The Prince George’s County incident report has survived three departmental headings, two archive rooms, and a case number the system refuses to acknowledge. The Goatman has seen worse.

The incident report generated by WTC’s Prince George’s County field team on the evening of March 14th has now been submitted four times. It has been rejected twice, reclassified three times, physically relocated between archive rooms on two separate occasions, and currently exists in a bureaucratic state that a source inside the county records office described to me as "not technically lost, but not technically found either." The case number assigned during its third submission does not appear anywhere in the departmental filing system. When I asked how that was possible, there was a long pause, and then the source said they had to take another call.

The report in question documents an encounter involving six witnesses along a stretch of Fletchertown Road in the early hours of March 14th. The witnesses — four of whom provided statements, two of whom have so far declined — describe a large bipedal figure at the tree line, estimated between seven and eight feet tall, with what multiple accounts characterize as "an unusual head profile" and movement inconsistent with known large fauna in the region. The word "goat" appears in two of the four statements, unprompted. This is, for the record, not the first time a report concerning the Goatman has arrived at a filing desk and been quietly redirected somewhere more comfortable.

Community Notice

A Paper Trail in Three Acts

The report’s journey goes like this. Submission one was filed under Livestock Incidents, which is where it landed because one of the responding county officers checked a box he later described as "the closest available option." It was rejected within seventy-two hours on the grounds that no livestock were involved, which is correct. Submission two was reclassified under Environmental Disturbance, held for eleven days, and then moved to a physical archive room — not scanned, moved — because a departmental software migration was underway and someone decided paper was simpler. Submission three was re-entered into the new system under Hominid-Adjacent Incidents, which is the most accurate categorization it has received, assigned a case number that the system generated and then apparently did not save, and placed in a tray where it currently sits beneath a 2019 report about a man who claimed his neighbor’s scarecrow had been rearranged overnight. That case was closed.

I filed it correctly the second time. I filed it correctly the third time. At some point the problem stops being the report.

— County records liaison, Prince George’s County, name withheld at source’s request

I spoke with two of the four witnesses on record. The first, a woman in her mid-fifties who was driving home from a late shift, told me she stopped her car because she thought an animal was in the road. It was not in the road. It was standing at the edge of the tree line approximately thirty feet from the shoulder, and it was, in her words, "watching the road, not crossing it." She said she sat with her headlights on it for what she estimated was forty-five seconds before it moved back into the tree line. She described the movement as "wrong, but not slow." She filed a report the following morning because, she said, she is "the kind of person who files reports." She has since followed up on its status twice and been told twice that it is "being processed."

I’ve processed livestock reports. I know what a livestock report looks like. Whatever this is, it is not that.

— Second witness, identity withheld, occupation: not disclosed

What I keep coming back to is the livestock classification. Someone looked at a report describing a seven-to-eight-foot bipedal figure with an unusual head profile behaving in a deliberate, apparently observational manner along a road with a documented history of anomalous sightings going back decades, and checked the box that said Livestock. I don’t think that person was careless. I think that person was doing what people do when they encounter a category that doesn’t fit any of the available boxes: they pick the nearest one and move on. The system doesn’t have a box for this. The system has never had a box for this. What it has instead is a tray in a reclassified archive room and a case number that, as far as the database is concerned, does not exist. The report is real. The witnesses are real. The case number is whatever the opposite of real is when it comes to county filing infrastructure. I have noted all of this in my cross-reference materials. It will be on the wall by Thursday.