The Mysterious Dark Watchers

The Santa Lucia Mountains or the Santa Lucia Range is a rugged mountain range located in the coastal area of central California. Named in 1602 by a Spanish cartographer as the Sierra de Santa Lucia, the mountain range stretches for 105 miles or 169 kilometers from Monterey County in the north all the way south to San Luis Obispo County. Among its southern peaks stands the famous Hearst Castle. The Santa Lucia Range is the coast north of Ragged Point, forming a 100-kilometer wall of wave-dashed cliffs known as the Big Sur, to which the Pacific Coast Highway clings. 

It is a land of immense beauty and tranquility, where California Condors fly high above its mountains, and sea otters and elephant seals populate the turbulent waters at their base. 

But lurking within these mountains is the strange and mystifying phantoms that stand motionless in long black cloaks. Surveying the crags and peaks of the mountains of Santa Lucia, these unfathomable creatures have been spotted by travelers to be looking out to the sea, often wearing broad brimmed hats, and sometimes carrying either a staff or a walking stick. But what is consistent in the description of those who have seen them is that they are always still, silent and featureless. Those who try to get a good look at these fantastical beings fail because, by the time that they attempt a second glance, they have already vanished. 

What Are Dark Watchers?

These mystical entities are believed to reside in the misty hillside of Big Sur in the Santa Lucia Mountains. The early Spanish explorers and Mexican ranchers that came after referred to these creatures as “Los Vigilantes Oscuros.” In modern times, they came to be known as “The Dark Watchers.”

The Dark Watchers are a group of migratory entities that have appeared in California Folklore for supposedly the past several hundred years and are purportedly stalking travelers along the Santa Lucia Mountains. They are apparently giant human-like phantoms that are only seen at twilight, and they are usually spotted standing silhouetted against the night sky along the ridges and peaks of the mountains. These beings are believed to possess incredible hearing as well as impeccable eyesight. They are also immune to high-tech detection and prefer to only reveal themselves to travelers or trekkers who are equipped with simple items like hats and sticks. 

Origins, References & Accounts

Tales about the Dark Watchers appear in many books, and many personal accounts of encounters with them can also be found online. A description of the Dark Watchers can be read in many books about California’s famous supernatural stories, but these descriptions always referred to the writings of Pulitzer Prize-winner John Steinbeck and poet Robinson Jeffers as literary sources that mention this phenomenon. 

In 1938, John Steinbeck was living near Monterey at the northern end of the Santa Lucia Mountains when he published his book of short stories titled “The Long Valley.” One of the stories included in the book is the short story “Flight,” which most famously mentions the Dark Watchers specifically. The Dark Watchers had notoriety in the area at the time because of poet Robinson Jeffers – who also lived in Big Sur – published the poem “Such Counsels You Gave to Me” in 1937. In his poem, Jeffers described the Dark Watchers as “forms that look human… but certainly are not human.”

Steinbeck and Jeffers writing around the same time in the same region and drawing inspiration from the same local traditions implied that some form of Dark Watchers lore predated both of their literary creations. But what was it?

Original accounts of the Dark Watchers date all the way back to the Chumash - a native American tribe which has lived along the central coast of California and among the Channel Islands for around 13,000 years. These Chumash natives have included stories of The Dark Watchers in their oral legends and traditions since the Pre-Columbian era.

Validity of Origin Story

One of the most detailed and authoritative accounts of Chumash beliefs is arguably the 1974 1200-page doctoral dissertation by Thomas Blackburn, which was later on published as “December’s Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives.” Blackburn’s principal source in writing his dissertation about Chumash beliefs was the massive archive collected by American linguist and ethnologist John Peabody Harrington between 1912 and 1928, including 111 oral narratives of the Chumash native tribe. Harrington’s body of unpublished research was housed at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives, and Blackburn went through it all, compiling virtually all there is to know about the Chumash beliefs. 

With an expert having researched extensively on the subject matter, we are now left with a very important question: Did the Chumash really tell stories about the Dark Watchers? If we are going to base our answer to this question on Blackburn’s work about the Chumash beliefs, then we can conclude that there were no creatures anything like the Dark Watchers mentioned in the oral narratives of this native American tribe. 

The closest thing that can be connected to these watchers was a creature called nunašīš. The Chumash believed that the Earth, as we know it, is the Middle World, which is an island surrounded by the ocean. The sun and other celestial bodies are a part of the Upper World, and down below are a Lower World. Among the dwellers of this Lower World are the Nunašīš, which are monstrous and misshapen animals who come up to the Middle World at night and spread bad luck, illness and other negative things. These creatures can also be shaped like humans, but they are neither dark nor cloaked. They are also not known for standing still against the night sky along mountain peaks.

The Chumash also believed in shape-shifting animals and humans, which is a belief widely held by many Native American cultures. However, so far, claiming that the Dark Watchers can actually be linked with any Chumash tradition cannot be done without casting doubts on its validity. Hence, it is also just as likely, if not more so, that the supposed connection of the Dark Watchers with Chumash oral stories could be just an invention of the 20th-century ghost story authors. After all, what better way to lend credibility to an urban legend than to tie it to an ancient culture?

