Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, November 2025
Humanoid Encounters:
Creatures, Phantoms, and Other Strange Entities Sighted in Maine
By Nomar Slevik
Foreword by Albert S. Rosales
2025, 323 pages, Paperback, US $19.99
ISBN: 9798310497719
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Nomar Slevik’s latest book, Humanoid Encounters, is a tour de force of numerous extraordinary accounts of reported encounters with mysterious humanoid beings, cryptids, and some that are quite difficult to categorize, events associated with the state of Maine. And what better person to write its Foreword than Albert S. Rosales, a man who single handedly has been collecting and researching (and writing his own books) on thousands of such incidents reported throughout the globe.
I was born and raised in Maine (though I’ve lived in Tennessee now since 1977) and my hats off to Nomar for all of the research and boots on the ground investigations he’s been doing into Maine’s previously largely overlooked anomalies. And they are certainly quite considerable.
Being a former Mainiac (as we’ve been jokingly called) I had read a bit about the Algonquin Indian legend of a mysterious part human-like creature with wings, a being called Pamola at Mount Katahdin, but Nomar fills in a good deal of thought-provoking history and accounts that I was not that familiar with. Some that’s downright high strange spooky.
Sometimes these phenomena can be rather personal and Nomar shares how his own father has strange memories like one time seeing like a five-foot-tall green humanoid with bright eyes in his basement and another time being watched by a small humanoid figure wearing a plaid shirt outside his home. Nomar himself, as a young man living in a second floor apartment in Portland, got up out of bed to use the bathroom but he suddenly noticed the air seemed thick, sound seemed muted, and as he was walking through the kitchen he noticed out a window something strange perched on an eave there, something with what looked like “oily black skin glinting in the moonlight,” with pointed oversized ears, with wings folded up behind it’s back. Nomar unintentionally made a noise with one of his feet on the floor whereupon the creature’s head turned quickly in his direction. Then next the thing stood up, spread its wings out, and flew away over nearby trees, after which his hearing returned to normal.
Interestingly, in his dad’s case, with the green humanoid in the basement, he had awakened from sleep to encounter his cat looking at him. He also noticed a strange quietness. “More than that, sound seemed muffled as if a heavy blanket had been tossed over the house,” Nomar wrote. His dad felt the cat wanted him to follow her. He recalled getting up and following the cat downstairs into the basement where he encountered the green being. But then the next thing he knew he was sitting up and back in bed, next to his sleeping wife. It was some 25 years before he finally divulged that story to his son.
This is interesting as it seems to compare to Nomar’s experience with the winged creature in some respects back in 2003. He wrote: “I’m not sure what happened next other than my hearing going back to normal; my next memory was waking up in the morning.”
Some people seem to be somehow “wired” or tapped into such anomalous experiences in some way, and I can’t help but wonder if Nomar and his father, like so many thousands of other experiencers who have been studied through the years, may happen to some extent share this trait as well. In fact, Nomar even included his sighting of a 5-6 foot tall a thing that resembled a “life-sized version of one of those spooky stick figures from the Blair Witch Project” one evening in February 2020 as he was driving down the Bayside Road in Ellsworth, Maine. The figure disappeared into the woods. He stopped his car there, rolled down the window, but saw no footprints and detected no sounds. However, after a short while an “overpowering mix of rotting eggs and sulfur” filled his car.
We just happened to be in correspondence around this time, and he shared this strange episode with me back then, just a month later. There are a wide variety of chilling, deep weird accounts contained within the pages of this titillating and provocative book. It covers so many bizarre reports of visitations from denizens seemingly from some sort of alternate dimension of reality like the nightmarish “dogmen,” dark eyed children, Bigfoot, ghostly apparitions, phantom hitchhikers, angelic type beings, monsters, demonic types, orbs, birdmen, extraterrestials (or maybe John Keel’s ultraterrestrials), mysterious aquatic creatures (how about the 1630s merman encounter alleged by a Michael Mitton in Casco Bay?), the dark mind-boggling tale of the Frogmen of Devil’s lake, and many, many more documented high strange incidents.
“Maine has a rich and expansive ghostly history, with countless books dedicated to it,” Nomar wrote. He even pointed out how Maine’s prolific horror novelist Stephen King himself once had an encounter with the ghost of a bald-headed old man in a blue suit who was there one moment and then inexplicably wasn’t the next. I didn’t know about that before reading it in Nomar’s book, though I always wondered if he might have ever had his own paranormal experience. I was aware though that his ideas for his many stories originally got their inspiration from back in the days of his childhood. “My mother used to read FATE magazine, which was about the paranormal, flying saucers, and all that stuff,” he revealed in a 2014 interview on PBS. “She would read the stories to me and I was fascinated.” Many of us over the years who are interested in these true tales of the unexplained have been longtime FATE readers. I’ve got three bookshelves myself of this magazine, a periodical that goes way back to 1948 and is still in circulation today.
I’ll bet Nomar has been an avid FATE reader too. Humanoid Encounters also belongs on the bookshelf of every avid reader of strange encounters with mysterious beings.
