Have you ever heard of the Hexham Heads or Wolf of Allendale?
Now that Halloween is approaching you might want to clue yourself up because, well there's no easy way of saying this, a werewolf may be out there.
On 10 December 1904, we, the Hexham Courant, published a story with the title "Wolf at Large in Allendale".
The wolf committed a "great slaughter of sheep" on the moors above Hexham in the winter of 1904 and was believed to be an escapee from the private zoo of Captain Bain in County Durham.
A hunt quickly ensued among petrified locals thinking the wolf may move on from sheep and start attacking children.
After many weeks the drama soon came to a grisly end when the wolf was cut in twain by a Midland Railway express near Cumwhinton station on the Settle-Carlisle railway.
Too badly mutilated to be preserved, the wolf was beheaded and sent to the Midland Railway's headquarters at Derby.
For a week, the head of the Allendale wolf was displayed in the window of a taxidermist's shop in Derby before being mounted outside the Midland Railway's boardroom.
In 1936, the head was still there, but it has now vanished, and subsequent searches for it have been unsuccessful.
Now let's fast forward to the 1970s, when things start to get even creepier...
The last bit of the article (written by David Clarke I think) is pretty level-headed:-
"So should we all immediately drop what we’re doing and head to the hills?
Perhaps not just yet. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it remains the case that senior US ‘whistleblowers’ have been making similar allegations for decades but never managed to back them up with proof, asking us instead to believe their incredible stories based on trust in their credibility.
When pressed to produce evidence for their fabulous stories they often fall back on security oaths that prevent them from telling us what they know – or threats from the ‘Men In Black’.
Elizondo, who certainly doesn’t back his claims with definitive evidence, has already been proven to be unreliable – he is on record as promising that official disclosure about the existence of UFOs was imminent way back in 2018.
In Britain, Nick Pope, who worked for the MoD’s UFO desk for three years, broke ranks in 1996 to proclaim that ‘extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting Earth and that something should be done about it urgently’. Much like Elizondo, Pope claimed to have seen evidence in then secret files that convinced him that something bizarre, and potentially hostile, was visiting us.
But when in 2008 the MoD began to release those files, the ‘evidence’ was conspicuous by its absence.
Critics have noted that for a man who should know he has a struggle on his hands to be taken seriously, Elizondo hardly does his credibility any favours when he admits to some deeply weird beliefs that sometimes veer into the supernatural.
As well as his mention of the ominous floating green balls that he claims appeared on and off for seven years, he describes working telepathically with colleagues in so-called ‘group remote viewing’ to disturb the dreams of a terrorist thousands of miles away.
He also alludes to the idea that aliens are possibly angels or demons visiting Earth, and claims his former boss at the Defence Intelligence Agency – who he does not name – believed UFOs didn’t need further investigation as they were ‘obviously’ the work of the Devil.
Sceptic Mick West, who specialises in analysis of UFO videos, told the Mail that Elizondo’s bizarre anecdotes ‘suggests that he really believes a wide variety of unusual things that deeply involve a supernatural interpretation of reality not yet based on any verifiable facts’.
So are those who stalk the corridors of power – even in the West’s most powerful defence and intelligence agencies – just as prone as the man in the street to being gullible about flying saucers and little green men?
Without concrete proof – the ‘smoking gun’ that remains elusive in the UFO world – it seems that might well be the case.
After all, even Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who led the RAF to victory in the Battle of Britain, believed in fairies and insisted that UFOs came from Mars and Venus. It looks like we can wait a little longer before we press the ‘Invasion Earth’ panic button."