Interested in cryptozoology? Considering a career in our field? This post is for you!
An important part of our work is the collection, analysis, and verification of reports given by people who had close encounters with specimens of particularly elusive species we otherwise have little data on. The following is an excerpt from such a report, published anonymously on request of the report giver.
"Back in the eighties I worked at an illegal abortion clinic in the Carpathian mountains. There were four nurses, all of which had been kicked out of their last legal jobs for minor misconducts and such, and one other doctor except me, a guy who’d previously been a national health consultant until he was ousted for being transsexual.
The whole operation was pretty idiot proof. Romania was working hard to make abortions impossible, but there were plenty doctors willing to send pregnant women our way instead of ruining their lives one way or another, and trying to shut us down up in the mountains wasn’t worth the effort for the regime.
It was in ‘89 that we had the incident. A woman was brought to us - in the middle of winter, we were half snowed in - by her fiance. The guy seemed pretty spooked, but he held her hand all the time. She was… somewhat numb, I think. Distant.
My Romanian wasn’t particularly good, and as soon as they explained what was going on, two of the nurses who talked to them freaked out as well. The other doctor thankfully understood more than I did. He explained to me, that the thing the nurses kept saying - Bogoroditsa - meant ‘bearer of god’, a word usually reserved for the Virgin Mary.
Back then we knew even less about angels than we do now. I, personally, didn’t know anything at all.
The first ultrasound we did of the woman was, to put it blankly, horrifying. There was a foreign object inside her torso, a shapeless writhing mass of dense, muscular tissue. It was far too large for a foetus, indeed it seemed impossible that the woman wasn’t in incredible pain. The object had ruptured her uterus, and now extended through most of her abdominal cavity, putting immense pressure on her intestines.
I wanted to remove it immediately, but my colleague suggested running a blood test first. There were tremendous amounts of pethidine in her system, an opioid that, as far as I know, can only be produced synthetically and was unlikely to turn up in the body of a woman out in the mountains. It did, however, explain her behavior and the absence of pain.
The husband was very attentive throughout the process. He seemed devoted to his wife, though understandably quite out of his depth. While he closely monitored every step we took, he never interfered or lost his nerves.
We proceed with the removal. The internal injuries the patient had sustained were likely to kill her within hours, and we had very little idea what the foreign object even was. Even just a cesarean would have been a procedure we rarely performed - we usually employ less invasive methods, and intervene before the foetus reaches that size - but what we were doing here was at least caesarean and hysterectomy, and likely something far stranger altogether.
I had watched “Aliens” not long before that day, and while I prepared for the incision, I couldn’t quite erase the image of the chestburster from my mind, waiting in the body of this poor woman to break out of her and tear us all apart.
After brief deliberation with my colleagues, I decided to use a longitudinal incision, to provide enough access for whatever we would have to do. The foreign object that occupied most of the patient’s abdominal cavity was white and leathery. It had indeed escaped her uterus, and strained up against her diaphragm.
I carefully pulled the object out of the patient’s body, and placed it on a nearby table. She was bleeding internally. Her uterus had not only ruptured, but most of it was missing altogether, as were her ovaries. Similarly, parts of her large intestine seemed to have been torn out, with the mass of the foreign body blocking its contents from leaking into the abdominal cavity, which meant that the removal had unsealed these openings.
We took care of her as best as we could. Neither of us had a lot of experience here, but we made do with what we had. I will spare you the details, suffice to say the patient survived the procedure.
When we were sufficiently certain she was stable, we left her in the care of one of our nurses, and turned our attention towards the oblong, white object we had pulled out of her abdomen. It was, upon closer inspection, terrifyingly clear what it was: a cocoon. Beneath the white, faintly translucent hull we could see spindly limbs strain against it.
There was no discussion as to how we would continue.
We carefully opened it. The creature inside was, as far as we could tell, close to its adult form. It had the elongate body of a wasp, but a coloration I have never seen in any other animal. Its body was entirely white, like it was made of porcelain. Its thin, semitransparent wings broke the light like pristinely cut diamonds and almost seemed to glow from the inside. The most extraordinary thing about its appearance, however, was its head: its chitinous exoskeleton looked like it had been moulded to resemble the face of a long-dead saint. The face was solemn and regal, a perfect death mask.
It was only then that it occurred to me that it might be alive still. I had somehow assumed that its premature evacuation would leave it nothing more than an aborted fetus, but I didn’t know shit about insects, much less about ones larger than the average toddler with the faces of men. To make sure, we used a stapler gun to pierce its shell in a place we hoped to find its brain, or whatever it’s called in insects. Supra-something ganglion.
The angel convulsed, suddenly, and unfurled its wings in its death throes. The refractions of the lights in its wings painted colorful sparks across the room, and a terrible, grinding noise erupted from its thorax. It was… I have no words to describe that sound. It was the singing of heavenly choirs ground apart in the gears of the cosmic engine that moved the firmament.
I think I lost consciousness for ten minutes, give or take. When I regained my senses, the angel’s exoskeleton had collapsed in on itself, and cracked in multiple places. I made sure that my coworkers were alright, but when everyone had woken up there wasn’t much left of the angel to analyze. Whatever intestinal fluid it had secreted in its death throes had dissolved most of its insides.
For reasons obvious from the legal status of our clinic it was difficult to have an expert examine the carcass. When we finally handed it over to a contact at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München to be examined by actual entomologists, it was in a state that allowed for very few examinations.
It were the specimens discovered in Paraguay in the aughts that actually allowed for detailed descriptions of angels as a species. I was never allowed to see the other specimens, and I have avoided even reading the descriptions too closely. The, uh, the psychological effects of the secretions of angel larvae are still poorly understood, but from what I’ve heard and experienced myself it seems that the pethidine they use to pacify the host body is the least addictive part of it. There’s these… these vapors… uh… I’m sorry. I will have to end my statement here. I can feel the shaking starting again, and, uh, my vision… I’m sorry."
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