Strange Creature Photo
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on March 4th, 2013
From Facebook:
A friend of mine lives in Pennsylvania and saw this as she called her dogs in.She was scared,because it didnt run off.She has 2 big black chows.We think she saw a baby sasquatch.And that is what she thinks also,because she has never seen anything like this.She knows what a bear looks like,and she said it looked like a little gorilla.Polly
What is it? Any guesses Cryptomundians?
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
yeah i saw weird
bear with mange…
I don’t suppose we could get a couple of blown up shots of that at different sizes could we?
Very interesting…
Yao Guai?
A mangy something or other. A coyote or black bear cub. I live in PA and have seen several animals with extreme mange…foxes and coyotes, even raccoons-they look unusual in the extreme. Google mangy bear cub…
By the way, her two chows didn’t attack or make a big fuss? Very interesting…
Did she offer it a bagel?
It’s a bear you can tell by the front appendages and the size of the paws. It’s either malnourished or mangy.
Chupacabra……Next !
Is that a man in the background carrying something else in he fore or and if what’s the head and what’s the butt
I suppose this photo is right around the threshhold of “if I give them this, maybe they can figure it out.”
But it might be just too far on the “not enough info” side. Too blurry and pixelated for me.
Yeah… a headless Bigfoot, on all fours!
Seriously, I DON’T see anything that looks like a head. At first I thought, “baby elephant”. All these blurry, lost-in-pixels, distant shots – why so many of them? I see them all the time. They far outnumber even middling pictures.
I’m suggesting we consider going back to low-speed FILM cameras, with slides and films that can withstand a lot of enlarging.
Really good picture
I second the mangy bear cub suggestion. Legs give it away.
I don’t think it is a bear. The legs are too long and thin in relation to the body.
I think I see what looks to me like a head, with a canine-type muzzle and a black nose. It is held pointing to the creature’s right. but maybe my mind is trying to put a blurry image into a recognizable form.
I’m afraid this one is just another blobsquatch.
Desertdweller: I see what you’re talking about. May be a head. What bothers me the most is the FEET. If it’s a dog or coyote, seems like it has booties on. And the entire lower legs look too thick to me.
“She was scared, because it didnt run off.”
Well, if it didn’t run off, she should have been able to get a better picture. 🙁
Not sure why people think bears have short legs…google a bear skeleton and don’t let the fur coat of a healthy bear fool you.
It can be anything, but it’s not a sasquatch because it’s just too skinny. It could be a man in an ape-suit, or just an animal.
bear with mange?
I know this, I would not want to cross paths with this creature alone in the woods.
I see a chimpanzee hiding behind a large toilet seat with a head.
If that’s a recent photo with what appears to be snow on the ground then I wouldn’t think it could be a mangy anything. How could any wild animal with mange live through a Pennsylvania winter.
Might be a sick bobcat. OR actually a picture from Japan of a snow monkey.
Lets recall that bears hibernate to live through the more severe weeks of winter, mange or otherwise. It is fat stores and slowed metabolism that sustains them, not their fur. Just at this time of year, the food supplies are beginning to return as the amount of daylight increases – although on warm winter days, bears may actually forage for food. Bears emerging from torpor may be depleted from fat supplies and appear quite thin, especially when exagerated by a case of mange.
In fact, I just read a report in the Endeavor Newsletter for Northwestern PA that cases of bears seen with mange are on the rise in recent years in that region.
Other sources I read confer that bear populations in PA have had higer reported cases of mange recently. Of course we’re speaking of Black Bears, the only bear that now occurs in PA. This state also has been offering up the largest black bears of almost any US state and Canada – some weighing over 700 pounds, almost twice the average weight of most black bears. I reference “Game & Fish” online…
“Pennsylvania’s Incredible Giant Black Bears”.
Seeing as how I live in PA, I’ll have to keep my eyes open and my dogs close.
Definitely a squatch. Mystery solved.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Not sure which one.
nothing like a small blurry “it might be bigfoot” photo in 2013.
we have HD now folks… this stuff is a joke.:)
It would have been smart to take a photo of the tracks if there was snow on the ground.
