Witness Reports Harrowing Encounter with Winged Humanoid near Kaneville, Illinois

The Singular Fortean Society was contacted last Monday by Mat Sexton, 33, who said he’d encountered a winged humanoid while driving to work early that morning in northern Illinois.

Prior to the events of Monday, Sexton said he had seen the creature twice in 2023.

“I’ve had three different encounters that started around the same time last year in April or May,” he told investigator Tobias Wayland in a phone interview.

Both of his prior encounters took place in the early morning hours, sometime between 1:30 and 3:30 a.m.

The first time Sexton said he saw the creature was on US Highway 30 near a town called Hinckley in Illinois.

“I was driving my truck at the time because I’m a semi driver, so I kind of do later night runs,” he said. “And going down that road, I saw a huge branch fall off of a tree and kind of like hit [the road] a little way ahead of me. So, I looked up and there was this maybe 12-foot creature. I’m not sure really how to describe it other than it was covered in like a mouse-brown, short-hair fur. It didn’t look leathery.”

The creature, he said, “was humanoid.” 

“It had legs and arms separate from wings, and it came down and went right in front of my truck. It was kind of like when those eagles fall and then they unfurl their wings at the last minute and fly off,” Sexton said. “That’s what it did.”

At first the startled truck driver wondered if maybe what he had seen was simply a large bird, but that explanation didn’t exactly seem to fit.

“It freaked me out, but I was like, there has to be something I’m missing here,” he explained. “And then I just kind of dismissed it.”

It became more difficult to dismiss when he saw the same thing only three weeks later, this time on I-39 off of US Highway 30, just 10 miles or so from his first sighting.

“Again, it went real low in front of my truck,” Sexton said. “It was the same sort of creature, and I got a better look at it this time.”

He described the creature as having a sort of webbing between its legs, almost like a flying squirrel or wingsuit. Its feet had three big claws in front and a talon in the back, and its face had an elongated snout.

“The closest thing I can think of is a gerbal snout or face,” Sexton said. “It was elongated like that.”

The creature’s wings were membranous and appeared to be separate from its arms, he added.

Sexton estimated the creature to be at least 10 feet tall based on its size relative to nearby reference points.

“I was able to get a real good gauge of its size, because I saw the fog line on the right-hand side [of the road] and the middle line of the highway and its feet crossed, the fog line and its head was touching the middle line, so [it had to be] at least 10 feet,” he said.

The being’s wingspan was similarly huge, Sexton said, estimating it to be between 20 and 25 feet.

Just as before, the winged humanoid swooped down and then flew back up before disappearing into the darkness.

Again, Sexton tried to rationalize his experience, thinking, “Maybe I’m just tired, maybe I’m not seeing right.”

He wondered if he had simply seen an owl or even just garbage blowing in the wind.

“I kind of went through everything it could have been,” he said. “And I just kind of wrote it off because as much as I’m open to paranormal and cryptid things, I’m a fairly skeptical person.”

But then he saw it again a year later.

Sexton’s third encounter took place on McGirr Road about three or four miles west of Kaneville at approximately 2:15 a.m.

As he drove his truck onto a small bridge spanning a creek, the creature suddenly appeared.

“I don’t know if it came out from under the bridge,” Sexton said. “It just swooped down real close, almost touching the windshield. And that made me swerve because [the creature] took up so much of [the windshield], and it was so huge. I swerved into the oncoming lane, hit the gravel, and I got my composure back. After that, I was wondering what the hell was going on, just still going. It came down again from the right side to the left over my hood, buzzing over my hood. And then it was 30, 40 yards to the left and up in the sky.”