Been following the Great Lakes cluster for about three years now and the uptick is genuinely hard to ignore. What strikes me is the geographic consistency - most of the credible reports are hugging the same woodland corridors between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. That's not random noise, that's a pattern.
I'll be honest, I came to Dogman late. Mothman is my bread and butter, and what pulled me toward these reports was the behavioural overlap - the paralysing eye contact, the sense of being assessed rather than threatened. Witnesses describing that same dreadful intelligence behind the eyes. Whether that means anything taxonomically, I genuinely don't know.
What I'd push back on is the tendency to lump every bipedal canine report together. There are at least three distinct types being reported around the Lakes right now if you cross-reference the BFRO database with some of the smaller regional forums. Body proportions, movement style, and vocalisation descriptions vary considerably.
Has anyone been mapping these properly? I've been dropping pins on a custom Google Maps layer but it's patchy - I'm only working from publicly available reports.
A few questions worth chewing on:
Are sightings correlating with any specific terrain features (river confluences, ridge lines)?, Any seasonal clustering, or year-round?, What's the overlap with Indigenous land boundaries? There's something there that keeps nagging at me.
Would be particularly interested to hear from anyone with boots-on-the-ground experience in Wisconsin or the Upper Peninsula. This deserves more rigorous attention than it's getting.
