Repeated themes in history through legends and popular drama, writings and movies, has to make one wonder about a kernel of truth. Cynocephaly (dog-shaped heads) have been reported for thousands of years, whole tribes of these people. Yet, today, we seem surprised to hear they ever existed.
One man, Kirk Stokes, is perhaps one of the most prolific witnesses and archivists of these beings. And his forays into the Kentucky wilderness and his ability to accurately and clearly account for his encounters, makes what he has to say all the more riveting.
Before I take you readers into the depth and breadth of Kirk's encounters, let's do a little back history on cynacephaly (dog-shaped heads).
Ancient art portrays the dog-headed ones and explorers, like Marco Polo, reported encounters with a tribe of this kind in Angamanain Island in the Indo-China area.
"The people are without a king and are Idolaters, and no better than wild beasts. And I assure you all the men of this Island of Angamanain have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are all just like big mastiff dogs! They have a quantity of spices; but they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race. They live on flesh and rice and milk, and have fruits different from any of ours." ("The Travels of Marco Polo")
"The people are without a king and are Idolaters, and no better than wild beasts. And I assure you all the men of this Island of Angamanain have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise; in fact, in the face they are all just like big mastiff dogs! They have a quantity of spices; but they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race. They live on flesh and rice and milk, and have fruits different from any of ours." ("The Travels of Marco Polo")
In Native American lore, there are shape-shifters and skinwalkers, often described as man-beast and often with dogman features.
Kirk was born and raised in Kentucky. He grew up in a more urban-like environment, but at the age of 14, he started fishing. He took to the sport so much that it became a permanent hobby. The treks out were uneventful and relaxing. That is, until he was a couple years out of high school....
Kirk and his friends went fishing in 1991. Kirk was about 20, his friends of a similar age. They were out at Taylorsville Lake, a very long lake in Spencer County, southeast of Louisville.
The men had fished all day and went to sit down at their campsite, about 15-20 yards from the shoreline in a clearing of trees.
It was August and humid and the young men didn't build a fire. They sat around giving each other the usual male back and forth prodding and joking. Kirk sat atop of his tackle box. His friends sat across from him in folding chairs.
Kirk was hearing something coming through the thicket up the hill, mowing down trees. It sounded like a bulldozer.
He glanced over at his friend's face across in the lantern light and saw a look of horror on his face. Kirk silently wondered if his own face was showing the same thing.
The sound was like nothing Kirk had ever heard in the woods. He didn't know what to expect, so he turned on the little flashlight he carried on him. The woods had gone silent and that was almost more horrifying. It felt like they were sitting in a vacuum, devoid of any sound.
He turned toward the treeline and used the flashlight on it. The men saw nothing the first time Kirk swept the light over the trees.
The second time, however, he hit it.
The head and neck were above the tree line which was about 10-12 feet high. It took a moment for Kirk to realize the massiveness of what he was seeing. And then, the terrifying details came out clearly.
The light got the side of its face, head tilted looking at Kirk as he shined the light. Only one eye was visible with the head tilted. The eye was as big as a baseball and pure black, no sclera. Light reflected off it. The head was maybe 2-1/2 to 3-feet wide at the brow. The snout was 7-8 inches long and it was bearing yellowish teeth.
Kirk didn't know how to react to the horrifying sight, he chucked his flashlight toward it. He had no way of knowing if it struck.
He turned around quickly to escape when he heard a groaning moan. The vibration of it hit him in the chest and he fell back off of his tackle box to the ground.
Lying on the ground, the vibration traveled through his chest and radiated to the pelvic area. He was utterly paralyzed by it. The best he compare it to was standing on a gun range when someone shot off a heavy duty rifle, but perhaps 100 times stronger of a vibration through his entire body.
Released all at once from the paralyzing vibration, Kirk got up and ran. His friends were not there. He found them back at the truck perhaps 800 or so yards away. They were inside the truck, doors locked.
Once they let him in, Kirk sat back and caught his breath. No one said anything. They sat there maybe 20 minutes trying to assimilate what happened.
Kirk felt a twinge of anger. They had left all their gear back there and he wasn't going to leave without it. His fishing gear and his smokes were there and he really needed a cigarette.
Like most 20-year-old young men, Kirk was cocky enough to set a goal of getting his stuff and leaving with his dignity, so he grabbed up his friend's 12-gauge and got another flashlight and quickly got his stuff back to the truck.
