Sheesh. I swear I never know what I’m going to be dealing with from one day to the next. You wouldn’t BELIEVE some of the stuff that finds its way across my desk.
Hang on to your socks and be prepared to feel a little… incredulous. I know I do.
OK… I’m going to say it. I saw something several years ago. Something I can’t explain. It might explain my fascination with the Gable Film. It will not likely, however, explain how things keep going from weird to weirder.
About 10 years ago, I was riding as a passenger in a Jeep. It was early evening on a warm, summer’s day. I believe we had the top down.
We were driving into Glenwood, just south of Eugene, coming over a hill, approaching the area where Bring Recycling is now. It is an industrial area. The road we were traveling on crested a hill, with a guard rail on the left, then dipped down into town. On the left below us, there was a field, with a treed hill behind it. The freeway is on the other side of that hill. The field was freshly plowed and was adjacent to an industrial building complex.
As we crested the hill, a movement in the field below and to the left of us caught my eye and I watched, horrified, as something ran across the field on all fours, straight toward the road. At the rate and direction it was moving, I quickly realized that it was going to come up the embankment and intersect the spot on the road where we would be seconds from now. One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. I screamed at the driver to, “Watch out!” or something to that effect. He briefly slammed on the brakes, but then sped up again because there were cars behind us. I sat up higher in my seat and craned my neck to look behind us to see if it had made it to the road yet. It never appeared. The entire “sighting” lasted maybe 2 seconds, but that thing has been running through my head ever since.
I’m going to do my best to describe what I saw. Describing it will NOT explain it.
It was long and lean and supremely muscular. I estimate it would have been approximately 7′ tall, had it stood on its hind legs. It looked like a cross between a dog and… a man. I have no other means of describing it. It was a deep, almost blue-black color with what I assumed was a short, very shiny coat of fur, like a pit bull or black lab. Its musculature was pronounced like a body builder’s, rippling, as it crossed the field at breakneck speed on all fours, running so fast that the movement reminded me of a cheetah – the back legs nearly overlapping the forelegs as it ran. I did not notice a tail. I don’t remember anything about the feet. I got a sense that the forelegs were more like… “arms”. The head was HUGE and blocky.
And here’s where it gets VERY strange. While I can’t remember many specific details about the face, it was NOT that of a dog. It looked more like a man’s. There was something about it almost human-like, very ugly, terrible and horrifying, but not HUMAN. The appearance and overall movement of this thing made my blood run cold.
I was semi-hysterical after we saw it, trying to wrap my brain around what it was, trying to explain to the driver what I’d seen. Finally, I made him turn around and drive back into the building complex next to the field. There was nothing there. I got out and walked through the field. The dirt was freshly plowed, dried, fine and powdery.
There was not a single track ANYWHERE in that damned field.
I know what I saw. I just can’t explain it.
Flash forward several years. I’m picking up a dog for someone from a man in Springfield. He and I started talking about the fact that I do Bigfoot research. He said, “I’ve never seen Bigfoot, but I saw something weird a while back over by the ponds near Autzen Stadium.” And he went on to describe driving to work one foggy morning and seeing this THING run across the road in front of him on all fours. He said, “You’re not going to believe this. It looked like a huge, muscular black dog… with a guy’s face.”
I questioned him further and was astounded. He described the EXACT same thing I’d seen. I hadn’t mentioned a word about it.
Ever since the day I saw that thing, I’ve referred to it as “the hell hound”. I didn’t know what else to call it.
This image was created by 3D game artist Mark Blosser (click here to see the original image I found – used by permission). I discovered it while searching for something – ANYTHING – comparable, on Google images. The head of what I saw was blockier and I can’t speak to the details of the face, but the body was so close it made me shudder. I inverted the colors in Photoshop to make it appear black. The musculature is very similar to what I remember seeing.
When I saw the Gable Film, I was fascinated. The creature in that film is stockier than what I saw, but the agility is similar.
Recently, I received a report via email. A young man and an older woman claimed to have been encountering something in a particular location in the woods here in Oregon regularly.
“OK, we know that you guys have a lot of reports and we have reported one in the XXXX XXXX, OR. But we go up there frequently almost every other week to the same spot, and every time we hear these great growls so big I get back in my car and have it in drive ready to leave only windows down so I can listen still.. I know its not a bear I have lived near XXXXX for years, and we have talked to the rangers as well and its not a bear and cougar is too small to sound like that.
So every time we slowly drive to the edge of the corridor to leave and stop to listen….they follow us. I mean they as they are in different directions as well. In a pack not sure if its big foot or…something else but its there. If by any chance we could get you guys to come investigate with us or interview so we can tell you about these events, this is a big deal…its every occurrence…”
OB Investigator Jason Moore called the witness. He related that three out of the four times they’ve visited the location, they’d been growled at by something that sounds like a “four-stroke” [ATV] engine and said the sounds had followed their car out of the woods. At one point, she said she briefly witnessed the creature and that it stood upright, had pointed ears, long arms and had a snout… kind of like a wolf.
Jason Moore and Shawn Jones came out from the field moments ago from meeting with the eyewitnesses and visiting the location. I just spoke with Jason on the phone, and he related to me that the sounds heard were most likely ambient noise – water, vehicle noise – being “funneled” to the location. He heard the sound but said that it did not appear to come from any creature. He did not know what to make of the alleged sighting – the witness was less sure about what she’d seen than the initial discussion had indicated, but that she’d “seen something”. (More details will follow once I receive the investigators’ complete report, I’m sure, but it seems to have been a case of honest mis-identification.)
So that’s that.
But wait. There’s more.
All of this served to remind me of a case file I had stashed away. I spent 3 hours two nights ago going through STACKS of files trying to find it. I finally located it last night.
The case file describes a woman who had several encounters back in the late 1980’s with a similar creature at a camping area near the Cowlitz River in Washington. The phone number, remarkably, was still valid, and I managed to get in contact with her last night. I’ve arranged for artist Peter Oberdorf to work with her on a forensic image reconstruction of the creature, and she sent me some of her own sketches of what she saw. She claims to have observed one of these things at close range in July, and again in December, when it threatened her family.
She said it sneaked up behind her husband, ON TWO LEGS, as he was at the campfire. She stood and moved toward it, warning him, and it grimaced at her, opening its mouth wide and showing its teeth.
While the images she’s drawn resemble a bear somewhat, the witness clearly says that this was NOT a bear, and that it walked both quadrupedally and UPRIGHT, not hunched over, when it was on two legs, and its coloration varied from black to rust to beige on different parts of its body. She was very specific about the coloration. When I asked her if it resembled a bear or a dog, she replied, “A combination of both. But like human-like, too.” The haunches were rounded, the back slightly swayed. It held its “elbows” parallel to its belly when it was on all fours. The shoulders were very muscular; she made a point of stressing that. The head was blocky. The teeth were HUGE. It moved fast, “like a rabbit”. And she said it had HUMAN-looking eyes with a black pupil and amber iris, complete with whites around them.
Which immediately reminded me of this photo, supposedly found on a damaged game camera in Michigan in 1997.
Yep. That Michigan. In Antrim County, no less. Yep. THAT Antrim County. The one where the Gable Film was supposedly shot. The game cam was six feet in the air when this photo was taken. You can read all about this photo, and see the others from that game cam, over at the Michigan Dogman site.
What is it people are seeing? What did **I** see that day? I’m just baffled by this. Is it something akin to the Michigan Dogman? Is it a freakin’ werewolf, for crying out loud? Multiple mis-identifications? Furry figments of imagination? What?!?!?
Do you Yahoo!?
