April Monsters of the Month – Cloaked Creatures

When they want to stay hidden, the monsters in Drained can turn themselves as transparent as the clearest glass. Looking right at a lorkai, you’d see little more than a distortion in the landscape. Picture the Predator from the movie of the same name (one of my favorites), and that’s pretty close. No doubt this badass alien helped inspire the lorkai’s abilities.  

Lorkai don’t accomplish this using a cloaking device, like Predator’s Predator or Star Trek’s Romulans. They instantly destroy their pigmentation and change the density of their tissues to control light scattering. If that doesn’t make complete sense, that’s why I write fantasy instead of sci-fi. It’s biological magic, so there.

Transparent and translucent animals aren’t unheard of in nature, though. Various critters, including insects, mollusks, fish, and amphibians, most with glass in their monikers, have large see-through portions of their bodies. The vast majority live underwater, where the difference in the refractive index between their bodies and the medium they inhabit is less than in terrestrial environments. As far as I know, none are sizable, and they can’t morph to clear at will like the lorkai (though many cephalopods can instantly employ active camouflage).

Now, if you don’t mind transcending the laws of nature as we know them (and I sure as hells don’t), there may be real-life examples more akin to the lorkai than a larval octopus. Two reports come to mind. 

The first is an alleged encounter at Skinwalker Ranch described in Colm Kelleher and George Knapp’s Hunt for the Skinwalker. A distorted entity was reportedly observed by Tom Gorman (a pseudonym for Terry Sherman) and his son, charging from the trees at another man in a pasture. The near-invisible creature roared in the man’s face and bolted back for the trees.

I chanced upon a second report in David Paulides’s book, Missing 411 Hunters. He reports Jan Maccabee’s strange encounter while bowhunting. While in a tree stand, the woods suddenly went silent, and she noticed a distortion in the trees higher up in front of her. She described it as something big covered in plastic wrap moving through the canopy. Reportedly, multiple witnesses saw a UFO around the same time, only a mile away.

In both accounts, the “something” was later titled the Predator. As an experiencer of the unexplained, I believe witnesses, so both recountings fascinate me. Could the stories have been exaggerated in the retelling? Of course. Might there be mundane explanations? Maybe. If not, what could these witnesses have seen? Aliens? Ghosts? Military personnel testing new stealth technology? 

I haven’t a clue. Both anomalies were spotted in association with trees, where the movie Predator also spent substantial time. Might this cloaked alien be so firmly embedded in the zeitgeist that the brain might interpret something unusual in the trees as just that? Or could the trope be much older? Perhaps it’s something that’s always been in the canopies and our collective unconscious that birthed the iconic image of the Predator in the minds of its creators. The idea that humanoids could disappear using clothing (be it tech or magical) goes back at least as far as ancient Greece and Hades’ cap of invisibility.

But I’m partial to natural, biological invisibility–intrinsic active camouflage. Could there be some kind of monster like the lorkai in the wood, turning transparent at will? Perhaps a creature from another dimension, popping in for a visit? Stealthy fairy folk? Or an undiscovered aerial entity with the refractive index of air?

I hope so.