When he came back, Kirk told his friends, they needed to get their own stuff!
They never talked about it. If he tried to bring it up in front of others, he got the "look," so he learned to not bring it up as long as he saw them. Since that time, two of the men passed on and one moved far away.
It would seem that since that blasting experience, Kirk developed an extra sense about where these dogmen are, how to run into them. It might be that something of his own chemistry or electrical changed so that he is more sensitive to the intuitive signals or perhaps the dogmen themselves recognize him as no threat. It is exceedingly rare to run into one dogman, but to have seen them dozens of times shows that these woodland hairy upright creatures are not nervous around him. This might also have something to do with Kirk's repeated experiences teaching him that they are not aggressive toward him or at all threatening, simply fascinating to watch, as they come in many variations.
In 1997, in the Land Between the Lakes area in Kentucky (infamous for a legend of a dogman killing a family that was camping in an RV), Kirk was going to get an amazing sighting again that confirmed what he had seen in 1991.
A friend invited him to go fishing and Kirk was glad for a night away and some time on Lake Barkley. The men sat in a bass boat about 20 feet away from the bank, fishing as it was turning to night.
Kirk kept glancing to the darkened hillside as he heard popping. There was a lot of old driftwood up on the hillside and it sounded like someone was stepping down on the wood and snapping it.
His friend hit the spotlight and caught something walking on two legs about 80 yards from the shoreline on the hillside. It didn't protect its eyes from the bright light. The eyes reflected. It didn't run, but continued to stroll around as if looking for something.
Kirk drank in every detail in the spotlight. The hair was a sandy blond with a faint reddish tinge. The hands had no true claws, but long fingernails. It walked with muscular thighs like a Bigfoot, slightly pitched forward. It had a clear neck and two ears atop its head, not on the sides like we have. The ears looked like a bobcat's and had tufts of blond hair inside. Although it wasn't tall, perhaps 6-1/2 feet tall, it was shocking to look at. The eyes had an Asian-like appearance. Although it looked like a dog in the face, the face was thrust forward like a baboon more than a dog's snout.
Thus far, after dozens of encounters with these dogmen, Kirk has not felt threatened, been chased or harmed in any way, has not had mindspeak as some report, but feels as if they pass each other, acknowledge each other's existence and move on. They do not seem to fear encounters with him, but they do not seem to want to communicate either.
Kirk actively started out into the field to document and film encounters so he could share the knowledge in 2009. There were many variations of dogman he encountered from bobcat-earred to bunny-earred, from white with bits of black in the fur to blue black and whitish gray and more. Snouts could vary, as well from more dog-like to baboon-like. They were individual, but the basic characteristics were the same.
Here is an example of a capture of some questionable beings - who/what they are - we can't clearly identify, although the tree peeker looks a lot like a Bigfoot.
These forays into having uncanny timing and placement to witness amazing encounters also led Kirk to run into some other very unusual cryptids in Kentucky.
People often ask why some people witness many types of paranormal events. The best I can describe is that when you have witnessed one unexplained phenomena, you open yourself up to not assuming what you are seeing any longer, and so you catch things other glance right past. You only see the part of the world you believe it contains. Once you have an experience in the paranormal, you are now humbled to admit that there is more content than you were taught to assume.
Most people in the woods assume all the green and brown in front of them are trees and bushes. We must never assume that a tree is a tree or a bush is a bush. That is what cryptids count on. Just look at Mr. Tree Peeker (above).
This humility is the attitude Kirk takes into the forest. He makes no assumptions and allows the forest to tell him what it contains.
In the mid 1990s when Kirk was fishing often for recreation, he had run into something he could only describe as 5-6 foot tall owls (when standing) along a shore of a river at nighttime. He had spotlighted them and they did not scare.
They had white feathers mixed in around the neck and otherwise were a coal gray color. The width at the shoulder area was 3-1/2 to 4 feet wide. The eyes illuminated with the spot light. They did not cower or fly off.
Many years later, he looked back after seeing the Mothman movie and wondered. It was not all that terribly far geographically from Point Pleasant, WV.
What if the Mothman was simply a cryptid creature that so unsettled folks by its presence and timing, that legends were created around it?
Kentucky has had legends for hundreds of years of the thunderbird and even a mention or two of a child being whisked away by one. What Kirk didn't expect to do was witness one firsthand.
His sighting was in daytime in 2002. The bird was flying at a slow speed, flapping enormous wings. The wingspan looked to be about 16-18 feet. The bird looked like an eagle with a long tail, black head, cobalt blue feathers: a thing of beauty, as well as mystery.
Once you awaken the ability to see and to know where and when to look, a person can tap into many cryptid sightings that seem extraordinary, but in truth only need an intuitive inner guide.
There is a form of psychic intuitive talent that involves a gifted level of spatial awareness combined with a time/spatial synesthesia. In other words, a person who is very adept at understanding space and what is hidden within it, including energy signatures.
If you put this person into a haunted location or a forest, they know where things are and when to look. It sounds like much of this is apparent in Kirk. I use these skills for "psychic tracking." The encounter with potential infrasound back in 1991 likely changed some internal wiring for him in that he is now able to be aware of space and environments, as well as its contents.
**If any other researchers have been "blasted" by infrasound before and found some odd skills afterwards, please let me know. This is an ongoing study.**
Here is video of a potential dogman or maybe Bigfoot encounter -
One time, Kirk filmed perhaps the oddest thing he had ever witnessed. It was between trees when he saw it and he captured about 19 minutes of footage.
The face looked like a horse's head, but real slender with a long tongue hanging out. He could almost see what looked like wings behind the trees. It also had appendages atop the head of some sort. It pulled back the appendages and disappeared within the trees. In considering its size, Kirk figured it to be around 12 feet tall - quite exceptional.
Interestingly, in Illinois there was a glyph drawn by the Native People of what was called the Piasa Bird. Their legends said it used to eat their people and that there was a cave of bones nearby where it took them. In the early exploring years when it was come upon, the cave was apparently found, indeed filled very deep with bones.
In New Jersey there is a legend of the Jersey Devil, said to have horns, walk upright, horse's head, red eyes, wings and a dangling tongue.
Here are some stills from a video Kirk took (ORIGINAL VIDEO)
When asked what his goal is, Kirk has a health attitude about it. He says he feels compelled, as he has this odd sense of where to go and when, to use it for archiving a variety of creatures that are out in the Kentucky wilderness.
These sightings might seem extraordinary until one considers that for hundreds of years Native People reported these creatures in that region and even today people run across them.
Kirk does not feel threatened by these beings, only curious to view them, document them, and move on to the next one and the next until he has a body of knowledge.
I am glad he's willing to share this with us, as it's information many of us would not come across on our own.
Whatever happened in 1991 when Kirk got "zapped" by infrasound leads me to believe that he recognizes on some very "other sensory" method, that something "other" is nearby.
I hope to continue to share some of Kirk's experiences and insights in coming posts on the blog. I'm definitely following this researcher's work.
More info:
Kirk's YouTubeChannel
Dogman of Michigan
Books by dogman expert, Linda Godfrey
Dogman sighting map
Native legend of dog man
My post "Who's Dogman's Daddy?"
Kirk's Accounts
Kirk and his friends went fishing in 1991. Kirk was about 20, his friends of a similar age. They were out at Taylorsville Lake, a very long lake in Spencer County, southeast of Louisville.
The men had fished all day and went to sit down at their campsite, about 15-20 yards from the shoreline in a clearing of trees.
It was August and humid and the young men didn't build a fire. They sat around giving each other the usual male back and forth prodding and joking. Kirk sat atop of his tackle box. His friends sat across from him in folding chairs.
Kirk was hearing something coming through the thicket up the hill, mowing down trees. It sounded like a bulldozer.
He glanced over at his friend's face across in the lantern light and saw a look of horror on his face. Kirk silently wondered if his own face was showing the same thing.
The sound was like nothing Kirk had ever heard in the woods. He didn't know what to expect, so he turned on the little flashlight he carried on him. The woods had gone silent and that was almost more horrifying. It felt like they were sitting in a vacuum, devoid of any sound.
He turned toward the treeline and used the flashlight on it. The men saw nothing the first time Kirk swept the light over the trees.
The second time, however, he hit it.
The head and neck were above the tree line which was about 10-12 feet high. It took a moment for Kirk to realize the massiveness of what he was seeing. And then, the terrifying details came out clearly.
The light got the side of its face, head tilted looking at Kirk as he shined the light. Only one eye was visible with the head tilted. The eye was as big as a baseball and pure black, no sclera. Light reflected off it. The head was maybe 2-1/2 to 3-feet wide at the brow. The snout was 7-8 inches long and it was bearing yellowish teeth.
Kirk didn't know how to react to the horrifying sight, he chucked his flashlight toward it. He had no way of knowing if it struck.
He turned around quickly to escape when he heard a groaning moan. The vibration of it hit him in the chest and he fell back off of his tackle box to the ground.
Lying on the ground, the vibration traveled through his chest and radiated to the pelvic area. He was utterly paralyzed by it. The best he compare it to was standing on a gun range when someone shot off a heavy duty rifle, but perhaps 100 times stronger of a vibration through his entire body.
Released all at once from the paralyzing vibration, Kirk got up and ran. His friends were not there. He found them back at the truck perhaps 800 or so yards away. They were inside the truck, doors locked.
Once they let him in, Kirk sat back and caught his breath. No one said anything. They sat there maybe 20 minutes trying to assimilate what happened.
Kirk felt a twinge of anger. They had left all their gear back there and he wasn't going to leave without it. His fishing gear and his smokes were there and he really needed a cigarette.
Like most 20-year-old young men, Kirk was cocky enough to set a goal of getting his stuff and leaving with his dignity, so he grabbed up his friend's 12-gauge and got another flashlight and quickly got his stuff back to the truck.
When he came back, Kirk told his friends, they needed to get their own stuff!
They never talked about it. If he tried to bring it up in front of others, he got the "look," so he learned to not bring it up as long as he saw them. Since that time, two of the men passed on and one moved far away.
It would seem that since that blasting experience, Kirk developed an extra sense about where these dogmen are, how to run into them. It might be that something of his own chemistry or electrical changed so that he is more sensitive to the intuitive signals or perhaps the dogmen themselves recognize him as no threat. It is exceedingly rare to run into one dogman, but to have seen them dozens of times shows that these woodland hairy upright creatures are not nervous around him. This might also have something to do with Kirk's repeated experiences teaching him that they are not aggressive toward him or at all threatening, simply fascinating to watch, as they come in many variations.
In 1997, in the Land Between the Lakes area in Kentucky (infamous for a legend of a dogman killing a family that was camping in an RV), Kirk was going to get an amazing sighting again that confirmed what he had seen in 1991.
A friend invited him to go fishing and Kirk was glad for a night away and some time on Lake Barkley. The men sat in a bass boat about 20 feet away from the bank, fishing as it was turning to night.
Kirk kept glancing to the darkened hillside as he heard popping. There was a lot of old driftwood up on the hillside and it sounded like someone was stepping down on the wood and snapping it.
His friend hit the spotlight and caught something walking on two legs about 80 yards from the shoreline on the hillside. It didn't protect its eyes from the bright light. The eyes reflected. It didn't run, but continued to stroll around as if looking for something.
Kirk drank in every detail in the spotlight. The hair was a sandy blond with a faint reddish tinge. The hands had no true claws, but long fingernails. It walked with muscular thighs like a Bigfoot, slightly pitched forward. It had a clear neck and two ears atop its head, not on the sides like we have. The ears looked like a bobcat's and had tufts of blond hair inside. Although it wasn't tall, perhaps 6-1/2 feet tall, it was shocking to look at. The eyes had an Asian-like appearance. Although it looked like a dog in the face, the face was thrust forward like a baboon more than a dog's snout.
baboon snout
Kirk actively started out into the field to document and film encounters so he could share the knowledge in 2009. There were many variations of dogman he encountered from bobcat-earred to bunny-earred, from white with bits of black in the fur to blue black and whitish gray and more. Snouts could vary, as well from more dog-like to baboon-like. They were individual, but the basic characteristics were the same.
Here is an example of a capture of some questionable beings - who/what they are - we can't clearly identify, although the tree peeker looks a lot like a Bigfoot.
This is a screen capture made by me at 39 seconds and 55 seconds in top center of the screen so you can see this fella popping his head up.
This is a screen capture I made at 37 seconds on the video above from the bottom center of the screen - the fella peeking around a tree (dark area to the right of central tree is face peeking out and dark areas on both sides of the central at the bottom of the photo are his shoulders.
These forays into having uncanny timing and placement to witness amazing encounters also led Kirk to run into some other very unusual cryptids in Kentucky.
People often ask why some people witness many types of paranormal events. The best I can describe is that when you have witnessed one unexplained phenomena, you open yourself up to not assuming what you are seeing any longer, and so you catch things other glance right past. You only see the part of the world you believe it contains. Once you have an experience in the paranormal, you are now humbled to admit that there is more content than you were taught to assume.
Most people in the woods assume all the green and brown in front of them are trees and bushes. We must never assume that a tree is a tree or a bush is a bush. That is what cryptids count on. Just look at Mr. Tree Peeker (above).
This humility is the attitude Kirk takes into the forest. He makes no assumptions and allows the forest to tell him what it contains.
In the mid 1990s when Kirk was fishing often for recreation, he had run into something he could only describe as 5-6 foot tall owls (when standing) along a shore of a river at nighttime. He had spotlighted them and they did not scare.
They had white feathers mixed in around the neck and otherwise were a coal gray color. The width at the shoulder area was 3-1/2 to 4 feet wide. The eyes illuminated with the spot light. They did not cower or fly off.
Many years later, he looked back after seeing the Mothman movie and wondered. It was not all that terribly far geographically from Point Pleasant, WV.
What if the Mothman was simply a cryptid creature that so unsettled folks by its presence and timing, that legends were created around it?
His sighting was in daytime in 2002. The bird was flying at a slow speed, flapping enormous wings. The wingspan looked to be about 16-18 feet. The bird looked like an eagle with a long tail, black head, cobalt blue feathers: a thing of beauty, as well as mystery.
Once you awaken the ability to see and to know where and when to look, a person can tap into many cryptid sightings that seem extraordinary, but in truth only need an intuitive inner guide.
There is a form of psychic intuitive talent that involves a gifted level of spatial awareness combined with a time/spatial synesthesia. In other words, a person who is very adept at understanding space and what is hidden within it, including energy signatures.
If you put this person into a haunted location or a forest, they know where things are and when to look. It sounds like much of this is apparent in Kirk. I use these skills for "psychic tracking." The encounter with potential infrasound back in 1991 likely changed some internal wiring for him in that he is now able to be aware of space and environments, as well as its contents.
**If any other researchers have been "blasted" by infrasound before and found some odd skills afterwards, please let me know. This is an ongoing study.**
Still shot of a female
One time, Kirk filmed perhaps the oddest thing he had ever witnessed. It was between trees when he saw it and he captured about 19 minutes of footage.
The face looked like a horse's head, but real slender with a long tongue hanging out. He could almost see what looked like wings behind the trees. It also had appendages atop the head of some sort. It pulled back the appendages and disappeared within the trees. In considering its size, Kirk figured it to be around 12 feet tall - quite exceptional.
Piasa Bird
Interestingly, in Illinois there was a glyph drawn by the Native People of what was called the Piasa Bird. Their legends said it used to eat their people and that there was a cave of bones nearby where it took them. In the early exploring years when it was come upon, the cave was apparently found, indeed filled very deep with bones.
Jersey Devil
In New Jersey there is a legend of the Jersey Devil, said to have horns, walk upright, horse's head, red eyes, wings and a dangling tongue.
Here are some stills from a video Kirk took (ORIGINAL VIDEO)
When asked what his goal is, Kirk has a health attitude about it. He says he feels compelled, as he has this odd sense of where to go and when, to use it for archiving a variety of creatures that are out in the Kentucky wilderness.
These sightings might seem extraordinary until one considers that for hundreds of years Native People reported these creatures in that region and even today people run across them.
Kirk does not feel threatened by these beings, only curious to view them, document them, and move on to the next one and the next until he has a body of knowledge.
I am glad he's willing to share this with us, as it's information many of us would not come across on our own.
Whatever happened in 1991 when Kirk got "zapped" by infrasound leads me to believe that he recognizes on some very "other sensory" method, that something "other" is nearby.
I hope to continue to share some of Kirk's experiences and insights in coming posts on the blog. I'm definitely following this researcher's work.
More info:
Kirk's YouTubeChannel
Dogman of Michigan
Books by dogman expert, Linda Godfrey
Dogman sighting map
Native legend of dog man
My post "Who's Dogman's Daddy?"
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