Maybe that wasn't the Jersey Devil...

OK, al while ago I posted this thread, Is This the Jersey Devil?.

To make a long story short, I said that this guy,
was really this guy,
.

I'm not really a NJD researcher or anything, I just stumbled upon the pic of a hammerhead bat and noticed that it looked like alot of the drawings and descriptions of the Jersey Devil.

Well, a few months back, I stumbled onto something that might disprove my theory.
Clickee, Clickee... I'm surprized somebody hadn't already posted this to disprove my theory.
Basically, The drawing of the Devil shown above is actually a drawing of kangaroo that Norman Jefferies hooked wings to.
Woops! Maybe I was wrong.

I also found this, clickee, clickee...
It talks about the 1909 sightings actually being a real estate scam.

Oh well, you can't be right all the time. I guess nobody knows what The Jersey Devil really is. So, if your out by the Pine Barrens in NJ, you might want to keep your eyes open for kangaroos, large bats and The Jersey Devil.

The JD and the bat do look remarkably similar. Check out this site I found on them!
Hammerhead bat

Yep, they sure do.

If you look at the original thread, there are alot of arguements for the JD being a hammerhear bat. My pride was hurt when I found out that, the "eye-witness" accounts were of a costumed kangaroo.

I even sat on this info for half a year. I liked being right. Also, I was hoping another ATSer would bust me.

The thread I started, here, was, essentually, my Opus on ATS. I'd been a contributing member for years but, I had never added anything significant.

When I found out I might be wrong, my pride got hurt. I swallowed it. Hopefully, People on ATS learn from this. Even if you have been proven to be right, you still might be wrong. Never, never, ever, ever, stop searching for the truth; even after you've found it.

Appearantly the jerkass(PT Barnum style jerkass of course), Norman Jefferies, is still burning people after all these years. He even burned the cream of debunkers (that's right, us ATSers are the Cream) 50 years later.

Who knows. Maybe, I'm still right. At this point, anything is possible.

This is kinda my, "fish that got away", story. But, I love a mystery and, I'm glad that now the story of the JD has some mystery in it again... I was so sure I had solved that mystery!.. Oh well, this has served as an allegory for life, my life at least, Never think you have it all figured out. As soon as you know that you know, It "all", you get the grand pleasure of knowing that you are way off.


I bet that when Gazrok reads this, his cheeks will be turning red too.

Not really.
If you read the article, nowhere does it state that drawing is indeed of the kangaroo hoax.



To be more precise, the drawing appeared in the January 1909 edition of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and was drawn as reported by witness Nelson Evans, of Glouchester, New Jersey.

The Jeffries hoax was in 1929, 20 years after this drawing appeared.

Your comparison remains a keen one, and if one researches the Hammerhead bat, they'll find a remarkable similarity to past Jersey Devil images.



Personally, I still think you're right on the money...and that website was pretty irresponsible in putting the pic with that story, as it was unrelated (and without citing where the pic was from).



[edit on 10-9-2007 by Gazrok]

Have you ever visited the Pine Barrens or met a Piney?
The area is rife with all sorts of surprises. There's some record somewhere that it is the largest continuously uninhabited area per capita within a densely populated area in the world. It's totally inhospitable, and a friend of mine who attempted to own a home was driven out by "nature".
There are a ton of rational people from the Mid-Atlantic region who believe that there is something to the stories.

One of my high school teachers in NJ swears on his life that he witnessed the JD run/gallop across a street he was driving on. And his description was not that of a kangaroo. So idk, maybe ill email him with the bat description and get his take on that

The Jersey Devil has a lot of similarities to a relatively well-known type of non-human entity/animal. This Springheel Jack/Mothman entity is usually described as tall, winged and dark. Sometimes it has glowing red eyes. It travels more by big leaps than by flying. It's been seen all over the world and may have been twisted into a vampire myth in some areas.

It's an odd one.