Michigan Bigfoot On The Move?
Posted by: Loren Coleman on March 14th, 2009
The northern tier of states in the USA are beginning to experience sunshine, warmer days, and perhaps that’s spring in the air.
Can Bigfoot activity be far behind?
Some of my all-time favorite “Eastern Bigfoot” cases come from Michigan.
You remember them, don’t you? One of them – known with the tag phrase “Sister Lakes” – was from Cass County, Michigan. In May and June 1964, Sister Lakes, Michigan, was the location for many reports of an 8 to 9 feet tall Bigfoot, seen by Mr. & Mrs. John Utrup, Gordon Brown, Joyce Smith, Patsy & Gail Clayton, and several others, who were berry-pickers or those who had hired them.
The other significant series I investigated back then was the Monroe incidents. The August 13, 1965 story of Monroe, Michigan, involved Christine van Acker and her mother Mrs. Ruth Owens, having a close encounter with a black 7-feet tall Bigfoot. The Bigfoot reached inside their car, giving van Acker a black eye. (I vividly remember the newspapers across the country publishing van Acker’s bruised face and an artist’s drawing of the hairy, faceless Bigfoot.)
In a 2006 discussion with Bigfoot researcher Roger Knights, he correctly pointed out to me that the event might not have been an “unprovoked assault” from the Bigfoot’s point of view, because the women’s car had “brushed past” the Bigfoot before coming to a stop.
The Sister Lakes and Monroe Monsters had the rather distinctive shaggy look often reported from these Midwestern accounts, such as with Cohomo (from Illinois) and Momo (from Missouri).
The media in Michigan appears to be fishing for new information, lately, doesn’t it? The same publication that in the past has been down this road before, have just printed a new story on this business:
That funky smell; that hairy, not-quite-human gait; that long, low call through the woods:
Bigfoot! In Michigan!
There’s a declaration that’ll have friends turning away and snickering into their hands.
Here in the Great Lakes State, as in most of the northland, if it hasn’t been shot and dragged by the foot back into town for all to see, it’s considered not quite real.
But sightings of Bigfoot persist to this day. Just last year, a hunter in Oscoda County got a whiff of something stinky, then came upon a sleeping Bigfoot. Jeez-o-Pete!
One was seen in Arenac County in 2003, another in Ogemaw in 2007 near Lupton.
The reports keep trickling in, stoking the legend of Bigfoot. For fear of ridicule, few people are willing to make those claims publicly.
Who’s to say, though, that there isn’t a 7- or 8-foot, apelike creature hiding out in our remote swamps?
A team of researchers tried to flush one out in the Upper Peninsula in recent years, to no avail. Kind of like those cable TV “reality” shows where they never manage to find a live specimen of the creature of the week.
That’s OK. If Bigfoot were common, they wouldn’t be legend, would they?
Keep that in mind the next time you’re deep in the woods and you see, smell or hear something that’s Not. Quite. Right.
Could it be Bigfoot?
Maybe.
Source for article: “Bigfoot sightings keep the legend alive in Michigan,” The Bay City Times.
Investigator Walt Andrus’ enhanced drawing of Momo.
Another image of Momo (originally from MoMo = Missouri Monster), which mirrors what the typical Michigan Monster (which I guess I’d have to coin as MiMo or Mimo, humm?) looks like.
Details about the Midwestern incidents, the Momo sighting and another drawing of Momo can be found on pages 50-51 of The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Well, if it were in the ‘mitten’ of Michigan, I reckon we’d have to call it a ‘troll’ LOL.
The UP connects directly with northern Wisconsin and the nort’woods of Minnesota, then around the lakes to the forest in Canada from whence tales of the Wendigo come, right? Even on up to Hudson’s Bay.
I’m curious about the sighting of that hunter who came across one sleeping. No pictures? No carcass? What’s his story? Was that reported apart from in the paper?
Why didn’t he shoot the sleeping Bigfoot?
I know I’m alone on this but I fully support the killing of Bigfoot. Obviously a naturally deceased Bigfoot would be preferred, or indisputable photographic/video evidence. But I fear that’s pie in the sky thinking.
For the record, I’m a vegetarian and pacifist. But if a hunter comes across a Bigfoot, take the shot. Cut off a hand, its head, bury the rest, and mark the spot. If we want science and the world to accept Bigfoot as a real creature, I think a body is the only solution. If we want Bigfoot to remain in the realm of myth and legend, well, maybe that’s okay too.
Me? I want a body to put the debate to rest.
Loyalfromlondon:
I would prefer the creature be taken alive, but I would not be devastated if one was shot dead and its carcass was rpesented to the world. So I basically agree with you.
At least the proof would finally be there. I would not want to be in the person who does it’s shoes, though.
Plenty of room in Michigan for something like this. 🙂
I’ve said this before also.
A body is the only conclusive evidence. But I hope it will be a LIVE body. But how do you trap an intelligent creature?
As far as finding a corpse in the wild, my feeling is that these creatures (if they exist in the flesh and blood sense) live in tight family groups and probably bury their dead.