By 2023 there should be good enough photographic machines to take clear photos. The technology just isn’t there yet.
Cryptoraptor:
What do you mean by “photographic machines”? You mean photo processing technology. I disagree; can’t put lipstick on a pig (I’m sure somebody has tried);
I have to say I can’t work this image into a bear of ANY kind. All I can say is this resembles nothing I’ve ever seen. All four legs are very strange; the muzzle doesn’t fit any known animal of that body configuration. It’s not a Bigfoot.
I very much suspect it’s some sort of stuffed contraption; it fits no known animal that’s ever been described.
Goodfoot:
I meant cameras. With all the unfocused, grainy, low-rez, degraded photographs of bigfoot, etc… it is clear that camera technology has not yet developed sufficiently. 😉
Right – it isn’t a Bigfoot…if this is indeed a real animal, it’s a black bear, probably an older cub with mange and thin from winter fasting. Its head is turning slightly to its right. If you look closely you can almost make out the ears at the top of the head. You can see the dark nose. The bear has plantigrade feet like a human does. A bear with a good case of mange is very unusual looking. I live in PA and I know they’re here. Decoat any furry mammal and it will look very strange. Google image “bear mange”. All will become clear.
Cryptoraptor: Yes, but hoaxers will choose lesser technology, so as to avoid exposure. So will honest people, because they can’t afford it, or have other priorities.
cryptokellie: Okay, let’s think it through. There’s a fair amount of snow on the ground, so it’s still cold. And I can’t accept a bear cub in February; they won’t be out until April, usually, even more so if it’s cold. And I see the muzzle, but it’s nothing like a bear’s. More like a coyote or dog, but the rest of the body doesn’t fit anything I know of.
I’m still calling this some kind of taxidermy hoax, but it’s not as bunkum as FeeJee Mermaids, which I love.
It could be a hoax but if we take the lady at her word (you may as well throw out almost all of cryptozoology if you don’t) then it’s a mangy something.
By the way, I live in PA and bears can be active on a warm winter day…they’re not actually lying comatose. Snow on the ground dosen’t mean that it’s actually cold at that time, snow does take time to melt, compacted snow quite some time.
Bear with mange.
I see a man walking away from the camera, carrying something over his left shoulder…
Man…Seeing this picture should tell everyone to upgrade your phones people.
I mean seriously, this looks black and white and blurry as heck, was this taken in 1950 in the rain? Why does every potential cryptid have to be taken by someone with the worlds worst camera?
My phone has an 8MP camera on it, and when using digital zoom, pictures come out 10x better than this. Its hard to take a blurry low detail picture with it.
My regular camera is 15MP digital and if I was jumping on a trampoline with it, I think I could take a better picture of a mystery animal than this.
“Tricksy hobbitses try to steal Smeagol’s precious…”
shmargin – TOTALLY agree with you dude…. its 2013…. oh and why? cuz they’re garbage BS photos. 🙂
A Wolly Booger
It’s most likely, as others have also mentioned, a mangy bear. One that is facing the camera. it is precisely the kind of photo you would expect to occasionally get to help substantiate that the “Jacobs creature” of BFRO (Matt Moneymaker) fame is also a mangy bear.
How about a little quiz in logic:
1. There are bears in PA.
2. No sasquatches have ever been found (dead or alive)…anywhere, let alone in PA.
3. Bears get mange.
4. Mange causes loss of hair and many times loss of weight (primarly fat reserves).
5. Removal of hair and fat on mammals = profound change of appearance. (I think a few of us humans might have noticed that :).
6. Mangy animals appear different than their healthy counterparts – specifically, skinnier and longer-limbed.
Now, what is more likely – that blurry or odd-positioned still photos of unidentified animals that don’t look like anything else as observed by non wildlife experts are A) an alien or legendary organism, or B) a common animal filmed in an awkward position and/or having a common disease or health issue?
Let that little logic exercise soak in. Because THAT my friends, sums up (other than lies, hallucinations, errors in judgment and hoaxes) the entire episode of bigfootery. Wow! Maybe logic is an important subject to teach in schools, after all!
