Dover is a quiet town of pastures, horse farms and woodland about 15 miles southwest of Boston, and for most of its history it attracted little attention from the outside world. That changed in April 1977, when three teenagers in the town reported, in three separate sightings over roughly 25 hours, a small, thin creature with a large head and glowing eyes. Nearly half a century later the people who saw it still describe the same thing, investigators still disagree about what it was, and the creature they reported is known around the world as the Dover Demon.
What did Bill Bartlett report on Farm Street?
The first sighting came on the night of April 21, 1977. According to the account Bill Bartlett gave the Boston Globe in 2006, he was 17 and driving along Farm Street with two friends at around 10 p.m. (Radford gives about 10:30), on the way toward the neighboring town of Sherborn. He said the car was moving at perhaps 35 to 40 miles per hour when his headlights picked out something on top of a broken stone wall, and he described it as “standing on a wall, its eyes glowing” from about 10 feet away.
Bartlett told the Globe that the thing was neither a pet nor a familiar wild animal. “It was not a dog or a cat,” he said. “It had no tail. It had an egg-shaped head.” He described “long thin fingers” and a body that was “more human-like in its form than animal.” His two passengers did not report seeing the creature, and when the group went back to look for it, it was gone, so Bartlett went home and drew what he had seen, and that sketch on notebook paper became the image most people now associate with the case.
In a 2024 interview with GBH, the folklore writer Jeff Belanger, who has interviewed Bartlett, explained why he finds the drawing important. Bartlett went on to become a fine arts painter whose work has been shown in galleries, and Belanger said that, “like many artists, he understands perspective and size and so on.” Belanger added that Bartlett “didn’t have a camera back then, unfortunately, but he had his artistic eye and was able to draw this thing.”
Who else saw the creature?
About two hours later and roughly a mile away, according to news accounts summarized by the Globe, John Baxter, then 15, was walking home from his girlfriend’s house along Miller Hill Road. The Globe reported that he came within 15 feet of the creature near a creek in a heavily wooded area. Belanger told GBH that Baxter at first thought he was looking at a neighborhood child out late, until he saw “this strange kind of bulbous head, these long, spindly arms and fingers,” before the figure ran off into the woods. Baxter also made a drawing, which the Globe described as showing a humanoid figure with large eyes standing beside a tree.
The third sighting came at around midnight the following night. The Globe reported that Abby Brabham, also 15, was being driven home by her boyfriend when she saw the creature sitting upright on Springdale Avenue. Writing in the Skeptical Inquirer’s January/February 2023 issue, first posted online in December 2022, the investigator Benjamin Radford noted that she described the eyes as green rather than the orange Bartlett had reported, and that her companion caught only a brief glimpse. Radford also cited a detail from the original investigation, which found that she “thought she had viewed the creature for as long as thirty to forty seconds, a timed reenactment placed the length of Abby’s observation at only about five seconds.”
However the three sightings are explained, they form a tight cluster. The Globe noted that the locations, plotted on a map, fell along a straight line and that all were made near water. Belanger described the whole episode to GBH as “a 26-hour period over the span of two days in April of 1977,” and the Globe put it at a two-day span.
How did the case become famous?
The man who gave the creature its name was Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist based in Portland, Maine. The Globe reported that Coleman began an investigation within days of the sightings, interviewed all three teenagers within a week and came away convinced that they had not concocted a hoax. “We have a credible case, over 25 hours, by individuals who saw something,” Coleman told the paper in 2006. He later wrote about the case in his books, and Radford credits him with doing original research soon after the sightings.
Coleman also argued that the Dover creature does not resemble other well known reports. He told the Globe it did not match the chupacabra or the bat eared figures described by a family in the Hopkinsville, Kentucky, case of 1955. “It doesn’t really fit any place,” he said. “It’s extremely unique.” Belanger made a similar point to GBH, saying the Dover creature “doesn’t really match any description of any other cryptid from anywhere else.” He also noted that he would have expected copycat reports after so much publicity, yet “there really haven’t been any.”
Over the decades the town has come to embrace the story as part of its identity, and Belanger told GBH he once owned a Dover Historical Society T shirt with a cartoon version of Bartlett’s drawing, and the Globe reported in 2006 that the town clerk kept a file of materials on the case alongside municipal reports.
Could it have been a moose calf or a foal?
The most common ordinary explanation is that the teenagers saw a young animal in poor light. Radford wrote that many people suggested, based on the local wildlife and the time of year, that it “could have been a foal or baby moose.” He also pointed out the problem with that idea, noting that a year old animal “would have been bigger and have antlers and fur.”
