Spanish Search for Black Panther
Posted by: Loren Coleman on September 26th, 2007
Native, wild “black panthers” are not suppose to exist on the Iberian Peninsula, Europe. Mijas is a town and municipality in the province of Málaga, in Andalusia, in southern Spain. La Cala de Mijas is a separate village and tiny resort by the sea to the west. Word comes from that location of a new melanistic mystery cat search.
The hunt is on for a large black panther spotted by a member of the public in a park near the Los Claveles residential estate in La Cala de Mijas at around 7pm last night.
Since then, three other people have corroborated the sighting.
Suggestions that the animal was a large dog were ruled out after the man, who managed to photograph it on his mobile phone, told how he saw it climb a tree.
Several Guardia Civil environmental officers armed with tranquiliser guns were deployed to hunt down the animal, but the search was called off for safety reasons at nightfall.
A Guardia Civil spokesman said that the animal probably escaped from a private property. The search operation resumed today at first light. “Mijas police hunt large black panther,” think Spain, Wednesday, September 26, 2007.
I’ve not seen any published version of the reported cell-phone photo.
This probably is an escaped exotic pet, but thought you’d want to hear about this new search. Melanistic cats do have a certain appeal to those that keep big cats. But they also populate the cryptozoological literature, as well, before there were big pet feline owners.
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.
I live right along the “park” (actually a golf course) where the panther was sighted – the man who reported seeing it lives two doors down from me. The golfers are all out, so I suppose they think the panther has moved on. There’s a lot of shrubby undeveloped hills around here so he has plenty of territory if he goes the right direction.
No one has admitted to losing a panther that I’ve heard about…