Possible Explanations Behind the Dark Watchers

So, if the mysterious dark watchers are not at all a supernatural or mystical phenomenon, why are there people claiming to have seen one while hiking in the Santa Lucia Mountains in the fading twilight? 

We do not need to be an expert to know that our minds and eyes can sometimes play tricks on us, especially when we are in spooky environments where we are on edge, and our senses are on high alert. According to psychologists, illusions, hallucinations or misrepresentation of natural stimulus can be brought on by either exhaustion or isolation - conditions that are prevalent when you are traveling alone on the mountain trails of the Santa Lucia Range. 

Infrasound, which can be generated by the wind, can also cause feelings of uneasiness and anxiety in some people, which is why it is often connected to paranormal sightings. Studies show that infrasound between 7 and 19 Hertz can cause feelings of fear and panic in human beings. Researchers from the University of Hertfordshire conducted an experiment where they played music with and without tones of 17 Hertz frequency in the background. Results of the study showed that when the participants heard or felt the music with the 17 Hertz tones, they felt nervous, anxious and fearful. They also felt some pressure on their chests and chills crawling down their spine - feelings which are described by most people when they experience a paranormal event. 

An optical illusion known as the Brocken specter could also be a plausible explanation for the legend of the Dark Watchers. “Mountain Specter” can occur in certain atmospheric conditions when the sun is shining at a particular angle. A person’s shadow can be cast onto a cloud bank around them, which could create the illusion of a large shadowy humanoid figure. 

No one knows for sure who or what these Dark Watchers are. Where they come from or where they go when they disappear remains an unsolvable mystery to this day. As we have explained, it is likely that these creatures are nothing more than fictional legend, but even if they are real, these Dark Watchers were wise enough to have left no footprint behind that would have served as tangible proof of their existence. 

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Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Watchers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Lucia_Range
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4522
http://www.weirdca.com/location.php?location=179
http://www.independent.com/news/2014/nov/13/search-dark-watchers/
http://www.messagetoeagle.com/mysterious-dark-watchers-one-of-americas-greatest-ancient-riddles/
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/03/exploring-american-monsters-california/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Suggested_relationship_to_ghost_sightings
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/06/ghost-of-the-machine-sounds-in-the-paranormal/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brocken_spectre
https://www.britannica.com/science/Brocken-specter
http://earthsky.org/earth/what-is-the-brocken-spectre
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/globrock.htm

The Black Knight Alien Satellite

    This black knight is not at all related to the bat-costumed dark knight that we know all too well. In fact, many people think it’s an alien satellite that has been kept secret by NASA and the government for more than a decade since it was first discovered. Over the decades, there have been many sightings of the strange object, but no one knows why it’s up there floating in space. All reports from US, Russia, And Europe in general say that the satellite is of “unknown origin”. So what is this curious object anyway? When was it discovered? What does it do? What is its purpose? Let’s start from the very beginning.

    Although there are varied opinions, it is generally believed that Nikola Tesla was the one who “discovered” the black knight when he set up a magnifying transmitter at his Colorado Springs facility in 1899 to investigate wireless distribution of electricity. What he didn’t expect were strange signals that were repeated periodically with number and order. They were timed pulses coming as ...1, ...2, ...3, that led him to believe that the signal was coming from an extraterrestrial source. Tesla originally thought that the signals were being sent from Mars, but he later restated that the signal was actually coming from another part of space. It’s not surprising that Tesla associated the signal with alien intervention, because a lot of people believe that Tesla has had contact with aliens. It is believed that he received information from aliens in a number of different cases. For example, once he was trying to find an equation/principle for the AC machine and suddenly, out of nowhere, he got the answer via telepathy or from an unknown source. Apparently he also invented many things for the government that were kept from the public, but that’s another story on it’s own.

    Not long afterward Tesla’s discovery, Guglielmo Marconi, Italian inventor and electrical engineer, was also intercepted by a strange unknown artificial signal. He found that some of his morse code messages were being returned to him, which fascinated and frightened him at the same time.

     Following his discovery in 1927, another man named Jorgen Hals, a civil engineer in Oslo, was using a radio receiver to listen to shortwave transmissions and noticed something very peculiar was happening. His signals were being reflected back to him. He didn’t know what it was, but the echoes were being reflected back to him at strange intervals ranging from 3-15 seconds. These irregularly reflected intervals were later known to be LDES, or Long Delayed Echoes.

    After the occurrence of all of these events that might have been related to alien interaction (especially the LDES),  the press was majorly stirred up. From 1928 to 1930, a experiments were performed that tested the legitimacy of the reflected signals, and it turned out that they were very real indeed. The only problem was that no one had an explanation for the signals’ reflections. As a result, even more experiments were run in France and the UK in the 1930's, but at the end of the day scientists could do nothing but be confused and speechless. Even today, we don’t have an agreed upon explanation for the occurrence and location of these LDES.