Coleman raised the same objection more forcefully in his interview with the Globe, saying he canvassed local horse owners after the sightings and none reported a missing horse, and that it was not foaling season. He said only two moose were reported in Massachusetts in 1977 and 1978, both in Central Massachusetts, and that a yearling moose in April would be “bigger than the Volkswagen Bartlett was in.” In his view, “To have a bipedal moose with long fingers and orange skin and no hair and no nose would be more of a phenomenon than the Dover Demon.”
Radford’s own analysis took a different route from the animal theories, and he argued that the creature in the drawings is anatomically impossible, with a head too large for its thin neck and legs, and concluded that “we cannot accept the sightings (or the drawings derived from them) as accurate.” In his view, the teenagers’ descriptions may simply be inaccurate accounts of something real seen briefly in the dark, and he raised the possibility that what one of them saw was “a rack of light moose antlers glimpsed from an odd angle.” He made the same argument about the glowing eyes, which he said cannot be correct, pointing to his earlier investigation of the eyeshine reported in the Mothman sightings.
What about the prank theory?
The other explanation that has followed the case since 1977 is a prank, either by teenagers or played on them. Radford cited a May 1977 Associated Press report, which said that police who looked into the sightings chalked them up to “nothing more than a school vacation hoax.” Radford treated a prank as one of two equally likely explanations, alongside mistaken description, and noted that some of the sightings happened near walls and trees where someone could have stayed out of sight. However, he acknowledged that “many locals vouched for the teens’ credibility,” and, as Radford also noted, there has never been a confession.
However, the police view was never unanimous in the town. Carl Sheridan, a former Dover police chief, told the Globe in 2006, “That thing has haunted me for 29 years,” and he went on to say of the witnesses, “I knew the kids involved.” Asked what they saw, he said, “I still don’t know. Strange things have happened. The whole thing was unusual.”
Bartlett himself has consistently rejected the prank explanation. “This was no prank,” he told the Globe. “I wasn’t trying to be funny. People who know me know I didn’t make this up.” Belanger, who spoke to him years later, told GBH that “his story hasn’t wavered in all those years.”
What does Bill Bartlett say now?
Bartlett has talked about the sighting with obvious reluctance. “I have no idea what it was,” he told the Globe in 2006. “I definitely know I saw something.” He described the attention as a burden more than a reward, saying, “It’s a thing that’s been following me for years.” He added, “In a lot of ways it’s kind of embarrassing to me,” and then, “It was definitely weird. I didn’t make it up. Sometimes I wish I had.”
He also described a strange episode a year after the sighting, when he heard a thump on a parked car and made out a small figure leaving the scene. The Globe reported that he remained unsure what it was and allowed that it could have been a youngster playing a prank. Belanger told GBH that apart from this, Bartlett has had no further sightings, and that every April and every Halloween reporters ask him to tell the story again.
So what did they see?
The record supports three firm points, and they are worth separating from the theories. Three teenagers in Dover reported a similar creature over about 25 hours in April 1977, an experienced investigator interviewed them within a week, and no physical evidence of any animal was ever found. Beyond that, the explanations divide sharply, since Coleman and Belanger regard the witnesses as credible people who saw something they could not identify, Radford argues that their descriptions cannot be accurate, and the moose, foal and prank theories all have defenders and critics. Bartlett’s own answer, given decades after the event, remains the most honest summary of the case: he has no idea what it was.
Established: Three Dover teenagers reported seeing a similar large headed creature in separate sightings on April 21 and 22, 1977, and Loren Coleman interviewed them within a week.
Disputed: That the witnesses saw a moose calf or a foal. Suggested by others and considered by Radford, rejected by Coleman on size, season and local records.
Unverified: That the sightings were a prank by or on the teenagers. Raised by police in 1977 and by Radford, denied by Bartlett, with no confession or evidence.
Fringe: That the creature was an extraterrestrial or a supernatural being.
Sources
- Mark Sullivan, Decades later, the Dover Demon still haunts, The Boston Globe, October 29, 2006. archive.boston.com
- Arun Rath and Diego Lopez, Nearly half a century later, ‘Dover Demon’ mystery still puzzles enthusiasts, GBH All Things Considered, April 29, 2024. wgbh.org
- Benjamin Radford, Deconstructing the Dover Demon, Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 47, No. 1, January/February 2023 (posted online December 2022). skepticalinquirer.org