And it still doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the old Leonard Nimoy’s “In Search Of” series quite a few years back. At least he wasn’t so arrogant as to name it “Finding…” 🙂
bigfootbuster:
This photo aside, we can at least ascertain either
(1) your lack of a science degree or
(2) your egregious failure to exercise it outside a very narrow technical range of specialty.
They DID teach logic where I went to school.
bigfootbuster: OK, let’s parse.
“It’s most likely, as others have also mentioned, a mangy bear. One that is facing the camera. it is precisely the kind of photo you would expect to occasionally get to help substantiate that the “Jacobs creature” of BFRO (Matt Moneymaker) fame is also a mangy bear.”
(Prove it. You can’t. Actually, given how you pile assumption on assumption, I’ll take the “photographer,” who thought it looked like a “little gorilla,” over you, precisely because one can’t tell what that is.)
“How about a little quiz in logic:”
(This’ll be fun.)
1. There are bears in PA. (They share habitat with sasquatch. Good point.)
2. No sasquatches have ever been found (dead or alive)…anywhere, let alone in PA. (That anyone wants to believe. There are some guys in PA you might not want to stand in front of and call them liars.)
3. Bears get mange. (Hmmmm. That might mean sasquatch do too. So you can diagnose mange from a badly-pixelated photo? Some degree you got there!)
4. Mange causes loss of hair and many times loss of weight (primarly fat
reserves). (So you are diagnosing how much hair/weight loss here? From what are you making this judgment?)
5. Removal of hair and fat on mammals = profound change of appearance. (I think a few of us humans might have noticed that :). (I get better looking every day. You are diagnosing “removal(?) of hair and fat, precisely, how?)
6. Mangy animals appear different than their healthy counterparts –
specifically, skinnier and longer-limbed. (So, you saw this guy before he got all pixelated? As in, you were there?)
“Now, what is more likely – that blurry or odd-positioned still photos of
unidentified animals that don’t look like anything else as observed by non
wildlife experts are A) an alien or legendary organism, or B) a common animal filmed in an awkward position and/or having a common disease or health issue?”
(When one thinks that only cars and buses exist, and not trucks, the chances of getting hit by a truck, according strictly to that person now, are zero percent. Some of us might want to look more than “both ways” before crossing the, um, woods.)
See, what this amounts to is another “expert” content that no one will call him on all the assumptions he stacks up, because, well, he is an “expert” and cannot be gainsaid.
Except by people that concern themselves with, er, logic.
Debate Jeff Meldrum and you might start making points. Until then…don’t shine that ‘science’ right in people’s eyes, junior. Blinds folks to the truth. And how to get it.
(Again, for the record: I don’t know what that is. That’s not the expert take, just the intelligent one. I’ve seen more bears than you. Wanna bet…?)
Tree stump with a touch of snow on the sides…
OK, to everyone: a little indesputable quizz;
Which lifeform can be proven to exist in PA.?…….Bear…100%
Evidence; actual living specimens, no further proof required.
Which lifeform can be proven to exist in PA.? ……Bigfoot…0%
Evidence; eyewitness (subjective), photography (inconclusive), footprints (inconclusive), physical (inconclusive), actual living specimens…none.
Based on the EVIDENCE, if the image shows an actual living animal and the CHOICE is between a Bear (100% proven, even if mangy) or a Bigfoot (0% proven) – then your answer is clear.
Please don’t misunderstand, I hope for the day when the Bigfoot also equals 100%.
But this image isn’t the one to do that.
Note that this picture appears to have been run through a photo-program to enhance the image so that something at least shows in the dimly lit landscape. I feel this is why the detailing is so poor. Also, I think that this is small detail of a larger image in which the subject figure is rather small.
Dr Kaco:
Wow. I was NOT expecting that one. A blobstump.
Goodfoot:
Not saying with 100% assurance that it is a tree stump, could be an actual living creature in the pic, BUT pareidolia is an amazing thing…. 😉
It could simply be a Bantha, with mange. On Tatooine II, Tatooine’s artic sister planet, further out from their star, this can be quite common. The Snow People, Tusken Raiders on Tatooine II, could verify this.