I’d say you are right with the body thing, but taking one captive would be catastrophic simply because it would ensure the species to become some freakshow. From that point on, more and more of them would be captured and it would finally cause the end of sasquatch in the wilderness.
I think that’s why it would be preferable to find an already dead body (or shoot one by “defence”) and wait to have concrete datas on their living space, their alimentation, number, ect, to show the carcass to the world.
Who knows, maybe the government is doing just that right now… would be cool!
It’s one of the time honored debates. Do you shoot the Bf to prove it’s existence, or not? It’s all about perspective. If you believe BF is alive and afoot, do you really need a body? And if you are of the scientific mind, nothing but a body will do. So what is the answer? And I think the real truth is, for scientific minds, only a body will do. For the rest, the eye witness evidence, the footprint casts, and the rest is enough.
For me, I think there is enough other side evidence to say that BF is there and alive and well.
One has to imagine the macho of a hunter that would use a gun designed for hunting deer on a sleeping giant hominid which people typically report in the several hundred pound range, which one might naturally presume has the kind of “get up and go” that would put a 200 pound face eating-chimp to shame.- And if not macho, maybe low IQ or high threshold for risk…or combination of all that, I dunno.
But seriously, spring is the time for more people to be out in the woods and the spring time is when the undercover is less dense which makes it a great time to observe animals on the ground and in the trees, and especially along the roadways.
As to your point dogu4, I guess the second best thing to finding a dead Bigfoot killed by a hunter is finding a dead hunter killed by Bigfoot.
Nothing would help solve this mystery faster than major news networks covering a murder that involved animal hair, blood, and tissue samples, along with primate canine teeth marks and non-human footprints.
I had a sighting as teenager with my family in Southern Illinois while driving down the highway. I still wonder what would have happened if I made my sister pull over and I gave chase. Sacrificed my life for the scientific world I guess.
I live in iosco county mi in the mitten i hunt close to lupton we are about a half mile from a sighting in the rifle river recreation area and its about 2 miles from another sighting from lupton.There is also 2 sightings in my county not far from here. We have alot of remote places here there are alot of woods and swamp around here. Not very many houses in this neck of our woods here lotsa room to roam i can drive all day and never see another person.Im not saying that makes a bigfoot here but there is plenty of room here to roam. Just look at google maps and look for tawas,oscoda, hale,rose city,mio and look at all the nothing between them.
There are all kinds of reasons a hunter given the opp won’t shoot at a sasquatch, and dogu4 lists only one (that has been given as the reason by many a hunter, even by a number of them who had no real desire to shoot but thought they could predict the result if they did).
I’m one of many who just laughs at that “nobody’s shot one” line. First of all, folks have reported doing so, at least two that I am aware of fatally and at least a couple others seriously wounding their target. And the reasons the killers didn’t “bring back proof” fall squarely in what could be predicted from the most cursory overview of human nature.
Good point there, DWA. I don’t wish to suggest that they can’t be killed by guns, but rather that doing so intentionally is something different from hunting and is more like self-defense or through misidentification.
In actuality, I think a more pertinent and realistic reason why hunters don’t shoot what they think is BF is that hunters actually are fairly observant of hunting ethics and techniques neither of which condone, or even encourage the practice of just blasting something unknown or something that is not already in their mind as legitimate game (or prey). It not only is “poor form” but not really productive. And so far, I don’t think anyone’s managed to purposefully find one with the intention of shooting it with either gun or camera, and when people say they do encounter them they seem to be invariably the result of chance encounters which wouldn’t, almost by definition, afford the opportunity to hunt with intent.
Why we can’t hunt ’em with decent cameras and optics remains a bigger puzzlement for me. I think that if the creature exists its “nature” is not well enough understood to even occasionally its behavior, for all our efforts in speculation.
I am not a pacifist, nor am I anti-gun, and I have killed animals for food before.
But, I do not think I could shoot a hairy hominid in cold blood any more than I could shoot a human in cold blood.
If it was self-defense, that is one thing–I could shoot a human intruder in my home who was bent on doing harm to me and mine without remorse. I could do the same with a large rare animal such as a grizzly bear, even though it would sadden me a little to do it. If it is a matter of survival for myself or my kith and kin, that is one thing–and if a Sasquatch was attacking us–well, I could shoot.
But I ask this–what if the Sasquatch has intelligence beyond that of a chimp–what if it has the intelligence of perhaps not a Rhodes Scholar, but of an intellectually challenged human? What if it has the intelligence of a human child?
It would be wrong to kill it in that case–it would be murder. And the glory of bringing proof to science of this species would not be enough for me to remove the remorse of having committed murder in the name of truth.
I suspect that there are others like me in the world. There are accounts of hunters saying they had guns but they could not use them because it would have been morally wrong to do so, because the creature was so human.
How is that so hard to understand?
Murder only applies to humans. Though killing any living creature without good cause is horrible.
