In the autumn of 1903, the small Iowa town of Van Meter was not expecting anything to come out of the darkness.
Then, shortly after midnight, a strange light appeared above the rooftops.
At first it seemed almost ordinary, perhaps a burglar’s lantern, a reflection, or some distant light moving through the night.
But when U.G. Griffith, a respected local businessman, went to investigate, the thing he saw was anything but ordinary.
A towering figure stood above the town.
It was described as possessing enormous bat-like wings, a strange horn or projection upon its head, and a brilliant light that appeared to shine directly into the darkness.
Then it moved. Not like a man. Not quite like a bird.
And certainly not like anything the people of Van Meter recognised.
Over the following nights, more residents claimed to encounter the creature. It appeared upon rooftops, telephone poles and around the town’s buildings.
Some witnesses fired directly at it, yet the mysterious visitor seemed unaffected by the gunfire. Others reported a terrible odour surrounding the creature, while strange sounds were said to echo from the direction of an abandoned coal mine.
Fear spread through Van Meter.
Eventually, a group of armed townsmen gathered and followed the creature toward the old mine.
What happened there sounds less like an incident recorded in an Iowa newspaper than something torn from the pages of a Gothic horror story.
The men heard unnatural noises coming from beneath the earth.
Then, according to the accounts, two creatures emerged, one apparently smaller than the other.
The townsmen opened fire. The creatures did not fall.
Instead, they disappeared back into the darkness of the mine.
And after that night, the Visitor was gone.
No body was recovered. No explanation was found.
Yet unlike many cryptid stories that appeared decades after the supposed event, the Van Meter mystery was being reported in newspapers at the time, including the Des Moines Daily News.
Contemporary reporting captured both the extraordinary claims and the growing uncertainty surrounding what the citizens had actually encountered.
More than a century later, the story remains one of Iowa’s strangest pieces of folklore.
A winged creature. A blinding light. An abandoned mine. A town in terror.
And a visitor that came from the darkness, then vanished back into it.
🦇 Physical Appearance & Description
Descriptions of the Van Meter Visitor varied somewhat between witnesses, but several recurring characteristics emerged across the 1903 encounters.
Unlike a conventional bird or bat, the creature was repeatedly described as a large, upright, humanoid or partly animal-like figure with enormous wings, creating an appearance that witnesses struggled to compare with anything familiar.
The result was something that seemed to occupy an unsettling space between man, bird and bat.
📏 Estimated Height
The Visitor was generally described as enormous.
Later accounts commonly place it at approximately:
8–9 feet (2.4–2.7 metres) tall
Some retellings give slightly different measurements, and the original witnesses were naturally estimating its size under extremely unusual circumstances. Nevertheless, the impression of a creature far larger than an ordinary person is a recurring feature of the legend.
The size was particularly striking when the creature was seen standing or moving on the ground, where its proportions could be compared against buildings, poles and people.
🦇 Wings
The most unmistakable feature was its enormous wings.
Witness descriptions characterised them as bat-like, rather than feathered bird wings.
They were reported as appearing:
- Large and expansive
- Dark or blackish
- Smooth or leathery
- Capable of supporting the creature in flight
- Folded against the body when it was perched or standing
Some later accounts describe the wings as having a distinctly leathery appearance, reinforcing comparisons with a giant bat rather than an oversized bird.
The creature could reportedly move rapidly through the air and was seen flying away toward the abandoned mine.
👤 Body & Build
The Visitor’s body was not consistently described as purely human.
Instead, witnesses reportedly perceived a large, heavily built, dark or greyish figure with a strange mixture of humanoid and animal characteristics.
Some descriptions portray it as standing upright, while other accounts describe it moving on four limbs or using a strange hopping or kangaroo-like gait when on the ground.
This variation is important.
The Visitor was not simply described as:
“A giant man with wings.”
Its movements and proportions were part of what made witnesses struggle to identify it.
🐦 Head, Face & Beak
The head is one of the stranger aspects of the reported creature.
