Story 15
A Story About Maybe Seeing a Lizard UMA
I started having occult-like experiences after I saw a mysterious alien-like creature in my grandparents’ chestnut orchard when I was in the second grade of elementary school (please see The Story About Seeing a Mysterious Alien?).
This time, I’ll tell you about the time I might have seen that famous Japanese UMA.
This also happened when I was in elementary school. It was the winter of fifth grade, and I was walking home from school alone.
The road I walked was along the national highway. My hometown isn’t exactly a big city, but because my school route was along that main road, even back then the area was lined with many restaurants, supermarkets, and hospitals.
Normally, I’d go home with a friend, but an influenza outbreak was going around, and my friend had been absent for about three days.
Other than walking alone, nothing seemed unusual about my commute that day.
I was only about 200 meters from home.
Near my house there were a lot of restaurants. In that remaining stretch, there was a conveyor-belt sushi place, then a pizza shop, then a ramen shop, in that order. Past them, after one standalone house and an intersection with traffic lights, was my home.
It was then, right between the pizza shop and the ramen shop, that I noticed a moving shadow clinging to the block wall along a narrow side path.
I loved animals, so if it was a cat or dog I wanted to pet it, and if it was a bug or lizard, I thought I’d catch it.
But what I saw was clearly a huge lizard, over a meter long. For a second I thought it was an iguana, but it had dark brown, smooth scales, and none of the spiky frills an iguana has.
(It’s a Tsuchinoko………!!!!)
It clearly had no limbs, a thick tail, and a triangular head.
It slowly, slowly crawled along the wall like a snake, coming toward me.
I tried sneaking closer, thinking I’d catch it.
Once I was close enough, I reached out both arms toward its head to grab it.
But my palms didn’t touch anything. Instead, it leapt from the wall to the ramen shop’s outer wall.
As I stood there dumbfounded, it slithered along the wall with a sickening, snake-like movement, silently. This time it wasn’t slow—it moved quickly and nimbly.
All I could do was stare at it in shock.
Soon it climbed onto the roof and disappeared from sight.
There’s a theory that Tsuchinoko sightings are just people mistaking the creature for a “blue-tongued skink.”
Even as a kid, I knew what a blue-tongued skink was. But the one I saw, which I thought might have been a Tsuchinoko, didn’t look like one at all. Its head was too big, its neck was thin, its tail was thick, it had no legs, and it was too large. And besides, blue-tongued skinks actually have legs.
Even if it was some other kind of lizard or snake I mistook it for, could a cold-blooded animal like that really move around so energetically on a day when the temperature was below 10°C?
