The Moth Man. United Kingdom

In these latter cases, the army gazette explained that this man had his fun with the sentinels, approaching their sentry boxes stealthily, climbing on them, and scaring the sentries by slapping them on the face, then fleeing with agility, benefiting from the effect of surprise. The gazette explained that this was a dangerous game, since the prankster was likely to be shot down by those sentries who would not remain awestruck long enough to forget to aim their guns at him and shoot after the usual warnings; indeed, rifles were soon loaded blank in order to avoid such a dramatic ending. Ancients of the Army indicated thereafter that one of their own officer was actually suspected to have been the prankster. Trashy tabloids of course exaggerated the story and “Spring Heeled Jack” appears on front pages drawn like a terrifying ghost. Decades later, authors of articles on mysterious event and sensationalist careless ufologists grabbed such old stories and completely deteriorated them. A ufologist of the Flying Saucer Review crew invented that the “creature” had a luminous helmet, pointed ears, the faculty to fly in the airs, a paralyzing ray – suggested by distorting the mentions of the time that sentinels had been paralyzed by fear – and presented these stories as those of witnesses of an extraterrestrial creature having had a flying saucer crash or failure. In spite of the absence of UFO, absence of landing, absence of extraterrestrial being, the distorted version was included in a catalogue of UFO landings that had much success, as that of a mysterious creature in tight-fitting suit and spitting a paralyzing blue light, flying in the airs, and resistant to gunshots.