The Legend of the Dover Demon

Come back with us now to 1977, when everything was just a little bit more awesome: the clothes, the dancing, and of course the cryptids. Nowhere were the groovy cryptids better exemplified than in Dover, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. In three separate incidents all late at night and spanning only 24 hours, four teenagers all reported seeing the same bizarre, unknown creature, while they were either walking or driving in the rural community. It was like some kind of alien monster, small but with a giant head and tiny thin body. In each case it vanished and was never seen again, except in the memories of the teens and in the annals of urban legendry. What could it have been?

We are here today to do our best to answer that question. We have no physical evidence that anything happened at all; just the testimony of these four young people. So let's take a closer look at what they said happened.

Dover is about a half hour commute from Boston, and is populated mainly by Massachusett's most wealthy. It is, in fact, Massachusett's wealthiest town, with a tiny population of only 5,000 back in 1977 (and hardly any larger today). The estates and the homes are both, by and large, large. It is beautiful and green and rural. But for high school students, it was not a place of dazzling social opportunities. The students would have had to find their own amusements.

Late on the nights of April 21st and 22nd, 1977, four students from Dover-Sherborn High School (total enrollment just under 500) all shared an incredible experience, but in three (apparently unconnected) incidents. Their ages ranged from 15 to 18. The first came when Bill Bartlett, 17, was rolling in his sweet Volkswagen with some friends. Suddenly he saw — though nobody else in the car did — a bizarre creature on the side of the road: short but with a huge head, white or peach in color, big eyes and no other facial features, and very thin neck and limbs.

Two hours later, John Baxter (15) was walking home when he encountered a silhouette walking toward him. He called out, and the creature ran away across a ditch, and John then caught his first good look at it. It had a huge double-lobed head like a peanut, and skinny arms and legs with long fingers that seemed to wrap around and mold to the tree it held, and to the rocks it stood upon.

The next night, also late, 18-year-old Will Taintor was driving his girlfriend Abby Brabham (15) home. She spotted a creature in the road, monkey-like but with a huge oblong head, the smooth-skinned creature tan in color, its eyes shining back brightly in the headlights. Will caught only a passing glance as they drove; the entire sighting lasting only a few seconds.

Bartlett (today a professional artist) and Baxter both drew sketches of what they saw, and they were strikingly similar. A small thin creature with a huge double-lobed head, tiny body, and shockingly skinny neck and limbs — and no features on its face except glowing eyes, reflecting the headlights.

The Dover Demon is one of those cases that's really hard to solve, to anyone actually trying to solve it. The alleged creature made only one appearance in history, to only a few people in just that one 24-hour span. Nobody ever reported anything like it before or since. It only appeared to four teenagers, all of whom knew each other and attended the same (very small) high school. It didn't appear to any adults or to anyone else on those streets at the same time, despite three alleged appearances at three different locations. There simply wasn't any data except for four verbal, unevidenced accounts. Normally I would simply ignore a story like this on the principle of Hitchen's Razor: What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

But this is Skeptoid, and since the urban legend exists, we know there are lessons to be learned in how to skeptically approach the claims, and in understanding how and why the urban legend exists.

Let's look at the possibilities. If there was a strange creature, there are two possibilities:

1. A small population, perhaps just one, of this undiscovered creature roughly as described, is (or was) real, and actually did make the appearances to the teens; or
2. Someone hoaxed the teens with some kind of costume or puppet — perhaps even one of the four of them.

If there was no strange creature, there are also two possibilities:

1. The teens all misidentified a normal animal or person. As we know, this is by far the most common explanation for mysterious sightings of all kinds; or
2. The teens made it up and lied about it.

So now let's do our thing, and go through each of these four possibilities to see where each is strong and where it's weak:

1. The creature was genuinely a strange, unknown entity.

This should be the last possibility to be considered. It's where Occam's Razor comes in: the explanation requiring the fewest new assumptions should be preferred. None of the other three explanations require any new assumptions at all. Hoaxes happen every day. People misidentify things every day. People lie about stuff every day. But an unknown strange entity is a gigantic new assumption about the world.

