On This Day in Weird, January 21...

1522: Head inquisitor Adrian Florisz Boeyens is elected Pope Adrian VI.

1897: Actor J. Carrol Naish, known for roles in Return of the Terror, Charlie Chan at the Circus, Batman (1943), The Whistler, The Monster Maker, House of Frankenstein, The Beast with Five Fingers, and Dracula vs. Frankenstein, is born in New York City.

1903: Harry Houdini escapes from Halvemaansteeg police station in Amsterdam.

1932: John McCandless reports a "half man, half beast" prowling the countryside five miles north of Downingtown, Pa.

1951: An F-82 fighter plane makes three unsuccessful passes at a UFO visible on radar, flying through restricted air space over Oak Ridge, Tenn.

1952: A Navy TBM torpedo bomber pursues a dome-shaped UFO near New York's Mitchel Air Force Base but cannot match its speed.

1965: A bright, circular UFO hovers for 45 seconds over radio station WTVR's transmission tower in Richmond, Va.

1967: Two witnesses observe a UFO with red, white and blue pulsating lights trailing their car in Gering, Neb.

1975: A young couple report seeing Bigfoot in a church parking lot, in Richmondtown, Staten Island, N.Y. Later the same night, a motorist brakes to avoid hitting the creature near a garbage dump in the same vicinity.

1975: Witnesses spot a UFO over Cape Girardeau, Mo.

1976: Two UFOs, each about 75 feet in diameter, pass over New Mexico's Cannon Air Force Base at 5:55 a.m. Witnesses near Fairfield, Mont., report a 300-foot craft on the ground, at 9:00 p.m.

1977: A round, glowing UFO pins a boat in a bright beam of light, in St. Bernard Parish, La. Two hunters in the same area observe a similar "light from nowhere." On the same night, an Avianca airline crew sees a UFO trailing their plane over Bogotá, Colombia.

1984: A mother and her two children see an "enormous" gold UFO following their car near Jasper, N.Y.

1986: 100 hardy souls brave 38°F weather (3°C) to participate in Indiana's Nude Olympics race.

1989: Five witnesses watch and photograph an amber colored UFO passing over Corydon, Ind., at an altitude of 200 feet.

1993: Dogs bark furiously as a triangular UFO flies over Tuttle, Okla.

1997: Motorist Juan Hernandez sees a "star-like object" descend over Camuy, Puerto Rico. Stopping on a highway bridge to watch it, he sees a bulbous-headed creature inside a transparent cupola atop the silent craft. As it departs and he attempts to follow, a military vehicle blocks his path. Several men in black uniforms emerge, warning Hernandez that "something may happen to him" if he proceeds.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A PANTHER? ASKS ZACHARY MANN

What is a Black Panther?

          The other day, on one of my rare days off from work, I was shopping around in one of my favorite local used book stores. This is something I encourage everyone to do more often, you always find the greatest little treasures there. Anyway, I was looking through the non-fiction section trying to see if there were any books with a Cryptozoology twist to them. I found plenty on ghosts and a few on UFOs, but nothing that jumped out as Cryptid related. So I began looking through the more ‘traditional’ wildlife books and there I found something really interesting.

          In the section for mammals I saw a book with a hand drawn picture of a large black cat on it. This got me curious. Then I read the title, Black Panthers: Little Known North American Treasure, by Alfred Willis. This really got me interested, because as most of you will know, black (or melanistic) big cats of any kind are not supposed to live in America. Needless to say I wasted no time in purchasing it. As a side not, when I was at the checkout counter the lady behind the desk said she had seen this book when it came in earlier that day and, had no one bought it by the end of her shift, she would have. While I’m a little sad to have denied her that, it does show that many more people are interested in weird and unexplained animals than many might think.

    So, anyway, when I got home I read the table of contents and was more than pleasantly surprised when I saw that two whole sections of the book where about Virginia sightings. In fact more than half the total book was. As for the book itself, it’s about the author, Alfred Willis, growing up in Virginia, first hearing about Black Panthers, his two first hand encounters with said beasts, and his forty plus years traveling around the country (mostly Virginia) and collecting the first-hand accounts of the people who claimed to have had encounters. Interviews and stories range from people talking about what their grandparents and great grandparents (some dating back to the late 1800’s) to those who had just had encounters the same year this book was published, 2007.  As a side note,  while this book is very much about a Crypto zoological creature, the word Cryptozoology doesn’t feature anywhere in this book nor does it talk about similar creatures form anywhere else in the world.

