Georgia-based investigator Aubrey Bowen spoke to a man recently who said that he and his friend encountered a 12-foot-tall black and silver deer while driving to Albany, New York.

The encounter took place in the summer of 2013, the man told Bowen, while they were returning to the University at Albany.

He said that his friend, who was driving, had become lost while trying a shortcut, and after being set back even further in their trip by car trouble, they found themselves driving along rural roads sometime between 10 and 11 p.m.

"As we were going, I saw something out of the corner of my eye," he told the investigator. "It came off the driver’s side, so it was coming off of [my friend's] side. As I’m looking, there’s a huge creature. I go, you know, 'chill.' So [my friend] slows down, and as he’s slowing down, the [headlights] got just close enough for us to see what I can only describe as...it’s not really a deer, let me explain, it’s...the physical form of it is a deer, it’s huge, huge, huge, like 12 feet tall…like 12 feet [tall] by nine [feet long].”

His estimate of the creature’s height was measured from the ground to the top of its antlers. By comparison, an adult male elk measured the same way can be upwards of nine feet tall and an adult male moose upwards of ten.

The creature was in the middle of the road after "it literally took like two steps," he said. "It stood there, and turned its head slightly to us. It was just looking at the light, because I didn’t feel like it was looking at us, personally. [It] stared and then continued on its merry way. The thing that kind of got me most about it was the antlers. The antlers, and the eyes; it was just...it was just something different."

The antlers, the man said, were "kind of twisted. They looked like deer antlers, like how the formation of deer antlers would go, but in a sense they were like dough. I know that sounds weird, but you know how you can twist pretzels into different shapes? It looked like somebody did that with its antlers."

Its eyes, he continued, were white; a condition he did not attribute to eyeshine.

"The eyes were white. Deer’s eyes are supposed to be black,” he said. “I don’t know if it was the headlights, but the headlights weren’t necessarily on the deer’s face; it was like midway up at best. You know, because we didn’t drive up any closer. We slowed down and stopped pretty distant from it. We were looking up to it. Because the stars were out, it helped a little with the full visual. But it wasn’t on the deer’s eyes itself. They were white, not black; straight white eyes."

The creature’s fur seemed to be black and silver, the man said, but, he added, “I may be mistaken on that, I can chalk that up to the headlights and the fact that I’m looking at this creature for seven seconds tops. It was nighttime, but the headlights made it look black and silver."

Regardless, he said, “It was definitely fur. It looked like a pretty even tone...it wasn’t spotted at all.”

The creature's face, he said, "was a little bit flat. I don’t want to say it wasn’t a deer, because that’s the thing I can most closely associate it to, even in the face. It looked just like a deer to me."

He was insistent that the creature, whatever it was, could not be any other animal indigenous to the area, like a moose or an elk, nor, he said, could it have been any ordinary deer.

"I know it couldn’t have possibly been a regular deer," he said of the animal. "[My friend and I] kind of chalked it up to being a spirit animal, because we really couldn’t come to an actual conclusion of what it actually could have possibly been."

Whatever it was, the man said, "It was weird. It was a very weird experience...It was just a really crazy, singular experience."

 

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