Some accounts describe a bird-like or beak-like face, with later reconstructions sometimes portraying it almost like a gigantic prehistoric bird.
One particularly unusual description attributed to Sidney Gregg portrayed the creature with a large beak, which it supposedly used in an unusual manner while descending from a telephone pole.
This is one of the reasons modern illustrations sometimes make the Visitor resemble a bizarre cross between:
A giant bat + a bird + a humanoid figure.
However, the facial details are considerably less consistent than the creature’s wings and extraordinary size.
💡 The Horn & Blinding Light
Perhaps the most famous physical characteristic of the Visitor was the horn-like projection on its forehead.
Witnesses described a blunt or horn-like structure extending from the head, associated with an intensely bright light.
The light was variously compared with a:
spotlight, lantern, searchlight or brilliant beam.
It was reportedly bright enough to illuminate surroundings and, in some accounts, temporarily overwhelm or disorient people looking toward it.
This feature is particularly unusual because it does not fit naturally with either a bird or bat.
It became one of the defining elements of the Visitor’s later identity.
👃 The Unnatural Odour
Several accounts also associated the creature with a powerful, unpleasant smell.
Descriptions of the odour vary in later retellings, but witnesses reportedly found it sufficiently offensive or overwhelming to become part of the encounter itself.
The smell is particularly interesting because the Visitor was supposedly encountered around an abandoned coal mine, giving later researchers an obvious environmental avenue for investigation.
Whether the odour originated from the creature itself, the mine environment, or something else entirely remains unknown.
👣 Feet & Tracks
Some versions of the story include reports of large three-toed footprints, with claims that plaster casts were made of the impressions.
The alleged tracks became an important part of later versions of the legend because they appeared to provide something more tangible than eyewitness testimony alone.
However, no surviving footprint cast provides modern scientific confirmation of an unknown animal.
The footprint evidence should therefore be treated as historical reported evidence, rather than proof of an unidentified species.
🦇 Overall Appearance
Taking the recurring descriptions together, the classic Van Meter Visitor would have appeared as:
A towering, dark or greyish humanoid creature standing roughly eight to nine feet tall, possessing enormous bat-like wings, a strange bird-like head or beak, and a blunt horn-like projection from its forehead associated with a brilliant, almost searchlight-like beam.
It was not consistently described as hairy like Bigfoot, nor as conventionally reptilian or monstrous.
Instead, its appearance was strangely clean, dark and otherworldly, a gigantic winged figure that could stand upon rooftops and telephone poles, move with bizarre terrestrial movements, then unfold its wings and disappear into the Iowa night.
And perhaps most unsettling of all, the witnesses did not describe one perfectly consistent creature.
They described something they were desperately trying to understand.
That uncertainty is part of what makes the Van Meter Visitor so compelling more than a century later.
📍 Location & Country
- 🇺🇸 Primary Location: Van Meter, Dallas County, Iowa
- 🌎 Region: Central Iowa
- 🏛️ State: Iowa
- 🇺🇸 Country: United States
- 🌾 Historical Setting: Van Meter and the surrounding rural countryside
- ⛏️ Associated Location: The former Van Meter coal mine and nearby brickworks
- 📅 Historical Encounter: September–October 1903
- 👁️ Primary Encounter Area: The town of Van Meter, with later events moving toward the abandoned mine northwest of the community
- 📍 Coordinates (Approx.): 41.531930° N, 93.954120° W
🌾 Van Meter, Iowa
The Van Meter Visitor is inseparable from the small Iowa community that gave the creature its name.
In 1903, Van Meter was a very different place from the modern town. The community existed within a landscape shaped by railways, farmland, coal mining and the local brick industry, with the abandoned workings of the former Van Meter mine lying among the countryside surrounding the settlement.
That mining history is particularly significant to the legend.
Historical Iowa records confirm that the Van Meter coal mine had been abandoned in 1902, only about a year before the strange encounters began.
The mine had operated alongside the local brickworks, making the existence of substantial underground workings in the immediate area a genuine part of Van Meter’s history rather than something added to the legend later.
