Swamp Monsters

Maine Mystery Beast Banner

Hot on the heels of Lewiston Sun Journal’s Mark LaFlamme being named “Journalist of the Year,” there’s more popular culture news of the Maine Mystery Beast. The 2006 Mount Desert Island Marathon® is to be run on that scenic Maine coastal location on Sunday, October 15, 2006. Artist Paul Szauter has written to inform me that: There are, at last count, 29 mile marker banners up for auction. The silent auction will conclude at the finish line in Southwest Harbor on Sunday. My banner for this year’s marathon celebrates the Maine Mystery Beast, the Terror of Lewiston. At Szauter’s webpage [...]

Lost World Is Coming

Look what Peter von Puttkamer is bringing to Discovery HD Theater on December 14th, on Animal Planet, December 10th and 17th, 2006, and in Canada on OLN Cable, December 17th, 2006: The Real Lost World. Peter is the director of the successful 2002 series, Monster Hunters, and my all-time favorite documentary about the quest, Sasquatch Odyssey: The Hunt for Bigfoot. This image of the movie poster may be clicked on to enlarge. Of the individuals highlighted on the poster, I only know Dean Harrison, recently of Australia, who has been a helpful and good research associate of mine. Anyone know [...]

Skeptic Dogs Maine Mutant

Cryptomundo reader and Skeptical Inquirer managing editor Ben Radford has taken on the “Maine Mutant” in a SI column published on Sunday, September 24, 2006. Click on image for full-size version Photograph by Michelle O’Donnell. Used by permission. In “Mystery Monster Dogs Maine” Radford overviews the story, getting all the facts right, more so than most retellings of the events. He even quotes me correctly: When Maine monster hunter Loren Coleman was shown a photo of the creature on Aug. 13, he stated, “This is a dog, probably a feral dog or a hybrid, but a dog.” Then Radford mentions [...]

Mothman Producer Dies

Executive producer Barry Conrad (above, right) and his producer partner Lisa McIntosh (above, left) have been working on their documentary project about the Flatwoods Monster, Kelly Creatures, and Mothman for over five years. Their production company has completed several documentaries that have been broadcast on the Biography, A&E, Discovery, Sci-Fi and TLC channels. When the crew visited me in Portland, Maine, on April 19, 2002, they were here to interview and tape me about Mothman, my book on the topic, and the then just-released Richard Gere The Mothman Prophecies movie. They did this, intriguingly, in a live production event in [...]

Flatwoods: September 12th

It looked worse than Frankenstein. It couldn’t have been human. Kathleen May. The smell was like oil on hot metal. You know, that greasy, sweet, slippery odor, slightly burnt and perhaps even appealing. But then more and more of it seemed to be saturating the molecules all around. It filled your nose. It permeated your pores. It made you sick to your stomach. It wouldn’t go away. The creepy feeling was close, something beyond the knowing, beyond understanding. The dog was sick; the boys ran down the hill. In two days, the dog was dead, and no one thereabouts would [...]