"I thought I wanted answers," said Coty Creighton, who discovered Goat Man roaming the wilds of Utah on July 15, "but I was naive. I should have left well enough alone. Now I just want the mystery back." His disappointment stems from the fact that someone contacted the state Division of Wildlife Resources on Monday and revealed that the creature Creighton saw was not in fact a mysterious cryptid some had compared to the legendary Bigfoot, it was some 57-year-old dude from California in a goat suit.
It is sad that the mystery (although, I think, not all the humor value) is now mostly gone. Of course, I knew this when I wrote the earlier post, as these are the kind of things I make it my business to know, but I wanted to give you the chance to experience, however briefly, the mystery that was Goat Man before it became tainted by truth. Such is my regard for you, the reader.
But now you know, or at least you know more than you did. The man, who understandably did not give his name, reportedly called the division's conservation outreach manager (Phil Douglass) on Monday "on the advice of a friend from Utah," and provided information "that substantiates he was the person in the goat suit photographed by Coty Creighton on July 15."
"He gave me details that convinced me it was him," Douglass said, which immediately conjures up every Law & Order episode in which a suspect knows details "only the person in the goat suit would know." According to Douglass, the man said he was a hunter who had traveled to Utah "to test out a goat suit in preparation for an archery hunt of mountain goats in Canada" next year. "He found out about Utah," Douglass said—apparently someone's plans to conceal the state have been foiled—and learned "that it was fairly easy to get close to the goats" for training purposes. (Why the goats of Utah are easier to get close to than other goats, he didn't say.)
So off he went to Utah with his goat suit. If you're wondering, this was crafted from a hooded painter's suit covered with Polarfleece for fur. The man also "wore a hat backward, pulling the brim down to his chin to look like a billy goat's beard," Douglass said, something I'm completely unable to picture but I'll take Goat Man's word for it. This may not have been his own invention, because the man told Douglass that "there are small groups of hunters who also wear goat suits" to get close to goats, and presumably kill them.
I'd very much like to see one of these groups patiently stalking an unsuspecting herd of mountain goats or whatever other live nonhuman vertebrate creature they might be craving at the time, and wait until they are just outside bowshot to spook their prey with a bullhorn. "WARNING: GOAT MEN ARE APPROACHING. DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THAT BACKWARDS HAT THING." Then I would flee because the Goat Men probably also have rifles.
Although Creighton believed Goat Man knew he had been spotted, he told Douglass that he actually had no idea he was being watched, let alone photographed. "He told Douglass that he shot video of himself near the goat herd, frequently had to adjust the hood of his costume and had to take breaks from crawling on all fours," which is presumably what he was doing when Creighton took this picture:
I can't quite make out whether he was smoking a cigarette or maybe having a beer during this break, but I'd like to think so. The thing is, you might get away with that kind of thing in Utah, since the goats are apparently so easy there, but I wouldn't try it with the big-leaguers up in Canada. They'd spot that in a heartbeat.
Or if not, I'd point it out to them. "HEY, GOATS DON'T TAKE SMOKE BREAKS, DO THEY?" And then I would flee.