To see just how gigantic it would be, we can consider the creature's anatomically implausible nature. This explanation would be correct only if the teens' description of it was infallible and faultless. So we're talking about a creature with an enormous head which would be quite heavy, supported by a neck and limbs that would be (according to the drawings) totally inadequate to support its weight. It had no evident nose, mouth, or ears; thus no way to breathe. It was naked at night, when the average temperature there on that date hovers just above freezing, 3°C/38°F. Its other distinctive features are also unknown among full-time bipeds. There's nothing like it in the whole taxonomic catalog.

There's also the matter that it was only seen during this one 24-hour period. If it lived in the vicinity, it would have been spotted many other times as well — there simply aren't any examples of actual creatures living among humans that have only ever been seen once, and it's just not plausible. So in just about every way, this is not an acceptable explanation.

2. Someone hoaxed the teens.

Of course this happens. It could have been anyone, or it could have been one of the four making up their own experience and then trying to scare their friends with some kind of costume or puppet. Well, it couldn't have been a costume, because its small size and twig-like limbs were well outside the range of what any human could have fit into. Could it have been some kind of puppet, marionette, or radio-controlled audio-animatronic? Well, sure, it could have; but if so it was pretty elaborate and effective; wouldn't a hoaxer who made something so elaborate want to use it more than just on these few kids just this one time?

In a 2023 article for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, author Ben Radford (who popped a tire on one of our vans on the Skeptoid Death Valley Adventure) noted that the police concluded the whole episode was "nothing more than a school vacation hoax" and that "though many locals vouched for the teens' credibility, several pointedly did not."

I agree that a hoax is a possibility, I just don't think it's a very likely one — unless all four were in on the hoax and there never was any elaborate puppet creature.

3. The teens misidentified a normal animal or person.

It's possible for one person to see an everyday animal or person from pretty close up and misidentify it so radically as a large-headed alien-like creature with very thin limbs, but it's much less likely for four people to all do so. So, while it's true that honest misidentification accounts for many reports of strange sightings, I think it's pretty unlikely in this case.

Yet misidentification of an ordinary animal is what investigator and author Joe Nickell went with, also writing in Skeptical Inquirer and also in 2023. He was satisfied that the Dover Demon was simply a male snowy owl. The color and shape of the whole owl are generally a good match for the reported double-lobed head lacking any nose or mouth, the eye shine would be compatible with the reports, and if its wings were extended a bit they could be mistaken for long, spindly arms with long fingers at the end.

The owl identification is a bit troublesome for me — not only because Joe is a respected friend of mine, and because just two episodes ago I also disagreed with his identification for the Gloucester Sea Serpent; but mainly because it's not logical. Yes, granted, a person might look at a snowy owl in the right conditions and they could think they're seeing something that looks like what these teens drew. But if it happened to four people in town in just 24 hours, it must be a very compelling illusion. Yet the illusion never fooled anyone, ever, before or since.

For this reason, I don't find the misidentification explanation to be a good fit for this case. Which is unusual, because it's often a perfect fit for many cases of strange sightings. And this brings us to:

4. The teens lied about it.

This is the only one of the possible explanations that has no weaknesses. There's no evidence that anything happened at all. Again quoting Radford:

Despite police searches and the participation of four researchers from five different UFO and Fortean organizations, including [cryptozoologist] Loren Coleman, no evidence was ever found. Eyewitnesses were interviewed, measurements were taken, and reenactments were done... The fact that the Dover Demon was a one-off sighting reported by three teen friends in just over one day hurts its credibility as well. No one else in the town reported seeing anything strange, and nearby animals were reported to be acting normally.

Some authors have noted that the year of the event, 1977, was the same year that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, and that the creature drawn and described by the teens was a suspiciously close match for the alien creatures in that film. The kids could have been inspired by it and cooked up a little scheme to pretend to have seen one. I discount this, as the movie was released a full eight months after the Dover Demon sightings.

Just to be clear, I'm not calling the kids liars. Nothing unusual having happened is simply our null hypothesis, our default assumption, in the lack of any compelling evidence to the contrary. The alternatives all range from illogical to completely implausible. So, unless the Dover Demon makes a reappearance and leaves us some empirical evidence of his existence, this one remains an uninteresting — and almost certainly false — campfire story.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning