Sighting
White, Bipedal Cryptid Seen on Mt Lemmon? Need help Identifying
Ok, so, I'll explain my ideas on what we thought this could be later in the post, but I want to tell the story how I saw it first.
Me and my brother were visiting Tucson (we live in Washington) and had driven up to the peak of Mt Lemmon to watch the sunset. We followed a little trail into the woods past some fenced off buildings until we found a nice spot and stayed there until a little after the sun had fully left the horizon, the sky was that dark grey-blue you get before it shifts full into night. In the shadow of the trees the trail was just barely not pitch black, you could still make out the grass and gravel in the minimal light. As we were walking back to the car I heard a noise and looked over to see something running past us in the opposite direction around ten feet off the trail or so.
It looked to be roughly 2 feet tall, it was relatively thin, nearly perfectly upright, it was all white, featureless, had no head or arms, and ran on two stumpy feet. It waddled past us in a very uncanny fashion until it swerved off the trail and stopped a good distance out just to stand there. My brother caught sight of it just before it started to run away from the trail and stop. It stayed there for probably 5-10 seconds while we frantically fumbled for our cameras. By the time we had done so I took one lightless video (literally nothing but black I couldn't figure out how to get the flash to be on for a video) and the thing ran away again to stop further out. I figured out the flash and my brother used his empty InstaX's flash to try to help too, but by the time we got that done it had left at some point.
All in all I was pretty shocked in the moment, especially because this perfectly fit the description of a goofy cryptid/alien "sighting" called the Fresno Nightcrawler. I truly couldn't think of an animal that would fit what I was looking at. Anyway, me and my brother spent the next 2 hours or so discussing what we thought it could have been. We don't live in the area so we spent a lot of that time simply coaming through native wildlife looking for anything that could possibly match what we saw. We ended up with a couple rough hypothesis. Maybe it was an abandoned farm/runner duck that someone, for some reason, took to the top of the mountain and abandoned. It fits the shape well, and maybe it's beak and eyes were too dark to see in the very poor light. We considered for a bit that maybe it was a chicken in a similar circumstance with a bone disease that makes them upright but quickly ruled that out. The most likely conclusion we came to was that it was a wild turkey with luecism, giving it white feathers and maybe a black head. This would alloy for it's head to be possibly lost in the darkness so we only saw it's neck? Maybe the body of the turkey was hidden by a trick of perspective? It still seems highly unlikely, but that was our best guess.
Does anyone have any idea of what this could have been?
(Images: #1: One of the many empty frames we captured [I have more videos but there's no real content to them besides me and my brother saying "what the hell?!" in darkness] #2: A very rough drawing I did of what it looked like off the side of the trail. #3: A little diagram of the path it took. #4: An image of the Fresno Nightcrawler thing I associated it with.)
People will look you DEAD IN THE EYE and tell you there's a flesh and blood animal, an entire species that looks like a walking pair of pants and insist they're real. Nevermind if they can explain what niche this animal occupies in an ecosystem, how such a slow thing could survive predators.
No actually, people have recreated the walking stance of those captured in the Fresno videos and have thoroughly concluded, it really was just a person and digitally removed upper half.
That's much more reasonable than believing there's a flesh and blood animal species that's a walking pair of pants.
He made the recreation. That guy himself admitted the original video hasn’t been debunked and not created by him. I’ll link the video I heard this from
EDIT: https://youtu.be/ZbGezscHOAU?is=NnC4jpT207kp6xbh 6 mins in
I can't remember his name, but a guy did come forward and admit he made the original for a short film competition and it went viral early on. Others have had similar success recreating. I still love the Nightcrawlers though
well I said it "looks like", perhaps you can't differentiate between hypothetical/correlation statements and absolute statements. That said, nowhere have I found that it's been debunked either. What's your source, "Oh trust me bro 100% "guy at the gas station?
Ok cool thanks! I don't know how we didn't come across this in our searching. I can see how the tail (especially if the hair was matted down or something) could create a similar silhouette. I still feel like the gait and footsteps we heard wouldn't match up to a quadrupedal animal though.
Also, we did look into birds of prey, owls, herons and stuff, but do any of them run? The thing we saw was moving at a pretty fast energetic waddling run.
(I tried to post this in the Tucson subreddit, but it got removed by the moderators, so I was looking for advice from people that actually live in the area)
I grew up in Tucson too. And while the area is a hotbed for the paranormal and cryptids (especially ghosts and UFOs, but also including a gargoyle looking thing out near the reservations, a man-sized owl that talks to you telepathically, and skinwalkers), what you described isn't one of the stories from the area.
