The Muhnochwa Face-Scratcher Panic, Uttar Pradesh

July 2002. Rural eastern Uttar Pradesh. The stories began quietly. Something came at night. It flew, it flashed coloured lights, and it left people wounded. Villagers gave it a name. Muhnochwa. The face-scratcher.

By August the scare had spread from the east across a wide band of districts, from Mirzapur, Allahabad and Ghazipur to Sultanpur, Barabanki, Sitapur and Kanpur. Thousands of villagers kept watch through the dark hours.

No two descriptions matched. Some saw a figure about half a metre tall, with the face of a dog or cat, carrying red and green lights. The red light flashed during an attack. The green light showed as it left. For some it was like a human being with long hair. Another witness compared it to a fox with a jump as high as 18 feet. Kalawati, 53, of Darra village, said it was like a big soccer ball with sparkling lights. She was left with burns on her forearms.

Others spoke of a sharp light, like a photocopier top plate, of electric shocks, and of a hard oval object. Dr Sanjay Agnihotri treated over 24 people in a fortnight. He saw "long deep marks left by the scratches made by either long nails or some sharpened iron tool."

This was not only village talk. The District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police of Mirzapur reported that they had seen the flying object themselves. The magistrate, Amrit Abhijat, claimed to have filmed it.

On 7 August an intelligence team set up an observation post at Sitapur. As bait, they built their own muhnochwa, a mixer-grinder base fitted with orange, yellow, green, red and blue lights. At 1:05 am a flash of light neared the apparatus. It descended close to the handmade muhnochwa. Then it disappeared. The team saw the light three times. Their tape showed "a flash of light running across the screen but nothing more."

The fear turned on people. In Sultanpur district, a youth mistaken for the attacker was lynched. A man shot dead his own mother while firing at a light he believed came from the muhnochwa. At Barabanki, police fired on a mob storming a police station, killing one man and injuring 12. In Mirzapur district, the Associated Press counted at least seven deaths from unexplained injuries within a week. The state legislature debated the crisis, and the opposition blamed the government.

Intelligence officials first told reporters the prowler was from space. Scientists pushed back. C. D. Sharma of ISRO's tracking centre ISTRAC called the theory unconvincing. Dr N. K. Mehrotra of Lucknow University called it remote. Prof. Ravindra Arora of IIT Kanpur, a lightning specialist, proposed ball lightning drawn by the dry spell. Prof. Chaman Mehrotra suggested atmospheric changes, with someone adding mischief through a man-made thing in the air. Police offered insects. Superintendent Kavindra P. Singh blamed a 3 1/2-inch-long winged insect, and the intelligence survey of 100 victims counted 10 insect bites. Dr Narrotam Lal said victims had often inflicted the symptoms themselves, unconsciously. Years later, epidemiologist Timothy F. Jones put it plainly: "It's called mass hysteria."

The scare lasted about a month. No one was ever charged as the attacker. It sits beside the Monkey-man of Delhi of 2001 and the Popobawa of Zanzibar among the great night-attacker panics. The tapes made by the magistrate and the intelligence team have not been found online.