This is the story of the West Virginia wild man as that is about the only name I could think of to give it for now, to start with this photo was really an accident, it was really no more than a simple landscape photo. I take landscape photos quiet often but I seem to take more in the fall when the fall leaves are on which was what I was doing when I noticed limb movement on one of the trees but figured it was either more of the ravens or turkey vultures that usually hang out on that mountain side. You must understand that the distance I was shooting from was at least 850 to 900 yards and at that distance even an animal this large looks very tiny. I never even looked at the photo till days later, I just came in from shooting landscapes and set the camera down on the counter. |
| A few days later I decided to download my photos to my computer and when I came across this landscape photo and started zooming in to see if I could discover what kind of bird it was moving the limbs when I was taking the photos and then I seen this, it was not a raven, it was not a turkey vulture, and in fact it was not a bird at all. You are looking at a highly cropped photo of the left side of it's face as it is walking to your' left behind a bowed over tree, I only photographed it from it's bicep up because most of it's body is behind trees and foliage, it was light brown in color and the hair on it's head is almost a chocolate brown color, it almost looks caveman like and was quiet large, I had hunted all of my life growing up and had never seen anything like this, I had heard tales of people seeing bigfoot creatures but I personally had never seen one, I am not saying that bigfoot don't exist I am only saying that I had never seen one in all of my days of hunting. My favorite past time hobby is amateur wildlife photography and photographing animals that are not yet recognized by science or are thought to be extinct, in other words "I hunt cryptids with cameras" my technique for hunting them is by documenting them with photographic evidence preferably at a long distance without disturbing them in their natural habitat, now when I say cryptid animals I do not mean anything like this thing in this photo. To me, cryptid animals has always been some type of bird, or mammal like a large cat because I have ran across large cat tracks when I use to hunt, and I have seen large birds that looked unlike most birds native to my area, or even an insect that looked totally unlike insects that I normally have seen, that is "or was" about my list for cryptids until this happened around the fall of last year. And now I have to tell myself that these things are real, I can not deny what was in front of my own lens, and I can not deny what others have seen any longer. Usually after I find an unknown animal in an area I always like to take more photographs of the area that I photographed the animal in because nature is always changing, rivers rise, and trees fall, and things change, so I did that in this case as well, this animal was gone at that time but the tree was still there, and that's not all, about a week later while photographing this same area in hopes of getting another photo of this thing I got a photo of another unidentifiable animal that was there also but this time I was zoomed up to 300_mm and I got his photo as well but that will be another story and about another animal, "if I can convince me to post it", it's not easy coming to terms with the reality something like this : ( It took me a while to even decide to post this animal and I finally talked myself into it but I did a lot of research after these photos to try to identify this animal but it was not possible, feel free to comment if you would like, and if you have ever spotted anything similar to this I would like to here about it, and as usual be sure to drop in at cryptidsandphotos.weebly.com/ and I will try to add more photos below click photos below to enlarge them. |