It was 1972 in a sleepy little Cincinnati suburb when a police officer noticed what appeared to be a four-to-five-foot tall FROG standing on its hind legs near the Little Miami River. 

He reported the sighting in Loveland, which quickly took off across the small town of 13,000, garnering surprise and mysticism as residents asked themselves if the story of a human-sized frog could possibly be real. 

Days later, a second officer spotted the creature and shot it. After retrieving the carcass, he discovered it was an iguana and brought it to the second cop to see if that the creature he saw. 

The first officer later backtracked, saying it must have been the lizard, but that didn’t stop locals from keeping an eye out for the mystical creature he may have seen. 

And the tale of the Loveland Frogman was born. 

‘It’s a legend, and everyone knows about it,’ cartographer and Frogman Festival founder, Jeff Craig, 56, of Cincinnati, told DailyMail.com. 

Craig had been working on a map of Ohio, detailing all the weird spotting of things found in the Midwestern state when he came across the story of Frogman. 

‘I started looking into things,’ the University of Cincinnati graduate told DailyMail.com. ‘I don’t think people are seeing things and making it up.’ 

It was 1972 in a sleepy little Cincinnati suburb when a police officer noticed what appeared to be a four-to-five-foot tall frog standing on its hind legs near the Little Miami River. And the tale of the Loveland Frogman was born

The 2016 sighting of the Loveland Frogman 

Days later, a second officer spotted the creature and shot it. He discovered it was an iguana and brought it to the second cop to see if that the creature. The first officer later backtracked, saying it must have been the lizard, but that didn’t stop locals from keeping an eye out for the mystical creature he may have seen (pictured: a waterway in Loveland)

Although he admits there’s not a lot of hard evidence that a four-foot frog actually lurks in the Little Miami River or adjacent waterways, he still thinks its an interesting story. 

The Loveland Frogman has only been spotted by locals a total of three times, with the latest being in 2016. 

However, the first believed spotting of the animal was in 1955. 

Leonard Stringfield – an American ufologist who was born and raised in the Buckeye State – began looking into the folklore of Frogman after the incident and found a 1955 UFO sighting that described several ‘frog-like’ creatures coming out of the spacecraft, Craig recalled. 

People quickly grabbed onto the similar comparison and it ‘became part of the legend’, and the town began to claim the first sighting happened nearly 20 years earlier, Craig said. 

The latest spotting happened in 2016 by Sam Jacobs, who was playing Pokémon Go near Congregation Beth Adam Synagogue. While crossing train tracks near Lake Isabella, he spotted the strange monster. 

‘We saw a huge frog near the water. Not in the game, this was an actual giant frog,’ he swore to WLWT at the time. ‘Then the thing stood up and walked on its hind legs. 

‘I realize this sounds crazy but I swear on my grandmother’s grave this is the truth.’ 

‘It’s a legend, and everyone know about it,’ cartographer and Frogman Festival founder, Jeff Craig, 56, of Cincinnati, told DailyMail.com. ‘I don’t think people are seeing things and making it up’

Craig said people later speculated the spotting was actually a water sprinkler that in the dark looked just like what Jacobs said he did. 

No other times has the mystical creature made an appearance. 

‘There’s a lot of unanswered questions,’ Craig told DailyMail.com. 

The Chicago-area native, who moved to Cincinnati to attend college in the 1980s, said he’s a ‘hopeful skeptic’ that the thing is real, but said ‘no one’s trying to prove’ its existence. 

Craig said roughly 50 percent of the town believes in Frogman, but the community still embraces the folklore anyway. 

A local coffee shop even has Frogman on its cups, and Craig, himself, started the Frogman Festival in 2023 to ‘celebrate’ the legend. 

‘People come from all over the country,’ Craig said. ‘As far as California.’ 

Roughly 2,000 people attend the festival each year, where there are speakers and vendors and more. 

‘Everyone loves the vibe… the attitude is positive,’ he said. 

Despite being a bit of a skeptic, Craig has always been interested in outlandish stories and has created an entire map of the US showing the spots things have happened called Map in Black. 

The Duke Energy cartographer believes the Loveland Frogman makes the cozy town a ‘unique spot’. 

‘Otherwise, it’s just a little suburb,’ he said.