One very strange little corner of the world of the paranormal is that of shapeshifting, dog-like canid humanoids. Dogmen, werewolves, call them what you want, but they represent a truly anomalous and head-scratching realm, indeed. It seems almost absurd that such things could ever exist, but there is a surprisingly large amount of reports out there dealing with precisely this, and some of them get very bizarre, indeed. Here we will look at some of the most outlandish, bizarre, and downright mindbogglingly weird cases of dog-like humanoid entities from the very outer limits of the odd. 

In the spring of 1982, a university student by the name of Tessa Dick, who incidentally was the wife of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, was heading home from her classes at Chapman University, in El Modena, California. She pulled up to a red light and waited for it to change, and as she did so a black limousine pulled up next to her. She looked out at it and noticed what she thought was a large, black German shepherd sitting there in the back seat, and she noted that it looked very intelligent and was “clean and well groomed.” She sat there admiring the beautiful animal for a moment, but then she was shocked to see it put its arm out the window to show that it had a human hand. She would say of what happened next:

Just before the light turned green, the dog casually put his arm on the window ledge, and he had a hand. My jaw dropped and the dog smirked. I thought he was chuckling, pleased with himself that he had shocked me by showing me his hand. It looked like a human hand with fingernails, well-manicured and coal-black skin like his hair. His arm had short black hair like the hair on a dog’s front leg, but his hand was hairless. And the arm had an elbow and shoulder like a human elbow and shoulder. The light turned green and we both drove away. I never saw that limousine or the dog again. I tried to find some kind of ape or monkey with a face like that, but no such animal exists. And of course dogs don’t have human hands. So what did I see? Now I think that the dog owned the limousine, rather than being the pet of a human. I have always thought that the sighting was meant specifically for me… but I don’t know whether to take it as a gift or a threat.

Tessa would take the story to famed paranormal investigator and Dogman researcher Linda Godfrey, who would publish it in her book Monsters Among Us, and it really is quite bizarre. What was this creature and why was it driving around in broad daylight in a limousine? Who knows? Just as strange is a case from the files of Albert Rosales, which supposedly occurred in the area of the city of Acre, in the Northern District of Israel. On October 14 of 1996, the city was visited by an unidentified flying object with blue, red and white lights, which was witnessed by numerous residents to fly over the city and appear to go out over the coastal plains region to drop behind some dunes. It is unclear what exact connection this UFO would have to the events that would play out that evening, but it was to be a very strange night, indeed, marked by numerous sightings of bizarre entities throughout the area. 

One of the weirdest of these allegedly was witnessed by a man named Abdul Alhazrad, who was driving along and saw a man standing by the side of the road hitchhiking. He pulled over and offered the stranger a ride, and the man got in, with nothing particularly odd or menacing about him at this point. Abdul started the car up and continued along with the man in the passenger seat. The two drove along in silence for a time, but at one point Abdul glanced over to the stranger and was horrified to see him suddenly transform into something less than human. Within moments the stranger had morphed into a humanoid with a dog-like head with “with floppy ears and a single, cyclopean eye at the top of its long snout.” The terrified witness slammed on the brakes and made a run for it, and when he stopped to look back the Dogman stepped out of the car, took a few steps forward, and then just seemingly vanished into thin air. Interestingly, that same evening two Bedouin Arabs encountered what they described as a mutated, dog-headed human that chased their car and jumped 20 feet to grab onto the side of the car and clamber up onto the roof. The two witnesses would claim that they could not dislodge the beast from their vehicle and that it had simply vanished into thin air at some point. It is hard to say whether these encounters were connected in any way to the UFO that was seen that evening or not, but they are damn strange either way. 

Also from 1996 is another case from the files of Linda Godfrey, this time from the American Midwest. The setting of this strange tale is what is described as “a quaint Midwestern Baptist church,” where one Sunday morning a middle-aged woman who was new to town came in and took a seat among the other approximately 225 other churchgoers. The lady seemed to be restless and fidgeting a lot, and witnesses would later describe her as having a “very strange grayness” about her person, but at the time most did not think much of it. The sermon went on as usual, but when the minister stepped off the stage and walked past the woman, she suddenly bolted to her feet and let out a “bloodcurdling scream,” much to the astonishment of everyone around her. The woman then suddenly went into some sort of seizure and morphed into a hulking, muscular humanoid “wolf-like creature” with grey hair all over its body and what were described as cloven, “deer-like hooves” in full view of hundreds of people. Oddly, this bizarre transformation occurred nearly instantaneously, and the woman’s clothes had vanished.

The creature apparently took on a “protective stance” and howled and roared for several minutes while the congregation cowered in terror. The minister stepped forward to confront it, upon which it seemed to recoil away and look around as if deciding whether to attack or flee. At that moment, four men from the congregation rushed the beast and struggled to hold it down as it resisted with superhuman strength and panted and howled in fury. Just when they thought they could not hold it down anymore, it then allegedly transformed back into the woman just as suddenly as it had appeared. The woman was described as looking dazed and confused, as if she had no idea what had happened to her. She was then ushered away and it is unclear what happened to her after that. What was going on here?

In more recent years is a case from the state of New York. In June of 2015, three friends went camping in the mountains and at first everything went smoothly. They set up camp, did some hiking, and that evening sat around a campfire to chat and tell stories. As they sat there talking, they would claim that the forest around them had suddenly gone silent, all of the usual sounds of the nighttime wilderness ceasing to leave them in an eerie quiet. They stopped talking, and as they listened to that silence and tried to figure out what was going on, they could feel a sort of static electricity in the air and from the quiet emerged a low humming sound. There was then a bright flash of light in the distance that seemed to light up the entire forest. One of the witnesses would say of it:

It looked like when a real big firework explodes for the first few seconds, but it lasted for about a minute before it split up into 3 or 4 other lights and shot back down into the trees. We could see the lights glowing out in the woods and then there was a big gust of wind and it was gone. Everything smelled like it had just rained but it never did.

The men at the time thought it had probably been a meteor, but that night things would get stranger still when one of them woke the others to say there was a large creature of some sort out in the woods watching their camp. He had at first taken it to be a bear, but then realized that it was walking around and standing on two legs and looked more simian than apelike. The three men all scanned the forest trying to get a glimpse of it, and their thoughts now were that it was maybe Bigfoot, but things would get even stranger still when they saw it standing close by and realized that it looked more like a werewolf, with a hairy, humanoid body and the “head of a dog,” with dark grey all over its body except for the front, where the hair was white or yellow. The creature stared at them balefully for a moment and then let out a loud, ear-splitting scream that sounded like a “pig being slaughtered,” after which it was joined by three more of the creatures. These “Dogmen” then ran to the tent to destroy it and the witnesses ran as fast as they could towards their truck. As they sped off, the came across one of the creatures standing in the middle of the row with its chest puffed out, and they had to swerve to avoid it. They would go back to the campsite in the morning to find that all of their camping gear was gone. All of the men would insist that this was not Bigfoot but something else, and say that they believed they came from whatever had made that light show they had seen earlier in the evening. Dogmen from a UFO or something else?

These and other cases like them are those that really skirt around on the outer periphery of the truly bizarre and are firmly in the realm of true high strangeness. What do we make of such things and how do we categorize it all? These cases are so weird that they seem to almost defy any sort of possible explanation. Ghosts, demons, aliens, figments of the imagination, how can we even begin to explain such anomalies? As it stands, they remain lodged in the world of those truly surreal cases that will perhaps forever remain a mystery.

(Article by Brent Swancer republished from mysteriousuniverse.org)