#dog-men

A peek into my next big piece. Given how today is going so far, I might just be able to start on that as well.

The Beast of 7 Chutes

Dogman? Bigfoot? What is it holding?

On June 1, 2005, a photo was taken of an unidentified species standing beside a waterfall in the Parc des Sept Chutes in Quebec, Canada. Amazingly, the creature appears to be holding something and is staring at the photographer, who doesn't notice it. This creature does not match the typical descriptions of the legendary Bigfoot, which is usually described a being a massive creature that resembles a human, having a conical head and a human-looking flat face. As well, the Bigfoot is not usually described as being aggressive. The creature in the photo has several unique physical attributes that differentiates it from typical Bigfoot sightings. The creature is erect, standing on two legs and appears to be between 5-6 feet tall. It has an elongated snout that appears dog-like as well as silver hair on its head reaching to it's shoulders. The creature's body is black and the left arm is visible bent at the elbow. Quite remarkably, the creature looks to be holding a white dog. Based on the red area that looks like blood on the creatures head, it may have been feeding on the dog. The creature has a triangular shaped head and, unlike most Bigfoot who retreat when seen, this creature is holding his ground and staring aggressively and directly at the photographer. In August 2008, David Claerr wrote an article comparing the Beast of Seven Chutes and Dogman of Michigan: In the forests of Northern Wisconsin, Michigan and East Central Canada, between about 42 to 48 degrees of Latitude, there have been a resurgence of reports of a large, bipedal carnivore, within the past several years. There is a notable resemblance in the descriptions to a being in the lore of native tribes: the Windigo, a tall, ferocious creature with a wolf-like head on the body of a man or bear. It also fits the descriptions from European legends of the werewolf. The cryptic creature is reported to have unique characteristics that differ from the appearance of a Sasquatch or Bigfoot. Generally smaller and less stocky than a Sasquatch, it is said to be closer to the height of an average man, and the arms and legs are similar in proportion to the human. The hands or fore-paws are said to have long curving, sharp claws. The feet, judged by footprints, are said to be elongated somewhat like the human, but the toes are shorter and configured more like a canine. But the most striking feature, according to the accounts, is the elongated muzzle with large protruding canines and pointed incisors. Accounts of sightings of the creature are often in conjunction with a fresh kill, usually a deer. Its demeanor is hostile and aggressive, according to reports. The non-human expression is said to be malevolent, and the glaring eyes and snarling grimace are said to provoke a deep sense of dread. The accompanying illustrations by the author are based on purported eyewitness accounts and a detail from a photo taken in a park near, Quebec Canada. "Seven Chutes" refers to the cataracts or waterfalls in the park, which is known by the the French name "Parc de Sept Chutes". In a small area of the larger, complete picture of a waterfall, a strange figure is facing the camera and looking up through the foliage on the embankment. Amazingly, it appears to be cradling a white poodle in its arms. The hand-drawn digital illustrations by the author were derived by a visual study of an enlarged detail of the figure. Sophisticated filtering effects were employed to isolate color groups and enhance details of the structure and textural patterns. A compensation for motion-blur was added. The resulting rectified image, which revealed surprising detail, was used as a visual comparison for the illustrations. The crown of the creature's