Werewolf stories, p.2
Werewolf Stories, page 2
Sources:
Douglas, Drake. Horror! New York: Collier Books, 1966.
Spence, Lewis. An Encyclopedia of Occultism. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960.
Apuleius, Lucius (c. 125–c. 180)
Lucius Apuleius lived in North Africa around the middle of the second century. Although he wrote in Latin, he was very familiar with the popular Greek romances of his time. His passion for Greek philosophy expressed itself in a book of philosophical extracts, which included an essay on Plato and another on the theology of Socrates. Although he was very prolific, the books of Apuleius failed to enter the classical canon of authors because of his vocabulary and involved syntax; thus he is remembered primarily for his Metamorphoses, often referred to as The Golden Ass.
In a sixteenth-century engraving depicting a scene from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the protagonist, transformed into an ass, eavesdrops as an old woman tells the tale of Cupid and Psyche.
In nearly all of his prose, Apuleius displays a kind of obsession with the supernatural, Eastern religions, and magic. His Apologia is written as his legal defense for the accusation that he had cast spells on his wife and her family. In The Golden Ass, he describes the salves that wizards and Witches used to transform themselves into animals. In one episode, he tells of peering through a crack in a door and watching a Witch named Pamphile take off her clothes and remove from a chest several small boxes that contained various ointments:
She anointed her whole body, from the very nails of her toes to hair on the crown of her head, and when she was anointed all over, she whispered many magic words to a lamp. … Then she began to move her arms, first with tremulous jerks, and afterwards by a gentle undulating motion, till a glittering, downy surface by degrees overspread her body, feathers and strong quills burst forth suddenly, her nose became a hard crooked beak, her toes changed to curved talons. …
To Apuleius’s spying eyes, Pamphile was no longer Pamphile but had become an owl. As he continued to watch in astonishment, Pamphile uttered a “harsh, querulous scream, leaping from the ground by little and little” until at last “she stretched forth her wings on either side to their full extent and flew straight away.”
After such a demonstration, Apuleius decided that he must apply the ointment to his own body and become an owl, just as Pamphile had done. After he had thoroughly applied the salve to every part of his body, Apuleius began to flap his arms and eagerly anticipated the appearance of feathers that would signal his transformation into an owl. But to his great surprise and disappointment, his skin hardened into a leathern hide covered with bristly hair.
“The palms of my hands and the soles of my feet became four solid hoofs, and from the end of my spine a long tail projected. My face was enormous, my mouth wide, my nostrils gaping, my lips pendulous, and I had a pair of immoderately long, rough, hairy ears.” Instead of an owl, Apuleius found that the ointment had transformed him into an ass.
Sources:
Spence, Lewis. An Encyclopedia of Occultism. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960.
Balls of Light That Change into Creatures
It is apparent that that shape-shifting beings do not confine themselves to animal-human hybrids. Furthermore, it is possible that some UFO encounters might not be what they initially appear to be — that is, face-to-face confrontations with extraterrestrials from faraway worlds. We must consider that they may actually be carefully stage-managed, manipulated events. Perhaps our presumed aliens are, in reality, shape-shifters from our own world — entities that toy with our minds and assume the role and appearance of ETs.
When people ponder on the matter of extraterrestrial encounters, they typically think of so-called alien abductions and the Grays, those diminutive, large-headed entities with eerie, black eyes that are near-hypnotic in nature. Back in the latter part of the 1940s and the early 1950s, however, things were very different. Back then, the Grays were in the sights of precisely no one. That is not to say people weren’t encountering aliens; they most assuredly were. Back then, however, they were known as the Space Brothers. They were very human-looking aliens — sometimes slightly shorter in stature than us, and other times reaching heights of around seven feet. They sometimes wore long robes and other times wore silver outfits, similar to the clothing worn by fighter pilots. And their message was always the same: they were deeply concerned by our growing nuclear arsenals and wished us to lay down our weapons and live in peace and harmony with one another.
