DOG MAN ENCOUNTER?

Time : after moon rise

Month: March? April?

Year: 2012?

Location (Latitude: 31-33'48'' NLongitude: 110-20'04'' W): Upper Garden canyon picnic area. Ft. Huachuca, Arizona (stealth camp)

Subject: Dogman?

It was under a full moon in either the months of march or April in 2012 while stealth camping near the upper garden canyon picnic area on Fort Huachuca military reservation, that I had an interesting sighting or encounter with what I can only describe as a dogman.

Earlier in the afternoon my friend Matt had dropped me off on Garden canyon road with enough food and gear to last me for a week. I headed into the woods and went to one of my favorite stealth camping sites on base.

I did the usual things like set up my hammock and tarp, ate some chow, read my book, listened to music on my Mp3 player etc. My habit while camping is to go to bed when it gets dark. Im pretty lazy when it comes to making a fire . Why? Well, fires require fuel, fuel means work, and besides a fire is impractical while stealth camping. Nothing gives you away quicker than a fire.

Anyway, I lay in my hammock listening to music when I noticed a lot of light activity around the Aerostat blimp on base – I think my camp was only about 2 miles as the crow flies from the blimp.

I turned of my Mp3 player and just watched the lights circling around in the sky. A wind had picked up and my tarp was flapping loudly in the breeze so I got up and took it down, thereby enjoying an unobstructed view of the beautiful Arizona night sky. I concentrated mostly on the lights in the sky and noticed that the moon was on the rise, I took in that spectical as well. The ambient light under a full moon in the Sonoran desert is enough to read a book by. It was bright and since the wind had died down, I put my tarp back up to cut out the moon light while I tried to sleep.

I lay in my hammock drifting in and out of sleep kind of “cat napping”. I drank some water and watched the circling lights some more. I notice one light descend to the road and I could see the brightness of that light through the trees. No, it wasn't the moon light, the moon was high in the sky by that time. Odd I thought, there was a nice cool breeze blowing down from the peaks and I then fell to sleep listening to crickets, whippoorwills and pygmy owls.

Sometime later (Maybe 2 hand spans of the moon) I awoke to total silence in the woods, not one sound could be heard –no bugs, no birds, no wind - not even in the distance – I did have an odd mechanical like sound in my ears -

I was laying in my asym hammock on my right side when I did hear an odd sounding breathing, so I rolled over on my back and looked over my left shoulder and I saw was what I can only describe as an anubus (the man with the jackal head seen on Egyptian tombs), holding up the edge of my tarp looking at me. I was terrified and couldn't move. I could hear its odd breathing and smelled a odor that reminded me of a cat box. Finally the spell broke and I shouted a colorful metaphor and grabbed for my browning high power. This beast dropped my tarp edge, ran 2 or 3 steps on its hind legs, then dropped down on all fours and ran off into the moonlit shadows of the scrub oak forest. I had wondered about how tall is was bipedal. I usually set my tarps high enough for myself to walk under with out stooping. That would have made this thing 7 or 8 feet tall. Maybe black or Grey in color. It was hard to tell in the moonlight. This was a sentient being of some type, definitely real.

No, I hadn't been drinking, nor had I been smoking weed and doing 'shrooms, I simply saw yet another oddity in the Huachuca mountains.

It was pretty scary, there was still no sound of any kind or any breeze blowing. I took down my tarp and packed my gear all the while listening for anything, and sound besides the sounds of my packing – nothing came to my ears.

I sat down in my crazy creek chair and pulled my 9mm browning Highpower, waiting for daylight. That was one of the longest nights in my memory. Slowly the sounds returned to the forest .Once the sun had nearly cleared the Mule mountains to the east and it was light enough to see, I cached my food and shouldered my packed then bushwacked back to my friends house in town. Honestly, I have never been back to stealth camp in that area. I have gone back to the area only once for a day hike.

Once I was back in town, I told my friend Matt about it and he called it a “dogman”. I had never heard of such a thing, so I got online and did some research. What I found is that there have been literally hundreds of sightings around the world of what people were describing as a Dogman. Their collective descriptions sounded exactly like what I saw. It was definitely a unique experience.