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WWN presents the true story of Bat Boy in a series excerpted from the hit book, Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed!

“In a world gone batty… there was one Bat who could save the world.”

In an exclusive agreement with Barry Leed, PhD (MBS) and Neil McGinness ( the authors of Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed), WWN will excerpt parts of the popular Bat Boy book for our readers.  It tells the complete story of Bat Boy – and he’s not happy with us, because the book contains classified, personal, sensitive files concerning Bat Boy that have never been made public.

The book can be ordered HERE.  

Read Chapter 1 – HERE.

Read Chapter 2 – HERE.

This entry is from Chapter 3,  THE SCHMING THING:

Over an intense observational period, Dillon studied the creature intently and attempted to communicate with him in an effort to locate the rest of his race. This quest drew Dillon inward and made him less communicative to his underlings in the lab. He grew distrustful of those around him and began to guard Bat Boy zealously. His security guard, Thrush, actually bugged the cage area so that he could eavesdrop on Dillon when he went into Bat Boy’s holding pen alone. On two occasions, Thrush allowed me to listen in on Dillon during one of his speech therapy sessions. Dillon was trying—unsuccessfully—to communicate with Bat Boy. The session was nothing more than a squeakfest. Dillon would start with three short squeaks followed by a long one, and Bat Boy would echo him. Dillon could get Bat Boy to parrot him, but that was all. The dialogue (if you can call it that) reminded me of the sad exchanges between a delusional parent who believes his one-and-a-half-year-old has started to talk when in reality the child merely babbles.

Dillon grew more exasperated as his attempts to deepen communication with Bat Boy met with failure. Then he located a speech therapist named Catherine Peake. Peake billed herself as the “lisp fixer.” She also took pride in correcting unreconstructed Southern drawls. She spent several days attempting to “squeak it out” with Bat Boy. She lasted only three sessions before she ran out of the room red faced and vowing never to return. Many in the office believed that Bat Boy may have exposed himself to her. Others took the position that Dillon exposed himself to Peake. Thrush boasted that he knew what really went down but wouldn’t cough up the information unless someone paid him two hundred bucks. No one took Thrush up on his offer. Instead, someone leaked incriminating security camera footage of what happened when Catherine Peake left the lab that day. Misplaced conspicuously on the coffee lounge bulletin board where they would certainly be discovered, the grainy black-and-white still shots showed Peake beating Thrush back with a femur that she had dislodged from the lab’s skeleton.

Lab controversies aside, Dillon went out of his way to please the creature. He ordered a diverse collection of bugs from an insect supplier. The company supplied Dillon with tons of mosquitoes and gnats and fourteen different types of flies. Mayflies and scuttle flies were Bat Boy’s favorites. Dillon found out that Bat Boy, unlike most bats, liked to feast on bugs with stingers. Dillon figured the stingers gave him extra taste, the way some people like a dash of Tabasco on their food. He ordered wasps by the millions.

Then, in October of 1992, Bat Boy escaped. Unbeknownst to Dillon, his cage cleaner and part-time custodian, Sayer Schming, would torture Bat Boy during his nightly cage-cleaning duty. Schming later confessed at trial that he would set his portable stereo near the door and play Cher’s greatest hits at the loudest possible volume. He would then run a spotlight into the room and fix the light on Bat Boy’s eyes. The light would disorient Bat Boy. As he squinted in a futile attempt to get his bearings, Schming would prod Bat Boy mercilessly with the handle end of his mop broomstick. As Bat Boy lay collapsed in a cage corner, Schming would place the mop end of the broom on his head and don it as though it were a wig. He would then grind-dance to the pole end that dangled from near his head, mouthing the words to the Cher hit songs as he danced.

Bat Boy bore the brunt of this abuse heroically while looking to flee at the first chance he could get. Late one night when one of Dillon’s assistant researchers had been careless with the dead-bolt auxiliary door, Bat Boy made his move. He was able to twist off his cage’s padlock and flee the lab.

Schming was ultimately brought up on charges. At the trial, a court-appointed psychiatrist testified that Schming’s beatings were administered as a sadistic release against his own failures. The jury found Schming detestable and quickly found him guilty of personal injury assault. Many people applauded the judge’s decision to allow the case to be tried as a human personal injury claim rather than an animal rights abuse case.

During Schming’s trial, Dillon maintained that he knew nothing of Bat Boy’s abuse and he ruefully recounted how Bat Boy’s ability to mask his unhappiness while in captivity should be taken as a sign of his advanced intelligence. Publicly, Dillon vowed to find the creature again. Privately, he felt crushed over the loss of his find. To those in the know, his public vow rang hollow. Everyone knew Dillon had really dropped the ball.

