MOMO

Opening

At around 3:30 p.m. on 11 July 1972, eight-year-old Terry Harrison was playing outside his family's home at 1004 Allen Street, near Marzolf Hill in Louisiana, Missouri, when he saw a large, dark, hairy creature by a tree and ran screaming for the house. His fifteen-year-old sister Doris, cleaning a bathroom sink, looked out of the window and saw it too: a figure about seven feet tall, its matted fur flecked with blood, a dead dog under one arm, and a putrid smell drifting through the open window.

Over the next two weeks, sightings spread up and down the Mississippi, drawing national media, search parties and a zoo director's look at a set of tracks. Fifty years on, Doris still says she saw something real. A retired local teacher says, just as firmly, that she knows who made the whole thing up.

Timeline

July 1971, a year before the main flapJoan Mills and Mary Ryan, two women from St. Louis, report that a hairy creature took the lunch from their picnic near Louisiana, Missouri. It is sometimes cited as Momo's first appearance and often confused with the 1972 events, though it got far less press.

11 July 1972, about 3:30 p.mTerry Harrison, eight, and his five-year-old brother Wally are outside chasing the family dog when Terry sees the creature and runs for the house. Doris, alerted by the screaming, looks out and sees the same figure: about seven feet tall, dark and heavily furred, holding a dead dog, with blood in its fur. Her early account describes it as so hairy you couldn't see its eyes. The glowing eyes in later retellings came from other people.

Same afternoonDoris gets her brothers inside and calls her father, Edgar Harrison, who worked for the Louisiana Board of Public Works. The family does not try to cash in. The children and their mother reportedly refuse to go back to the house for a time, which local historians cite as hard to square with a family running its own hoax.

Following daysWord spreads locally and then nationally. Other witnesses come forward, among them Richard Allan Murray, a lifelong resident who later became the town's fire chief and a city council member. Driving along a creek through town, he says, his headlights caught an upright figure in the woods before it ran off. "I was amazed to see something," he said.

Following two weeksSightings continue along the Mississippi and then on other waterways further west. Witnesses report fleeting glimpses, a smell, bear-like growls and inhuman screams. A 20-person posse goes out and finds nothing. Conservation agent Gus Artus leads a three-hour search of 100 acres on Marzolf Hill and reports "nothing that even looks like a monster." Tracks are found and sent to Lawrence Curtis, director of the Oklahoma City Zoo.

Curtis's verdict. Most accounts say he judged the tracks a hoax, a credentialed rejection of that piece of physical evidence that does not touch the Harrison sighting. Some retellings report the opposite, that he called them the tracks of an unknown primate. I have not found his own words, and the two versions cannot both be right.

Rest of summer 1972Curiosity seekers and monster hunters descend on the small Pike County town. Despite more than a month of searching by locals, state officials and outside investigators, no conclusive hard evidence turns up, and the sightings dwindle by the end of the summer.

LaterPriscilla Giltner, a retired Louisiana educator, says publicly and repeatedly that the episode was "a bamboozle" by three of her former students, who she says confessed to her. "I will never, ever, tell their names," she told the Associated Press in 2012. None of the three has come forward.

2022, the fiftieth anniversaryDoris Harrison Bliss, then in her mid-sixties, still maintains that what she and her brothers saw was not any animal known to science. The town marks the date with events, merchandise, a Mo Mo Crumbly Burger at a local restaurant, and a costumed Momo at the Elks Lodge. Nashville artist Bill Whyte comes back to perform his 1972 song about the creature.

October 2024Area historian Brent Engel tells the Missouri Department of Conservation's NatureBoost podcast that Doris is still standing by her story.

Key figures

Doris Harrison Bliss is the central and most consistent original witness. Her younger brother's reaction in the same moment backs her up, and her account has held for five decades even as other people added details, the glowing eyes in particular, that she did not originate.

Giltner holds the most specific hoax claim, and it cannot be checked at this distance: she alone knows who the students were, and without them her account is a strong secondhand claim, not a documented hoax.

Murray is the best-credentialed secondary witness, a man who went on to hold positions of public trust in the same town, and whose account moves from skepticism to a brief sighting of his own.

Curtis is the only outside scientist on record. Whatever his verdict was, it covered the tracks sent to him and not the eyewitness testimony, a distinction that retellings sometimes blur into "the whole thing was debunked." The record does not support that summary.

Physical and documentary trail

The record has extensive 1972 newspaper coverage, including detailed reporting in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an expert track examination, and witness testimony its original source has kept consistent for fifty years. It also has Giltner's hoax claim, which names no one.

What it lacks is any physical evidence that survived expert scrutiny. The tracks are the only object anyone formally examined, and on the usual account they were judged fabricated. Everything else rests on eyewitnesses from different backgrounds who saw something at different times.

She knows what she saw, and she's standing by her story, and she'll take that to her grave.

Things you might not know

• The name is a postal code. Momo is short for Missouri Monster: MO for the state abbreviation, Mo for the first two letters of monster.
• It had a theme park ride. Six Flags near St. Louis ran a ride named after the creature from 1973 to 1994.
• A UFO man camped in the yard. Haden Hewes, a UFO enthusiast from Oklahoma City, pitched camp in the Harrisons' backyard and floated theories that Momo came from UFOs or was a Neanderthal-type survivor.
• The monster got a film. Momo: The Missouri Monster (2019) is a docudrama of the 1972 events, featuring Cliff Barackman and James "Bobo" Fay of Finding Bigfoot.
• It still turns up. In 1991 William Magee described a seven-foot creature with black-brown hair near Bowling Green, Missouri: "You can tell me I'm full of crap all you want. I know what I saw."

Competing explanations

A hoax by local teenagers, as Giltner says, with the tracks judged fabricated by the zoo director. This explains the spread of later sightings well, since a well-publicised hoax reliably brings a wave of copycat and mistaken reports. On Giltner's account alone it does not explain the Harrison sighting, because her students are never placed at that first event.

A black bear standing upright, a candidate raised at the time. It fits the growls, the size and the dark colour. It fits less well with an upright, humanlike posture held long enough for several witnesses to describe, and it does not explain the dead dog.

A genuine, still unidentified animal, the reading Doris Harrison Bliss has held without variation. It rests on her and her brother's immediate reactions, not on any surviving physical evidence.

Civic self-interest keeping the legend alive whatever happened. Momo is an actively marketed part of Louisiana, Missouri's identity, with merchandise, a song and anniversary events, which gives the town a real reason to keep the story going regardless of what it was.

Later life of the case

Momo has followed a path like the Hodag's, but less resolved. Physical evidence judged fake sits next to an unretracted core eyewitness account, and the town has adopted the legend either way. Unlike the Hodag, Momo has no named, on-the-record confession, which leaves it between confirmed hoax and open mystery.

Finding

The tracks, the one piece of physical evidence anyone examined, were on most accounts judged fabricated by a credentialed outside expert, which gives this case firmer grounds for skepticism than many cryptid reports have. That verdict does not reach the Harrison sighting, seen by two siblings in the same moment and maintained by Doris for fifty years, and it does not connect to Giltner's claim about three students she has never named.

What still will not resolve: who Giltner's students were, Curtis's own words on the tracks, and what the Harrison children actually saw on 11 July 1972. Until one of those surfaces, Momo sits where many small-town legends do: partly undercut, defended by a witness who has never wavered, and fully adopted as local identity either way.