Among the more well-known of the contactees were George Adamski (whose 1952 book, Flying Saucers Have Landed, became a huge hit not just with UFO devotees but also with the public), George Van Tassel (who attracted significant FBI attention as a result of his UFO claims), and Frank Stranges (who maintained that human-like ETs had infiltrated the Pentagon). And then there were the lesser-known contactees, one of whom is central to the story related here. His name was Orfeo Angelucci. Although a fairly minor cog in the contactee wheel, Angelucci wrote a number of books that were well received, although they failed to sell in large quantities. They included The Secret of the Saucers and Son of the Sun. The nature of Angelucci’s experiences are not unfamiliar ones.
A Warning from the Shape-Shifters
According to the man himself — who was born in 1912 and worked for a flooring company in New Jersey — it was in 1946 that his otherworldly experiences began, which Angelucci reveals in Son of the Sun. Angelucci had a big interest in science and aviation and, in August 1946, launched a large balloon array into the skies of Trenton, New Jersey. The balloons were filled with different kinds of mold, the reason being to determine if mold was affected by exposure to different altitudes, temperatures, and air pressure. Angelucci further maintained that it was this experiment that caught the attention of the Space Brothers, who specifically chose him to further their agenda on Earth.
Although Angelucci claimed numerous encounters with the cosmic brothers (and sisters, too), it was not so much the encounters that were significant but the means by which the entities from the stars manifested before him. It is important to note that although Angelucci stressed that it was in the summer of 1946 that aliens first took note of his work with high-altitude balloons, it was not until 1952 that the cosmic ones met with him, face to face. By this time, Angelucci had moved to Los Angeles, California. The night of May 23, 1952, was when everything changed for Angelucci. The day had started out as a strange one, even before the ETs arrived on the scene. From the moment he woke up, Angelucci felt agitated and worried; he had a strange sense that the day was going to turn out very weird.
At the time, Angelucci was employed by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation — which, interestingly enough, had also employed ufologist George Van Tassel, albeit in the 1940s — and was working a night shift. It was shortly after midnight on the evening in question that Angelucci got in his car and drove home. He didn’t know it then, but he was about to have a most interesting detour and experience. It was as Angelucci crossed a bridge over the Los Angeles River — a bridge that was eerily empty of any other vehicles at the time — that he caught sight of a large, blue-colored ball of light that was clearly shadowing him. The circle of light, about the size of a beach ball, took a sudden turn and appeared directly in front of Angelucci’s car. Shocked to the core, Angelucci slowed his car to practically a walking pace and watched, amazed, as two small green balls of light emerged from the larger one and floated toward him.
Via telepathy, a booming voice informed Angelucci that he had indeed been watched ever since the day of that fateful balloon launch back in 1946. Angelucci was about to ask a question when the two balls closed in on each other and then merged into one larger green light. In mere seconds, the ball changed into the disembodied images of a man and a woman — as Angelucci came to learn, the floating heads of a pair of aliens who could pass for you or me. Like many contactees, Angelucci was asked — in a slightly bullying and patronizing fashion — to spread the word of the supposedly utterly benevolent ETs. “We’ll be back,” they said when all was over. The ball of light raced into the sky, and Angelucci, a nervous character at the best of times, raced home.
Angelucci’s numerous encounters were significant in the means by which the entities from the stars manifested before him as speaking balls of light.
The aliens were good to their word and arranged another meeting, again late at night, under Los Angeles’s Hyperion Avenue Freeway Bridge. Angelucci patiently waited and finally noticed a pair of small balls of green light approaching through the darkness. They were coming. The lights transformed into one single light, described by the man of the hour as something resembling a huge “soap bubble” that gave off a “pale glow.” A chummy chat about the universe, destiny, life, death, and even the afterlife followed — although the chat was a strange one, given that Angelucci found himself speaking to a ball of light that spoke back to him. Suddenly, the light was gone, and Angelucci was left to do nothing stranger than head back home.
Neptune warned Angelucci that our solar system had been the home to numerous earlier civilizations that had destroyed themselves, and that unless humans changed our dangerous ways, we would surely be next.
