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January 18, 1909, Burlington, New Jersey, USA, a police officer:

Brief summary of the event and follow-up:

All that seems to be reported is that on January 18, 1909, a policeman in Burlington, New Jersey, USA, allegedly saw what he called a "Jabberwock", with no teeth, eyes like blazing coals, and "other terrifying features".

Basic information table:

Narratives:

[Ref. ny1:] NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY:

The magazine says that on January 18, 1909, a policeman in Burlington, New Jersey, saw what he called a "Jabberwock" with no teeth, eyes like blazing coals, and "other terrifying features".

Soon reports of mysterious tracks in the snow came from Chester, Connecticut; Hoboken, Reading, in Pennsylvania; Willmington, in Delaware... [Etc.]

[Ref. jc1:] JEROME CLARK:

Jerome Clark says that on January 18, 1909, a policeman at Burlington spotted a flying "Jabberwock" with glowing eyes, and soon residents in the neighborhood found mysterious tracks in the snow.

[Ref. jc2:] JEROME CLARK:

Jerome Clark says that on January 18, 1909, a policeman at Burlington spotted a flying "Jabberwock" with glowing eyes, and soon residents in the neighborhood found mysterious tracks in the snow.

[Ref. fc1:] FRAN CAPO:

The author says that on January 18, 1909, a policeman in Burlington, New Jersey, saw what he called a "Jabberwock" with no teeth, eyes like blazing coals, and "other terrifying features".

[Ref. ar1:] ALBERT ROSALES:

Albert Rosales indicates that Burlington, New Jersey, on January 18, 1909, at night "A police officer spotted a flying 'jabberwock' with glowing eyes, and soon residents of neighboring towns were finding mysterious tracks in the snow, apparently related to the creature."

Albert Rosales indicates that the source is "Jerome Clark, Unexplained!".

[Ref. gm1:] "JERSEY DEVIL" GOOGLE MAP:

Points to consider:

Before discussing this particular case, I must make some general remarks about what was called the "Jersey Devil".

In Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, for nearly two centuries at least, some people give reports of encounters with a "creature" whose descriptions suggested that it was some sort of "devil", though in my opinion it was often merely a large bird in migration there, the sandhill crane.

Ufologically, these stories are mostly not considered as related in any way with UFOs or UFO occupants, in my opinion too they should not be part of a catalog of "close encounters of the third kind".

However, some ufologists included such stories in such catalogs, thinking for some reason it does have something to do with the UFO question. Most of the time, they do not include all the Jersey Devil reports, but only a few of them, maybe due to lack of documentation or maybe for some other reason I do not understand.

So I have to include all these stories, because if some source considers, rightly or wrongly, that this a UFO-related, then it is within my scope, not to immediately and arbitrarily disregard their idea, but to evaluate it, and thus to collect the documentation and the comments about it. And therefore, I have to check and document all reported, not just those selected arbitrarily by these ufologists who believed this is UFO material. This is why you cans see I have a file for each Jersey Devil reports, even those that were never included in the ufology literature.

I should note that most stories are fragmentary, often because the sources write about several observations, and what is said about one report is supposed to be implicitly true for the others. I do not do it that way; I publish case files individually and discuss each on its own merits or issues, and offer a specific assessment for each case. But of course, generalities can be said on these reports. As I do not want to disconnect individual reports from these generalities, I make the following notes.

I want to first list the various explanations offered for the "Jersey Devil" - they could apply its late equivalent the West Virginia "Mothman" which was introduced in UFO books the 1960s:

