I am providing a link to a sighting my wife and I had while driving home from our grandson's little league game in the Otsego area. I apologize for the blurry pics, our phones at the time didn't have the best of cameras and our zoom feature was trying to focus on an object over 300 feet away at dusk. Noting the position of the creature, I went to GOOGLE maps and used their distance calculator. The cat is walking just at the edge of where the land slopes downward and that's the point of reference I used. The calculaiton came back as 91.58 meters, or 300,5 feet. So at that distance you can see the apparent size of the cat, I went back the next day, yes, I was armed just in case, and took pictures of the prints I saw. Then, I went to the MI DNR in Plainwell where I presented the pictures to the officer there. He shrugged and said he hada never heard of a black cougar. Apparently, melanistic animals are things of which he has never heard. He hemmed and hawed abot going out and looking for it so I suggested placing a large trap out there and baiting it. He moaned about needing to use a dead deer as bait and how much it would stink. Really? Houses are not in close enough proximity to be too offensive. In an attempt to urge him further, I told him that there were ponied that had been clawed and dogs found dead in the area AND there is a small group of house just out of frame at the bottom of image #7 just behind the trees, where swingsets and sandboxes are. I asked him if the welfare of those children didn't warrant him baiting a trap. Long story short, he didn't do anything, so I reported everything to a group here in MI that records cougar sightings, hoping they would follow up as they take action on reports called in to them. Your thoughts? Melanistic cougar? Black panther? Not a cat at all?
It looks like a large black cougar to me, and the patch on its side is strange, but could be some kind of mange or something, as you mention, or an anomaly of the melanin. Those tracks are HUGE ! ! When I looked for information, it appears that other people in the eastern US (it specifically mentioned Pennsylvania) have reported seeing black panthers or mountain lions; however the articles all say that there is no official record of such an animal existing in the US. No one believed that the Panda Bear was real until late in the 1800’s, and its black and white color stands out against a green vegetation background, and panda bears do not even try to hide from people. They simply lived too remotely in the mountains of China for people to see them, and it was considered that the black and white bear was a legend, until someone killed one and brought down the pelt for proof. Even after that, it was many years before they had panda bears in captivity in zoos for people to see. I totally think that it is possible that black mountain lions could exist here, they exist in other parts of the world, and there are reports of people seeing them.
Stories pop up on the news or in the local paper about black panther sightings in the Adelaide Hills , along with photos but they are usually taken from a fair distance away , so it’s never been proved if it’s a panther or not We don’t have much in the way of wildlife roaming the hills except for koalas / kangaroos / snakes / birds / reptiles wild cats .
I found this but it dates way way back to 2011 https://au.news.yahoo.com/south-australias-mysterious-big-black-cat-12253607.html But the same ole story surfaces every now and then ….we don’t have any “big cats “ roaming wild in Australia but feral cats are known to grow quite large but not as large as a panther , I’ve seen huge wild cats caught in rabbit traps and they would tear you apart given half the chance …they were ginger in colour . Metal rabbit traps have been banned in Australia for some years now
I really liked it when Josh Gates began a show that was intended to search for cryptids. I mean, I couldn't wait. The I watched the shows where he crashed through the forest at night trying to find a creature that had likely fled the moment he began yelling orders to his team, and the film crew, and made his first jump into the brush. no thanks. After that, I watched the show for the locations, not the host. Pat Spain had a very interesting show if not searching fo cryptids. I think he would be a good candidate for a show dedicated to cryptids. Forrest Galante made a huge splash but the hope of the show's renewal doesn't seem good. There are fifty-eleven shows about demons and ghosts; crimeny, one cannnot swing a dead cat without hitting one, yet cryptids in general are out of luck. Serious hosts with serious content is what we need. For now, I watch Expedition Bigfoot. Except for the guy who zooms out on dimension jump, or spirit Bigfoot, the balanc of the team are pretty solid. I like the fact they have a primatologist on the team.
Pretty strong sign that the priority is simply reality TV entertainment. Even the mass market History Channel shows feel more serious than that.
Have you ever listened to Dustin Nemos, @Ivan Tea Sanderzon ? He is a former atheist/turned Christian and he was on Nino’s Corner.TV talking about the nephilim, and in relation to cryptids like Sasquatch, Dogman, and other strange monster-type creatures that people have reported seeing. He showed some of the elongated skulls, and said that through interbreeding with regular humans, these nephilim have sort of blended in with everyone else; but some of the differences still show up, and he showed pictures of a Rothschild that show his elongated skull. Not as long as the ancient skulls we have unearthed, but still different from a natural human skull looks. What he said (as I understood him) is that when the angels came down and married human women, they produced a hybrid human. This hybrid , unlike many hybrids (mules, etc) was not sterile, and also , like some hybrids, lost the gene that stops normal growth; so the offspring matured at normal size, and then kept growing until they became the giants of legends. He explained that this is what a Liger (lion/tiger hybrid) does, and that they can get huge because they continue to grow throughout life. I have read that a pig will continue to grow, too, but we kill and eat them before they get really large. Anyway, he went on to explain that the sons of the angels were what we call nephilim, and they also created other animal hybrids; but not all of them became giants. He said that he thinks this is where the cryptids came from, the flying and swimming ones, too, as well as the ones in forests.
What does God say about Nephilim? Genesis 6:4 reads as follows: "The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown." Now interestingly enough, God used the word "reknown," which Merrian-Webster defines as "a state of being widely acclaimed and highly honored." This to me means that the Nephilim, while being the offspring of fallen angels and the daughters of Adam, were not all oppressive nor evil, or God would have defined them so.
"Mighty men"... "of reknown" suggests Sampson, Hercules, etc. Interesting that in Greco-Roman lore "gods" had offspring with humans too.
The UK has had legends of large black dogs and large black cats wandering the forests and farmlands for centuries. Last evening, my wife and I watched last wednesday's Expedition X. They were looking for the large black cat that has been rumored to lurk there. They were successful in capturing a short night time video of it and a single hair for DNA sampling. The DNA sample came back as feline but there was no exact match. There was no detailed description of the DNA results. I'm wondering why a definitive match couldn't be made. Also, since the reports can, in some cases, go back centuries, there would have to be a good sized breeding stock to account for the sightings going back so far.
I have heard those stories too. Perhaps the reason no DNA match can be made is because it has interbred with something domestic. They should have been able to come up with some kind of match though, but not an exact match. There were rumors that the cats came from pets and private zoos on the estates of the wealthy years ago. The people of the zoos went bankrupt and the animals were released or escaped into the countryside. Perhaps the animal DNA lab n Oregon could make some kind of match. I think it is one of the largest in the world.