Three weeks later, under cover of overwhelming darkness, Angelucci was back at the bridge — as were the two green lights. This time, they shape-shifted into the forms of a man and a woman whose appearance, said Angelucci, put them both at around the age of 35. The male entity, named Neptune, warned Angelucci that our solar system had been the home to numerous earlier civilizations that had destroyed themselves, and that unless humans changed our dangerous ways, we would surely be next on the long and sorry list of casualties. It was for that very reason, Neptune said, that Angelucci should write books about his experiences and get the word out to the public — which he duly and faithfully did, right up until his death in 1993 at the age of 81.
Finally, it should be remembered that W. Y. Evans-Wentz, a native of Trenton, had a similar series of experiences in 1910, in Ireland, involving two supernatural entities that manifested out of a pair of glowing balls of light. Indeed, when one compares the 1910 Ireland case, described by Evans-Wentz in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, with Angelucci’s experience in 1950s-era Los Angeles, one sees very little difference between the two. They practically mirror each other. That both Evans-Wentz and Angelucci were born in Trenton, New Jersey, makes the story even more bizarre.
Bosco, the Mysterious Morphing Ball of Light
In July 1952, an encounter similar to those of Orfeo Angelucci was reported by a man named Karl Hunrath, who at the time lived in Racine, Wisconsin. It is a story that is told in a declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) file of 1953 titled “Karl Hunrath” and in an article from me titled “Kidnapped by a Flying Saucer?” On the morning of July 22, Hunrath complained to his local police department about something strange that had occurred just a few hours earlier, in the dead of night. Who knows what the cops thought of it all, but it basically went as follows.
In the early hours of a Sunday morning in July, Hunrath’s bedroom was flooded with a blinding white light. He immediately sat upright, and as his eyes finally adjusted to the light, he saw in the corner of the room a floating ball of light that had a diameter of about four feet. Hunrath could only stare in shock and awe. Then, something amazing and terrifying happened: the glowing ball transformed into a well-dressed man in black, and Hunrath found himself temporarily paralyzed.
The “man” proceeded to pump Hunrath’s right arm full of chemicals, which rendered him into a distinctly altered state of mind, and proceeded to tell Hunrath that he had been chosen to play a significant role in the alien mission on Earth. A very groggy Hunrath could only look on from his bed as the somewhat foreign-sounding, but perfectly human-appearing, alien told him: “I am Bosco. You have been chosen to enter our brotherhood of galaxies.”
The suit-and-tie-wearing Bosco advised Hunrath that the brothers from beyond were deeply worried by the warlike ways of humans and so determined to take action against the dastardly elements of humanity that wanted to spoil everyone else’s fun. There was not to be any The Day the Earth Stood Still–style ultimatum for one and all, however. Nope. The aliens wished to recruit sympathetic humans to aid their righteous cause. Perhaps more accurately, they wanted to get someone else to do their dirty work while they lurked safely in the shadows. As Hunrath quickly came to realize, he was now one of the chosen few. But there was more. Bosco, via what Hunrath said were “occult techniques,” downloaded into his mind countless amounts of data on how to build a terrible weapon that had the ability to destroy aircraft — specifically, the aircraft of the U.S. military, which the Space Brothers viewed as being just about as dangerous to world peace as the dastardly commies.
“I am Bosco, and that will be its name, too,” boomed the alleged alien, in reference to the device that he wanted Hunrath not just to build but also to deploy. Far too stunned and drugged to move, Hunrath could only watch in a mixture of befuddlement and shock as Bosco then turned on his heel and left for his — one might be inclined to assume after an experience like that — flying saucer. There was no amazing “Beam me up” type of exit for Bosco, however. For a ball of light that shape-shifted into a human-like extraterrestrial, Bosco had a very down-to-earth means of making good his departure: he pulled back the curtains of Hunrath’s bedroom window, clambered out, and vanished into the depths of the early-morning blackness of Hunrath’s front yard.