Dillon found reasons to fire most of the lab personnel. Somehow Thrush stayed on as head of security. When asked if his staying on had anything to do with inside information on the Catherine Peake affair, Thrush politely demurred with a smile.

Dillon got rid of me by accusing me of selling lab secrets to FEMUR—Bat Boy ranked atop their most-wanted list. Dillon was paranoid that FEMUR would locate and steal Bat Boy. Dillon was convinced that FEMUR had planned Bat Boy’s escape, and he lumped me into his conspiracy theory.

When confronted by Dillon, I explained to him that I wasn’t with FEMUR. I did confess that I took a payment of $2,300 from the Defense Department to conduct research on bat flight studies in order to help pay for my PhD. Bats have a hinged joint that allows them to pivot in flight on a dime and the Air Force has long tried to have someone replicate their natural flight pattern to build a new breed of super fighter jet.

Dillon flew into a rage. He threatened me with having Thrush torture me to get the truth. Knowing that Thrush enjoyed torture (even to this day his Facebook profile lists waterboarding as a hobby), I fled out the side door of the lab.

Looking back at it now, I realize that Dillon had started to grasp for straws in the days following Bat Boy’s escape. When I started at the lab, I divulged my Defense Department association to the compliance officer. I figured the doctor must have known about it. The witch hunt that Dillon led against lab employees provided a convenient shield from the reality that the blame for Bat Boy’s escape fell squarely on his shoulders.

For the next seventeen years, Dillon and I watched from the sidelines as Bat Boy eluded subsequent would-be captors. Major media outlets, chief among them Weekly World News, celebrated Bat Boy’s life on the run and elevated him to an American folk hero in the process. Bat Boy became our new Huck Finn. Adrift on the Big River of American culture and clad in his trademark jean shorts, Bat Boy never looked back. He was beyond reproach. To the delight of millions of Bat Boy’s fans, it looked as though there was no padlock strong enough, no scientist clever enough, and no governmental agency powerful enough to capture this wily and impish new hero.

Dejected by Bat Boy’s escape from Dillon’s lab, I returned home to Indiana to complete my doctorate. Marie and I wound up getting married. After obtaining a PhD in mutant bat studies at the University of Indianapolis, I set out to capture the creature to study him while banging out scientific articles detailing how Bat Boy and bats would save us all. It proved a tough way to make a living.

To pay the bills, I found myself doing guest lectures, or substitute science teaching, as my ex-wife, Marie, called it, at West Virginia middle schools. Prior to each guest lecture, the words of my former PhD adviser back in Indiana would ring in my ears, “Watch yourself out there, Mr. Leed, or you’ll end up teaching remedial science to a bunch of illiterates at Podunk Middle School.”

At night, following the sporadic substitute-teaching assignments, I would track Bat Boy. Downhill, uphill, around hills, I sought the mutant. I crisscrossed the West Virginia mountainsides, down into the flats and back up the foothills. From Reddish Knob in the Cumberland Plateau, up to Seneca Rocks in the Monongahela National Forest, I kept searching. Between Brushy Run and Teterton, I crawled along ridgelines to conceal my body outline. My charcoal-activated layered suit masked my scent from the mutant as I searched nearly every pocket and draw of those ridged valleys. Obsessed with my hunt, there were many nights where time slipped away, leaving me no choice but to spend the night under the stars at altitude with a makeshift shale slab serving as my bed. I shunned cell phones out of fear that the mutant would home in on my frequency via echolocation and triangulate my whereabouts. My mountaintop sleepovers started to take a toll back at home. With no means to phone home, my wife, Marie, worried until she stopped worrying.

Yet, through the years and the dissolution of my marriage, I never lost hope. When we had finally saved up enough money to get divorced, I got to keep the Taurus wagon and a Snuggie-style fleece blanket from Pompanoosuc Mills. Marie, somehow, kept the condo and my collection of Japanese anime.

Enduring it all, I remained optimistic that my path would cross again soon with this unique Wunderfledermauskind: Bat Boy, who himself remained out in the world—too wily to hunt down like an animal, too wily to capture, even too subliterate to interview.

In the alarming frequency of Bat Boy’s recent rash of attacks, I sensed my opportunity. I had reached out to Dr. Dillon and he agreed that Bat Boy must soon be captured and, in a reconciliatory gesture, the good doctor even invited me back to his lab to discuss next steps. The tone of his voice expressed a new spirit of cooperation. As he told me on the phone, “Dr. Leed, let’s bury the petri dish and find my Chiropteran Tot before he kills somebody.”