head has an irregular red coloration that has the appearance of a stain, perhaps blood. The rest of the hair or fur, which follows coherent patterns, is in shades of grey to white, darker at the base and lighter toward the tips. The head has a moderately long mane that appears to obscure the ears. The coat of hair on the arms, legs and body is somewhat uniform and comprised of stiff bristles about an inch and a half long, judging from proportions. The lower legs and feet in the image are obscured, so the illustrated configuration of them is conjectural. The "dog" it appears to hold is less distinct since it has more of a motion-blur, but still looks more like a dog than any other object or animal. From studying the apparent bone structure, musculature, posture and hair-growth patterns it is a reasonable hypothesis that the creature, if real, would have characteristics most in common with the primate branch that includes macaques and baboons. Since the environment in the reports is the colder mid-northern regions, an analogous primate could be the Snow Monkeys (macaques) of Japan, which have a seasonal growth of hair that allows them to survive temperature extremes. Related primates, like baboons, also have enormous canine teeth and a head that can appear very dog- or wolf-like. The hind legs and feet of a baboon are also somewhat dog-like in appearance and function. These conjectures are worth considering if a bipedal, primarily carnivorous primate is postulated. Of course, most primates are omnivores or herbivores, but that does not preclude the possible existence of a carnivorous primate. An analogy to that premise would be the carnivorous marsupial "wolves" and "lions" formerly inhabiting Tasmania. Reports of this type of cryptic biped in the Americas go back centuries before the arrival of Europeans. There have been sporadic reports since the days of New World settlements of this and perhaps related creatures by well known explorers and historical figures. Whether the phenomenon is real or imaginary, a greater understanding of this and other mysteries can be gained only through scientific investigation and comprehensive field research. The person who took the photo lives in Quebec, about 15 minutes from where the photo was taken. He speaks French and works as a driver for a construction company and wishes to remain anonymous. He was sightseeing alone at the Parc des Sept Chutes which is near Saint-Georges de Beauce, Quebec, it was about 90 degrees that day. He did not notice the subject or anything out of the ordinary while he was walking around the park taking pictures. The date was Wed. June 1st 2005 there were no other park visitors around. He took 76 photos (all at medium resolution) of various park features, he also recorded 4 videos. (The videos are available for anyone who wants to view them.) The camera was a Canon A70. He was looking through the photos at home that same day and was surprised to see the subject/creature standing in the woods looking up at him. The photo was number 32 in the set. He has since been back to this area 3 times and taken photos and videos on each occasion. He was back on Monday July 4th and was spooked when he heard something walking in the woods 20-30 feet away from him. He stated that he probably will not be going back there alone. In some of the later photos he took he had his girlfriend stand where the subject was and he stood where he initially was and took photos to get a sense of size and scale. Here is a recreation photo taken a few weeks later of the EXACT area Source Credit(s): Posted by Lon Strickler at Phantoms and Monsters naturalplane.blogspot.com/2011/08/what-was-beast-of-seven-chutes.html Photo of recreation taken from haveyouseenthiscreature.com For anyone interested The lat and long for the location where the photo was taken... Latitude: 47° 7'17.46"N Longitude: 70°49'47.28"W

