David Nardiello, 29, of Wantagh, encountered one such evolutionary enigma this past May in Osaka, Japan, in a town called Shinke-Cho. Nardiello had lived in a small apartment in the town for three years, teaching English to high school students at the nearby Higshimozu High School.
After a tiresome night of Shorinji Kempo, a form of kung fu, Nardiello rode his bicycle the few blocks home, as he'd always done. It was a rainy and foggy night. This being Japan's rainy season, continuous torrential downpours had flooded a rice field bordering his building. Staring out over the newly formed lake, something appeared that has piqued Nardiello's curiosity ever since.
"I'm looking in the lake and I see this thing pop out," Nardiello told me. "A white neck. And it's got two black eyes. And then it turns its neck to look at me. And it noticed me. And then, right as it noticed me—it started walking out. But it looked like it had cat's legs. It looked like maybe it was a lizard. It turns to look at me, then turns and takes out wings and starts to fly away. It must have gone almost 100 feet up in the air, out of nowhere. It sent shivers up my spine. I got the hell out of there."
Curiosity turned to fear. Nardiello ran up the stairs to his third-floor apartment and peered outside the window. "I look out the window and I see it fly right by again," he recalled. "Really fast, too. Right up, close. [The wings] looked like bat's wings. And its paws looked like a cat—like the arms of a cat. It had a tail, too. [Its face] looked like a white snake with black eyes. Like great-white-shark black eyes."
After asking neighbors if they, too, had ever witnessed the aerial creature, Nardiello found that no one else had actually seen the thing—but had in fact heard strange animalistic cries coming from the field in the past. Nardiello soon learned that there was a general theory among many of his native friends that the beast might be some sort of mutation, evolving from a foreign animal perhaps set loose in Japan. Nardiello ran an illustration of the being in his school's newspaper to see if anyone else had witnessed the thing.
One co-worker, Kato Sensei, branded the animal Nekohebitori, which translated into English means "cat snake bird."
Nardiello describes the abdomen of the cat-snake-bird as leathery. He speaks of its eyes and teeth, but describes the organism as being void of feathers. Nardiello also believes the avian quadruped may be part reptilian. One thing he is convinced of for certain is that the animal was dangerous. Nardiello believes it was a lone hunter.
