An artist's depiction of a Goblin from the world of Middle-Earth of J.R.R Tolkien - the books which made goblins popular fantasy creatures
Goblins are creatures made famous by the fantasy genre of fiction, commonly depicted as small, evil, pointy-nosed, pointy-eared humanoids.
Description[]
Those who enjoy diving deep into the mysteries of cryptozoology know that every now and then, someone reports a sighting of such a bizarre nature that even the most open-minded researchers promptly dismiss it as fantasy. And although sometimes, indeed, the report ends up lying on that pile of fictional debris, it is usually the opposite that takes place: film makers and book authors rush to verify stories of the strange in order to create their own worlds for people’s entertainment.
The goblin falls into this category. Countless legends in ancient books detail the goblin’s human-like appearance. Now, hundreds of researchers and people who claim to have seen the cryptid keep flooding the internet with videos and theories in an effort to explain what these creatures really are. From extraterrestrial explanations - like the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter - to bloodline associations of the creature with the shy Gnome or the mischievous Leprechaun.
Goblins were popularized by the world-famous fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien, first appearing in his Hobbit book. Their appearance in Tolkien's mythos cemented the way people portray them in media to this day. While Goblins existed before Tolkien's writings, Orcs, which are frequently associated with them (and in Middle-Earth are actually two names for the same creature), did not, and were a species invented by Tolkien.
Modern Sightings[]
In 2012, a man captured a mysterious image that he believes could contain a "being walking through the woods with a lantern."
The video, taken by a trail camera in an undisclosed location in North America and shared on YouTube by user 123superbox, shows a pair of deer grazing at night, suddenly startled by an unknown source of light and what looks like a "being" coming out of the grass. The light and the strange shape then vanish, reappearing seconds later at a different location on the screen. "I went out one day and checked my trail camera a few days after I set it up, and this is what I found," the man said. "If you look closely, it looks like a creepy being holding some sort of lantern," he continued. The figure, he explained, can’t be a human because "a normal whitetail deer would run off at the sight and sound of a human, and the deer keep looking at the being and go right back to eating." Unidentified sources of light show up a few times during the video, but it is only the first 10 seconds that seemingly conceal the strange shape.
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