First introduced to his radio audience by Art Bell, the odd but compelling phenomenom continues. People are reporting increased sightings of beings who seem to be shadows come alive. Are these strange creatures time travelers from our future? Are they simply ghosts? Demons? Visions created from altered brain waves due to too much computer use? Lex explores several possibilities and interviews experts as he tries to get to the bottom of a very amorphous pit.

Dancing with Phantoms:
An Examination of the Shadow People Phenomenon

 They were, simply put, grotesqueries: flabby, obscenely seething entities, exuding oxygen from their orifices. Constrained by tremendous forces, they seemed to be sinking into the ground, even as they lumbered towards us. Blunt waves of noise slowly emerged from their upper regions, rupturing the thin membrane between us. Crude life forms, they appeared to have little more than a very rudimentary consciousness.

No, it's not a description of the Shadow People -- rather, it's how they themselves might view humans. Perhaps to try to get inside this murky phenomenon, we have to see from their point of view. But I'm getting ahead of myself -- seething, lumbering entity that I am.

We thought we'd heard of everything that goes bump in the night. But a seemingly new breed of paranormal life burst onto Art Bell's radio program, Coast to Coast AM, in late March 2001. Dubbed "the Shadow People," the phenomenon touched on elements from the lore of ghosts, aliens, demons, and out-of-body experiences. Yet the abundance of Shadow People reports (Art received a staggering 4,500 emails within one week) indicated a distinctly different phenomenon was emerging, with its own unearthly set of characteristics.

Now, nearly five years later, Shadow People have entered the paranormal vernacular. Tales of sightings are a regular staple on Coast to Coast AM, now hosted by George Noory (who has shared his own accounts of seeing "shadow rodents"), websites have sprung up, and awareness of these phantoms has begun to solidify.

Still, it remains tricky to pin down what is by its very nature, elusive. While many have seen shapes or shadows moving in their peripheral vision and just chalked it up to a play of light or a figment of their imagination, what seems new in these reports is that the shadow beings are being observed straight on. "It was 3-4 feet tall, human in shape, and crouched over an antique velvet chair," said Allen, a Denver caller to Coast to Coast who had previously thought of the incident as a ghost sighting until he began to hear similar stories on the program. "I didn't know what it was doing but it was doing something and it was sure surprised to see me, my dog and my son," Allen went on. "It was almost like we had surprised an animal out it the wild somewhere. It turned, made eye contact and then zipped up the hall, though it didn't seem like it had legs." Allen said his dog then chased the figure up the stairs, which by then had vanished.

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See Also:

Above and Beyond, Chapter 1

Above and Beyond, Chapter 2

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