Unexplained
Reports of a headless, winged creature chilled the countyé
Though Kent has seen its fair share of paranormal incidents, one of the most bizarre sightings occurred on a cold, winter’s night in 1963.
It was late on 19 November, and Sandling Park was shrouded in darkness.
A group of four young men turned on to the lane that ran alongside the park, laughing and chatting as they made their way home.
Walking along the path, recalling the night’s fun, were 17-yearold John Flaxton and 18-year-old Mervyn Hutchinson, plus two other friends.
The group had just left a party and were in high spirits. But the boys’ happy mood was soon unsettled, when something strange and unearthly suddenly appeared in the sky.
It was a glowing, oval-shaped object descending from the dark clouds.
Measuring a few metres in diameter, the bright, almost golden orb hovered noiselessly above a field.
The teenagers stood transfixed as the object slowly disappeared from sight. The friends were spooked. ‘We should leave,’ one said. The other three agreed but no sooner had they started to hurry away than the orb appeared once again.
This time, it seemed locked on to them. It moved when they moved, stopped when they stopped.
This continued for a few minutes before it vanished behind some tall trees.
Growing increasingly anxious, the group stood in disbelief.
Then, suddenly, they were startled by a frantic rustling and snapping of twigs in the bushes close to the trees where the orb had disappeared.
John Flaxton reported afterwards that he felt a cruel, cold fear grip his body, as did his friends.
Then, from out of the bracken emerged a bizarre, terrifying shape.
The boys said they were confronted by an almost human-looking creature, standing upright on two legs with large webbed feet, and roughly 5ft tall.
But that wasn’t the most disturbing detail...
‘It didn’t seem to have any head,’ Hutchinson said after the ordeal, ‘and there were huge wings on its back... like bat wings.’
The bat-monster began erratically waddling towards the terrified teenagers, who suddenly snapped out of their horrified trance – and ran as fast as they could.
Arriving frantic and breathless at the nearest police station, the boys tried to share their story with officers.
But the police were sceptical, and dismissed the boys’ claims, assuming they’d had a little too much fun at the party that night!
Had the friends seen a UFO that night? Was the bat-monster an alien visitor?
Two nights later, a man named Keith Croucher reported seeing a glowing, egg-shaped object in the night sky.
It was hovering over a local football field, not far from where John Flaxton and Mervyn Hutchinson and friends had encountered the freakish, bat creature.
Another local, John Mcgoldrick, was fascinated by the reports of UFOS and alien bat-men – and, on 23 November, ventured into the Sandling Park woodlands with a curious friend, hoping to encounter the beast themselves.
While they didn’t run into a bat-beast, they did discover weird footprints measuring
The monster waddled towards the terrified teenagers…
24in long and 9in across.
They also came across foliage that looked as if it’d been flattened by something very heavy. An alien spacecraft, perhaps? The Press were swift to report the story of the ‘batbeast of Kent’, and even followed Mcgoldrick into the woods on 11 December.
Sadly, the expedition found nothing, and interest in the stories faded – until the 1970s, when ufologist Chris Wolfe began his own investigation.
However, after interviewing Flaxton and surveying the site of the incident, Wolfe concluded that the group had seen an ordinary crow, illuminated by the flashing of an electric train in the distance.
But many feel that this explanation is flawed.
There were also others who argued that the group had simply been spooked by a scarecrow.
But how could a crow appear to be 5ft tall? Or headless, with big webbed feet for that matter!
And, of course, scarecrows generally don’t move...
With no further sightings, the bat-beast of Kent remains a mystery to this day.
Still nobody can agree on whether it was an Earthborn creature, a visitor from another planet... or something else entirely.