For all those who had made fun of my quest to find Bat Boy, my ex-wife chief among the group, it would be time to eat mosquito pie. This was my time to prove them all wrong. I was not a vampire freak; I was a scientist on the verge of groundbreaking discoveries, and I was about to begin working again with the Mammal Messiah.

…the Bat Boy story will continue…

ORDER GOING MUTANT:  THE BAT BOY EXPOSED HERE.

WWN presents the true story of Bat Boy in a series excerpted from the hit book, Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed!

“In a world gone batty… there was one Bat who could save the world.”

In an exclusive agreement with Barry Leed, PhD (MBS) and Neil McGinness ( the authors of Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed), WWN will excerpt parts of the popular Bat Boy book for our readers.  It tells the complete story of Bat Boy – and he’s not happy with us, because the book contains classified, personal, sensitive files concerning Bat Boy that have never been made public.

The book can be ordered HERE.  

Read Chapter 1 – HERE.

This entry is from Chapter 2,  THE MAMMAL MESSIAH:

Two days earlier, Dr. Dillon had text- ed me that he was closing in on Bat Boy again. He had tracked the mutant to a mountain cave near Seneca Rocks, West Virginia, only twelve hundred yards away from the very same cave where he had first captured Bat Boy in June 1992.

Early in his career, Dr. Dillon had earned respect within the scientific community for his work on natural color selection among winged mammals. Then, in 1992, he found Bat Boy in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. Dillon was two miles below Earth’s surface in a cave complex when he heard a faint squeal of pain. As it turned out, Bat Boy’s foot had wedged into a crack between two rocks.

With Bat Boy temporarily immobilized, Dillon was able to sedate him with a tranquilizer dart. Dillon took the creature to his lab in Wheeling for observation. Dillon’s life would never be the same. The acolytes in his lab called him the Mammal Messiah. Every researcher in the lab felt as though they had hitched their petri dish to the next Charles Darwin. When Dillon hired me in 1992 as a research assistant, I was on summer break from writing my doctoral dissertation in mutant bat studies at the University of Indianapolis. As an eager young doctoral candidate, I gained Dillon’s trust and was granted second-class, or supervised, access to the creature.

My memory of that first day in Dillon’s lab remains with me to this day. Dillon assembled the staff to introduce me and began to speak in his trademark scientific tone that dispelled all mystery. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is young candidate Barry Leed. He is to have full access to all of your findings, and you all are to consider his inquiries with the expeditiousness that you do mine. He is here because he is what you all routinely fail to be: perfectly, incorruptbly, and passionately aware of what would befall the human race if our bat population were to ever be compromised. I have never known a young scientist of such purpose—with, of course, the exception of myself. You are all to consider him my Moses.”

I couldn’t have predicted that my dissertation work on the relevance of bats to the human ecosystem would strike the chord it did with Dr. Dillon. My professors back in Indy treated my work with skepticism.

My adviser warned that my theories relied solely on hyperbole and worst-case scenarios. “Beware of the temptation to invent the catastrophes you hope to prevent, Mr. Leed. History tends to treat this kind of scientific/martyr complex with enduring scorn. And the decision makers in the grant department tend not to fund them. You should also know that this so-called Mammal Messiah, Dr. Dillon, is rumored to dabble in mutants just like a Bigfoot hunter. Watch yourself out there, Mr. Leed, or you’ll end up teaching remedial science to a bunch of illiterates at Podunk Middle School.”

Instinct compelled me to leave Indy. In my gut I knew that the Mammal Messiah was no circus act. Yet my heart wanted to stay put. In those first weeks, the swirling lab smells of formaldehyde and other chemical agents couldn’t shake the lingering scent of sweet Marie in my bed. It killed me to leave her back then. Years later, even after all of the deceit and humiliation, I still catch myself drawn back into those early days of our romance, in Indian-no- place, Indiana, of all places, sucking back cold beers down in Broad Ripple in between marathon lovemaking sessions on those oppressively hot Midwestern summer nights. Johnny Freakin’ Mellencamp in a dirty lab coat.

Dillon despised the innocence of my uncomplicated, beer-swilling, Midwestern youth. The doctor knew that in the back recesses of his lab prowled the one thing that would shatter my innocence forever: on the morning of September 19, 1992, Dillon took me to meet Bat Boy.

Dr. Dillon led me through his main lab area, where we passed by his staff of tight-lipped, anal white coats and the petri dishes they dutifully manned. No one looked up as we moved toward the back of the lab. Dillon was a task- master and a vicious perfectionist; his staff never made eye contact with him and pressed on with their work as if it were the Manhattan Project for bats.

