The Upright Frog of the Little Miami River
The Loveland Frogman stands about a meter tall, with slick, wrinkled froglike skin and a frog's or lizard's face, walking upright on its hind legs along the Little Miami River at Loveland, northeast of Cincinnati, Ohio. The earliest story dates to May 1955, when a traveling businessman claimed he saw three small frog-faced figures gathered by the road, one holding a short rod that sprayed sparks — a detail that led early UFO writers to file the case among "contact" reports.
The weightiest sightings came in 1972. In the early hours of March 3, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey caught a crouched creature in his headlights; it stood, climbed over the guardrail, and went down the bank into the Little Miami. Shockey described it as about a meter tall with leathery skin and a frog's face. Two weeks later officer Mark Matthews encountered a similar animal on the river road and fired at it without effect. The two police reports put the Frogman in the local papers and made it Ohio's most famous small monster. Years later Matthews revised his account: the thing had been a large escaped iguana, tailless and therefore oddly upright — and the two officers' versions have never fully agreed since.
The internet gave the Frogman a second life. In August 2016 a young man playing Pokemon Go said he filmed a frog-shaped figure with glowing eyes at Lake Isabella near Loveland, and the video went viral; that same year Cincinnati staged the musical Hot Damn! It's the Loveland Frog! The town has embraced its mascot, complete with a riverside statue of a banjo-playing frogman.
