OWLMAN

Opening

Over the Easter weekend of 1976, by the account that reached print, two sisters on holiday from Preston saw a winged, feathered figure the size of a man hovering over the tower of St Mawnan and St Stephen's church, on the headland where the Helford River meets the sea. Their father, Don Melling, cut the holiday short and gave a sketch to a local artist and stage magician, Tony "Doc" Shiels. Shiels later named the thing the Owlman.

That July two 14-year-old girls camping in the churchyard woods described a man-sized owl with red eyes and black, pincer-like claws. Further reports followed in 1976 and 1978. All of them reached the public through Shiels, who was running a sea serpent campaign off Falmouth that spring. Nobody else ever interviewed the 1976 witnesses.

Timeline

30 January to 19 February 1976On correspondence tapes to his American friend Michael McCormick, Shiels calls himself "a born hoaxer", says he hopes to hoax Falmouth with a Cornish sea monster, and on 4 February floats faking photographs of "a winged sea dragon".

5 March 1976The Falmouth Packet prints two blurred sea serpent photographs sent in by "Mary F". The creature becomes Morgawr.

17 April 1976, Easter SaturdayThe Melling sisters, June, 12, and Vicky, 9, see the figure over the church tower. Shiels writes that their father would not let him talk to the girls, but gave him June's sketch.

June 1976Fortean Times no. 16 carries Shiels's bulletin of Cornish reports with the sketch, the first printed description according to his biographer Rupert White.

3 July 1976Sally Chapman, from Plymouth, and Barbara Perry are camping in the woods by the church. They meet Shiels on Grebe Beach the next day. He has each girl draw what she saw.

4 July 1976Two more girls report a silvery grey bird-man with red slanting eyes and feet like black crab's claws.

2 August 1976A Redruth landlady phones Shiels to say three French students lodging with her were frightened by "a big, furry bird". He never hears from the girls.

1976The pamphlet Morgawr: The Monster of Falmouth Bay, by "Anthony Mawnan-Peller", carries the Melling account.

June and August 1978A girl named only as Miss Opie reports "a monster, like a devil" flying up through the trees by the church, and a bird-like creature is reported over the Helford. White records that Shiels and two of his daughters were holding "invocational" rituals in the area that summer.

1989 and 1995Jonathan Downes logs a young man, "Gavin", who says he saw it with a girlfriend in 1989, and an anonymous letter from a self-described Chicago marine biology student in 1995.

Key figures

June and Vicky Melling were the first witnesses. They never spoke publicly. Everything they saw comes through their father, then through Shiels.

Sally Chapman and Barbara Perry gave the fullest 1976 account and the two best-known drawings. Shiels told Fortean Times that both had read the Morgawr booklet and seen him on television, so they knew in advance what the thing was supposed to look like.

Tony "Doc" Shiels (1938 to 2024) was a St Ives painter, writer, street performer and stage magician who billed himself as the Wizard of the West. His books on conjuring dealt with staging supernatural effects. He collected every 1976 report and coined the name.

Jonathan Downes, a cryptozoologist, put the case in front of a wide audience with The Owlman and Others. He went through the Cornish newspapers for 1975 to 1977 and believes the witnesses were real people.

Physical and documentary trail

The trail is paper and pencil. There are Shiels's letters and bulletins, the Mawnan-Peller pamphlet, three girls' drawings and the short notes written under two of them. Downes argues the pamphlet's author was a pseudonym but not for Shiels. Friends of Shiels told White it was his work. Shiels never admitted it.

In Magonia 76 (November 2001) Gareth Medway compared the handwriting under the Chapman and Perry drawings. He found it different in the habits a writer can change at will, such as joined or separate letters, and close in the ones that are hard to disguise, such as the placing of the dot over the i. Medway is a hostile reader, and handwriting comparison from published reproductions is not a forensic test. No photograph, feather, footprint or pellet was ever recorded.

An earlier version of this report said the drawings went into the Cornish papers, that the July girls were local, that the creature hissed, that ornithologists offered an escaped eagle owl and that police failed to find a hide. I found no source for police involvement or newspaper publication of the drawings. Barbara Perry would only say she lived "quite near the river" and Sally Chapman was from Plymouth. The hiss appears only in later retellings, not in Downes's quotations. The eagle owl suggestion is Lionel Fanthorpe's, not an ornithologists' finding. Those details have been corrected or removed.

It was like a big owl with pointed ears, as big as a man. The eyes were red and glowing. At first, I thought that it was someone dressed up, playing a joke, trying to scare us. I laughed at it, we both did, then it went up in the air and we both screamed.

Things you might not know

• The hoax plan predates the sightings. Shiels's tapes to McCormick run from December 1975 to 19 February 1976. They describe hoaxing a sea monster, not an owl, and never mention Mawnan.
• He planned to stay out of it at first. On 30 January 1976 he said he would have nothing to do with the press at the beginning, then step in "as a psychic" once things were moving.
• Shiels gave permission for the tapes to be published. Mark Chorvinsky printed them in Strange Magazine no. 8 in 1991. On television in 1998 Shiels still said he never lied.
• The pen name is a pun. "Peller" is a Cornish word for a conjuror or witch, so the byline reads roughly as the conjuror of Mawnan.
• Cornish folklorists refused it a place in folklore. Tony Deane and Tony Shaw wrote that with Shiels involved, "the soubriquet 'fakelore', rather than folklore, springs to mind".
• The church really does have owls nearby. Joe Nickell has argued that barn owls, which nest in church towers and similar buildings, account for a pale winged shape over a church.

Competing explanations

An unknown winged animal. This rests on witnesses nobody else interviewed, drawings that came through one man and no physical trace in 50 years. Downes counts the 1989 sighting as the only one with no link to Shiels.

A misidentified owl. A barn owl at dusk, or the escaped eagle owl Lionel Fanthorpe suggested, would give a round face, large eyes, ear tufts in the eagle owl's case and an alarming lift off a branch. Neither owl is the size of a man. Fear and a story already in the air could supply the rest.

A staged story. Shiels had taped a plan to manufacture monster sightings by word of mouth weeks earlier. Every 1976 witness reached print only through him, and his family and friends were part of the Morgawr campaign. Against this, there is no confession about the Owlman, no witness has said they were coached, and Downes believes the Cornish distrust of outsiders explains why people talked only to a local man.

A primed sighting. Even if the July girls were sincere, Shiels himself said they had read the pamphlet and seen him on television first.

Later life of the case

Downes's book made the Owlman a fixture of British cryptozoology, often paired with the American Mothman. In 2001 the Falmouth Packet printed an unsigned piece, reputedly by the reporter who named Morgawr, saying the 1976 sea monster was "a huge model" made by Falmouth art students with Shiels and a Packet reporter. That piece is about Morgawr, not the Owlman. In 2022 the folklorist Ronald M. James treated both creatures as an invented tradition that grew real belief. Shiels died in Killarney on 11 July 2024, aged 86, without conceding that any of his monsters were faked.

Finding

The Owlman exists as a story with a documented route: one showman, a pamphlet, a magazine and a handful of children nobody else questioned, in the same months he had taped a plan to fake a monster flap. That is enough to treat it as an invented local legend rather than a sighting record. It does not reach a hoax finding. Shiels never confessed to the Owlman, his tapes never mention it, and no witness has recanted.

What still will not resolve: who the Melling girls were and what, if anything, they saw over the tower. They have never been traced or heard from in their own words.