At the back of the lab, an addition had been made to the building. The gaps of ceiling panels above and the differing vinyl floor surfaces that joined together unevenly beneath my feet suggested that the addition had been done hastily to make room for an unexpected, special purpose. In the middle of the threshold of this newly created addition, a janitor sporting a name tag that read scheming swept patches of scuffed plaster into a central pile.

“Morning, Doc,” the janitor greeted Dr. Dillon. Dillon walked on without acknowledging the sweeper. The hallway grew darker. I noticed that the fluorescent light tubes had been removed from the ceiling fixtures and that someone had placed cardboard boxes over the windows and taped them over. We reached a steel door flanked by a guard sitting in a fold- ing metal card-table-style chair.

Perched in the chair outside the door with a wooden baseball bat in his hand sat Alan Thrush. Thrush wore taut fatigues and over- sized aviator glasses, and had a nine-millimeter gun strapped to his side. I could smell wet tobacco. Thrush’s jaw had an uneven jut that suggested some kind of shrapnel incident. This was a man who had stuck his chin out too many times. “Thrush here is in charge of security, Mr. Leed. Thrush, Mr. Leed here is being granted second-class access.”

“Boss, you sure about that? You ain’t known the kid too long. How do you know he ain’t with femur?” Thrush peered over his shades to make eye contact with Dillon. Dillon nodded. “Nice to meet ya. Call me Thrush,” the guard said as he waved the bat in front of my face. The bat came from a Cooperstown souvenir shop called the Hall of Fame Bat Company. thrush was branded on the side.

Underneath, the second brand read kontra killer. Lab scuttlebutt later in- formed me that Thrush had served as some kind of mercenary before Blackwater made that line of work glamorous. Thrush fancied himself the Sultan of Sandinista SWAT. On his coffee breaks, Thrush could be found in the lounge doing check swings with his souvenir bat, bragging loudly to unimpressed females about what he called the Thrush & Ollie show, a reference to his Sandinista-thumping, back-jungle Nicaraguan adventures with contra supporter Colonel Ollie North. Thrush now earned his keep running security for Dr. Dillon.

“Thrush, I don’t pay you to question my judgment. I pay you to kill anyone who tries to enter this door without my authorization. Mr. Leed, you have now met the real Bat Boy, our rent-a-cop Alan Thrush. Thrush, just add Leed to the short list, please. As for anyone else, it’s—” “I know, Doc, I know,
two in the chest and one in the head. And you don’t have to tell me how to do my job.” Thrush picked up a pa- per coffee cup and fired a sluice of tobacco juice into it. He then stood up to begin unlocking the three dead bolts on the steel door.

With the dead bolts cleared, Dillon stepped forward to use his keys to open the first steel door. He led me into a dark anteroom. Thrush poked his head in and handed two cylinders to Dillon. “Here are your bugs, Doc.” Then Thrush reached out to me offering two earplugs. “Kid, you’re going to want these. Bet you haven’t heard a squeal this loud since prom night. Hell, I ain’t heard a squeal that loud since I stuck a
Sandie with my bowie down in Nicky Gra-Gra.”

“That’ll be all, Thrush,” Dillon ordered while he secured a miner’s hard hat to his head and turned on the head- lamp. Thrush retreated and closed the door and began fastening the dead bolts. Dillon tested a penlight by pointing it into my eyes. “For the time being, you are not to be trusted with any flashlights. The slightest mistake with a flashlight and you’ll set him off.” Dillon then handed me a pair of thick protective mittens. “You’ll want these on as well. These are animal- trainer-approved gloves.”
Mind you, all I knew of Bat Boy that summer was what I had read in Weekly World News.

Unverifiable smatterings had been printed about the sighting of a potential missing link in the Shenandoah Mountains, but as I stood there in the dark, suffering a rash of very real paranoia that Dr. Dillon had not-so-platonic motives concerning me—he was, after all, awfully appreciative of my talents—I didn’t know whether to dirty my shorts or cry for help. What the hell was I getting myself into? Dillon pushed us through a low-ceilinged alcove and began to futz with more locks and yet another door.

“Stay calm, Mr. Leed. Life is about to become very interesting for you. You are about to meet
my Chiropteran Tot, or Bat Boy, as the press corps has labeled him.

Whatever you do, keep your arms and fingers to your sides. Don’t tempt him with any sudden movements. You’ll get only a glimpse from the penlight. Bat Boy’s not so fond of daylight, or any other light, for that matter. Temperamental prick. Trust me, you don’t ever want to anger him. The little guy’s stronger than an ox on steroids.”

