Continuing a definite trend here in cryptozoological news of late, this is a breaking May 3, 2008, story from the early edition of The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, California, about a “black cougar” seen by a Forestville, California man:
If there really is a black cougar prowling Don Callen’s woodlands near Forestville, it’s a bona fide feline phenomenon.
Such a creature may exist, experts say, but there has never been a documented sighting of a black cougar, also known as a mountain lion or puma.
And the furry shape in the two photographs captured 50 feet from Callen’s stationary digital camera might just be a black house cat, as common as a crow.
Two experts who’ve seen Callen’s photos flatly declared the images are inconclusive.
Callen, a Santa Rosa custom home builder and remodeler, admitted that he’s skeptical, too.
“It’s like getting a picture of Bigfoot,” he said.
But Callen insists, based on reconnoitering the scene on his 52-acre property, that the cat would have come up to his midthigh. “He’s definitely a big cat,” Callen said.
“It’s definitely enticing,” said Jack Dumbacher, a curator at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who viewed the photos Friday.
But he and Rob Dicely, who runs an exotic cat preserve in Occidental, said the image is too blurred and the lighting too low to make a species-positive identification.
“It could be (a black cougar),” said Dicely, whose 19-cat collection, called Leopards, Etc., includes a mountain lion named Shoshone. “That’s about as far as you can take it.”
It could also be a black house cat, black bobcat or a black panther, and it could have escaped from or been released by a pet owner, Dumbacher said.
Mountain lions, which roam from Canada to South America, come in shades from light tan to dark brown, which could “easily be mistaken for black,” Dicely said.
Callen said he’s shown the photos to dozens of folks, and heard several accounts of big black cat sightings from west county to Petaluma.
“I’m dying to have someone look at it and say, Hey, you’ve got one,'” Callen said.
Mountain lion sightings and attacks on livestock occur several times a year in Sonoma County, and a 70-year-old man was mauled by a lion last year in Humboldt County, the most recent documented attack on a human being.
Callen’s photos were snapped by a surveillance camera tied to a tree on the mornings of March 13 and April 5. The camera’s still in place, and both experts said they’d love to see clearer images.
“That would be a really exciting find, if that’s what it was,” Dumbacher said.
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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