Discussing Storyhouse Productions The Real Wolfman & other creature topics tonite on Dr. Wm. Lester radio 10-12 pm EST http://bit.ly/2XP7vm 

The good doctor and I both had the same question about the recent HC show The Real Wolfman. I was in the show -- for a few minutes -- being interviewed over a year ago in the studio for Uncanny Radio and also provided some research and art.

Both Dr. Lester and I wondered, though, why the crew went to such lengths to document the ballistics of silver bullets versus normal lead ones. Ostensibly, it was to show whether the silver bullets could have been effective enough to kill a large, wolf-like creature (such as a hyena). But the only reason to use silver would be if you thought you were dealing with a supernatural animal, which in THEORY would be killed by the silver itself and not the velocity or wound damage. And I think they were hoping to prove their case for a hyena as culprit, which is not a supernatural animal. So that part was confusing to me. I'm still thinking... 

We will hash this out in detail, including whether those silver bullets were fact or legend, and the likelihood of a single hyena killing and sometimes decapitating over 100 people tonight.

Say I do some day find myself nose-to-nose with the Beast, and happen to have my camera on and set to video...

The following video I made last weekend of the Kettle Moraine Studio Tour demonstrates I'd be highly unlikely to capture a proof-worthy creature video.

It does give a dizzying glimmer of what the show was like in the XN-trix studio where I was a guest artist. And it was a lovely show I was honored to be in.

 

KMST 2009


I'm going to go practice making videos now...

I've been called worse. So when an airline in-flight magazine gives me the title of monster hunter it strikes me only as a tad amusing, and perhaps even accurate. Midwest's current fall issue chronicles the tour of southeast Wisconsin strangeness that I gave Chicago writer Rod O'Connor in July (read ONLINE). Using my books Strange Wisconsin and Weird Wisconsin, we covered Lake Geneva's lake monster, Jennie, the Beast of Bray Road (natch), the Millard dinosaur store (which didn't make it in but see my photo below), Whitewater's famed witch's triangle, and the weirdest legend in Wisconsin: Haunchyville, alleged domain of tiny men with miniature but lethal baseball bats.


 

O'Connor does a great job of contrasting SE Wisconsin's pleasant, woods-and-cornfields landscape with the monsters and strangeness that lurk therein. He writes as fastidiously as he keeps his car -- despite the fact that he often has a baby on board, the interior would put any dealer's detailer to shame. "We never eat in the car," he told me as I bit into the pita sandwich I had just acquired at the LaGrange General Store. His eyes followed a crumb that had dropped to the pristine passenger seat where I sat. I hastily retrieved it and made sure there were no more. You never want to tick off someone who is going to write a major magazine story about you. 

I did thoroughly enjoy the day, especially our side trip to Mystic Drive in Muskego where the Haunchies famously dwell. The tales tell of a forbidden lane at the end of the street that is guarded by a rifle-toting man in a black pickup truck, where you are sure to incur a whopping fine for trespassing. We did encounter a black truck with two men but no visible rifle. But the farm at the end of the street where the lane should have been is now busily subdividing itself like an amoeba, and the Haunchy habitat appears to have been obliterated.

I was amazed then when we discovered a weedy yard on Mystic Drive itself with three small, strange-looking buildings. From the looks of them, no humans of any size ever dwelled here, but I wondered whether their presence was enough to have started the Haunchy legend in the first place? Supposedly the Haunchies were a colony of little people retired from area-based circuses, but I had expected to find nothing at all from this popular urban legend. The tiny buildings were a fun bonus. They can be seen from the road, no need to trespass. Here is a picture of the oddest one:


 

It is obvious from the state of disrepair that this is no country for old, little men. 

The tour was fun, though, and we barely scratched the surface of weirdness in Wisconsin. I hope the Midwest passengers get a charge out of the article and a little crypto-education to boot. Perhaps more than one will be alert enough to glimpse that pterodactyl winging its way past their cabin window.... 