As we passed through the second set of bolted steel doors, all external noises ceased. It was dead silent. Dillon put his shoulder up against a large iron bar and slid it back to un- lock another large steel door. The door swung open. Using the door as a shield, Dillon hid behind the steel to make sure the mutant was caged. Convinced he was enclosed, he inched forward. Inside it was dark, pitch-black. Dillon waved the weak light beam across the creature and I caught my first glimpse of Bat Boy.

He moved in a rush, a quick, pale sixty-five- pound blur of motion. Dillon pointed the flashlight toward him again, and it seemed to dazzle him for a moment. Bat Boy froze and I caught him clearly. The creature had a haunting white lantern of a face that looked to be the unholy by-product of a one-night stand between Nosferatu and Mickey Mouse. His bulging eyes darted back and forth. When his bulbous pupils moved, the whites of his eyes shone wildly in the darkness. I could feel his core torso muscles tighten and detected his large ears prick back just like a horse when it senses danger. Suddenly the bat child let loose a bloodcurdling scream. My eardrums nearly burst and my pants soaked instantly. I had forgotten to insert the earplugs and dropped them to the floor in fright. The scream had to register over 120 decibels.

“Sweet Marie, get me out of here,” I said to myself, longing to be back in the flat Indiana plains pressed against the acreage of her rolling curves. Dillon used the penlight to open a large cylinder that he had brought with him. It was packed solid with mosquitoes, and they started buzzing around the room. Bat Boy went to work darting about devouring the bugs. He was caged but you could feel the air move and hear the swish as he sprang back and forth inhaling his protein with wings beating. Dillon then reached into his lab coat pocket and threw five frozen dead mice into his cage. “Here you go, Tot. I didn’t forget dessert.”

Dillon motioned for us to back out of the room. On the way out, his headlamp flashed near Bat Boy’s right ear, causing another shriek. While he chewed hungrily on his mouse-icle, I saw what looked like an earring.

The chiropteran bared his teeth and hissed a stream of liquid at me. My cheek felt the splatter of warm goo. Dillon grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of the room. “It’s his natural anticoagulant. Don’t worry, it’s harm- less—unless he bites you. If he bites you and injects that anticoagulant into your wound, you’ll never stop bleeding. When he spits, that means he’s ready to eat. Let’s get out of here.”

As we emerged, Thrush pointed his bat to- ward me, on the end of which he had placed a soiled towel. “That mutant got you pretty good, kid. Here, take this to clean up.” Not wanting to offend the guard, I grabbed the crusty old oil rag. Warm urine dripped down my pant legs. Loud ringing obscured my hearing. In the space between my two damaged ears, a warm, filmy goo coated my face. My eyes started to sting. My heart pounded with a disorientating fear. My dignity crushed by this caged creature, I hobbled back toward Dillon’s office, sliming the lab hallway with a snail trail of wetness.

Back in the safety of Dillon’s office, I regained some composure. I toweled off and spoke to the doctor.

“Was he wearing an earring?”

“Good. You noticed that. We had to sedate the hell out of him to get that in. It’s a transponder. I am hoping that it’ll give us the opportunity to track him one day back to the race of people he left underground. I am hoping this little guy leads us to his tribe. You did good in there, candidate Leed. His appetite is insatiable. I really don’t have enough to feed him.

That feeding you witnessed is merely a fraction of the bug intake that he would consume in the wild. I am waiting for my bug shipment to get here.”

Dillon was understandably obsessed with the creature. He refused to think of Bat Boy as a mutant, as most others did. Based on his knowledge of natural selection, Dillon believed that Bat Boy belonged to a new species of subterranean cave dwellers. I remember him telling me, “Find one mutant and get your name in the paper; find an entire new species and you’re Charlie friggin’ Darwin.”

He told Weekly World News in his famous interview announcing the discovery of the creature, “His eyes are twice as big as they should be, and his ears are like satellite dishes. This boy clearly belongs to a race of people who live miles beneath the surface. It’s my belief that they evolved batlike features to enable them to survive in total darkness.” He went on to explain, “Bat Boy almost certainly strayed from a much larger pack.”

