This brief, but terrifying, encounter with an unknown, swift growing creature would forever haunt the two armed guards who stumbled across it while performing a routine night patrol near a Cuban sugarcane field in 1915.
While the testimony regarding this fascinating case is admittedly scant, it remains one of the oldest and most intriguing cryptid reports to hail from Cuba… or anywhere else for that matter.
First brought into the public eye by renowned UFO and extraterrestrial chronicler, Albert Rosales, this incident seems like it might have been culled straight from a classic 1950s sci-fi comic, were it not for the fact that the event occurred a full 18 years before the invention of the modern comic book.
According to Rosales, the incident took place late in the evening near Jicotea, Las Villas in Cuba. The episode involved two unnamed men who were on patrol near the perimeter of a sugarcane field. The men were on horseback and approaching a bend in the trail when suddenly their horses froze and began “snorting as if in a panic.”
The men were attempting to urge their horses forward when they both “noticed what appeared to be a small white sack-like ‘bundle’ on the ground” adjacent to the trail. The off-white “bundle” aroused the men‘s curiosity, but what caught their attention was the fact that this object was moving as though it were a “living” thing.
The agitation of the horses quickly escalated into panic as the bundle seemed to crawl towards “now terrified horses.” At this point one of the guards liberated his pistol and managed to fire “several shots at the thing.”
Instead of stopping — or even slowing down — this bizarre life form, the armed men were shocked to discover that the bundle grew proportionately “larger every time it was shot at.”
Within moments the still advancing bundle had grown until it loomed almost as tall as the horses themselves. At this point, one can only imagine the sheer level of terror that these two men must have experienced confronting this unidentified entity on that dark and desolate sugarcane trail… as so many of us would in a similar situation, they almost certainly feared the worst.
For reasons undisclosed, perhaps the horses were simply to frightened to be ridden, the petrified guards dismounted (or may have been thrown off) and, fearing for their lives, fled the area — and the ever developing monster — on foot, leaving their horses behind to fend for themselves.
It’s not difficult to surmise what must have happened next. Once back in the relatively safety of their home or office, they surely had frantic (and likely hushed) discussions about what they had seen, where it might of come from and to whom should they confide… if anyone? Whatever the outcome of these discussions were, it seems obvious that they managed to keep their chilling secret for a very long time.
The next morning, the men — bolstered, no doubt, by the light of day — became concerned about the welfare of the horses they had left as a barrier between themselves and the ever enlarging, Blob-like beast. They need not have been concerned, however, as the animals were found soon after “wandering the fields apparently unharmed.”
So what was it that the two sugarcane patrolmen saw during their late night inspection? Was is some kind of strange ATMOSPHERIC MONSTER akin to the GARGANTUAN GLIDERS seen in Nevada in 1925, or was it an alien from OUT OF THIS WORLD not unlike the PURPLE GLOB that two police officers watched descend on Philadelphia in 1950?
Due to the time that elapsed between the event and when it was reported, we will likely never know the whole story, but the two things we know for sure are that this is one of the all time weirdest critters we’ve ever chronicled and that this thing, whatever it is, has an amazingly effective — albeit unearthly — defense mechanism.
Rob Morphy is an artist / journalist / filmmaker / designer / crypto chronicler / pod host / cult movie lover and co-founder of American Monsters.