The now-declassified FBI file — titled “Karl Hunrath” — reflects that Hunrath had assured the police there was no way he would even consider building Bosco and letting it loose on the world. Special agents of the bureau were not quite so sure, however. The neighbors were soon complaining of strange noises coming from Hunrath’s garage day and night, and at least three or four times per week he had a visitor who stayed for hours on end. Checks of the man’s license plate by the FBI revealed the visitor was a local: Wilbur J. Wilkinson — a subservient, Igor-like lackey to Hunrath’s escalating Dr. Frankenstein. On a morning in early August, FBI agents made an unannounced visit to Hunrath’s place of residence, demanding to be shown what it was that he and Wilkinson were working on in the garage. Weapon or not, to the FBI it appeared to be nothing more than “a collection of radios, and speakers and cables strung together.” The somewhat bemused agents said their farewells and left. Had they been born into today’s world, they might just as well have texted their boss: “Hunrath/Bosco: WTF?”
Whether Hunrath may have anticipated getting such a visit is unknown. But we can be sure that Hunrath was now a man on a mission. And with the bureau boys snooping around, Hunrath had no choice but to head for pastures new. There was only one way he was going to achieve his goal of fame and fortune and do the right thing by brother Bosco. It was time to say “adios” to both Wisconsin and the FBI and head to where all the alien action was then taking place: California. Hunrath and Wilkinson soon hooked up with the major players in West Coast ufology at the time. These included such contactees as George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson, along with a number of UFO researchers and investigative groups. All was going well until November 1953. That was when things came to a mysterious and ominous end.
It was early on the morning of November 10th that Hunrath and Wilkinson rented a compact aircraft from a local airstrip. They headed off for what they claimed to several colleagues, just 48 hours earlier, would be a face-to-face meeting with a group of extraterrestrials connected to Mr. Bosco. Although the pair was seen taking off from the airstrip and headed in a direction that would have set them on a course for Palm Springs and Joshua Tree, California, they were never seen again. Despite extensive searches by the emergency services, Hunrath and Wilkinson were not found. No wreckage of the aircraft was ever found, either. Wilkinson’s wife never heard from her husband again. They were gone — forever.
The strange stories of Orfeo Angelucci and the Hunrath–Wilkinson affair could be considered just a couple of odd but engaging UFO encounters except for one thing. Their experiences with the morphing balls of light parallel nearly exactly those of W. Y. Evans-Wentz in early twentieth-century Ireland. In that case, however, there was no extraterrestrial component — just fairy-like entities.
This raises an important question: Are the balls of light native to our world rather than extraterrestrial? Probably, yes. That being so, perhaps their incredible ability to shape-shift allows them to toy with, manipulate, and tantalize the human race — for bizarre and obscure reasons that, for all we know, might be born out of a decidedly deranged sense of humor. Maybe they simply enjoy passing themselves off as hair-covered hominids, ETs, or fairies — and amazing and terrifying us in the process — for one simple reason: because they can.
Sources:
Angelucci, Orfeo M. Son of the Sun. Los Angeles: DeVorss, 1959.
Redfern, Nick. “Kidnapped by a Flying Saucer?” Mysterious Universe. April 6, 2012. http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2012/04/kidnapped-by-a-flying-saucer/.
Redfern, Nick. Shapeshifters: Morphing Monsters and Changing Cryptids. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2017.
Baring-Gould, Sabine (1834–1924)
For many werewolf enthusiasts, the first book that they may have read on the subject is The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) by Sabine Baring-Gould. Perhaps a good many admirers of this classic work that tells tales of lycanthropes remain unaware that the Rev. Baring-Gould stood at his writing desk to produce more than 1,240 separate publications. The Anglican priest, who was born in Exeter, England, is revered as a writer of hymns, and those who sit in their Sunday pews and gustily sing the popular “Onward Christian Soldiers” and then lower their voices to harmonize on “Now the Day Is Over” would undoubtedly be shocked to know that the composer of such Christian standards was also fascinated by werewolves.