The doctor pulled open a steel file cabinet door to show me the records he had begun to compile on the creature. To this day, I re- member seeing that initial file and knowing then and there that I could not retreat to the Hoosier hospitality of my native state and the pinup-pretty Marie. This was the front line of everything that I had studied for and I had just glimpsed what they can’t teach you in school. Just like Dillon, I found myself ensnared under Bat Boy’s spell. The buzzing in my ears melted into a rhythmic whoosh as an ethereal calm came over me. I was disoriented, my pants were wet, my hearing cut in and out, and warm goo was crusted on my face, yet somehow my anxiety dissipated now as it all sank in. My muscles relaxed as though I had ingested a strong benzodiazepine. Bat Boy was my medicine. Everything felt soft and fuzzy, even Dillon’s pointy fifties-style glasses. In that moment, I knew I had fallen off the precipice into a life-altering free fall. Sorry, Marie, there would be no turning back.

My life was about to become the cave I had always wanted it to be. I was in it, beautifully lost in a subterranean alternate universe, where I found myself seated at the right hand of the Mammal Messiah himself. As I scanned the documents Dillon handed me, he began speaking in excited tones about how close he was to communicating with the creature. He told me that within months he would locate Bat Boy’s lost tribe, that there were other species out there to be discovered. The tingling sensation in my ears made my hearing itself seem more acute. It was as if I were hearing for the first time. Everything began to make sense. My eyes bore through Dillon’s glasses. We locked eyes as I held the file close to my chest and listened intently to his spellbinding theories. I had become a disciple of the Mammal Messiah.

…the Bat Boy story will continue…

ORDER GOING MUTANT:  THE BAT BOY EXPOSED HERE.

WWN presents the true story of Bat Boy in a series excerpted from the hit book, Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed!

“In a world gone batty… there was one Bat who could save the world.”

In an exclusive agreement with Barry Leed, PhD (MBS) and Neil McGinness ( the authors of Going Mutant: The Bat Boy Exposed),  WWN will excerpt parts of the popular Bat Boy book for our readers.  It tells the complete story of Bat Boy – and he’s not happy with us, becaue the book contains classified, personal, sensitive files concerning Bat Boy that have never been made public.

The book can be ordered HERE.  

This entry is from Chapter 1, SIGHTINGS:

At 3:21 p.m. on a cool December day north of mile marker 63 on I-95 just south of Richmond, Virginia, Amanda Lethbridge checked her rearview mirror and noticed an unusual figure clinging to the grille of the Peterbilt truck in her rear. Lethbridge, a thirty-seven-year-old resident of Richmond, switched to the right lane to let the truck pass.  She caught a glimpse as the truck passed by at seventy-five miles per hour. The creature had his head bent back and was snapping at insects in midair.

A week later, on a clear, balmy night in Sarasota, Florida, Chris Caddick’s cocker spaniel, Meat Loaf, became agitated by something in his backyard. Caddick stepped outside to investigate.  Meat Loaf led his owner to a banyan tree where Caddick saw an animal crouching
on a lower branch. Caddick grabbed a broom and attempted to prod the animal from the tree. In a second, Caddick was mauled. His two hands were bitten clear to the bone. Hours later, from his hospital bed, Caddick  told the investigating officer that the animal’s teeth were like “tiny daggers.”  Meat Loaf was never found.

Later that month, outside Ely, Nevada, a young woman named Lucia Rickards left her house around dusk to look for her cat, Cookie. Rickards spotted what appeared to be a small boy standing behind her car parked in the driveway. The boy did not see her. Rickards watched
in horror as the boy lifted up her Honda Accord with one arm, grabbed Cookie from underneath the Accord, and ate her.

Then, without warning, in Seattle, Washington, Lionel Boldy came within inches of losing his life. Boldy’s chilling encounter was recorded by the Seattle Police Department in an official witness statement: “I was sitting on my patio eating a pizza and drinking a beer when I heard scratching in the bushes. What I saw froze my blood. My first thought was, ‘My God! It’s Dracula.’ I could actually smell his breath. The creature looked like he would be extremely dangerous if he felt threatened. There was no way I was going to threaten it, whatever it was. He
stood there staring at the piece of pizza I was holding.

His eyes were as round as saucers. I figured he might be hungry, so I threw a slice to him. He grabbed it right out of the air and
disappeared behind the bushes. I discovered the next morning he’d spit out the anchovies.”