QuinlanOUR12, the YouTube poster of the Gable 2 film, yanked his minute-or-so contribution today and wrote a backpedaling note saying he never intended to mislead anyone. Is that an admission that the film is misleading?

He also included a strange sentence with the first letters of every word capitalized so that alert readers will realize they spell DNR COVERUP.

Some people have also noticed that he used words and locations found in Steve Cook's The Legend, such as the town of Bellaire and the name, Quinlan.

In my experience, someone who sets up little tricks and word plays in his correspondence is someone who enjoys messing with people. I do not enjoy people-messers -- does anyone? But this makes it all the more likely to my mind that at least parts of this second film were manufactured in some way.

Not that government agencies don't sometimes cover things up. Especially things that are large and scare or eat people. A conspiracy theorist might conjecture that perhaps the DNR leaned on this guy to remove the film and undo the unwanted exposure it was giving them. But I'm no conspirator theorist.

Enough people have seen the film, however, that it has already taken its place alongside Gable 1 in the world of less-than-smoking-gun crypto vids. My bottom line is still the same: real or fake, you still can't tell what the creature is in the first one!

That Hannity Show feature has brought some interesting things out of the woodwork, most  particularly a short, grainy film purporting to be the smoking corpse followup to the Gable film. That film was a 3+ minute piece of 1970s home movie-making that followed the adventures of a stocky individual with shoulder-length, dark curly hair. The person could be male or female but the arms (particularly the small wrists) and the clothing suggest female to me. This person rides a snowmobile, chops some wood, looks under the hood of his/her truck, and then apparently decides to film an unidentified quadruped in some nearby trees. The film ends with a large mouth and teeth enveloping the camera. It can be seen in its entirety at http://www.michigan-dogman.com/00_gable.html. This is the official site of Steve Cook, Traverse City radio personality and chronicler of the Dogman since 1987.

The video was given to Cook by someone who claimed to have bought it at a garage sale, so its true provenance is unknown. Cook assembled a team of investigators who affirmed it was shot with a Kodak camera of 1970s vintage but it could neither be proved hoax nor reality. And the animal it depicted has never been definitively identified. Cook finally released the whole thing to the public on a Creative Commons license and invited the world to have at it.


 



Last week, someone known as QuinlanOUR12 posted on YouTube a second film that the person claimed was shot by his uncle, an amateur filmmaker tapped by the Michigan DNR to record a grisly "bear attack." It shows the exact same truck as the first film, with a uniformed agent holding a paper tablet that says the truck is registered to one Aaron Gable. Who may or may not be the upper torso trailing guts and gristle that we learn is lying (partially) back in the trees, quite a distance from the road where the filmmaker first stepped out of the truck.

The torso looks much like the star of the first film. Same hair, same plump arm and small wrist. The shirt is checkered, with sleeves that look like a short ladies' style. Conveniently, we never see the face before the tarp is dropped back over the corpse. The body appears to have been cut in half beneath the bottom hem of the shirt, and what could be bits of pelvis and femur remain. It could, in fact, be a person crouching in a deep hole with a shirt on his/her back that has been stuffed with a part of some animal carcass -- but if so, has been most expertly set up.

What really strikes me is that this has to be the most cursory, poorly filmed criminal investigation piece ever made. It brings up many questions. Like --WHERE IS THIS UNNAMED UNCLE NOW? He did nothing criminal. Why can't he come forward to confirm his work? Q-12 doesn't say the uncle, John, is dead, only that he moved to Florida in psychotic fear. Florida has modern communications, last I heard.

Also, in this film the crime scene is strangely empty. Where are all the other investigators? The coroner? Detectives? Sheriff?  Why is the victim's camera (same model as that shown in first film) apparently in perfect condition after having been in the jaws of some large carnivore? And if the victim was dragged so far off the road, why is the top half of the torso in near perfect condition, not even a nibble on that nice plump arm or middle? No blood visible either. Of course, it may have bled out nearer the road if the bottom half was consumed there and then the rest of it dragged to the woods, but if so why doesn't the torso look much worse? And why didn't the officer turn the corpse over so that the face could be identified for the investigations film? Wouldn't a positive ID be the first aim of any investigation?

