A Pale Stranger on the Promenade

The Men in Black are a nightmarish bunch, stalking UFO witnesses and sending threatening phonecalls galore. They could make your life hell if they so chose - but would you ever expect to run into one of them on a tropical island holiday? No? Well I can imagine that's the same sort of security that Neville and Barbara Jacques were lulled into by the peace and pleasure of Fuerteventura, Costa Caleta - but of course that sense of security would soon be shattered by a surreal run-in with an entity that I seriously doubt the Jacques couple could've even imagined existed.

## Terror in Fuerteventura!

Neville Jacques is a social worker who lives with his wife in Northeast England's Cleveland County (twinned with Ohio's much more famous city of the same name), and decided to go and visit the Canary Islands between November and December of 2012. They eventually arrived in Fuerteventura, Costa Caleta - much to their joy. On this specific occasion, the happy couple were walking along a '*very long*' promenade walkway back to their hotel. It was around 4pm, and there were some other holiday-goers wandering about. The walkway in question was described as being quite high up on a volcanic rock face, situated directly at the sea's edge and close to a wide area of open space. This beautiful scenery, however, certainly wasn't improved by the dark presence that the couple soon noticed '*about 100 meters*' in front of them.

This dark presence took the form of a thin man of about 6'2" in height. He was wearing a wide-rimmed black hat, and had a narrow face adorned with '*sixties type*' dark sunglasses. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, had a light-coloured jumper over his shoulders and long trousers on his spindly legs. This totally ridiculous get-up was only made more blatantly bizarre by the appearance of the man's face - it looked deathly pale '*as if it was plastered in sun-block*'. As he walked towards them, Neville started to get the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that the man was watching him, even though he couldn't see his eyes behind the dark glasses.

The couple laughed between themselves at the odd-looking stranger, but these giggles likely soon morphed into a sense of dread as the odd man approached them and it dawned on the witnesses that he wasn't wearing sun-block. It was just his skin - '*whiter than white*'. He held his big hands out in front of him, and his pale fingers were noticeably lengthy. By the time he was about 5ft away from them, they had realised the full fear factor of the situation. His skin was '*almost translucent*' and his sunglasses were wrapped around the entirety of the area around his eyes. His face was narrow and sunken, and his jaw was angular and highlighted by noticeable cheekbones. Neville - being a social worker for elderly people - guessed that the man appeared to be in his sixties.

As the nebulous being passed the horrified couple, he turned his head to look directly at Neville and spoke '*with a kind of acknowledging manner*'. He said something which the Jacques couple couldn't even begin to understand. It didn't even sound like a human language - '*it was high and low pitched at the same time and very short*'. The bizarre entity left the scene after that, and Neville notes how odd it was that neither he or his wife thought to look to see where the man went. They didn't even consider taking a photo, and can't work out why they didn't. Neville said that he had gotten the feeling that the man had been watching him from when he had first noticed him.

When the couple returned to their hotel, Neville '*could not stop thinking*' about the encounter, and constantly discussed it with Barbara. He insisted that the man they had seen '*wasn't from here*' and that his clothes somehow weren't right. He apparently looked totally incomparable in appearance to anyone else Neville had ever seen. When he went to bed, he found that he couldn't sleep much - seeing as he would constantly see the man in his mind whenever he tried to. He would ultimately be plagued by thoughts of the odd being for the rest of the holiday - certainly putting a dampener on the tropical excursion in question.

Neville would later hear Nick Redfern talking about the Men in Black on *Coast to Coast AM*, and would be shocked to see an artist's impression drawing of one such entity that almost perfectly resembled the pallid mystery man of Fuerteventura. He contacted Mr. Redfern and relayed the story told above.

## Source

'The Monster Book: Creatures, Beasts and Fiends of Nature' by Nick Redfern