The sightings were growing frequent. Too frequent. As the nation grew worried over its fate, the climate changed. Climate warming dropped out of sight. Climate fear took over. The president scrambled every available agency, including FEMUR (Federal Emergency Mutant Undercover Recovery), which hadn’t been scrambled since the Teapot Dome scandal of 1922. FEMUR failed to allay the growing fear. The situation tormented
reds and blues alike. Glenn Beck cried in prime time. Then, a night later, so did Anderson Cooper. Our country didn’t need this. Not now.  I was sitting on my patio eating a pizza and drinking a beer when I heard scratching in the bushes. What I saw froze my blood…

Not with escalation in Afghanistan, economic instability, child vaccination uncertainty, and Regis Philbin still on television.  Most media outlets promptly placed the blame on a rabid albino bunny cat gone wild. CNN located a primate biologist named Devon Pickstock, who had surveyed the attack scenes for DNA and bite radius samples. Pickstock went on-air and quickly ruled out an ABC, or albino bunny cat, and confidently identified the culprit as a shaved saber-toothed ostrich. The saber-toothed ostrich, or STO as Pickstock referred to it, would be quickly
trapped and shot.

CNN declared the case closed and focused the bulk of their attention on the discovery of an alien mummy fetus that a Kentucky man had found in a discarded beer cooler. Gradually, people tried to go about their business.

Ever since the “Bigfoot in a Balloon” episode, I had learned not to trust CNN. No way was this an STO or an ABC. Maybe the work of an eagle-headed hare, or EHH, but I doubted it. I had good reason. I had seen this attack pattern before, and it didn’t fit with an EHH. For me, the culprit needed no introduction. As a young doctoral candidate in mutant bat studies, or MBS, I had first laid eyes on the ornery beast known as Bat Boy in Dr. Ron Dillon’s lab in 1992.

The nation would not want to believe that Bat Boy was behind the attacks. The government had declared him a hero for his service in the Middle East. He had returned home from keep out of sight. But around the time of these recent sightings, I had intercepted chatter on the wire indicating that Bat Boy’s shell was beginning to crack.

Signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, had surfaced.  These recent attacks were either a poorly veiled cry for help or an angry assault on the citizenry that made his postwar reentry into society so difficult. I hoped for the former. Either way, something needed to be done before it was too late. Innocent lives hung in the balance.

I took off to visit the scientist who had first captured Bat Boy, the high priest of mutant bat studies, the Wheeling Wunderkind, the Mammal Messiah, Dr. Ron Dillon.

…the Bat Boy story will continue…

ORDER GOING MUTANT:  THE BAT BOY EXPOSED HERE.

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EVERGLADES CITY, FL – A group of Florida men videotaped and caught a 750 pound mako shark!

Jamie Bunn, Danny Massa, Jeremy Huston and John Monti went swordfishing on Saturday, off of the Point Everglades Inlet. About 18 miles offshore, they noticed a dead swordfish floating in the water, being circled by a mako shark.

The men decided to lasso the dead fish and draw it up against the boat, so they could get a good look at the shark. Angry over the loss of its food, it began biting the boat’s exhaust and propellers!

After much struggle, they were able to get the shark gaffed and tied. But after almost three hours, they were unable to get it into the boat. “We realized we had a fish well north of 600 pounds when we couldn’t get it in the boat,” Bunn said.

The four men decided to just tie it to the back of the boat and tow it into the marina, where it weighed in at 748 pounds!

TOKYO – A Japanese spacecraft that returned to Earth in June aptured dust from an asteroid.

For the first time in history, space dust was captured.  And the Japanese did it!

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, said an analysis of samples brought back by the Hayabusa spacecraft showed some came from an asteroid called Itokawa, which could offer insight into the creation and makeup of the solar system. It is only the fourth set of samples to be returned from space in history — including moon matter collected by the Apollo missions, comet material by Stardust, and solar matter from the Genesis mission

.The spacecraft’s capsule landed successfully in the Australian Outback in June after a seven-year, 4 billion-mile (6 billion-kilometer) journey, despite a series of technical glitches that threatened the mission.

“These results have exceeded our expectations. I’m not sure how you express something that surpasses your dreams, but I’m filled with emotion,” project chief Junichiro Kawaguchi said.

JAXA analyzed 1,500 microscopic particles from the capsule and determined that nearly all of them had come from the asteroid based on their mineral composition, the agency said in a statement. It plans to further analyze the tiny specimens.

Hayabusa, launched in 2003, reached Itokawa in 2005. After taking photos of the 1,640-foot (500-meter) -long asteroid, Hayabusa landed on it twice in November 2005. The spacecraft then limped home after developing a fuel leak and losing contact with Earth for seven weeks.

The craft was designed to shoot a bullet into the surface of the asteroid that would crush and propel material through a long tube into a sample collection container. There is no certainty the bullet actually fired, scientists say, but they believe the impact of the tube’s landing would have forced some material upward and into the collection chamber.

JAXA said the aim of the $200 million project is to understand more about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Scientists hope to study how and when the asteroid was formed, its physical properties, what other bodies it may have been in contact with, and how solar wind and radiation have affected it.

