Not my usual territory - I'm more of a UFO and MIB lad myself - but I've been noticing this cluster too and it's hard to ignore. The Great Lakes area has always had a weird density of high-strangeness reports across multiple categories, not just cryptids. Something about that region seems to generate encounters full stop.
What's interesting to me is whether the uptick is genuine or just better reporting infrastructure now. More people have decent cameras on their mobiles, more local Facebook groups feeding into the bigger databases. Could be the sightings were always there and we're only now capturing them properly.
That said, I did speak to a bloke at a conference in Leeds last year who'd done fieldwork near Lake Michigan and he was absolutely convinced something large and bipedal was moving through those treelines. Wouldn't go back. And this wasn't some excitable first-timer, he'd been doing this twenty years.
Anyone got actual coordinates or rough locations for the recent ones? Would love to plot them against the older historical reports and see if theres a pattern emerging.