The bulk of the written text is what the witnesses saw, meaning that the author must have audio recorded what the witnesses were saying and then just went home and typed it down. I will say as a read it can be a tad boring just listening to people say what they saw for page after page, especially if you try and read it straight through like me, but I will say that if you break it into chunks the book is a great collection of first-hand accounts.

          Now the two most interesting things about this book are, first despite spanning over a hundred years and several generations, it is remarkable how much all the eyewitnesses' descriptions are the same. Features included by witnesses over and over again include a lopping tail longer than its body, a round head with rounded ears, the creature emitting a horrifying women-like scream, a foul odor, piercing emerald green eyes and a complete lack of fear of man. More than one story involves these creatures' climbing on people’s roofs, trailers and even outhouses. They also have a tendency to be aggressive towards dogs.

          The second and really interesting idea that both the author and the eyewitnesses seem to share is their rather unusual idea of what the creatures are. Before we talk about what they have to say, let’s talk about the main theories and explanations put forward for these kind of creatures previously.

          One is that they are examples of a rare melanistic kind of Mountain Lion, (Puma concolor).This idea tends to come up because the only large cat known that comes close to the sizes reported for these kind of cats native to most of America is the Mountain Lion (Cougar, Puma, and Catamount etc.) But there is a major problem, in that this kind of cat is not known to be able to display the melanistic color phase. Sure some cats are a darker color than others, but they are all still the same basic shades. While they do have this gene in their DNA they don’t seem to be displaying it. True every hundred generations or so one melanistic Mountain Lion will be born naturally, but the odds of ever seeing it are more than one in a million. Given that hundreds of reported sightings come in across the America every year, in some places more often than reports of normal color phase Mountain Lions, I believe the idea that they are melanistic Mountain Lions is not a very plausible explanation for theses cats.

    The other popular theory is that these cats are escaped specimens of either of the two big cat species that do have a melanistic phase, the Leopard (Panthera pardus) or the Jaguar (Panthera onca). Leopards are not native to America, but many people keep exotic pets illegally and these creatures often escape or are released by careless owners when they become too much to handle. This does happen more often than most people realize.

 As for the Jaguar, they are not native to most of the parts of the country where these kind of cats are reported. But Jaguar fossils from as recent as 10,000 years ago have been found as far inland as Florida and Tennessee. And as recently as the 1890s they were found in states like California and New Mexico, and in the 1920s they were found in places like Texas and Arizona. In fact recent trail cameras in Arizona and Texas have shown that some of them are slowly making their way back into the USA. Whether there is a breeding population is another matter experts are still debating about. The same situation for escapees applies here as it does for the Leopard.

Another explanation is that these cats are a much less popularly known creature the Jaguarondi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi). These medium size cats are found mostly in Central and South America, but have been occasionally observed in Florida. They vary in color phase from grey, to tan, to all black. But the known species of this cat fall short in the size range for what people are seeing. More on this cat later. So if these are the traditional explanations, what is Alfred Willis and the dozens of eyewitnesses he has interviewed say these cats are?

They (mostly author Alfred Willis) argue that, not only are these cats real, but they represent a completely novel species of big cat all their own. That’s right, not melanistic Mountain Lions, not escaped or released Leopards and Jaguars, not even abnormal house cats (Felis catus).  

The author bases this argument on a few facts. One is that, as he correctly states, Mountain Lions don’t show a melanistic color phase and that a couple of freaks every so many generations couldn’t account for the hundreds of sightings every year. Second, some of the features like the emerald green eyes are not typical Mountain Lion characteristics, they tend to have more yellowish eyes.  Third, while he does acknowledge that releases and escapees do happen, they don’t really explain the decades (or centuries) old reports. Sure nowadays anyone with cash to burn and an internet connection can buy a baby leopard, but 20, 50, 100 years ago it was a very different situation.  

Finally many of the eyewitnesses, especially the old timers, would constantly reassure him in their interviews that they know what a Mountain Lion looks like, many said that Mountain Lions lived right alongside the Black Panthers, and that these were not the same creature. In fact they would only refer to the black cats as Panthers and not Mountain Lions or Pumas or any of the other common names for this cat, indicating these were a special separate animal.