According to the traditional account, the Visitor appeared repeatedly around the town before the final confrontation drew an armed group of residents toward the abandoned mine.
There, the story takes its strangest turn.
The townspeople reportedly encountered the creature again, along with a smaller, similar being, before the mysterious figures disappeared back toward the mine workings. The Visitor was never captured, and no conclusive explanation for the events was ever established.
Today, Van Meter remains the natural geographical centre of the case.
It is a remarkably ordinary Iowa town, which makes the old story all the more unsettling.
Because beneath the familiar streets and surrounding farmland lies a piece of local history involving an abandoned mine, unexplained lights, a gigantic winged creature and a terrified community armed against something they could not identify.
The Visitor was never officially explained.
And whatever appeared over Van Meter in 1903, it left behind a legend permanently attached to this small Iowa town.
🌾 Habitat & Environment
Unlike many cryptids associated with remote forests or mountains, the Van Meter Visitor was reportedly encountered primarily around a settled rural community.
The events of 1903 unfolded in and around Van Meter, Iowa, where the creature was reportedly seen moving across buildings, perching on elevated structures and travelling through the surrounding countryside.
Rather than having a clearly defined natural habitat, the Visitor appears in the historical accounts as a creature that entered the human environment, creating a particularly unsettling contrast between an ordinary Midwestern town and something that seemingly did not belong there.
🏘️ Town & Built Environment
Many of the reported encounters occurred within the town itself.
Witnesses described seeing the Visitor:
- 🏠 Perched on rooftops
- 📞 Standing on telephone poles
- 🏦 Around commercial buildings
- 🌙 Moving across the rooftops at night
- 🛣️ Travelling through or above the streets
- 🏪 Appearing around businesses and residences
One of the most unusual reports involved the creature apparently resting on top of a telephone pole, where it was observed before eventually descending and moving away. Another account described it moving between buildings and across the rooftops.
This gave the creature a remarkably urban character for a cryptid.
The Visitor was not simply hiding in the woods.
It was appearing above people’s heads.
🌾 Farmland & Rural Outskirts
Beyond Van Meter itself, the surrounding landscape consisted of the kind of open agricultural countryside characteristic of central Iowa.
Fields, roads, small waterways and undeveloped ground surrounded the community, providing plenty of open space for something capable of flight to move between locations.
The rural environment also offered something the town could not:
Darkness.
Once the Visitor left the illuminated streets and rooftops, witnesses would have had little opportunity to follow its movements through the surrounding countryside.
This may help explain why the creature could reportedly appear suddenly, disappear from view and then seemingly reappear somewhere else.
⛏️ The Abandoned Coal Mine
The most important environmental feature in the legend is undoubtedly the abandoned coal mine outside Van Meter.
The Visitor was repeatedly associated with the direction of the old mine, and witnesses reportedly saw the creature flying or travelling toward it.
By the final confrontation, a group of armed townspeople had gathered near the mine after reports of strange noises coming from underground.
According to the traditional account, two creatures eventually emerged from the mine area before retreating underground again.
The mine therefore became more than just a location in the story.
It became the Visitor’s supposed den.
Whether it actually served that purpose is impossible to establish, but within the legend the progression is striking:
🏘️ Van Meter → 🌾 countryside → ⛏️ abandoned mine
The creature seemed to be moving from the human world toward something hidden beneath it.
🌙 A Nocturnal Creature
The Visitor was overwhelmingly associated with night-time activity.
The encounters generally occurred during the early hours, when the town was quiet and visibility was poor.
Its reported ability to fly, combined with the darkness and the intense light allegedly emitted from its head, made it particularly difficult for witnesses to determine exactly what they were seeing.
There was, however, at least one unusual daytime-associated account, involving the creature reportedly perched upon a telephone pole.
This makes the Visitor’s habitat story somewhat different from a strictly nocturnal animal and is worth preserving as part of the historical record rather than smoothing the accounts into a single consistent pattern.
🦇 What Kind of Habitat Would Suit the Visitor?
If the 1903 descriptions are taken at face value, the Visitor would have been unusually well suited to an environment containing both elevated structures and open countryside.