    Of course, after the experiments were run, the black knight became an even hotter topic for many news outlets, and the first story of the alien shuttle appeared on May 14th, 1954 when St. Louis Dispatch and The SF Examiner wrote about it, explaining that the U.S had found a strange satellite in space and that it could possibly be a surveillance satellite launched by the Russians.

     Then, on August 23, 1954, another story was released about the Black Knight, this time by the tech mag Aviation Week and Space Technology. They basically told the world that the Pentagon found two satellites orbiting the earth, both of which were natural. The pentagon was furious when they heard about the release of the story because want the satellites to be known by the public. As a result, they lied to the public and told them that the satellites were asteroids (as if anyone would actually believe them). By then the public already knew that something was up, and that either the Russians had managed to put something into orbit or there was something more...supernatural at work.

    A few years later, in March of 1960, another satellite was found orbiting earth. This satellite was a spectacular discovery because it wasn’t like the previously discovered satellites at all. It was a large black object weighing about 15 tons that was in POLAR orbit around earth, which means that it passes over polar regions and has a plane that contains the polar axis. This is amazing because first of all, the US and soviets didn’t even KNOW how to put an object in polar orbit. Second of all, neither country was capable of putting an object that weighs so much into space either. Third of all, the satellite was twice as fast as any known satellite at the time. As a result, the strange polar-orbiting satellites acquired a name: the Black Knight. No one knows for sure the origins of the name, but it’s believed that the name is based on a rocket the British had developed, which was also called Black Knight. After the amazing discovery, astronomers across the country conducted research on the satellite and realized that it had one of the strangest patterns of appearance and disappearance, because it would disappear for long periods of time before reappearing again YEARS later. 

   Robert L. Johnson, director of the Adler Planetarium, said that "‘THE OBJECT ‘DOESN’T EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO MAINTAIN A REGULAR SCHEDULE,LIKE ANY OTHER HEAVENLY OR MAN MADE OBJECT...‘WE DON’T KNOW WHEN TO WATCH FOR IT.’" What was it trying to do?

      Stanford space scientist Ronald Bracewell had an explanation for the phenomenon and believed that the satellite was a way for a distant alien civilization to communicate with earth. He said that the aliens might have sent out a probe, or ‘Bracewell probe’ as it’s we now call it, into the universe to look for other planets that seemed promising and contained intelligent lifeforms. He said that the satellite would remain dormant until humans found a way to send signals to it, in which it would send signals back.

     Duncan Lunan, a Scottish science writer was so intrigued by Bracewell’s theory that he decided to test it out for himself. He reexamined the data from the LDE experiments of 1928 and was absolutely and completely baffled. He mapped out the delays from the echos he recorded in 1928, and found that they formed the pattern of the  Boötes constellation, a constellation the in the northern sky. Not only that, Lunan was also able to decode the message that was being conveyed from the LDE Data at a stable point between the orbits of Earth and Moon called L5. the message read:

“  START HERE.OUR HOME IS EPSILON BOOTIS. WHICH IS A DOUBLE STAR. WE LIVE ON THE 6th PLANET OF 7 — CHECK THAT, 6th OF 7 — COUNTING OUTWARDS FROM THE SUN WHICH IS THE LARGER OF THE TWO.OUR 6th PLANET HAS ONE MOON,OUR 4th PLANET HAS THREE,OUR FIRST AND THIRD PLANETS EACH HAVE ONE.OUR PROBE IS IN THE ORBIT OF YOUR MOON THIS UPDATES THE POSITION OF ARCTURUS SHOWN ON OUR MAPS.”

If this doesn’t send chills down your spine, I don’t know what does.

     What’s even more amazing is that, along with the decoded message, Lunan also realized something else. Although he made his discovery in 1972, he realized that the star system he saw from the LDE data was not like the star system he saw in the skies at all. He concluded that if the black knight really was an alien probe, it must have taken ages to reach earth. He was right. By looking back in time, Lunan realized that the map he created matched how Epsilon Bootis looked like the Epsilon Bootis that was in the skies 13,000 years ago. This means that the satellite, possibly sent from a distant alien civilization, could have been orbiting the planet since pre-history.

     By then, Lunan was pretty much convinced that an alien civilization living near the Bootes constellation was trying to contact earth. It’s possible that the the same signal was also intercepted by Tesla and Macroni as well, but we will never know for sure. Sadly, since there wasn’t solid proof regarding the existence of such a supernatural satellite, people started believing the Pentagon’s excuse that the Black Knight was just some “space debris”.

     Thankfully, visual evidence of the satellite was found in 1998 when the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor was able to take high-resolution pictures of the strange black object while they were in space. The old stories of Tesla, LDES, and Lunan’s constellation map once again resurfaced in the minds of people across the country. Until today, we are still not sure what the Black Knight is, what it does, or where it comes from, but we DO know for a fact that it’s no regular satellite.