The Manitoba Hominid Anomaly Desk now has four active open files on the Moose Man. No file has been closed. The files are not communicating with each other.

The Manitoba Hominid Anomaly Desk opened a new file on the Moose Man on Tuesday. This is the fourth file. The previous file, opened in March, remains open. The file before that, opened in what records describe only as ‘late autumn, probably,’ also remains open. The first file, which predates the current filing system and is technically stored in a format the Desk no longer has equipment to read, is considered open by default. No file on the Moose Man has ever been closed. I want to be precise about that. This is not an administrative backlog. Nobody at the Desk is describing it as a backlog. They are describing it as an active situation with multiple open files, which is a different thing, and I have chosen to take them at their word while noting the distinction for the record.

Twenty-one witnesses contributed to the Tuesday filing. Their accounts were collected across seven townships in a corridor that follows, roughly, the tree line running northeast from the Riding Mountain plateau. I say roughly because three of the witness statements place the Moose Man in locations that do not map cleanly onto any route a single entity could travel in the time described, unless the Moose Man’s relationship with transit time is not the same as ours. The Desk has noted this. The Desk has opened the new file partly because of this. The new file does not yet contain the old files’ information. The Desk is aware of the other files.

Community Notice

The Files, Their Status, and the Question of Whether They Know About Each Other

I spoke this morning with Senior Anomaly Coordinator Britta Halvorsen, who has managed the Manitoba Desk since 2017 and who was direct in a way I found useful. She confirmed that Files One through Four each contain distinct witness clusters, distinct incident windows, and distinct preliminary assessments of the Moose Man’s behavior and general disposition. She confirmed that none of these files has been formally cross-referenced with any other. When I asked why, she was quiet for a moment — the kind of quiet I recognize, the kind that means someone is deciding how much of a true answer to give — and then she said the files were opened under different protocols. Different protocols meaning, I gathered, that merging them would require a determination about which protocol governs. That determination has not been made. I did not ask how long it had been pending. I could tell from how she said ‘protocols’ that the answer would not be a short number.

We are not saying the files contradict each other. We are saying they have not yet been introduced.

— Britta Halvorsen, Senior Anomaly Coordinator, Manitoba Hominid Anomaly Desk

The radio on my desk has been running a pitch this morning I would describe as mid-range and deliberate. Not urgent. Not settled. I mention this because I have been tracking conditions against radio behavior since 2014 and I have not established a correlation, but I remain committed to the data collection on the grounds that absence of correlation is not the same as absence of relationship. That is also, I realize, more or less the position the Manitoba Desk is taking with its four open files on the Moose Man. I find this either reassuring or instructive. I haven’t decided which.

I’ve seen big things in those trees before. This was big in a different direction.

— Witness 14, name withheld, Rossburn Township

I wrote this piece by hand this morning before the teleprompter version was prepared, the way I write everything. I used most of a pen on it, which is not typical for a filing of this length. I’m not assigning meaning to that. I’m noting it the way I note the radio pitch and the coffee and the things I can’t correlate yet. The Manitoba Desk will issue a status update on File Four within thirty days, which is their standard window. Files One, Two, and Three are not on the same update schedule. When I asked whether the schedules would be aligned, Halvorsen said that was a reasonable question. She did not say it was one she had an answer to. Reporting on the Moose Man continues. All files remain open. That is where we are.