Its reported wings would have allowed it to travel rapidly between locations, while rooftops, poles and mine structures would have provided elevated perches.
The abandoned mine, meanwhile, offered a dark subterranean refuge completely inaccessible to the townspeople.
This combination makes the Van Meter environment one of the most distinctive aspects of the case.
The Visitor supposedly did not belong exclusively to either:
The wilderness or the town.
It occupied the boundary between them.
And that may be why the story became so frightening to the people of Van Meter.
The creature was not something they had to travel into the wilderness to find.
The wilderness appeared to have come to them.
👁️ Historical Sightings — The Van Meter Visitor
The Van Meter Visitor is unusual among American cryptid cases because its story was not constructed decades later from a handful of remembered anecdotes.
The events were reported as they were unfolding in September and October 1903, with contemporary newspapers naming witnesses, describing individual encounters and following the growing panic in Van Meter.
The surviving newspaper trail is imperfect, and some original articles are difficult to access today, but enough contemporary material survives to establish that something extraordinary was being reported in the town during several nights in 1903. Iowa PBS likewise places the principal episode in late September 1903.
What follows separates the reported chronology from later interpretations wherever possible.
🌙 Night One — U.G. Griffith Sees the Light
The story traditionally begins during the early hours of 29 September 1903.
Ulysses G. Griffith, a local implement dealer and well-known businessman, was returning home through Van Meter at approximately 1:00 a.m.
The town had no electric street lighting at the time, making the strange illumination particularly conspicuous.
Griffith noticed what appeared to be an unusually bright light on or above the roof of the Mather & Gregg building on Main Street.
His initial assumption was mundane: perhaps someone was attempting to break into the building.
But as Griffith approached, the phenomenon behaved in a way that immediately disturbed him.
The light apparently moved across the street, appearing on another rooftop before disappearing.
Griffith subsequently told other residents what he had witnessed.
At this stage, there was no established “monster.”
There was simply a bizarre light moving around the rooftops of Van Meter.
The following days would transform that strange observation into something considerably more sinister.
💡 Night Two — O.V. White’s Encounter
The following night produced the first account in which the strange light became associated with a physical creature.
O.V. White, a local businessman who lived above his hardware store, was reportedly awakened during the early morning by an intensely bright light shining through his window.
White went outside to investigate.
What he reportedly encountered was no ordinary intruder.
The figure was described as enormous, partly humanoid and partly animal-like, with large bat-like wings and a powerful light associated with its head or horn.
One of the most famous elements of the case occurred here.
White was reportedly an experienced marksman and fired repeatedly at the creature at close range.
The shots apparently had no obvious effect.
Instead, accounts say the creature turned its brilliant light toward White and produced an extraordinarily unpleasant odour.
One contemporary account later quoted in connection with the case described the smell as sufficiently powerful to leave White confused or incapacitated. The Des Moines Daily News of 4 October 1903 carried an account attributed to journalist H.H. Phillips.
This encounter is important because it establishes several characteristics that would become inseparable from the Visitor:
🦇 enormous wings
💡 blinding head-light
👤 humanoid/animal-like body
👃 powerful odour
🔫 apparent resistance to gunfire
🏦 Night Three — Clarence Dunn & the Strange Tracks
As stories spread through Van Meter, residents began taking the possibility of an intruder seriously.
Clarence Dunn, a bank employee, was reportedly on watch during another encounter.
A strange light appeared, and Dunn reportedly fired at the phenomenon with a shotgun.
The creature or light subsequently disappeared.
More importantly, accounts associated with Dunn describe large three-toed tracks being discovered in connection with the encounters.
A plaster impression was reportedly made so that the strange footprint could be examined.
The footprint became one of the most frequently repeated pieces of alleged physical evidence in later versions of the case.
However, there is an important historical distinction here:
The existence of a reported footprint impression is part of the historical story; it is not equivalent to a scientifically authenticated track from an unknown animal.
No surviving scientific examination has established that the impression belonged to an unidentified creature.