• "Devil" per se, a creature from hell, the one that Christian traditions talks about. It is not far from the explanations that claimed "witches" made this Devil appear using witchcraft.
• "Devil" in the sense that there would be some sort of "parallel world" that shelters evil creatures who occasionally pop in "our" world. It is further argued that UFOs and their occupants are of the same nature, in an attempt to support a "theory of everything" claiming the existence of some "other worlds" or "parallel worlds or "other dimensions".
• UFO occupants, aliens; some rare ufologists seem to consider that any unusual creature must come down from some spacecraft, whether it is a "Bigfoot", "Chupacabras", "Devil" ou whatever else. A variant thereof proposes that all these creatures are "engineered" by more "classic" extraterrestrial beings.
• Some cryptozoologists put forth that the "Jersey Devil" is some ordinary earthly animal hitherto undiscovered by mainstream science. Most cryptozoologist do not vehemently claim this as if it was a proven fact, but merely suggest it is a possibility amon other possibilities.
• Some cryptozoologists felt that the Jersey Devil may be a "Bigfoot". This generally does not fit well with the descriptions, whereas a known bird fits better. Yes, some reports mention a four-legged creature, but generally with wings too.
• It was suggested the Jersey Devil is a Pterodactyl, the prehistoric dinosaur-bird, allegedly still living nowadays. Or some other survivor of the distant prehistoric times.
• An investigation by cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson made him explain that there was a real estate scam in 1909 there in which people had created false traces of the "Jersey Devil." Most debaters admit this, but consider, rightly in my opinion, it could not be the single explanation for all the reports. This does not mean that other reports could not be hoaxes too, and some definitely were, as the "Hyman" case or the case of the dead kangaroo fitted with wings.
• Some offer a pure "folklore" explanation. There would never have been any true observation, everything would be purely invented nonsense. It can obviously be suggested that some, if not all, of the stories are of this nature. It is clear that a Jersey Devil folklore has emerged, but it cannot be used as evidence that all reports were entirely imaginary from the start.
• At the time, a "malformed" and abandoned child ("the baby of Mrs. Leeds") was said to be the explanation. But it turned out that the descriptions, the geographical and temporal span, leave little credence to this explanation if it was supposed to be the only one.
• Various birds were named as an explanation for the Jersey Devil. Some are completely unsuitable, too small or too different from the descriptions. However, one bird seems to be an excellent candidate, the sandhill crane. In each of my "Jersey Devil" case file, I obviously check this explanation out. I am neither the first nor the only one to propose it, however, many authors made no mention of the sandhill crane, preferring to highlight the ridiculous "explanation" explanations to support their favorite one. For example they would ridicule the "Mrs. Leeds' baby" explanation to try to convince the Jersey Devil must have been "supernatural".

Now, about this particular report, it is so poor that not much can be said...

The date is different in some sources. The hour is generally not given, though [ar1] claims in was in the night.

There seems to be no good reason to claim the "mysterious tracks in the snow" are related to the policeman's report; they may be of some other or same animal but do no say much about the creature the policeman claimed to have seen.

The "no teeth" feature may be a way of saying the creature had a beak. The "eyes like blazing coal" may be the interpretation of the red parts near the eyes of a sandhill crane (image below).

The "Jabberwock" qualification may be a way to say it was a bird, but a bird the policeman had not seen previously, and a way to say he was scared. After all, we do not know how log he saw it, how well he saw it. The sandhill crane is a large bird with a wingspan that can extended over 2 meters; if such a bird, scared by the policeman, flapped its wings at him in the night at close range to fly away under the man's nose, it may indeed have been a frightful encounter, a motive for making the report.

Above: The Jabberwock is a fictional character from the novels "Through the Looking-Glass", and "What Alice Found There" by Lewis Carroll. It only appears within the poem Jabberwocky that Alice reads during the first chapter and never interacts with the rest of the cast. In the book illustration by Tenniel, the Jabberwock is a large winged mixture of several animals, with the body of a dragon, a whiskered, fish-like head, insect antennae and a pair of talon-like hands on both its arms and its wings, which may also serve as forelegs when it walked on the ground. It also wears a vest.

The qualification "Jabberwock" will be used by "police officer Louis Strehr" in a case in Camden dated a few days later. It is possible that the two cases are really the same.

List of issues:

Evaluation:

Confusion, bird, sandhill crane, or invention or unexplained.

Sources references:

* = Source I checked.
? = Source I am told about but could not check yet. Help appreciated.

• [ny1] * New York Folklore Quarterly, volume 30, New York Folklore Society, USA, page 235, 1974.
• [jc1] * "Jersey Devil", in "Unexplained!", book by Jerome Clark, Visible Ink publishers, USA, page 197, 1993.
• [jc1] * "Encyclopedia of Strange and Unexplained Physical Phenomena", book by Jerome Clark, Gale Research Incorporated publishers, USA, page 168, 1993.
• [jc2] * "Unexplained: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences and Puzzling Physical Phenomena", book by Jerome Clark, Visible Ink Press publishers, USA, page 562, 1998.
• [fc1] * "It Happened in New Jersey", book by Fran Capo, Globe Pequot publishers, USA, page 17, 2003.
• [ar1] * "1909 Humanoid Reports, compiled by Albert Rosales, circa 2006, at www.aforteanosla.com.ar/albert/anuarios/1909%20Humanoid%20Reports.pdf
• [gm1] * Google Maps, 2010, at maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&t=h&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=111307155664998215229.000492efa03d92c95c0b9

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This page was last updated on July 15, 2013.