What the hell is the Missouri Flying Humanoid?

by Kevin Candela

Hell may be the right word here. Look at the drawings. Consider the testimonials. What we’re talking about here is no extinct primate. This is a true monster, and I thank the brilliant Monsters and Mysteries in America for enlightening us as to this local legend’s existence.

Let’s start with the locale, because it’s a great one: Turkey Creek, Missouri, is not all that far from the Current and Jacks Fork Rivers and the National Scenic Riverways park that contains them. This is the Ozarks, pure and simple, and if you’ve been there, you know there’s plenty of woodlands, caves, water—in short, everything a man-sized creature would need to survive and live a private life. In fact there could be a bunch of these things in a place as remote as that part of the country.

Trivia note about the Ozarks in general: After the Great Chicago Fire, a massive amount of wood was needed to rebuild the city. That wood came from stripping the virgin pine forests of southern Missouri so bare that all the residual rocks from the clear-cut hills washed down into the creeks to form the stony creek beds that currently underlie the Jacks Fork, Current and other Missouri recreational rivers. Not sure if this homo vestans (“man the destroyer”, thanks to the movie The Abominable Snowman) devastation made it all the way over to Turkey Creek or not, but either way it would have chased native creatures out of the timber-cutting zone, and I’m guessing since man came from north, south and east that the MFHs would have cut and headed west.

Back to the creature.

What are we talking about here? Is this the inspiration for Batman? Or at least the comic book Man-Bat? Maybe it’s even L. Frank Baum’s “flying monkeys”. 

According to the testimonial on Monsters and Mysteries in America, the creature was strong enough to lift a heavy vehicle partially off the road (causing it to eventually wreck). This hasn’t happened since the great 1972 TV movie Gargoyles, which may just have been inspired (directly or by “osmosis”) by the Missouri Humanoid as well. A human can’t come close to matching that, which might make a skeptic think/say such. But remember, as Clint Eastwood and Clyde taught us in Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can, a man-shaped primate about four or five feet tall can reduce a car to scrap parts in quick order. So the MFH’s strength to me is no surprise, and right in line with that.

Let’s talk diet. What does it eat?

Well, whatever it might care to eat, the Ozarks have plenty of it. Mammals, fish, bugs, birds, “regular” bats and swifts—hey, even tarantulas are found down there, that area being about as far north as they’ve been willing to come so far. So food and water and privacy are all there in abundance. 

Yes, MFH is ripe for investigation in my opinion. But this is no job for two people with flashlights and sound equipment. They might well never be seen again. The Lost World: Jurassic Park was in this writer’s opinion an awful mess of a movie, but that lab trailer it featured is just about what you might need to successfully camp out a while at Turkey Creek and go poking around looking for the flying humanoid. I don’t recommend weapons, because the odds are the investigators will more likely hurt each other than anything else. The Ozarks are full of weird noises, and edgy researchers probably need not apply. This is a job for Snake Plisskens: detached professionals with ice in their veins who could look the thing(s) in the eye like those hunters in Monsters and Mysteries did without giving in to primal panic. Chain mail armor from head to toe might help, but only if it’s heavy enough to keep one from grabbing you and flying off. 

Now here’s the biggie: Is the Missouri Flying Humanoid “Nosferatu”?

I don’t know that Bram Stoker ever went canoeing on the Current River or fishing at Turkey Creek. But he didn’t invent the vampire, it’s an old story from Eastern Europe—where they no doubt have plenty of secluded woodlands as well. I can’t and won’t get into things like “Where are the fossils of its ancestors?” and such because such questions suggest that our archeologists have found fossils of everything when we all know there’s a big gap in their records of US (the so-called “missing link” thing). I suspect there are all kinds of caves hidden in and around Turkey Creek because they’re all over Missouri’s Ozark region due to residual Ice Age “groundwork”. I would guess that’s where the bones would be found.

But I’m not gonna go looking for them alone.