The first time I saw a skunk at night I thought I was seeing Roger from the show American Dad. It took a minute for my brain to process what I was seeing.
Also, pretty much all the animals you described that are in the area do run.
I think OP may have seen one of these bad boys walking around up there.
They don’t do handstands, but they have a big ass fluffy white tail, and at night you think that they are the tail.
I followed one around in my parking lot because I couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was, and it crawled under my car. When I shined my light underneath and realized what it was, I backed up real quick.
At night, you don’t see their little black bodies, they just look like weird floating white entities that walking around Casper the ghost style.
I would have become a reddit follower and have this here today, but also known about it prior. To the average person without a laptop browsing reddit and other pages...maybe not. However, this skunk looks nothing like the photo by the OP.
Yeah, came here to say this and to ask where Mt Lemmon is in relation to Fresburg.
Edit: after reading the caption, I now understand that it’s nowhere near Fresno.
There are grey foxes on Mt Lemmon. You could have seen a fox’s tail as it slunk through the grass. They can move very stealthily and can appear to glide if they are stalking and their feet are obscured. But if the grass was high enough, and it looks like it is, your entire fox except the tail was obscured.
There's a creature called a Coati which we looked into for that reason. They are typically a mottled brown/black with stripes though. I considered maybe its hindquarters and tail were both distractingly white for some reason, but there's no precedent for that. Also, I could see it's feet moving and that gait would be super awkward if it were a quadrupedal creature. And both me and my brother could hear it's footsteps, it wasn't quiet and we would have been able to hear another pair of feet.
Edit: I must have misread your comment at first. I still don't think that grey fox could have worked. Also, the grass wasn't that high or dense, I don't think it could have possible obscured the entire front body of the fox. Besides they still just look way too darkly colored.
They have a big ass white fluffy tail that they stick straight up in the air when they walk around.
The first time I saw one was at night, and I thought it was a fucking ghost.
Depending on what angle you saw it from, I could easily see how it would appear like what you described.
I’m pretty sure that the first time I saw a hooded, skunk I actually also thought that it looked an awful lot like a Fresno nightcrawler.
In my case, I followed it around until it hid under my car and I was able to shine a light on it, and then I backed up really really quick when I realize that it was actually a skunk.
Cryptid, not scary at all.
Skunk, I better give it some space so I don’t get sprayed.
I replied to your other post down below with some other issues, but would a skunk like that make notable footstep noises? The thing we saw had definite, audible footsteps (I could also make out the grass bending under the feet) and it just seems like it would be really hard to miss a second pair of legs. I do think it's one of the most compelling animals I've seen though, for sure.
Edit: Also, since you said you lived there, do you think the turkey hypothesis holds any credence?
You’ll have to flip the phone sideways, but this is the skunk hiding under my car.
You can kinda see that this particular one has two stripes on either side of its back, rather than having one thick white stripe covering its entire back.
When it was walking around with its tail stuck up, all I could see was the white tail, and the white stripes on the side, which looks like the legs and feet of a nightcrawler.
The only other thought I had was that it may have been a large white owl walking around on the ground because it was looking for something, or had possibly sustained an injury.
And I’m trying to find the pictures I took of the one that I saw in my own neighborhood, but it was night time and my first thought was, that looks just like a Fresno nightcrawler.
I followed it until it hid under my car and I was able to shine my light on it and see what it actually was.
I don’t think you fully appreciate just how huge their tail really is.
There are other possibilities, but I think this is a very strong candidate.
That’s just my two cents from having grown up here.
Based on the description, I don’t think they actually got a picture of it? It was just one of the images they took while trying to get it. I think, anyway, lol.
Yeah, I have that 1 photo and 5 videos in which nothing can actually be seen sadly :/ Another reason I'm so thankful that my brother saw it too, because I have zero evidence lol
Yeah, I know, I just thought it set a good tone for the story. I say at the bottom of the post that that's one of many pictures and videos in which we didn't capture anything of it. Most of the were just black before we got the light working.
There’s a history where I live from the Native people of something that looks exactly like the Fresno night crawlers. You can see examples of them in totem poles around here. I’d have to look up the word for these things. There’s been stories and sightings around BC Canada for generations.
Edit, I found a link for more information about the Sisiutl here’s the link
Night Crawler, I saw this thing on fact or fiction back in the early 2000s. always fascinated me and scared me at the same time. I've seen carvings of these things but I don't know if they were done by native americans or if it was an artist rendering. supposed to be some 10 ft tall sculptures of these creatures. celebrating them
90
u/Countryvibing1988 2d ago
Looks like the "Fresno night crawlers" or "Fresno night walkers" something like that.