Professor Hex: Big Cats and the Weird

Hex reader Greta writes:

I notice you have listed many articles about large cat sightings...

What is the significance of the big cats? I hadn't heard of anything supernatural or paranormal about them before... I hadn't expected them to be listed with mysterious aquatic creatures and bigfoot... and aliens...

What is the story?

Thanks for asking, Greta.

Alien Big Cats (or ABC's) are of interest to the student of the strange and mysterious for a variety of reasons.

Biologically, they can tell us a lot about other possible cryptids. We can learn a lot from animals who are secretive and have a habit of showing up where they’re not supposed to.

In the United States and Canada, the cougar (also called a mountain lion or panther) was almost driven to extinction during the settling of the North American continent, especially on the East Coast. Yet sightings continue in areas as unlikely as Ontario and Connecticut.

In my home state of Kansas, the mountain lion has been listed as extinct since 1904, yet they have been widely documented in recent years. If the big cats still roam the country and show up in places like Chicago, what the hell else is out there?

Despite DNA, photos and eyewitness reports, state wildlife officials vigorously deny the existence of cougars in a variety of states where they are supposedly extinct. If these officials can’t acknowledge the obvious, how would they react to sightings of truly out of place animals? Or disputed animals such as the sasquatch?

Sightings of big black cats pose another set of problems – they aren’t supposed to exist. Melanism (black coat) in North America cats is limited to the smaller cats like the lynx. Jaguars are black but they (supposedly) do not live north of Mexico.

So what are people seeing?

A big black cat in Los Angeles could conceivably be a jaguar or jaguarundi but what do we make of black panthers in Lake Placid, New York? Or Newfoundland?

Are these cats just undiscovered? A case of mistaken identity?

The big cat problem gets even stranger when we consider the sheer volume and history of big cat sightings in England - an island where cats larger than a moggy have been declared extinct for hundreds of years.

Many of the British stories are tinged with the supernatural and investigators like Nick Redfern think the cats themselves may be supernatural beings in some cases, citing the works of Jacques Vallee and John Keel to posit that the cats (and other types of anomalous creatures) may be Tulpa-like beings brought into existence by our minds or daemons that exist in our world and some other as-yet-undefined plane.

While the true causes of these sightings remains a mystery there is plenty for scholars of the weird to sink their teeth into.

posted by Prof. Hex at 8:57 AM

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