It seems that many parts of the US have lore about sightings and interactions with some sort of creature that resembles "skin walkers" and "werewolves" but doesn't always involve shapeshifting/transformation. Here is an hour+ program by the little investigative journalism and entertainment outfit Small Town Monsters. Many of you won't need this background, having looked into the topic yourself. But for those curious about it, the video can serve as one introduction/overview of the subject. There seems to be plenty of material for discussion. The topic seems broad, and interesting to many. Some leaning toward an unknown creature point of view while others take a more supernatural view. I've heard an argument for some overlap with Bigfoot reports and suggestions that these might be the same phenomenon or creature. Does anyone have a personal story to share? If you follow this topic what opinions do you have of it, and why?
Good one. I was thinking about this less as something supernatural than either something real and relatively unknown or something else mistaken for an unknown creature. Even the supernatural phenomena (transformations) might simply be misinterpretation or story misappropriation of something real. Maybe back in the Old World an unknown creature wasn't scary enough so the Church or other powers that be elaborated on the facts to sell an agenda or control the movement of people by demonizing the fields and forests.
Linda Godfrey has written much concerning Dogman. MI has many sightings, so when I go Squatching up North in the Higgins Lake, Roscommon area, I will also be doggedly (yes, I am that guy) attentive for any cryptic canids that have been reported there, too. There was a night time photo of a wolf standing on its hind legs with its forelegs out stretched in a human like manner. I'll try to hunt that pic down, as under close analysis, it did not appear to have been altered.
There is a guy named Steve with a youtube channel called “The Facts, by How to Hunt”, and he has over 600+ videos about all kinds of cryptic pheomena, like Bigfoot and dog men, and more. He was on Nino’s Corner.TV and talked about that dogman picture that you mention, and might have even shown it to us during the interview, I do not remember. Here is a video of him in Michigan, and he is just out in the woods and reading emails that people from Michigan have sent him about their sightings. I kind of skipped through it looking for the dogman picture and didn’t see it, but I think he probably has it somewhere in all of those almost 700 videos.
Like a lot of these things, the dogman lore might be explained as different stories of almost anything in reality that coalesced over time to fit a common narrative. Somebody gets scared seeing a funny dead tree trunk standing, somebody else sees a rear view of a rare "black" deer through tall grass, and such stories get passed around and somehow they turn into dogman sightings. But I'm not so sure that all instances can be explained away by that. I think we all want to see more and clearer evidence.
Since we are in conspiracy theories, I am going to throw out a possible theory. As far as I can see, there are only two ways that we can have a creature that is somewhere between a human and a wolf. One is that it is something that has existed unseen (or almost unseen) for centuries. These is some evidence for this, as shown by all of the old werewolf lore, as well as the Egyptian pictures of the human-like creature with a wolf head, or maybe a dog head. Along with those ancient stories, we have stories of “gods” who came from the sky and did strange things with animals, maybe some kind of hybrids or even cloning, and they are credited with making the chimeras, which might include the old stories of human hybrids and cryptids. The other possibility is somewhat similar, but is possibly happening right now. We know that the military has been experimenting with creating hybrids and also with cloning, and something like this could be the result of this kind of experiment that has somehow gone terribly wrong. Making cloned sheep is certainly not the final objective of the military experiments in cloning. Either way, we are being shown pictures and videos that show nothing, or are obvious fakes, so that we will discredit anything we read, see, or hear about creatures like Bigfoot or dog men, even if they might be an actual report of one.
That's a problem with the evidence. It may be far too easy to dilute real evidence with planted evidence that doesn't show anything or can easily be determined to be fake. One way to help select for likely "real" evidence could be to make sure the long-term whereabouts of those producing evidence or even personal stories is known. It seems that disinformation agents are more likely to be phantoms with no local record of residence in the area or traceable history that makes any sense for an honest actor. I feel that credibility is heightened when people have stayed put for a length of time, especially when that residence is within a sighting's area.
Here is one picture that I found of a possible Dogman. It looks like it came from a game camera, or trail camera, something like that. The face and paws are definitely strange, although this creature is not walking upright like the dog men are said to be seen doing. It definitely looks feral, whatever it is ! We seem to be living in a time when wild animals are losing some of their fear of humans, and some have literally moved into towns and cities, like coyotes have done. They are pretty safe there, because you can’t shoot them on a busy street like you can out in the middle of your back pasture. The little town in north Idaho where I grew up now has moose that wander through Sandpoint, which we never used to have. Part of that is because the government has brought in wolves, and forbidden the ranchers from killing them, so they have multiplied over the whole area of north idaho, and now are attacking animals like deer, elk, and moose and literally forcing them into towns for safety from the wolf packs. Whatever is causing animals to lose their fear might also be part of the reason that more people are seeing evidence of creatures that ordinarily stayed out of human proximity.
Pretty eerie picture! That seems like a pretty good point about animals moving into areas of human habitation more boldly. I even saw some large hawks right in my back yard on the ground and in low branches within the last 6 months. Something that I hadn't ever noticed before. I wonder if the covid years and work-at-home since then resulted in less roadkill, causing predators and scavengers to move inward looking for rabbits and squirrels and such? If so then it seems logical that food pressures, adaptation, and familiarity might mean more cryptids being seen as well.
Somewhere, I think I promised @jacobpetersheim this picture. I laughed at the "it's an injured wolf that walks on its hind legs to compensate" thing. How does it hunt, or run from predators, to include other wolves?
Yeah, the photo looks very strange, and I don't mean the problems with image quality. But between the two explanations given I'd accept fakery before the idea of a deformed wolf running around on the "hind legs" I see there. That's so ludicrous that (to me) it suggests that they can't debunk the photo as a fake.
Exactly. My suggestion is perhaps something out of frame might be causing the apparent bipedalism, or, it is an actual image of a wolf walking on its hind legs.
Hmm, can a wolf or even a dog do very much walking in such a manner? Even trained dogs, as far as I can recall, only do that in spurts of limited distance without some kind of additional support like pushing a monkey in a baby carriage. So the idea that a poor creature is somehow doing that as its primary mode of locomotion to survive... seems like a big ask of suspension of disbelief.