I must say I’m very intrigued by this notion. The idea that these hundreds of black cat sightings are not escapees or releases, but a truly unknown animal is one that I haven’t heard a lot of other researchers talk too much about, a new species living right under everyone’s noises. It may seem a little farfetched, but it got me thinking about just what kind of cat it could be if real. Having thought it over, I would say if they were in fact a separate species, my money would be on a larger unknown species or sub-species of Jaguarundi.

Here is why. Looking at the numerous detailed and almost always consistent eyewitness reports over the past hundred or more years, most of the creature’s features match up perfectly with a Jaguarundi, but on an up-scaled size. The shape of the head, the shape of the tail and the fact that Jagaurundis can come in black all point to this conclusion. So much effort into trying to prove these creatures are real has been placed in the idea that they represent escapees of known creatures, how ironic to would be if the answer was a completely new kind of big cat living among the America wilderness, who was just naturally black all the time!

So at the end of the day what are we to make of all of this? Are some reports of big black cats just oversized domestics? Without a doubt. Are some escaped or released exotics? Yes. The recent killing of an escaped Leopard in Indiana, albeit a normal color phase one, proves it does happen.  But can all such cases be explained? I don’t think so. Until one is caught or killed the questions and theories will go on. If there is anything I would like you, the reader, to take away from this it is this. Never stop asking questions. Always listen to what the locals (especially the older generations) have to say. They won’t be around forever. And, as if you needed any more of a reason to, support your local researchers and book stores. They just may be the key to unlocking the secrets to the mysteries we are desperately trying to solve.  

Editor's note: Alfred Wills' book, mentioned above, does not appear to be still in print.  However, as I write, there is a copy listed as being available at the Royal Oak Bookshop, Fort Royal, Virginia.

On This Day in Weird, January 20...

1942: Nazi leaders convene the Wannsee conference to chart Hitler's "final solution to the Jewish question," first outlined before Germany's parliament by Der Führer on this date in 1939.

1951: Two commercial pilots, an Air Force colonel, his aide, and an air traffic controller track a UFO passing over Sioux City, Iowa.

1952: Two Air Force intelligence specialists report a bluish-white UFO over Washington's Fairchild Air Force Base.

1953: Radar operators at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, track three UFOs at 55,000 feet, for a total of nine minutes.

1961: The film Ostroznie, Yeti! premieres in Poland.

1965: A "transparent" silver UFO passes slowly over Long Beach, Miss.

1966: A UFO that sounds like buzzing bees emits a blinding light over Katanning, Western Australia.

1967: Five witnesses watch a UFO flying over Methuen, Mass., at 6:30 p.m. A similar object appears over Lake Ontario at 10:15 p.m.

1968: A round, reddish-orange UFO follows and swoops around a car in Vermillion, S.D.

1975: Marjorie Nighbert sees a UFO shaped like a tadpole, the size of a washtub, flying silently over Pike, Ill., at 5:00 a.m. Fifteen hours later, a motorist calls police to report a white UFO circling over Vinita, Okla.

1988: While traveling near Mundrabilla, Western Australia, the Knowles family meets an oval UFO and feels their car briefly lifted off the highway.

1989: President Ronald Reagan (first elected in 1980) breaks the "Zero-Year Curse" by leaving office alive. Predecessors William Harrison (1840), James Garfield (1880), William McKinley (1900), Warren Harding (1920) Franklin Roosevelt (1940), and John Kennedy (1960) all died in office, four of the seven by assassination.

1990: A silver UFO paces a car outside Boyle, Miss. The car's engine fails, then restarts after the flying craft departs.

PANTHER INVESTIGATION - ZACHARY MANN INTERVIEWS WITNESS

Black Panther Q & A

Officially big cats (such as tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards) only exist in Asia, Africa, South America and in a few spots in North America. Yet practically everywhere the texts book say big cats don’t exist, they tend to show up. But if life were so simple the world would be far less interesting. Recently I posted here a story about a friend of mine who when he was in middle school reported seeing a strange creature that calls to mind the “phantom black cats” often talked about in Cryptozoology literature.  Over the course of a few days we talked via Facebook in order to get more detailed information. The following is our correspondence. My friend's name is withheld by request.

Q: Do you remember what year exactly it was?

