New NoCa Melanistic Panther Sightings
Posted by: Loren Coleman on August 9th, 2009
Well-known San Francisco Chronicle nature columnist Tom Stienstra writes of a melanistic panther or “black mountain lion” that was seen for more than 10 minutes in the foothills near Dublin in Alameda County. The next day, another one was seen by an engineer in the nearby San Ramon hills, California.
Lynn Reed, black mountain lion: “I have a ranch, 120 acres. I’ve seen mountain lions come through. This time I was going down 580, heading toward Pleasanton, about 6:15 p.m., came over the Dublin Grade (near Foothill), when we saw it, about 800 yards off. I slowed down, and I said to my wife, ‘Look at that! It’s a cougar or a panther.’ We took the next exit – I gave up our dinner reservations – and I circled back to get closer. We got maybe 300 yards away.
“We watched it for 10 minutes; the way he snuck through, it looked like he was hunting, looking for something. We watched him about 10 minutes. Very exciting. Incredible, really. I’m a hunter raised in Utah with a pretty good eye for wildlife. I kept staring to make sure I knew what I was looking at.”
“He was black as can be with a head the size of a cantaloupe,” Reed said. “We watched it for 10 minutes. I said to my wife, ‘Look how its tail goes back and curls up, look how its shoulders move.’ It was 3 feet long, the tail 2 1/2 feet, maybe 60, 75 pounds.”
A similar animal was seen last week in the nearby San Ramon hills by a surveyor, Art Whitten. “I was setting up an aerial panel and I felt something watching me,” Whitten said. “I turned and he was sitting in a ravine, 100 feet away. Of course, at first I was nervous, but he showed no interest in me. I’ve seen a lot of mountain lions, and I’d estimate it as the average size of a mountain lion.”
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.
Ok, as life long resident of the area in question I have serious questions about the sighting report.’
If you are on interstate 580 in the Dublin Grade region and headed towards Pleasanton that means you are headed east on 580 as you are going downhill into the Pleasanton/Dublin valley. Traffic gets quite nasty in that area during the evening commute but when it’s not a stop and go commute crawl the traffic blasts through their at 65-70 miles per hour. So what did they do to watch this animal for 10 minutes? Pull off the road onto the shoulder? There’s an old road that parallels 580 through the hills, but there’s few places to pull over on the old road without causing a traffic backup.
Was the animal on the north or south side of the road? That effects the plausibility of the story.
800 yards is quite a distance to see. There’s no lack of recesses and cutbacks into the hills along the side of the road. As a child, when my family drove through the area in question, my sister and I would especially watch the recesses and cutbacks to count how many dear we could spot. Looking back and up the hills into a deep recess could possibly account for 800 yards of distance but still, 10 minutes?
I’m just not buying it.
Study after study has shown humans are not very accurate observers. That’s why “eyewitness testimony” is at the bottom of evidence considered acceptible by mainstream scientists.
That said, it doesn’t mean that the observers didn’t actually believe they had seen a black panther. Or that they wouldn’t pass a polygraph or swear on a Bible as to what they “saw.”
But there has never been a proven “black” couger in all of American history. So it most likely was something else which still makes the sighting somewhat of a mystery. Just not a melonistic American couger.