Robert Fortney's "Dogman" encounter on the Muskegon River near Paris, Michigan

April 1, 1987. Steve Cook played a new song on WTCM-FM in Traverse City. It was called "The Legend," and it told of an upright, dog-like creature. Cook wrote it as an April Fools' joke. The story was invented.

Then the phone calls came. Robert Fortney is said to have been one of the first. According to several accounts, he heard the song while driving and had to pull off the road. He had seen that, he said. It was 50 years ago, in 1937, and he had never talked about it to anyone. Not even his wife or family.

The bank of the Muskegon River, closest to the town of Paris, in Mecosta County. Fortney was 17. He had been hunting small game earlier that day and had a loaded rifle with him. Now he was fishing. A pack of what looked like large feral dogs came out of the woods. Five, in one telling. Six, "as far as Fortney could count," in another.

He fired a warning shot into the air. The dogs "cringed and turned to slink back into the forest, all except one." The one that stayed was a big black animal, about ten feet away. It looked him in the eye. "They were blue," Fortney recalled in a 1987 phone interview. "What kind of dog has blue eyes?"

Then it moved. "It reared up on its hind legs and stared at me. It may be that I was just scared, but I swear that dog was smiling at me." In the fuller version, he fired a second shot. The animal stood up to around six feet tall and ran back into the woods on two legs.

Nothing about this encounter was written down in 1937 or 1938. No newspaper covered it. No police or wildlife agency recorded it. There were no tracks, no hair, no photographs. The main printed account is Linda S. Godfrey's 2003 book The Beast of Bray Road, and every version online is a retelling of a retelling.

The retellings drift. Some say 1937, others the summer of 1938. One gives the creature "glowing gold eyes." One search excerpt describes the caller as "in his mid to late 70s" in 1987, yet a 17-year-old in 1937 would have been about 66 or 67. Searches of genealogy and obituary records for a Robert Fortney in Mecosta County have turned up nothing.

The simplest reading is close to Fortney's own. He called the animals wild dogs, and dogs do sometimes rear onto their hind legs. He also allowed that fear may have shaped what he saw.

Writers on the wider Dogman legend point to the song itself. Skeptoid episode #477, "Wag the Dogman," by Alison Hudson, argues that it "inadvertently served as a catalyst for the mass invention of a belief." Darren Naish, writing on Tetrapod Zoology, calls the song "a work of fiction" and suggests folklore shapes how real sightings are read. He also proposes bears with mange for some Dogman reports. Cook has his own view: "I do believe people who think they saw something really did see something."

Fortney's riverbank encounter is now told as one of the earliest Michigan Dogman sightings, and the legend grew around it. Cook re-recorded his song in 1997 and 2007. MonsterQuest took up the subject, and in 2010 exposed the 2007 Gable Film as a hoax. A feature film, Dogman, followed in 2011. At the centre of it all is still one teenager, one rifle and a pair of blue eyes he remembered for fifty years.