A: No. It could have been any time while I was in Middle School, but I definitely remember it was Middle School.

Q: Do you remember what time of year it was?

A: The Fall. It was before the holiday season.

Q: Do you remember what the weather was like that day?

A: Sunny. Not a cloud in the sky.

Q: How long did you see it for?

A: Between 10-15 seconds.

Q: You said that the bus would pass by the same places from the other side of the street. Did you look when the bus passed by the farm again?

A: Yes. It was gone.

Q: How long in between was it from when the bus went by the first time and the second?

A: I don’t know exactly, but probably two to three minutes.

Q: Do you know if anyone else saw it?

A: No. I just sat there in silence watching it. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. If any of the other kids or the driver saw it, they didn’t say so.

Q: Can you say roughly how big it was?

A: About the size of a Golden Retriever.

Q: You said it was “creeping” as it moved, just what does that mean?

A: The way it was moving. It was acting like it was trying not to be seen.

Q: Do you remember anything else about how the creature looked? Any small detail will help.

A: The head was very big. The ears where large and round. The black was a deep black, not shiny. The tail was really long. It was almost as long as the rest of the body. It also lopped up at the end.

          I’m thankful that my friend was willing to open up to me like this. Many more people have encounters with strange creatures than most of us would think, but few step forward for fear of ridicule. And while he still doesn’t want his name released, I do hope he at least feels better about getting this off his chest and being able to talk with a friendly face who will not judge.

 

On This Day in Weird, January 19...

1809: Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston, Mass.

1910: Witnesses including the mayor, vicar, and a policeman watch a cigar-shaped UFO hover over Invercargill, New Zealand, at 100 feet altitude. A humanoid figure appears in a side door, shouting in an unknown language before the portal closes and the craft departs.

1953: Linda Hayden, British actress—known for roles in Taste the Blood of Dracula, The Blood on Satan's Claw, Old Drac and Queen Kong—is born in Stanmore, Middlesex.

1955: A U.S. military pilot sights a reddish-white UFO pacing his plane over the Pacific Ocean.

1965: A witness reports two circular UFOs hovering over an archery range at Brand's Flats, Va. The smaller craft lands 50 feet from the witness and disgorges three humanoid figures about three feet tall, jabbering unintelligibly before they return to their ship and lift off.

1966: A farmer watches a UFO rise from a marshy area near Tully, Australia, leaving behind reeds flattened in clockwise swirls, 32 feet in diameter.

1967: UFOs appear over Dunbar, W.Va., at 9:05 a.m.; Milan, Ind., at 3:00 p.m. (where 15-year-old Reed Thompson snaps a photo); and over Shamokin, Pa., at 6:00 p.m. (pursued by a local minister in his car).

1971: Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi plays the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" to establish motive at the Manson cult murder trial, in Los Angeles.

1972: Three police officers and four civilians watch a boomerang-shaped UFO hover over a high school in Phoenixville, Pa.

1976: Another boomerang-shaped UFO visits Heislerville, N.J., observed by multiple witnesses. Two watchers claim to see figures or "motion" inside the craft.

1977: Snow falls in Miami, Florida, for the first and only time in history (so far). Unprecedented flurries also dust the Bahamas.

1988: UFOs cause excitement in Foreman, Ark., and Benton, La.

1991: A Massachusetts respiratory therapist driving home from work sees a domed UFO with a large lighted window, hovering 25 feet above treetops in a residential neighborhood.

THYLACINE-A CRYPTID SOON TO BE DISCOVERED?

I cannot help but feel that the thylacine may be the next cryptid to be officially discovered.  The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus)
frolicked around Tasmania when white colonists arrived.  It was also known as the Tasmanian wolf and the zebra-wolf.  The last one in captivity died in 1936 and it is now regarded as extinct; but reports of sightings have come in on a number of occasions since then.  Sightings have been reported in 1968, 1982, 1986 and the 1990s.

There have also been reports from mainland Australia since the 1970s.  The Australian Rare Fauna Research Association have reported 3800 sightings on mainland Australia since 1936.  A cryptid reported from New Guinea, known as the dobsenga, may also be a thylacine.

PARANORMAL BIGFOOT

It cannot be denied that a case can be made for Bigfoot having on occasion some paranormal aspects, even though such a contention is anathema to some cryptozoologists.now read on....