This is therefore best presented in the Encyclopedia as reported physical evidence, not proof.
📞 The Visitor Takes to the Poles
Other residents subsequently reported seeing the strange entity above ground level, including on or around telephone poles.
This produced one of the most bizarre recurring images in the entire case:
an enormous winged creature perched above a small Iowa town.
One account described the Visitor as moving with an unusual, almost kangaroo-like hopping motion when it was on the ground.
Another local observer, reportedly a high-school teacher, interpreted the appearance in distinctly supernatural terms and compared the creature to a devil.
The reports were becoming increasingly varied.
Some witnesses were concentrating on the light.
Others on the wings.
Others on its strange movements, smell or footprints.
Rather than producing one perfectly consistent description, the encounters produced a collection of observations from different people under frightening nighttime conditions.
⛏️ The Mine Connection
As the encounters continued, attention increasingly turned toward an abandoned coal mine near the edge of town, associated with the area’s former brick and tile works.
This is where the story acquired its most enduring supernatural dimension.
Residents reportedly heard strange noises coming from the direction of the mine.
A contemporary Des Moines Daily News article dated 3 October 1903 is repeatedly cited for its extraordinarily dramatic description of the sounds, comparing them to the forces of Satan preparing for battle.
The language is important because it demonstrates how quickly the contemporary newspaper coverage itself had adopted the sensational tone that would later become characteristic of the legend.
The mine therefore became the suspected source of the Visitor.
If the creature had not simply wandered into Van Meter from the countryside, perhaps it had emerged from underground.
🔦 The Armed Search
Eventually, Van Meter residents decided that simply waiting for the creature to appear was no longer enough.
A group of armed men organised a search around the abandoned mine.
They expected the Visitor to emerge.
Instead, they reportedly heard strange noises coming from within the mine workings.
The atmosphere became increasingly frightening.
And then came the strangest development of the entire case.
According to the traditional contemporary account, two creatures emerged from the mine.
One was apparently the familiar large Visitor.
The other was described as a smaller version of the same creature.
The men opened fire.
The creatures were reportedly illuminated by the same extraordinary light and eventually retreated back toward the mine.
The men subsequently returned in greater numbers, heavily armed, intending to confront whatever had been occupying the abandoned workings.
But the creatures did not provide the confrontation the townspeople expected.
Instead, according to the account, they slowly descended into the mine shaft and disappeared.
And they were never seen again during the 1903 episode.
📰 The Contemporary Newspaper Trail
This is one of the most important aspects of the Van Meter case.
The story did not exist solely as later oral folklore.
Contemporary newspapers were actively covering it.
Among the documented 1903 reports are:
- 📰 Des Moines Daily News — 4 October 1903: “Town of Van Meter Wrought Up over a Fishy Story”
- 📰 Des Moines Daily News — 5 October 1903: “Van Meter Mystery Not Solved”
- 📰 Des Moines Daily Capitol — 6 October 1903: “Van Meter Hot under the Collar”
- 📰 St. Paul Globe — 11 October 1903: “A Winged Monster”
- 📰 The Courier — October 1903: “Des Moines’ New Monster”
- 📰 The Daily Telegram — 1903: “Monster of Terrible Form”
- 📰 The Pittsburgh Press — 1903: a further report concerning the winged monster.
This is significant because the story was evidently travelling beyond Van Meter itself.
The St. Paul Globe report of October 11 demonstrates that the incident had escaped the boundaries of the small Iowa community and become a regional newspaper curiosity.
⚠️ The Newspapers Did Not All Agree
Perhaps the most fascinating part of the newspaper record is that the contemporary press was not uniformly convinced.
The initial reporting presented the story as a serious mystery.
But subsequent coverage questioned or softened the claims.
The Des Moines Daily News reportedly followed its October 4 story with “Van Meter Mystery Not Solved” on October 5, while other newspapers treated the story with increasing scepticism or amusement.
This means we should resist the temptation to present the 1903 press coverage as though every newspaper simply confirmed that a monster had been present.
