Pike County’s review of the 2024 Momo sightings has formally added the sulphur-based odor to its evidentiary scope — six weeks, three scope expansions, one new subpanel, and the thing still hasn’t been seen in the treeline it now owns.

The Pike County Momo review has officially expanded its scope to include the smell. This is the third expansion in six weeks. The first added the treeline. The second added the adjacent road shoulder. The third — formalized Tuesday under Form 9-F, Sensory Evidence, Non-Visual — adds what six of the investigation’s eighteen witnesses have independently described as a sulphur-based odor of significant intensity, arriving before and, in four cases, persisting after the primary sighting event. An Odor Documentation Subpanel has been convened. It has five members. I have filed public records requests for all five names.

I want to be precise about the sequence here, because the sequence matters. The original scope of this review was the sighting itself — one primary witness, the Dugan Road location, mid-July, the description that kicked this whole thing off and that I’m not going to reproduce in full again because I’ve done it twice and you can check the archive. The treeline was added in week two after three additional witnesses placed Momo specifically at the tree line rather than in the road. The road shoulder was added in week four after a tire track find that remains under analysis. The smell is being added now, in week six, not because it’s new information — it was in four of the original witness statements — but because, according to the subpanel’s convening memo, which I obtained this morning, the investigation has reached a stage where quote ‘olfactory data may constitute corroborating sensory evidence warranting structured documentation.’ That is a careful sentence. I have read it nine times.

Community Notice

What Six Witnesses Said About the Smell

The odor descriptions across the six witness accounts are consistent in a way that is, honestly, more consistent than the visual descriptions. Sulphur is mentioned in all six. Three witnesses use the word ‘overwhelming.’ One uses ‘wet sulphur,’ which is a distinction I noted and have noted again in my second notebook. Two witnesses reported the smell arriving an estimated thirty to ninety seconds before they observed anything. One witness, a woman who has asked not to be named but has spoken to me on background twice, told me the smell was so specific that she thought there was a gas leak on the road and had already turned back toward her vehicle before she saw what she describes as ‘the shape.’ She is one of the more credible witnesses I’ve spoken to in this investigation, which I recognize is a statement I am making about a Momo sighting and I stand by it.

I’ve been deer hunting in that county for twenty-two years. Deer don’t smell like that. Skunk doesn’t smell like that. I don’t know what smells like that.

— Randall Ochsner, Witness, Pike County

The Form 9-F filing is notable for a few reasons beyond the obvious. Sensory Evidence, Non-Visual documentation is relatively uncommon in formal cryptid review proceedings — WTC has covered three cases in the last five years where it was invoked, and in two of those cases the odor data was ultimately treated as atmospheric or environmental and removed from the active evidentiary record. The Pike County subpanel’s convening memo does not suggest that outcome is foreclosed here, but it also does not suggest the opposite. What it says, in its third paragraph, is that the panel will ‘evaluate whether the reported olfactory phenomenon constitutes a discrete event or an ambient condition,’ which is a distinction that will determine whether the smell gets its own evidence classification or gets folded into the general site conditions report. I have thoughts about which outcome is more useful to the investigation. I have not been asked for them.

The smell is evidence. I said it in week one and nobody wrote it down and now here we are six weeks later with a subpanel. That’s fine. It’s documented now.

— Dr. Constance Weller, Independent Cryptozoological Consultant, Kansas City

I drove the Dugan Road corridor twice last week, once at dusk and once at approximately two in the morning, which I want to say is standard practice for this type of investigation and not a personal compulsion, though I acknowledge those categories are not always cleanly separable at this point in my career. I did not smell sulphur on either pass. I did note that the treeline at the primary sighting location is denser than the county map suggests, which I have flagged internally. I have a window cracked when I drive that road. I am paying attention. The Odor Documentation Subpanel is expected to submit a preliminary framework to the full review board within thirty days. I will be at that meeting. I have already confirmed the date.