Loveland Frog

The man who closed the 1972 half of this case was one of its two witnesses, and he did it in August 2016, after a couple playing Pokémon Go reported a giant frog at Lake Isabella. Officer Mark Matthews told WCPO that Ray Shockey had phoned him one night in March 1972 after seeing something on Riverside Drive near the Totes boot factory and the Little Miami River. Later that month Matthews himself saw an animal run across Kemper Road near the same factory. In the station's account of the interview, "it wasn't walking upright and didn't climb over the guardrail as the urban legend of the Frogman goes. The creature crawled under the guardrail." He shot it, put the body in the boot of his patrol car and showed it to Shockey, who, Matthews said, recognised it as the creature he had seen too. It was a large iguana "about 3 or 3.5 feet long", and it was missing its tail, which is why Matthews had not known it at once. "The thing was half dead anyway when I shot it," he said, and called the Frogman "a big hoax". He added that he had given the whole story, iguana included, to the author of a book of Ohio urban legends, and that the book ended the episode at the gunshot. The legend people repeat is that shortened version. The explanation has one weak point, and the zoologist Darren Naish named it on Tetrapod Zoology in 2020. Shockey's sighting was at 1 a.m. on 3 March 1972, when it was "cold enough for the road to be icy", and in Naish's words "a big lizard would be hiding away somewhere, not out and about". Matthews had an answer before anyone asked: he thought the animal had been living beside the pipes that discharged the water used to cool the boot factory's ovens. Naish also notes an earlier version of the confession, an e-mail attributed to Matthews in which the account had been "blown out of proportion"; Ryan Haupt, in a Skeptoid episode of 2015, traced it to a 2001 article in X-Project Paranormal Magazine, and Naish calls its authenticity doubtful. The iguana covers 1972 only. The 1955 account reaches us in versions that disagree with one another, and Naish lists them: an unnamed businessman or travelling salesman, named in Michael Newton's 2005 encyclopedia as Robert Hunnicut; three grey bipeds about three feet tall seen at 3.30 a.m. on 25 May 1955; in some tellings conversing, in others under a bridge, in some with one of them raising a wand that threw off sparks. That sparking device is what led some authors to treat the figures as aliens rather than animals.