White River Monster ("Whitey"): The Summer 1971 Sightings, Polaroid and Three-Toed Tracks

The White River had stories long before 1971. Sightings in 1915 and 1924. A Quapaw legend about an overturned canoe. A 1937 case in which farmer Bramlett Bateman reported something "as wide as a car and three cars long." Then came the summer of 1971, just six weeks after the first Fouke Monster sighting elsewhere in Arkansas.

June 17, 1971. Near Newport, an unnamed witness reported something smooth, gray and very long. In one telling it was "an enormous gray serpent, six feet across, as long as three pickup trucks," its skin wrinkled "as if its skin was peeling from sunburn."

About a week later, a Newport man described a "long, gray, thousand-pound creature with a pointed horn protruding from its forehead," thrashing in the water. Sources give his name as David Jenks or Earnest Denks.

Then Cloyce Warren, an employee of the White River Lumber Company, went fishing with two companions. A column of water erupted twenty feet from their boat. As the creature swam away, they saw a spiny backbone that stretched twenty feet or more. Warren took a Polaroid.

Late July. Ollie Ritcherson, 66, was on the river with Joey Dupree. Something rose beneath their boat and pushed it around on the surface. They never saw what it was.

Warren's photograph ran in the Newport Daily Independent. It is extremely fuzzy, some kind of a hump floating in the river, and the newspaper later lost the original. In early July, tracks turned up on Towhead Island, just north of Bateman Eddy. They measured 14 inches long and 8 inches wide, with "three long toes or claws and a spur of some kind projecting from the heel." A path of bent trees and crushed bushes led down to the river. Law enforcement officers made casts, and on July 14 a CBS news crew set out for the island. Psychologist Mike Loos weighed in. "I'm still a little skeptical, but I don't think that anyone would fake something as real looking as these."

In 1973, Senator Robert Harvey of Swifton sponsored Senate Resolution 23. It created the White River Monster Refuge, from Old Grand Glaize to Rosie, where it is unlawful "to molest, kill, trample or harm the White River Monster while in its native retreat." The resolution is non-binding. No one has ever broken it.

The debate brought its own suspects. Roy P. Mackal, in Searching for Hidden Animals, proposed a molting male elephant seal that had wandered up the Mississippi, which would fit the peeling skin. Joe Nickell preferred a manatee, noting the river lies outside the elephant seal's range. Others pointed to an alligator snapping turtle, with its pointed head and ridged gray back, or a huge fish such as an alligator gar. A spokesperson for the International Bureau of UFOs suggested a "Type-3 alien."

The last report came in 1974, when two residents found tracks on the riverbank. Newport never let Whitey go. The town puts the monster in its festivals, and the Chamber of Commerce keeps an archive of clippings, along with what it calls "allegedly the only picture of the White River Monster."