Do you remember looking at vintage pictures of Bigfoot when you were a kid? Remember the one still that was taken from a scratchy black and white video clip? The actual video showed Bigfoot running through the woods… stopping… staring. That was all the proof I needed to believe in the legend. It was fun to think that there might be some ancient man-bear type of creature living out in the woods somewhere. As I grew older I began to discount such sightings as hoaxes. Remember Hans Mobius’ Bigfoot sighting in Clarence back in ’06? How funny that these ‘sightings’ still generate so much talk and excitement.
Over the weekend I was sent a link to a long lost friend’s website. His name is Bill Herod, a local artist who has engulfed himself in the art of iron and metal works for a great many years. I clicked on the link (temporarily not working) thinking that I was about to encounter his latest portfolio, but that is not what was on the other side. Instead of examining Bill’s ingenious works of art, I found myself reading a tale of Buffalo’s legendary Mechanical Man – a robotic figure that once roamed the city’s train-yards and alleyways. Huh?
The story goes that the Mechanical Man was spotted for a great many years by police officers and residents of East Side neighborhoods. ‘Spottings’ occurred between the years of 1942 all the way up to 1972. On Bill’s site, he details many of the accounts… and he even features three clips from an old movie that he tracked down at an estate sale in which the Buffalo Iron Man can be seen walking through an old industrial site.
Check out Bill’s site (it will be up again soon), and you decide if the legend of the Mechanical Man is real… or has Bill Herod once again proved that imagination and creative hijinks is not dead in the city of Buffalo?