Where are the Nightcrawlers?
In the first season of SYFY’s hit series Fact or Faked, the Paranormal Files, the team investigated the case of the “Fresno Nightcrawlers.”
The case was based on a piece of footage captured by a security camera in Fresno, California. The video shows a bizarre pair of creatures moving across the front lawn of a home. Both the creatures and their movements are very strange. The stick like beings move in a fluid fashion, but their knees appear to bend backwards. Analysis of the film footage revealed that the creatures were somewhere between three to three and a half feet tall.
Some people believe the creatures were alien in origin, others dubbed them a cryptid postulating that they were some type of ancient creature that had resurfaced. Stories referred to them as the “nightcrawlers” and the name stuck.
In keeping with the theme of the show, the Fact or Faked team made numerous attempts to reproduce the video and prove it a hoax, however, they had no success in replicating either the video or the creatures.
Sometime later, a second piece of film turned up. This clip was purportedly captured on the outskirts of Yosemite National Park.
Again, the footage shows two strange, stick like beings. This time, the creatures were moving along a hillside.
The videos of these creatures have fascinated many investigators. At first glance, the videos look like a hoax, and poor ones at that. The creatures are so surreal, one would expect that they are fabricated.
But closer examination of the footage and details reveals nothing but more questions.
As the Fact or Faked team discovered, replicating the beings and their odd movements is difficult and none of the standard hoax scenarios worked to explain how the creatures may have been fabricated. If someone did indeed creature the footage, it seems they went through a great deal of effort to do so. And to what end? No one involved sought to make money from the footage.
As if the case wasn’t puzzling enough, it became stranger when a series of photographs surfaced. The photos show statues, carved in wood, that closely resemble the Fresno creatures.
Nothing about the case has proven simple and the photos are no exception. Their origin, it seems, can not be verified. The pictures surfaced from a source in Florida who claimed there were merely passed on to him by a woman who lived in New Jersey. But the man passing the photos along claimed the pictures were taken elsewhere, not in either of the referenced states.
A report aired on television in Mexico displayed the photos of the wooden statues and pointed out their similarity to the Fresno “Nightcrawlers.”
The Mexican news story further stated that the creatures were related to Native American legends and that the strange beings had been living in the Fresno area since the days before humans.
The photos, as noted, could have been taken in Florida, New Jersey, or other points in the southern U.S. All signs however point to the pictures being snapped in California.
No recent videos have surfaced of the nightcrawlers, though they continue to fascinate those interested in paranormal topics. If they’re still out there, perhaps they’ll surface on a new piece of footage soon. In the meantime, we’re left to wonder, where are the nightcrawlers?