I’m not advocating the wanton destruction of animals.
Mountain Gorilla, discovered after being killed and examined.
Coelacanth, discovered after being killed and examined.
There’s precedence for killing animals in order to study them scientifically and to create proper conservation.
I think its great that some want Bigfoot to stay in Legend and Myth, there’s something very romantic about that. I’d rather Bigfoot show up on the cover of Time magazine as the greatest zoological discovery in the history of mankind.
I have to take exception to Wiseman’s comment -“From that point on, more and more of them would be captured “.
I’ve heard this comment often. Why? It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s been a few hundred years since the earliest reports of white men encountering sasquatches and they’ve been wiley enough to elude us this far. Why all of a sudden would the event of finally “getting” one, regardless of the method, suddenly make it easier to make subsequent acquisitions? If anything it would make them even MORE skittish around humans and even HARDER to find. Another 100 hundred years might go by before we’d find one again.
And as to the intelligence of them. Sure, they’re not going to win a prize at the local high school science fair or solve any algebra problems. But imagine something smart as the aforementioned intellectually challenged human, with all the woods smarts and instincts of any predator or higher mammal. You’re not going to traipse into the wilderness and conk one on the head like it’s a cow. Just not gonna happen. It’s a creature of its environment, perfectly suited to hide from, get away from, intimidate and scare the crap out of humans who it deems a threat. And that’s apparently worked for them for countless centuries or however long we’ve coexisted.
I also think their intelligence is the only reason why there HASN’T been any witness dead by sasquatchicide. They’re certainly capable of -and having the threatening demeanor to- making short work of a human. Though I think they’re intelligent enough to realize (perhaps even by prior experience passed on to later generations -just my own thought), that if they hurt humans, more humans come. And that’s the very last thing they want.
Loyalfromlondon–my point is this–what if the Sasquatch isn’t “merely” an animal?
What if it is a human, or proto-human? What if it has the intelligence of a mentally slow human being? What if it has language? What if it bloody well is a different type of human?
Then, in my eyes, and in the eyes of not a few witnesses, killing it would be murder.
I am not saying that killing an animal is murder–I am saying that killing something that may well be as smart as we are in some ways, something which may have culture and language is murder.
I completely understand your point and taking it all into account, I would still stand on the side of killing it to prove its existence, homicide be damned.
Again to my earlier point, it’s not the preferred method. I would love for someone to sink a considerable amount of money and resources into a long-term expedition for Bigfoot. And I would love nothing more than for that to lead to High-Def indisputable video footage of Bigfoot, along with hair samples and the like.
But until that happens, if that even happens, I’m hoping a hunter gets lucky in the woods or a Bigfoot gets unlucky crossing a highway.
Grafikman says:
“I have to take exception to Wiseman’s comment -”From that point on, more and more of them would be captured “.
“I’ve heard this comment often. Why? It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s been a few hundred years since the earliest reports of white men encountering sasquatches and they’ve been wiley enough to elude us this far. Why all of a sudden would the event of finally “getting” one, regardless of the method, suddenly make it easier to make subsequent acquisitions? If anything it would make them even MORE skittish around humans and even HARDER to find. Another 100 hundred years might go by before we’d find one again.”
Wiseman’s right.
Grafikman’s statement makes a common – and very incorrect – assumption: that we’ve just been combing the woods for sasquatch for like ever. “We” haven’t. Just a few of us have; they’re without exception part-timers and almost exclusively amateurs. I say this over and over: IN TERMS OF BIGFOOT EXPEDITIONS, PATTERSON AND GIMLIN ARE IT. They are the list. They are the only ones who spent the time that – if they’d had the technology or the team with them – could reasonably have resulted in getting proof. Everybody else? A weekender, and not too damn many weekends at that.
Once science is on the case, that will change, big time. They’ll be out there in numbers, full time, using the latest technology. And they will develop search protocols quickly. The sasquatch hasn’t “eluded” us at all. Plain old Joes and Janes see them, pretty much all the time, to read the reports. OK, not as often as deer, bear, or even mountain lion perhaps. But about as often as wolverine and wolf, if not more.
Once science knows they’re there and starts seriously following up, we may be surprised how many we suddenly start knowing about. Remember: for every sighting on a database, there are at least ten – I might go for several times that – that go unreported.
Granted.
I also agree with you about the ten times unreported for every one that is.
I suppose the critical issue is exactly when will science “know” they’re there and when they’ll get off their arrogant keisters and set those protocols in motion…
grafikman:
Yep, the arrogant-keisters issue is always the $64K question.
All I ask mainstream science to do is drop the arrogant part. They can stay on their keisters for the time being. All I want them to do is to stop deflecting legitimate attention from the question by reacting to it with kneejerk, ignorant scorn.
That is nothing to ask, I don’t think. No scientist worth his degree has any business acting like an uninformed fool. And every one I’ve heard pronounce negatively on the sasquatch demonstrates, quickly, that he is unqualified to hold his opinion. Not having looked at the evidence will do that to one.