Project Scroll Research Note 2026-33: Nine feet from a five-foot bush: the 1964 wire record of the Dewey Lake Monster, Silver Creek Township, Michigan

In June 1964 reports of a large, hairy creature on two legs near Dewey Lake, in the Sister Lakes country of Cass County, Michigan, filled the wire services. The figure every later telling repeats, about nine feet and 500 pounds, went out on the Associated Press of 11 June as a description "pieced together by police from residents' complaints." The National Observer, as reprinted in The Observer's World (1965), traces the height to one man: "the accepted set of dimensions was established by farmer Utrup," who saw the thing standing behind a bush in his yard, measured the bush the next day at five feet, "and estimated that whatever he had seen stood four feet above that." The same AP story settles a disagreement among later books over Gordon Brown's encounter: his car's headlights lit the thing "standing between Utrup's barn and a shed," and then he "got a flashlight and followed the creature into a field near some woods." And the AP of 13 June names the conservation officer whom Wikipedia calls William Rowe as "Conservation Officer Bill Roe," who thought the creature a bear lured by swamp huckleberries. Project Scroll Research Note 2026-33, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-33/.