Spring Break
The Iron Skeptic: Octopus keg monsters from space (Gaaah!)
A Brazilian man attributes his unusal sickness to a wild claim of alien abduction. Only the town drunk verifies his story.
By: Aaron Sakulich
Issue date: 4/13/07 Section: Ed-Op
Originally published: 4/13/07 at 4:28 AM EST
Last update: 4/17/07 at 12:35 AM EST
Originally published: 4/13/07 at 4:28 AM EST
Last update: 4/17/07 at 12:35 AM EST
I considered the Pascagoula case, where two fishermen were abducted by carrot-nosed elephant monsters, had the weirdest looking aliens. I stand corrected. That torch has now been passed to the octopus keg monsters that abducted Antonio La Rubia in 1977.
For Mr. La Rubia, a resident of Paciencia, Brazil, September 15 started off fairly normal. He awoke at 2 a.m., washed his face, brushed his teeth, and was then off to his job at the bus company. Exiting his home, he saw something behind his house he thought was the bus that had come to pick him up. The hovering object, 235 feet across, "shaped like a hat", dull gray in color, was no bus.
La Rubia prudently decided to show the spacecraft the back of his shoes, but he didn't get far. A blue light suddenly illuminated the area and immobilized him. Three creatures, it seemed, had been sent to retrieve him.
The only creature as bizarre as the ones La Rubia reported seeing was the hallucinatory toilet paper mummy that dissected Sandra Larson's brain. The creatures stood roughly four feet tall, with a foot and a half antenna sticking out of the head. Their heads were shaped like "American footballs" with a band moving horizontally across them-like the sunglasses the blind black guy on Star Trek wore. The bodies were "stockier and broader" than La Rubia's, and from his sketches, I estimate them to be about the size and general shape of a keg. Each had two arms like elephant trunks: flexible tentacles that ended in something like a single finger. Considering what they did to La Rubia, I will assume these to be middle fingers.
The creatures' one leg looked like a bar stool. Like the spaceship, the creatures were dull gray in color and covered with some sort of rough scales. La Rubia later decided the scales weren't armor, since they didn't impede their movement, but must instead have been lizard-like skin. To round out this parade of madness, the creatures did not walk, they hovered, and they wore utility belts full of various gadgets.
For Mr. La Rubia, a resident of Paciencia, Brazil, September 15 started off fairly normal. He awoke at 2 a.m., washed his face, brushed his teeth, and was then off to his job at the bus company. Exiting his home, he saw something behind his house he thought was the bus that had come to pick him up. The hovering object, 235 feet across, "shaped like a hat", dull gray in color, was no bus.
La Rubia prudently decided to show the spacecraft the back of his shoes, but he didn't get far. A blue light suddenly illuminated the area and immobilized him. Three creatures, it seemed, had been sent to retrieve him.
The only creature as bizarre as the ones La Rubia reported seeing was the hallucinatory toilet paper mummy that dissected Sandra Larson's brain. The creatures stood roughly four feet tall, with a foot and a half antenna sticking out of the head. Their heads were shaped like "American footballs" with a band moving horizontally across them-like the sunglasses the blind black guy on Star Trek wore. The bodies were "stockier and broader" than La Rubia's, and from his sketches, I estimate them to be about the size and general shape of a keg. Each had two arms like elephant trunks: flexible tentacles that ended in something like a single finger. Considering what they did to La Rubia, I will assume these to be middle fingers.
The creatures' one leg looked like a bar stool. Like the spaceship, the creatures were dull gray in color and covered with some sort of rough scales. La Rubia later decided the scales weren't armor, since they didn't impede their movement, but must instead have been lizard-like skin. To round out this parade of madness, the creatures did not walk, they hovered, and they wore utility belts full of various gadgets.
