Nosewitness the Smell of High Strangeness

Research into strange phenomena has tended to concentrate on visual and audio data, but witness accounts of everything from UFO encounters to monster sightings often contain intriguing references to supernatural scents and paranormal pongs. JOSHUA CUTCHIN  argues that it’s time we took olfactory evidence for forteana seriously…

- Joshua Cutchin

Ivete Clemência Felipe and her relatives encountered an unearthly stench near SãoVicente, Brazil, one evening in 1978.The 23-year-old witness was alone in the home of her sister-in-law when she suddenly noticed a “little blue light in the sky quite far away.” As it approached the house with frightening rapidity, the anomaly grew in size and began to strobe a startling array of colours.

“I could hear a buzzing sound,” Felipe recalled. “It was going around and around. All the doors and windows were shut, but it lit up the inside of the house. I was so scared that I ran and hid under a bed.”

Her cousin and sister-in-law, both of whom observed the object upon their return home, corroborated the event. A follow-up interview by members of the Belo Horizonte UFO group CICOANI and investigator Bob Pratt revealed that both women detected “a smell of gas, like sulphur” during the incident. 

Five years earlier, the town of Murphysboro in southwest Illinois found itself under siege by a “7ft-[2m] tall mudcovered and light-haired man” dubbed the Big Muddy Monster.The beast was renowned for its overpowering odour, which many townsfolk attributed to the river of its namesake.They speculated the beast was using the waterway as a transportation corridor.

One of the more famous encounters during the Big Muddy Monster flap took place on 26 June 1973.Witness Cheryl Rath (née Ray) was stargazing on her back porch when she and her boyfriend heard rustling in the nearby bushes. Upon investigating the noise, the couple was amazed to see a manlike creature Rath described as “real tall, hairy. I think it was white, but [the hair] was dirty, matted. It had a real bad odour.

It was really rank. I never smelled anything like it.”