AND SOMEWHERE IN THE NORTH-WOODS DARKNESS...

Some five years ago an old lady bought a box of junk at a Michigan yard sale. When unpacking her junk at home she bumped into an 8mm film with a tag that said “GABLE CASE #MPO41177-1”. After finally obtaining a projector she seemed a bit shaken by what she saw on the film so she passed it on to local radio DJ Steve Cook who, in that area, is also known as the creator of the Michigan dogman song and a somewhat questionable character. He somehow obtained the rights to the film, had it examined by ‘experts’ and just put it up on youtube when those ‘experts’ couldn’t come up with anything conclusive. The film caused quite a stir in crypto circles and was taken offline again all in the span of a couple of weeks somewhere in mid-2007. I missed the boat on this one the first time around but luckily for me the film made a huge comeback a month or so ago when somebody uploaded the full version on youtube. Fox news picked up on it and all of a sudden thousands of theories as well as a new piece of film (gable film part deux) started to pop up all over the world wide paranormal web. Despite the shakiness of the back story and the pretty big Blair Witch vibe which I already find quite charming the film itself is actually really cool. Whereas the first one just depicts the attack the full version added a lot of background to the original. The first few minutes show random footage that seems pretty typical for a kid that just got his hands on his first camera. A lumberjack family doing their lumberjack business. Fooling around on snow scooters, chopping some wood, fixing their Ford pick up truck and rocking more flannel and sketchy haircuts than a 1991 grunge vid. If not actually shot in the seventies it’s clearly intended to look that way. All items stem from that era and if this really is a hoax then somebody went well out of his way in obtaining all this stuff and was actually clever enough not to make any mistakes in that department since it all seems to add up. Things really start to get going when this kid decides to take his camera out on a little roadtrip and appears to be looking for something. You briefly see him filming himself in the side view mirror before he spots something unusual. This is sort of unnoticeable when played at regular speed but somebody blew up the frame and it shows a human type of being doing some sort of stretch-out in a field. A lot of shaking ensues and the person holding the camera, could be the driver at this point, gets out and films the following: for half a second it looks like a person crawling on all fours in a bear suit or something and a human leg can actually be seen very briefly. As it’s moving sideways, keeping an eye on the guy that’s filming, it’s sort of looks like the gait of a silverback gorilla and when the beast decides to make its move it does so in a way that makes it look impossible for a human in a suit to pull off. At one point it actually leaps over a log or a trunk and whilst in the air it seems to be morphing into a raging bull. Some more shaking follows which probably means this dude is making a run for it and the last thing you see of the creature is a canine snout taking a bite at the camera. That last shot is so over the top it almost seems like it’s added for dramatic effect but there’s some weird shit happening nonetheless if you open up your mind to this type of stuff. As far as theories go, some claim it’s the family dog running around wearing one of those bear rugs you put in front of your fireplace, others say it might actually be a werewolf due to the morphing thing that seems to be going on. If this is fake I’d go with CGI as I can’t really think of any other way to hoax this or maybe somebody tampered with the footage of an actual bear attack. For now I’ll just say that this was one of the coolest hoaxes in a long long time but as with any other paranormal case we’ll never really know what did or didn’t happen. And that, my dear friends, is the life and death of cryptozoology.


Peace.