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

Cynocephali, the Dog Headed Men

Men with the heads of dogs have been reported since ancient times. Cynocephali were supposed to be a race living in Africa, who cannibalized humans. Seeing such beings in modern times would seem incredible, yet bizarrely, there have been increasing modern reports of these creatures. The Cynocephali have existed in the mythology of Europe, India and China. The legends of all three of these cultures originally said that the Cynocephali resided somewhere in the wild lands west of Tibet and north of Persia (modern-day Iran). The European legends later began placing Cynocephali in all unexplored regions. In Europe, they were described as dog-headed people, sometimes as dog-headed hairy giants that have something in common with hairy humanoids. In the legends from India and China, the Cynocephali were described as shapeshifters who could change from human to dog, but who always retained some animal features when they became human again. It should be noted that in these references these are not werewolves, but animals or gods with the heads of dogs on fully human bodies. Probably the earliest example is the Egyptian god Anubis. This god is depicted with the body of a man but with the head of a jackal. Anubis was a god of death and the underworld, and paintings of Anubis can be found throughout Egypt’s ancient sites. Worth mentioning is that Cynocephalus is a Greek word for a sacred Egyptian baboon with the face of a dog. The name Kynokephalos means dog-headed, from "kuôn," a dog, and "kephalos," head.

While the Greeks may not have had dog-headed gods, they knew of places where dog-headed creatures purportedly existed. As far back as the fifth century BCE, a Greek doctor wrote about dog-headed men that could be found in India. Later, a Greek explorer described dog-headed men (kynokephaloi), also in India, who spoke to each other by barking and were primitive savages by nature.  They were also referred to as the creatures that lived in "India beyond the Ganges" (which we now call Southeast Asia). Herodotus, Histories 4. 191. 3 (trans. Godley) (Greek historian C5th B.C.) : "For the eastern region of Libya, which the Nomads inhabit, is low-lying and sandy as far as the Triton river; but the land west of this, where the farmers live, is exceedingly mountainous and wooded and full of wild beasts. In that country are the huge snakes and the lions, and the elephants and bears and asps, the horned asses, the Kunokephaloi (Cynocephali) (Dog-Headed) and the Headless Men that have their eyes in their chests, as the Libyans say, and the wild men and women, besides many other creatures not fabulous." In the medieval mappaemundi, lurking at the edges of the world were monstrous races. The text contains the description of some of these species and most importantly included reference to the Cynocephali (Cynocephales, "Dog-heads"), one of the best-known monstrous races at the time. According to Pliny, they lived in caves, wore animal skins, hunted very succesfully, and used javelins, bows, and swords. Other sources that circulated in the middle ages picture the Cynocephali much more frighteningly, with enormous teeth and breathing fire. Several sources make them cannibals. All sources emphasize that they combine the natures of man and beast.  The Pygmei seem to even include  creatures with long hanging ears that droop to the ground, who evoke the earlier *Panotii*. [An inventory of these and other monstrous creatures from the *Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493*.] Centuries later, even the elders of the Catholic Church believed such beings existed. Saint Augustine pondered in his writings if dog-headed men were held to the same moral laws as humankind and if they could be saved. But Augustine was not Christianity’s only delving into the subject. Very bizarrely, some ancient icons of Saint Christopher depict him as having a dog’s head. The story goes that he led a sinful life in this form, but when he reformed and was baptized he was transformed into a man having a human head. Even King Arthur gets into the picture when he and his army allegedly defeated a band of dog-headed soldiers in the mountains surrounding Edinburgh.

And although he never claimed to encounter them personally, Marco Polo reported that dog-headed men lived on an island off the coast of Myanmar. If real Cynocephali exist, it is difficult to determine just what sort of animal they might be. Some of these legends might be garbled accounts of baboons, monkeys with dog-like snouts. Today, this explanation has been mostly dropped. Further studies have suggested that the Cynocephali tales are actually based on dog ancestor origin myths from tribes who were considered filthy barbarians by more "civilized" writers in India and China. According to these writers, whole races of people were deliberately killed because they weren't human, they were "really" monsters. When these myths were imported to Europe, they became even further changed from the originals. The European Cynocephali is often quite different than the creature of the original legends.

But - the tales are not all ancient. Current sightings of what are claimed to be humans with dog heads have happened in Michigan, Wisconsin, and even the Shetland Islands. Researcher and author Linda Godfrey has been reporting on sightings of an unknown upright-walking canine known as the 'Manwolf' or 'Dogman' for many years. Witnesses describe these creatures as 5 to 7 feet tall, extremely muscular, covered in fur, with large fangs, the head of a wolf or German Shepherd. The tales of dog-headed creatures, including the Dogman of Michigan, and the wolf-like Beast of Bray Road of Wisconsin are accounted in several of Godfrey’s dogmen books and  with the numerous amounts of reasonable eyewitness reports, the dogheads are very much alive in modern culture. Obviously there have been no skeletons of dog-headed humans ever found to back up these tales and most scientists ignore the modern sightings but for the few who do pay attention to them, the Cynocephali could be viewed as either some kind of hairy humanoid or as a cryptid canine of some sort. One thing is for certain - the widespread myths do make one wonder where all these stories came from and if these tales are just remnants of an earlier long-lost global myth that later developed their own flavors within different cultures or if there really are dog-headed men that have been living with us ever since ancient times. Sources: gods-and-monsters.com/cynocephalus.html, cryptidz.wikia.com/wiki/Cynocephali, historicmysteries.com/dog-headed-men, columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/munster/india/aa_india.html, newanimal.org/cyno.htm

Cryptid Chronicles readers, what do YOU think??

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The Legend of the Michigan Dogman

Strong, lean muscles strain under dark fur. Teeth and fangs flash beneath demonic eyes. A growl emerges as he rises to stand on his hind legs, stretching to more than 7 feet tall.

He is the Dogman, a legend of the vast Michigan woods, described with remarkable consistency by hunters, farmers and even the occasional motorist in reported encounters that date back centuries.

