What happened
On the evening of April 21, 1977, seventeen-year-old Bill Bartlett was driving with friends along Farm Street in Dover, a town about 24 km southwest of Boston. According to his account, in the headlights he saw on a stone wall a creature about 1.2 meters tall, with a large watermelon-shaped head and glowing orange eyes, no visible nose or mouth, and long, thin limbs. That same night fifteen-year-old John Baxter described a similar figure near Miller Hill Road, and the following evening fifteen-year-old Abby Brabham described one near Springdale Avenue. Each of them made a drawing, and Bartlett insisted he could swear to it “on a stack of Bibles.” On a map, the sighting locations formed a line more than 3 km long. The case was investigated by, among others, cryptozoologist Loren Coleman and UFO researchers.
Witnesses
Teenagers Bill Bartlett, John Baxter and Abby Brabham; the friends accompanying Bartlett noticed nothing.
Explanations and hypotheses
The police considered the story “probably a student vacation prank,” although the witnesses never retracted it. Proposed explanations include a foal or a young moose, and skeptic Joe Nickell pointed to a snowy owl, whose plumage in the light of old headlights could have looked peach-colored, and whose spread wings could have looked like thin arms. Brian Dunning noted that such an illusion would have had to fool several people within a single day, although he too assumes a mundane explanation. The case remains unresolved.
Unexplained There is no convincing explanation.
More: Wikipedia (en)