NC Cougar: State Says “Highly Unlikely”

Linda Janssen said she was having coffee with her nephew, a 22-year-old Army private visiting for Thanksgiving, when they looked out her kitchen window Friday morning. Janssen’s property on Pinehurst Drive backs up to Bolin Creek, which flows into waters feeding Jordan Lake.

Janssen said they saw the animal, as big as her 75-pound black Lab, in profile and face-on, and saw it leap over a tree trunk. They watched the big cat for about a minute and a half.

“It wasn’t a bobcat; it didn’t have that shape,” Janssen said. “It was sleek, like a [Lincoln Mercury] car commercial.”

But Janssen’s nephew, Sean Gilbert of Corpus Christi, Texas, says he knows what he saw.

“If that had been back in Texas, I would have shot it,” Gilbert said. “I know that sounds a little barbaric. I would have had it shot and mounted. In Texas, that’s a trophy.”

George Strater of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission thinks a Chapel Hill woman and her 22-year-old nephew probably saw a big dog, rather than a cougar.

“We get calls from time to time,” he said. “If there’s a track or something we’ll go out and look. We need some type of physical evidence.”

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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