What the newspapers actually establish is something slightly different:
Van Meter residents genuinely reported a remarkable series of events, and those reports became sufficiently serious and widespread to generate multiple contemporary newspaper investigations and follow-ups.
The newspapers do not establish that the creature itself objectively existed.
🕰️ How Long Did the Encounter Last?
Modern accounts commonly describe the incident as lasting four or five nights, and there is some variation in the chronology used by later writers.
The strongest historical timeline places the principal episode between approximately 29 September and 3 October 1903, with contemporary newspaper coverage appearing immediately afterward.
A modern historical bibliography likewise identifies September 29–October 3 as the principal period and links it directly to the contemporary Des Moines Daily News reports.
🕯️ What Remained After the Visitor Disappeared?
By the end of the episode, Van Meter had been left with a collection of extraordinary claims but very little conventional evidence.
There were reports of:
- 💡 Unexplained lights
- 🦇 A gigantic winged creature
- 🔫 Multiple attempts to shoot it
- 👃 A powerful unexplained odour
- 👣 Large three-toed footprints
- 📞 Encounters around rooftops and telephone poles
- ⛏️ Strange noises from the abandoned mine
- 👥 A reported second, smaller creature
- 📰 Multiple contemporary newspaper accounts
But there was no captured animal.
No body.
No preserved specimen.
No verified biological remains.
And no definitive explanation.
The Visitor simply disappeared.
🔎 A Case Preserved in Print
This is ultimately what makes Van Meter such a fascinating historical cryptid case.
The story sits at an unusual intersection between eyewitness testimony, contemporary journalism and folklore.
We don’t have to rely entirely on a century of people repeating the same story.
We can actually see that newspapers were discussing the strange events almost immediately in October 1903. The contemporary reports also reveal something that later popular versions sometimes obscure: uncertainty and scepticism were present from the beginning.
More than a century later, the basic mystery remains intact.
Something strange was being reported in Van Meter.
The witnesses described something extraordinary.
The newspapers recorded the panic.
And then, just as suddenly as the Visitor had appeared above the rooftops, the sightings stopped.
📚 Historical Source Note
For the Encyclopedia’s research trail, the particularly valuable contemporary references are the October 1903 Des Moines Daily News reports, alongside the Des Moines Daily Capitol, St. Paul Globe, Courier, Daily Telegram and Pittsburgh Press.
A modern historical bibliography independently catalogues these contemporary newspaper references and dates them to the original 1903 episode.
The later Des Moines Register retrospective, Iowa PBS historical feature and the 2013 book The Van Meter Visitor: A True and Mysterious Encounter with the Unknown are useful for reconstructing the case, but should be treated as secondary sources, not substitutes for the contemporary newspaper record
📚 The Van Meter Visitor in Literature & Popular Culture
The Van Meter Visitor has never achieved the enormous mainstream profile of creatures such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, but the strange 1903 case has developed a distinctive following among cryptozoologists, Fortean researchers, paranormal authors, collectors and Iowa folklore enthusiasts.
Much of its modern cultural identity has been built around a combination of books, local tourism, paranormal events and increasingly, cryptid merchandise and trading cards.
Unlike some famous cryptids, however, the Visitor has not been turned into a major Hollywood film franchise or long-running television character. Its cultural history is therefore particularly closely tied to the original historical case and to modern researchers who helped revive interest in it.
📖 The Van Meter Visitor: A True and Mysterious Encounter with the Unknown
The most important modern book devoted specifically to the case is:
The Van Meter Visitor: A True and Mysterious Encounter with the Unknown
Authors: Chad Lewis, Noah Voss & Kevin Lee Nelson
Publisher: On the Road Publications
Publication: 2013
ISBN: 9780982431467
Length: 238 pages
The book represents one of the most substantial modern investigations of the Van Meter case.
Lewis, Voss and Nelson travelled to Van Meter more than a century after the original encounters, examining the historical reports, eyewitness testimony, photographs and local stories surrounding the Visitor.