In the YouTube poster's letter, he claims his uncle was driven mad by his knowledge that the attacking creature left footprints with four toes (like a canine) rather than five (like a bear.) Where are the shots of these clear prints? There appears to be some kind of print in the grass next to the white paper labeled "giant," but the grass makes it very hard to make out details.

Furthermore, according to the letter this was in Antrim County, Michigan, in 1978 and no one has been able to find an alleged bear attack death recorded or even a death certificate for Aaron Gable (though that may not be the victim's name).

It is entirely possible that both films were made by the same party, especially given the extreme similarity of truck, attack victim, camera, and even terrain. They certainly seem to be related, at the very least. If a hoax, it is an extremely sophisticated hoax, but we live in a time of extremely sophisticated videos, and also in a time when any vintage item you might desire can be found a minute on e-bay.

I do know Steve Cook and he did not perpetrate any sort of hoax; indeed, he may have been the intended target. And he has done his best to investigate the mystifying first tape.

I also know that whatever this creature is, it does not follow the very consistent M.O. of most every Manwolf report I've received over 17 years in that it attacks rather than runs off when the witness' attention is diverted, and that it does not stand or run on its hind legs at any point. At least not that we can see on camera.

I would be inclined to agree with some posters at Cryptozoology.com that it is an old, thin or mangy black bear, but as you can see in a clip someone there contributed of a bluffing bear attack, that big bear head is easily identifiable and always there leading the charge. The head of the Gable film creature is much smaller in comparison to the body. I think the animal is still not identifiable. So no matter what it is, it still is not demonstrably a Dogman, Manwolf, or anything else.

Hopefully others will weigh in, such as the Antrim County Sheriff's Dept., the Michigan motor vehicle registration department (who must have a record of Aaron Gable if this is real), QuinlanOUR12 and his uncle, and the actor or DNR agent who was standing there holding those floppy paper signs.

I am going to be on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory this Thursday, and this topic is bound to be covered.

More later, I am sure!

 

It was really hard to choose a category for this post. Is the Beast of Bray Road a celebrity just because it's being featured on Sean Hannity's Fox News Channel show this Friday (9-midnight Eastern time)? That's a toughie, but the creature IS going to be on national TV, so I finally chose the "celebrities, TV, movies" label. However, there have been so many clips of the late Michael Jackson looking werewolfish in his "Thriller" video this past week that the real-life incidents described on Fox may seem tame by comparison.

The six-minute segment will include yours truly and witnesses Steven Krueger and Katie Zahn. Krueger is the former DNR roadkill remover contractor who had a deer carcass nabbed from his truckbed by a 7-foot tall wolf-headed creature in 2006 near Holy Hill, north of Milwaukee. Zahn has been seen on H.C.'s "Monsterquest" episode, "American Werewolf" where she passed a polygraph test on her encounter with multiple Manwolves in southern Rock County.

It also will examine that controversial Gable Film my friend Steve Cook has so thoroughly explored and now opened to everyone as a "creative release." I have not seen this on any other national program.

Hannity sent producer Tim Rhodes to Elkhorn just ahead of a big thunderstorm in late June and managed to film us in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, grab a few b-roll shots of Bray Road, and then flee the approaching "scattered tornadoes" local weather guys were predicting, all in one day.

He promised us a fair treatment, and seemed genuinely interested in the strange fact that hundreds of people around the US and world claim to have seen what looks like a huge, intelligent wolf walking,kneeling, or running on its hind legs. Open-minded curiosity...always a good sign.

The segment will appear on the show's regular "Conspiracy Month" feature between 9-10 pm Eastern, 8-9 pm Central. See the above Hannity link for a gander at his take on the Honey Island Swamp Monster.