Dogman may not be as well-known as some other hairy, scary creatures likely to be represented in Halloween costumes, but he is pure Michigan and will soon be coming alive on the silver screen.

The cryptozoological beast, a creepy combination of the two species that gives the Dogman his name, is the subject of a made-in-Michigan movie coming in 2012 titled "Dogman." It stars former "According to Jim" star and Cadillac native Larry Joe Campbell.

"Because Michigan is largely rural and there's a lot of wide open spaces and people tend to spend a lot of time communing with the outdoors, it gives rise to these kinds of legends and stories, just because of the connection people have to their natural surroundings," said Steve Cook, production director of WTCM-FM (103) and --AM (580) radio in Traverse City, and an expert on the Dogman. The 52-year-old Traverse City resident also is the modern-day father of the creature.

In 1987, Cook wrote a song about the legend to play for listeners on April Fools' Day. But when it aired, Cook's half-fact, half-fiction ditty was no joke to many who heard it. Calls and letters began pouring in, as listeners shared stories of their encounters with a similar beast -- Michigan's Bigfoot, the Wolverine State's Chupacabra.

One of them was Robert Fortney, who said he saw it in the 1930s while fishing the Muskegon River near Paris. When a pack of wild dogs approached him on the bank, Fortney fired a shot from his .22-caliber hunting rifle to scare them away.

"All the dogs scattered out of the way, except a very large black dog with blue eyes. It stood and looked at him for two minutes. He was amazed by fact this thing was standing there looking at him on two legs," Cook said of Fortney's account. "He claimed he never told anyone in his family or friends about it, because he thought he was crazy. When he heard the song, he thought, 'Wow, there's really something to this, I really saw what I saw.' He claimed (it) up until the day he died. That was the first of a more or less avalanche of reports we've received over the years."

Until that point, Dogman had been local folklore. The Odawa called him Wendigo and the French explorers, a loup-garou, according to a documentary Cook later made after collecting material that included this diary entry by a Comstock resident in 1857: "Near the barn, it stood as if a man, yet it bore the countenance of a grey wolf."

More modern accounts include that by a vanload of hippies who said they were harassed by the Dogman near Cross Village in 1967.

Police took an incident report in 1987 from people who said they saw such a creature in Luther. There are photos of something from the U.P.'s Garden Peninsula in 1968 and Onaway in 2004 and unexplained tracks discovered in the Waterloo Recreation Area in Chelsea in the late 1980s.

"I made it up completely from my own imagination as an April Fools' prank for the radio and stumbled my way to a legend that goes back all the way to Native American times," Cook said.

The song now goes into the station's play rotation every year around mid-September and also has been aired as far away as Arizona and Tennessee and on Armed Forces radio in Japan and Germany.

Cook said profits of almost $60,000 generated by his song and documentary have been donated to animal rescue charities.

"I'm tremendously skeptical," Cook said of the legend, "because I've sort of seen the way folklore becomes built from the creation of this song to what it's turned into ... but I do believe people who think they saw something really did see something. I also think the Dogman provides them with an avenue to explain what they couldn't explain for themselves."

Filmmaker and Ann Arbor native Rich Brauer, 57, who finished shooting "Dogman" in September, said: "Every culture has a mythical woodland creature that they blame stuff on. I don't know what it is about people that they want to blame stuff on something like that. There's an inherent imagination that people have, especially when they go in the woods and start to hear things and their hair stands up on the back of their head. ... It might turn out to be a chickadee on a stick, but up until that moment, it was something huge."

Janet Langlois, a folklore expert at Wayne State University, said that as far back as Greek mythology humans have been drawn to tales about "people who cross boundaries, like centaurs. We're drawn to them and frightened by them. It points out how complicated the relationship humans have with other nonhuman animals or creatures. We're always fascinated by creatures."

Big picture, she sees a larger purpose in such legends that cross cultures and time periods.

"It can range from simple entertainment to other complex, philosophical ideas about the universe," Langlois said. "I tend to think stories, even though they're simple and incredible, are building blocks of thinking about the nature of the universe."

Story by Zlati Meyer Detroit Free Press Staff Writer