Rather than simply presenting the creature as an established monster, the authors explore competing possibilities including:
- 👽 An extraterrestrial explanation
- 🦇 An unknown animal
- 🧠 Mass hysteria or psychological phenomena
- 🎭 A deliberate hoax
- 🌌 Something more difficult to explain
The book also contains historical material and modern accounts, making it an important source for the modern revival of the Van Meter Visitor legend. Its bibliography and research material extend across the original case and later investigations.
📕 The Van Meter Visitor 1903 and Beyond
A second dedicated book appeared in 2024:
The Van Meter Visitor 1903 and Beyond
Authors: David Weatherly, Chad Lewis & Kevin Lee Nelson
Publisher: Eerie Lights Publishing / Back Roads Lore
Publication: 2024
ISBN: 9781945950513
Length: 91 pages
This later work revisits the original 1903 encounters while expanding the story beyond the historical incident itself.
Rather than simply repeating the original case, it examines other strange events and later reports associated with Van Meter, asking whether the Visitor legend might have continued in some form after 1903.
It also reflects the modern growth of the Van Meter Visitor as a piece of local folklore and its connection with the town’s increasingly popular festival.
The book is particularly significant because it demonstrates how the Visitor has moved from being an obscure newspaper curiosity into a continuing piece of regional folklore.
🃏 The Van Meter Visitor in MetaZoo
The Van Meter Visitor has become one of the more distinctive Iowa cryptids represented in the MetaZoo trading-card universe, appearing in several releases and receiving multiple interpretations.
🛸 MetaZoo: UFO — 1st Edition
The Visitor’s original major MetaZoo card appeared in the UFO 1st Edition set, released in 2022.
- 🃏 Card: Van Meter Visitor
- 🔢 Number: 4/165
- 👾 Type: Beastie
- 🌌 Aura: Cosmic
- ⭐ Rarity: Gold
- 🪽 Traits: Flight, Flash
- ❤️ Life Points: 50
The card’s Cosmic classification fits the unusual dual nature of the 1903 case, which combines a bizarre winged creature with reports of a mysterious luminous phenomenon.
Its Flash ability also incorporates a flashlight as a real-world fourth-wall interaction — a particularly appropriate reference given the creature’s legendary glowing head.
🌊 MetaZoo: Torrential Tides
The Visitor returned in Torrential Tides (MZ2) in a substantially different form:
Van Meter Visitor — Foul Flier
- 🃏 Set: Torrential Tides
- 🔢 Card: 215
- 👾 Type: Creature
- 🌬️ Aura: Air
- ⭐ Rarity: Hidden Rare
- 🪽 Classification: Aerial/winged creature
💡 Van Meter Visitor — Guiding Light
The creature was subsequently reimagined again as:
Van Meter Visitor — Guiding Light
This appeared in the 2025 MetaZoo Convention Pack Series.
- 🃏 Card: CP25-021
- 🎴 Series: 2025 Convention Pack Series
- 👾 Type: Creature
- 🌬️ Aura: Air
- 🦇 Classification: Cryptid • Aerial
- 🪽 Trait: Soar
- 📍 Origin: Van Meter, IA
The card’s concept focuses directly on the Visitor’s famous radiant head/light, with the artwork and flavour built around the idea of a mysterious beacon in the night. The convention material explicitly identifies Van Meter, Iowa as its origin.
📌 MetaZoo Pin Club x UFO Mystery Collection
There is also a separate 2022 Pin Club x UFO Mystery Collection collaboration featuring the original UFO-era Visitor.
- 🃏 Card: Van Meter Visitor
- 🔢 Number: 4/13
- 🌌 Aura: Cosmic
- ⭐ Rarity: Gold
- 📌 Associated collectible: Van Meter Visitor Pin
An alternate version was also produced as 5A/5 Van Meter Visitor Alt, making this a separate collectible appearance rather than simply another copy of the standard UFO card.
🎃 Kuromi’s Cryptid Carnival
MetaZoo eventually gave the Visitor a much more playful treatment through its Sanrio collaboration, Kuromi’s Cryptid Carnival, released from 2023.
