Foreign.
Welcome to Otherworld.
I'm your host, Jack Wagner.
In the last episode we spoke to Emerson, a self described hardcore skeptic who had a very brief but strange encounter with a wolf during which he was chased, and then saw the wolf get up on his hind legs and continue running full sprint upright, like a man would run.
After this, he did some research and discovered a local legend called the Michigan Dogman, a legend that may or may not be partly a hoax.
After this, I decided to try speaking to some biologists or wolf experts in Michigan.
Normally this wouldn't be something that's very hard for me to do, but nobody, and I mean nobody, wanted to talk about the Michigan Dogman.
However, they did send over the DNR data for Michigan and told me that there are no known wolves in the area where Emerson had this experience, which I thought was really interesting.
This all led me to talk to the man who started this all, or at least no named it, the radio DJ Steve Cook.
After speaking to him, it seems that the Michigan Dogman was definitely started as joke.
The history behind it was made up by Steve.
And Steve certainly fueled the fire of this hoax by releasing fake footage.
But he also told me that he has talked to so many people over the years who he believes had very real encounters with something that sounded a lot like the Michigan Dogman.
I think this story is a very realistic representation of the paranormal in general.
Lots of fake material exists.
People do make up stories, and because of that, much of the world assumes that it's all fake.
Everyone wants things to be black and white, but it's just not the way this works.
Well, on this show, we speak to a lot of people who thought something wasn't real until they saw it with their own eyes.
And in the second part of this series, we'll be speaking to another person in Michigan who thinks they encountered the Dogman as well.
However, the thing that that this person saw seems quite different than what Emerson experienced.