One of my favorite online sites to read probably won’t be a surprise to anyone following me, but I’m a faithful reader of Mysterious Universe . Their variety of the weird is always interesting to me.
This week they had an article on the Horizon City Monster. It tickled some memory of it in my brain and I had to spend the morning reading all about it. The article mentioned that it originally was reported all the way back in the 70s, in the El Paso Times, so I went digging. Here is a timeline of his appearances in the news of its sightings.
Here is the original transcript of the 75’ sighting…
“ A monster of sorts is reported to be running around loose at Horizon City, and those who have seen him at the Horizon golf course describe him as big and mean looking, sunken eyes and a jaw juts way out. Sounds exactly like a whole lot- golfers we have seen just after they sliced one in rough, or missed an easy putt.
—9/75 transcript from El Paso Times
Then again he popped up in 2002…
“Montañez is a retired secretary, and moved to Horizon City from East El Paso in October of 2002. She has seen the creature known locally as the Horizon City Monster on two separate occasions. The first of these seems to have been when she was still living in the desert east of El Paso. She was driving along a desert highway when she spotted a hairy figure crouched over a dead coyote on the side of the road. Driving closer to the entity, she was shocked when it stood upright and walked up a nearby mesquite mound (a dune-like formation also known as a Nabkha). Although she swears that the creature was initially taller than the mound, as it jogged down the other side of the mound it seemed to get progressively lower into the ground with each step. It eventually vanished below the mound.”
— 10/02 witness account from El Paso Times
The local sheriff was also interviewed in 2002 on the sighting and here were his thoughts…
Horizon City Police Chief Tony Aguilar has been the town’s chief for about two years, and said he doesn’t recall any reports of bigfoot sightings.
“We’ve had reports before of meteorites landing in the desert, but nothing about bigfoots,” Aguilar said.
Aguilar remembered hearing about a hermit who may have lived in the mountains near Horizon City in the early 1970’s.”
He had long hair and he was unshaven,” Aguilar recalled. “A lot of hunters at one point found a little cave, and found old cans, and like he had been living off the land.”
As the creature was thought to pop in and out of sand mounds or possible caverns they asked a geologist back then to see about that possibility, here are their thoughts.
Although the witness Montañez maintains the creatures live in caverns that exist underneath Horizon City, Phil Goodell, a geology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, said no such caverns exist.
“Large desert expanses can’t have caverns,” Goodell said. “You have to have limestone rock, like Carlsbad Caverns does.”
In the Mysterious Universe article, the creature is possibly heard and not seen this time. Here is a blurb of how it was described…
“It must have been around 7ish at the time when out of nowhere, I heard what amounted to a screaming howling screech in the foreground. Thinking maybe someone was on their phone, I shrugged it off, but then a few minutes later, I heard it again and even asked to cast to stay quiet to see if they could listen to it too. A minute later, sure enough, the howls came back one long one, followed by a few short ones.”
Some El Pasoans have also apparently reported strange sightings near Ascarate Lake and Eastlake Boulevard..
So there is a bit of a timeline on this creatures appearance in the news. What do you think? Bigfoot? They have howls, encounter reports all the way back to the 70s. Certainly seems possible to me. The timeline here is also pretty well spread out, so maybe this creature either hides very well, hibernates or migrates. Or was it just a hermit after all ? Or wait! Was the hermit not a hermit at all? Lots of questions still, but It’s nice to read up on the lesser known creatures and encounter reports, so thank MU I enjoyed this research time immensely…
Have a wonderful Weekend!
Sasysquatchgirl 