Kuromi and Chibi Van Meter Visitor
- 🃏 Set: Kuromi’s Cryptid Carnival
- 🔢 Number: 24/103
- ⭐ Rarity: Gold
- 🌌 Aura: Cosmic / Dark
- 👾 Tribes: Alien • Chibi • Friend
- 🪽 Traits: Flash, Flight
- 📍 GPS: Van Meter, IA
Instead of portraying the frightening winged creature of the 1903 reports, this version transforms it into a cute chibi character alongside Kuromi.
It is a fascinating example of the Visitor’s journey from a terrifying Iowa newspaper mystery to a modern collectible character.
🃏 MetaZoo Legacy
Taken together, the Visitor’s MetaZoo appearances span UFO lore, aerial cryptid mythology, convention collectibles and Sanrio-inspired pop culture.
Its documented appearances include:
UFO 1st Edition → Pin Club x UFO → Torrential Tides → 2025 Convention Pack → Kuromi’s Cryptid Carnival
That gives the Van Meter Visitor a considerably larger trading-card history than a single-card mention might suggest, and makes MetaZoo one of the most significant pieces of the creature’s modern popular-culture legacy
🎪 The Van Meter Visitor Festival
Perhaps the most important modern expression of the legend is not a movie or television programme at all.
It is the Van Meter Visitor Festival.
The annual event was created around the town’s most famous piece of folklore and has grown into a celebration combining local history, cryptozoology, paranormal investigation and horror culture.
The festival has featured:
- 👻 Paranormal researchers
- 📚 Authors
- 🎤 Guest speakers
- 🦇 Cryptid presentations
- 🚶 Guided walking tours
- 🛍️ Paranormal and cryptid merchandise
- 🍔 Food and drinks
- 🎲 Monster-themed activities
- 📸 Historical and cryptid artwork
The town’s own 2026 documentation describes the festival as a cultural event inspired by the 1903 cryptid legend, noting that what began as a strange newspaper account has developed into a celebration involving speakers, walking tours and themed events.
🎨 Art, Merchandise & Local Identity
The Visitor has increasingly become part of Van Meter’s visual identity.
Modern representations commonly feature the creature’s now-familiar combination of:
🦇 gigantic wings
💡 glowing forehead light
👹 strange humanoid body
🌙 nocturnal setting
Festival artwork, shirts, posters and paranormal merchandise have helped establish a recognisable modern image of the creature.
There is even evidence of dedicated professional artwork being commissioned for the festival. Illustrator Shawn Engelmann designed the official 2025 Van Meter Visitor Festival T-shirt, which reportedly sold out.
🎙️ Podcasts & Modern Paranormal Media
The Visitor has become particularly well suited to the modern podcast and paranormal-investigation scene.
Its combination of:
1903 newspaper reports + named witnesses + strange creature + UFO-like light + abandoned mine + modern festival
makes it an unusually attractive case for paranormal researchers.
Modern coverage has therefore helped introduce the story to audiences who may never have encountered the original newspaper accounts.
This has effectively created a second life for the legend.
The original 1903 newspapers created the mystery.
Modern authors, podcasts, festivals and collectors keep telling it.
🦇 The Van Meter Visitor’s Cultural Legacy
The Van Meter Visitor has never become a mainstream monster on the scale of Bigfoot, Nessie or Mothman.
But its cultural development is arguably more interesting because of how closely it remains tied to its birthplace.
It has evolved through:
📰 1903 newspaper mystery
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📚 modern cryptozoological investigation
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🎪 annual Van Meter Visitor Festival
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🎨 local art & merchandise
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🃏 MetaZoo collectible cards
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🎙️ podcasts & paranormal media
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🏘️ modern Iowa folklore identity
And unlike a fictional monster manufactured by a studio, the Van Meter Visitor still belongs to a real town with a real historical event at its centre.
More than 120 years after the original reports, Van Meter has effectively turned one of Iowa’s strangest newspaper mysteries into a living piece of local folklore.
The Visitor may have disappeared into the mine in 1903.
The legend never did.