Experts from NASA and Australia are also involved in the mission.

WASHINGTON — Astronomers using NASA’S Chandra X-Ray Observatory found the youngest black hole ever to exist

Astronomers have discovered the smallest black hole ever to exist in the history of the universe.

The black hole could help scientists better understand how massive stars explode, which ones leave behind black holes or neutron stars, and the number of black holes in our galaxy and others.

The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth.  Data from Chandra, NASA’s Swift satellite, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory revealed a bright source of X-rays that has remained steady during observation from 1995 to 2007. This suggests the object is a black hole being fed either by material falling into it from the supernova or a binary companion.

“If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black hole has been observed,” said Daniel Patnaude of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. who led the study.

The scientists think SN 1979C, first discovered by an amateur astronomer in 1979, formed when a star about 20 times more massive than the sun collapsed. Many new black holes in the distant universe previously have been detected in the form of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). However, SN 1979C is different because it is much closer and belongs to a class of supernovas unlikely to be associated with a GRB. Theory predicts most black holes in the universe should form when the core of a star collapses and a GRB is not produced.

“This may be the first time the common way of making a black hole has been observed,” said co-author Abraham Loeb, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “However, it is very difficult to detect this type of black hole birth because decades of X-ray obseravations are needed to make the case.”

The idea of a black hole with an observed age of only about 30 years is consistent with recent theoretical work. In 2005, a theory was presented that the bright optical light of this supernova was powered by a jet from a black hole that was unable to penetrate the hydrogen envelope of the star to form a GRB. The results seen in the observations of SN 1979C fit this theory very well.

view of black hole from above

Although the evidence points to a newly formed black hole in SN 1979C, another intriguing possibility is that a young, rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful wind of high energy particles could be responsible for theX-ray emission. This would make the object in SN 1979C the youngest and brightest example of such a “pulsar wind nebula” and the youngest known neutron star. The Crab pulsar, the best-known example of a bright pulsar wind nebula, is about 950 years old.

“It’s very rewarding to see how the commitment of some of the most advanced telescopes in space, like Chandra, can help complete the story,” said Jon Morse, head of the Astrophysics Division at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The results will appear in the New Astronomy journal in a paper by Patnaude, Loeb, and Christine Jones of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra’s science and flight operations from Cambridge.

For more information about Chandra, including images and other multimedia, visit:

http://chandra.nasa.gov

BREAKING NEWS! There has been a Bat Boy sighting!

Bat Boy is as elusive as they come. Always fighting for freedom, Bat Boy is constantly on the move and keeps a low profile. Every now and then, however, there is a sighting of America’s favorite mutant that sends shockwaves of intrigue and speculation across the nation.

Bat Boy has been spotted in Connecticut and rumor has it that he is making his way into New York City. Comic Con 2010 is set to kick off this weekend. It should be a meeting place for the greatest mutants, freaks and unique individuals – a place where Bat Boy will blend in.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hang out with Bat Boy and Weekly World News at Comic Con 2010 NY.

Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite … hard.

INDIA – The 2010 Commonwealth Games are using an interesting security tactic!

The New Delhi Commonwealth Games are set to kick off this coming weekend. As is the case with any big-time sporting event, security is a top priority. Security officials are leaving no stone unturned and are using their creativity. Langurs will be deployed at several venues in New Delhi to keep similar simians from causing any trouble.

Langurs are a common type of monkey in south Asia, and because they are large and fierce they are often used in India to keep other monkeys in check in public places. There is no word yet if the monkeys will get stun guns or metal batons.

The New Delhi Municipal Council said it will put 10 Langurs on duty outside several venues starting Wednesday, but that number will increase in the days leading up to Sunday’s opening ceremony.

“The additional langurs will take care of the games venues and other important areas,” the council told the Press Trust of India news agency.

The 19th edition of the Commonwealth Games, only the second to be held in Asia after Kuala Lumpur in 1998, has its share of other animal-related issues, aside from monkeys. In addition to monkeys, stray dogs run rampant on the street, a 4-foot cobra was found at the tennis venue and another snake was caught in a room at the athletes’ village.

Security remains a high priority in New Delhi with thousands of heavily armed police and military personnel scattered throughout the city. In a continued focus on security at the event, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Wednesday it continues to receive reports of possible terrorist threats in India and issued an updated warning to travelers heading to the games.

“There is a high risk of terrorist attack in New Delhi,” the department said on its website. “Since 2000, there have been at least 14 major terrorist attacks in New Delhi on locations such as markets, train stations and other public places. These attacks have caused hundreds of deaths and injuries.”