-seven years ago today, a small town in Indiana served as the temporal and spatial gateway to the Midwestern hairy hominoid reports that would sweep across the hinderland of America in the 1970s. Momo (pictured below) was two or three years away (depending on what report you consider “first”), and the high strangeness of the ’77′s sightings was still around the time-span warp. Some events seem to have just the right names. It was almost sundown in the town with the opposite moniker.

May 19, 1969 – 7:30 p.m. CDT, near Rising Sun, Indiana, at a location outside the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lester Kaiser.

The Kaisers’ son George was walking through the farmyard on his way to a tractor, when he was startled to see a weird figure standing about 25 feet away.

“I watched it for about two minutes before it saw me,” young Kaiser said later. “It stood in a fairly upright position, although it bent over about in the middle of its back, with arms about the same length as a normal human being’s. I’d say it was about five-eight or so and had a very muscular structure. The head sat directly on the shoulders and the face was black, with hair that stuck out of the back of its head. It has eyes set close together, and a very short forehead. It was covered with hair except for the back of the hands and the face. The hands looked like normal hands, not claws.”

When Kaiser, who had been standing transfixed, moved, the creature made “a strange grunting-like sound,” turned, leaped over a ditch, and disappeared down the road running at great speed. Subsequently, investigators made plaster casts of footprints found in the dirt by the ditch. These casts show three toes plus a big toe.

From Chapter Three, “The Manimals,” pages 75-78, in Creatures of the Outer Edge by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman.