A US military & combat veteran details his trip, with a friend, to his wilderness cabin during the winter. After arriving, his ordeal with a Dogman soon starts to develop!
"Let me preface this letter with a quick description of my background. I am a retired military veteran with three decades of active duty serving my country and its citizens. I've been honored and privileged to be in command on many occasions during my career and have seen both the bounty of peaceful time and the horror of all-out war. You name it I've probably seen it and been through it in the US military. I do not write this to impress, I merely wish to state the facts so that you may judge the accuracy of what I'm about to tell you.
So, now, the facts as I know them to be my first face-to-face encounter with Dogman. It was 5 years ago in 2019 and there have been more since then my first Dogman experience took place in the western United States. I have a cabin in a national forest which is nestled in a beautiful valley located 50 miles up a dirt road at a fairly high elevation and is only accessible from late spring to late fall depending on how early or late the snowfall is each year. Most years it is impossible to get to the cabin from Thanksgiving through Labor Day due to heavy snow and ice on the dirt road that runs up to that part of the national forest. But four years ago in January, there was no snow, and since it is rare to be able to go there at that time of year, a friend and I decided to risk it and go up for New Year and planned on staying a week or so. We decided that if snow started falling while we were there, we'd retreat from it quickly and drive out in time before the road became impassible and safely make it down the mountain.
We launched from the city, got to the cabin around midday, and found there were a few inches of snow on the ground around it. Ever alert for animal tracks and prints I examined the snow for them I found bear, deer, cougar prints, and something else I was unfamiliar with and had never seen before. I now know that they were Dogman tracks. Not knowing what the Dogman track were at the time I first saw them I filed them away in my mind as a new experience and a new bit of data. Then my friend and I began powering up and commissioning the cabin, turning on the power and the water and the gas. The cabin has living quarters on one side and a huge garage with two huge aircraft-style hangar doors to slide open. I unlocked and opened the hangar doors about 6 feet wide. Then my friend and I began unloading the supplies from my Jeep parked in the carport and took them through the hanger and into the cabin proper.
As the afternoon progressed we settled in, restocked the cabin supplies, and cleaned a bit here and there. I never go unarmed into that wilderness, so one of the first things I like to do when I get to the cabin is to lay out whatever weapons I have brought with me on a big table out in the hangar. I did this and checked and loaded all the weapons. I also turned on and stocked the gas-powered refrigerator which I keep out in the hangar with some of the food I had brought that needed to be kept cooled. Then I returned inside the cabin proper and settled in for an adult libation and an afternoon and bull session with my friend.
After a bit of telling stories between ourselves, I noticed the sun had set behind the mountains and it was beginning to get dark outside. It was time to begin prepping for dinner I told my friend I would get some steaks out of the fridge in the hangar and went to do so. That's when something completely unexpected happened.
As I walked through the door from the cabin into the hangar I took one-two-three steps and froze. I was being 'sighted' by something outside. It was staring at me through the open hangar doors with murderous intent. In that split second, all the hair on the back of my neck and arms stood straight up and I started getting what I call my 'gut warning.' I've only gotten those before when flying into live fire from the ground or when in other combat situations in wartime. Yet, here I was in the middle of the American wilderness getting the very same well-known sensation stronger than ever.
I was pretty certain that it was not a human. I didn't freeze but my brain began racing. Instead of walking to the fridge I quickly went over to the weapons table, picked up a large gauge handgun, checked if it was loaded, and stuck it in my belt. Then I picked up one of the already loaded rifles. Once armed I then advanced towards the open hangar doors with the rifle in my hands. I got to the open hangar doors I raised the rifle and started appraising the situation through its scope, swinging it to the left and to the right. It was so dark by then that I could see little but vague tree shapes and the blobs of bushes outside in the forest.
Then suddenly, as I swung the rifle to the right, the feeling of being intently watched switched off, like flipping a light switch off. I stood there for a bit waiting for the tingle of my intuitive gut warning sign to reappear. After a little while the feeling of being watched didn't return, so I closed and locked the hanger doors, grabbed some dinner steaks from the fridge, and went back inside.
Later that night after dinner and KP duty I armed myself, opened the cabin door, and stood in the doorway. As soon as I did the feeling of being watched started up again, only not as intense as the first time. I stood there for a while and then once again the feeling of being watched switched off like a switch. The rest of the evening I turned the sequence of events around and around in my head but could not make any sense of this creature. It just didn't add up. Could it have been a murderous bear that had gotten a taste for "long pig' (human flesh)?
All of these thoughts and more went through my mind as I sat there gazing at the wood stove fire in front of me inside the cabin and eventually, I gave up obsessing about it. I told my friend we should hit our racks so we turned in and slept straight through the night with no further incidents. You're probably asking why I didn't leave the cabin the next day. All I can say is that I am perhaps a little too stubborn and have never believed in retreat of any kind. To me, that is paying for the same ground twice and you have to remember that I've been going to my cabin for 20 years now and have never experienced anything like being watched or hunted. Not ever, not even close.
The next morning we did the usual shower and shave routine and while having a cup of coffee outside in the carport the feeling of being watched returned, only it was weaker, as if it was from a distance. As the feeling of being watched returned I still couldn't make heads or tails of the situation I found myself in, but I was adapting as fast as I could. So, I told my friend we would be staying close to the cabin for the duration of our stay. I didn't want to take any chances with this new unknown threat so I told my friend that I was concerned about bears in the area. My friend took this at face value and agreed to stay close to the cabin and its immediate grounds for the duration of our stay.
In the days that followed, I got the sensation of being watched from time to time during the day but it was always weak and seemed to be from far away. But every time I opened the cabin door at night and stood there looking out into the night the feeling returned very strong and very close, like it was that very first night inside the partially open hanger doors. I forgot to mention that I have a pair of Generation 3 military night vision goggles I use these every night when standing at the cabin door looking for whatever was outside watching us. Each and every time I put the goggles on the feeling of being watched switched off as I explained earlier. This whole situation was darn peculiar and I just couldn't explain any of it in a rational way that made sense. All I knew was my training from the past and that if I stuck to that then my friend and I would be okay. if I developed a plan for the day I felt it would be all right and after all, we had plenty of weapons and food.
The procedure I settled on was simple. Don't go outside at night, don't leave any doors open, and stay very close to the cabin at all times. Most of the time we sat in the carport on folding camping chairs just shooting the breeze. Also, keep yourself armed and have extra firearms close at hand, and, most important, never ever go anywhere alone.
By midweek, after being at the cabin for 4 days, we began to get used to this 'watcher' because it too was following a set of rules and never came into sight. It stayed a certain distance from the cabin. It made absolutely no noise at any time at night it came closer and stared at the cabin and waited for me to open the door and look around. As soon as I used the night vision goggles it took off and so forth and so on.
On the fourth day at the cabin, my friend insisted on going on a hike. I sensed that I would have the opportunity to figure out who the 'watcher' was. I was using my friend as bait, for what I was mentally calling the 'watcher,' but I really wanted to know what this thing was. I figured my friend would be safe with me well-armed and watching them from a distance. So we agreed that he would hike down the dirt road for a short distance and then come back. My friend got ready to go, excited to get away from the cabin for a spell. I armed myself well. I holstered and put a large-bore revolver on each hip. I double-checked the load on my AR-15 and slung it in front of me. Then, at the last moment, I don't know why, I slung my old trusty full auto machine gun on my back. It is what you might call the spoils of war and has never failed me in the past.
My friend was ready to launch down the road and I was just as ready to watch him do so. He took off and I watched as he walked down the cabin access road to the main dirt road. As soon as he was out of sight I jogged over to a null that had a commanding view of the road and the entire valley and worked my way into some old-growth bushes. From there I watched as my friend started going down the road and within an instant I saw something else just off the road behind my friend. It was big and black and stood upright on two legs and it was fast! It had a weird flippy-floppy zig-zagging gait but it zipped from tree to tree incredibly fast, following my friend as he walked down the road. In an instant, I knew that this thing was the 'watcher' that had been spying and watching us all week, and it was not a bear. I raised my rifle and tried to see it through the scope.
My first glimpse of it was its head and upper body. It had the head of a dog. I swear it had the head of a huge dog! A little stunned I suddenly remembered my training and lowered my rifle sight to its legs. I saw huge muscular legs like those you would see on an Olympic heavyweight lifter. Its short dense black fur became sparse going down to its feet and those toes had huge curved talons, not nails. They weren't quite as big as the Velociraptor dinosaur talons from the Jurassic Park movies that everyone in the Western world has seen but they were almost as big and they looked incredibly lethal, like overkill, lethal in a split second! I took this all in. Then I pulled the rifle back up to sight on its head and chest and it was staring back at me, staring directly at me from about 100 yards away. I got a good look as it stared at me. It had a huge head, I would say much bigger than a human. It had short smooth black fur and a huge jaw that was slightly parted. I saw large white canine teeth in its mouth. Its eyes were deep dark red and, as I watched, it started to squint its eyes and really got a good look at me. The longer I looked at it and it looked back at me my brain tried to compare it to other dogs I've seen in my life. To me, its head looked like a cross between a German Shepherd and a Black Lab, but it was huge, absolutely huge! I got the sense that this thing was mean and pissed off!
I instinctively decided to shoot it. Just as I put my finger on the trigger of my AR and was about to pull it I was interrupted by the noise of a vehicle coming up the dirt road in the distance. I stopped sitting on the beast for an instant and looked down the road and then I swung my gaze back to the beast. It was gone. I lowered my rifle and scanned for it, and I couldn't believe what I saw. It was running away, faster than anything I've ever seen run. It ran through the trees so fast it was a blur and was running on two legs. Then it burst out of the tree line and went to all four limbs and actually increased its speed. It started going through a boulder field and then took off upslope at such a terrific speed that I remember saying to myself out loud, "You've got to be kidding me, nothing runs that fast!" I watched as it got to the steep granite mountainside across the valley and it just went straight up it, seemingly floating over the rock, it was so fast and it was gone in seconds.
I tried to process what I had seen. As the vehicle came up the road it was a US Forest Service Jeep with a ranger inside making his rounds for the week. The ranger stopped and talked to my friend down in the road and I watched as they chatted away. Eventually, my friend finished talking to the ranger, then he started up his Jeep and drove off. My friend started hiking back to the cabin.
When my friend returned to the cabin it was late in the day and I told them we'd be leaving the next day. Obviously, I walked around outside the cabin heavily armed after that. A little while later I noticed the ranger in his Jeep parked down at my access road gate. I walked down there to chat as I've known that guy for about the past 10 years. We talked about nothing for a few moments and then I said, "Hey, have you ever seen or heard reports of a huge dog running around these parts?" The guy looked at me oddly and very coldly said, "We don't talk about that stuff." Without another word, he started his Jeep and drove off as I was in the middle of saying, "What do you mean? What aren't you saying? What's going on?" I look back up the road thinking to myself what the heck is going on up here? It's never been like this before and so forth. I walked back to the cabin.
I couldn't get the image of that dog face with the red eyes out of my head that night inside the safety of the cabin. My friend chattered on about how good the hike was while I listened absentmindedly I replayed over and over in my head the events of that day. My mind kept returning to the image I had seen in my rifle scope and began filling in details that I hadn't noticed in the heat of the moment of that first real look at the creature.
I finally got a few hours of sleep and slept in a bit. The next morning I woke happy to see the daylight and thinking for the first time in my life that I'd be glad to leave the cabin that day. But little did I know our last day at the cabin would turn out to be the strangest one of all.
NOTE: I'm going to post this account in two parts. I'll post Part II tomorrow. Thanks for reading. Lon
Part II - US Military Veteran's Harrowing DOGMAN Encounter - Part II
Transcribed Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh-47GNUowY
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