Gator Roundup – Summer 2006

You’d think the Loch Ness Monster had shown up wearing a feather boa made out of ivory-billed woodpeckers and started beating hippie kayakers with the petrified corpse of a Bigfoot. – Mark Hinson, Tallahassee Democrat, August 13, 2006.

The US government’s official map of incidents of out-of-place alligators. For more detailed information on locations and citations, click here. Please click on the map for fuller-sized version.

You may recall on May 14th, 2006 (“Why Cryptozoology Is Interested In Alligator Sightings”, I predicted a summer of higher than normal reports of alligators being sighted and found. The war news from Iraq and from Lebanon-Israel (especially since July 12th) and recent terror plots have forced some of the gator incidents onto the back pages, but there have been several events reported nevertheless. Here is a quick roundup of the out-of-place alligator and related crazy croc incidents that I’ve tracked since the killing of three women by gators in Florida. Your OOP gator contributions are welcome.

An American alligator is often nearly invisible in its natural habitat. Please click on image for full-size version.

During mid-May 2006, at the Austrian lake Silbersee, near the town of Villach, sightings of allegedly a 5 feet long American caiman were recorded. No clarification on how they could tell it was a caiman versus a crocodile or an alligator, however. I have nothing on this one being captured.

Around this same time, May 2006, wildlife agents at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency received reports of alligator sightings on McKellar Lake, a backwater of the Mississippi just south of Memphis, and at T.O. Fuller State Park, north of the city. Up to five alligators may have been seen, including one said to be close to 7 feet long that was reportedly spotted on a bank of McKellar Lake. Alligators’ natural range is suppose to be south of Tennessee. No word on any being caught or relocated.

On May 19, 2006, game wardens in Texas put out an alligator alert because of several sightings on North Texas lakes – an unusual occurrence apparently – with the latest on the north side of Lake Lewisville, near Fort Worth. No news of any relocations or captures.

May 31 saw stories coming out of northern Alabama of water-skiers on the Elk and Tennessee rivers having sightings of alligators over the Memorial Day weekend. Here specifically, the interest in these encounters are being blamed on “fear” due to the “three recent fatal gator attacks in Florida.” But alligators should not have been a surprise here since they were introduced into the nearby Wheeler Wildlife Refuge in the the 1920s.

A month later, gator news has returned to reports on out of place incidents, mostly. One of the bigger stories of the summer was from Mesa, Arizona, where beginning during the last week of June 2006, the La Valencia apartment complex lake appeared to have an alligator in it. It was eating the lake’s ducks. Sightings told of residents seeing its head and tail. This alligator was never captured, as far as I could track this one.

On June 30, reports of a series of sightings at a lake near Camdenton, Missouri, are met with some skepticism as not physical evidence can be found.

Search parties went out on July 26 and 27, 2006, looking for an alligator after sightings in the previous days at Battle Creek Golf Course near 51st Street South and 145th East Avenue, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The four-feet-long gator had been seen in a Broken Arrow retention pond. It was never captured, apparently.

Then in last July, with most stories breaking in the media on the 29th, the “scaly, green creature” of French Broad River, near Brevard, North Carolina, began getting press attention. Sightings of the three feet long animal had been occurring for awhile. But only after photographs were taken did herpetologist Charlie Green determine it must be a caiman, out of place and discarded. There is late breaking news of the capture of this one, which I detail at the end of this column.

On July 31, 2006, Keynan McGuire and Josh Bryant, both 11, caught a 5-foot-long, 60-pound alligator at the Shady Lane fishing pond, in Evergreen, near Kalispell, Montana. There apparently had not been any sightings in the area before the gator was caught on the new fishing rod that Bryant had just received for his birthday, July 31. Now that will be one to remember! (The alligator was later destroyed by wildlife officials when it was found to be in rough shape from attempts to kill it by parents and friends of the boys. It is in a freezer in Montana at the Fish, Wildlife and Parks office but the agency is not sure what they will do with it.)

On August 6, 2006, the Boston Herald had a summary article on out-of-place alligators. It said, in part:

Each year, the state environmental police typically find about 10 of the ravenous reptiles wading in the state’s murky waters. But Ralbovsky says more than a dozen of the illicit alligators he takes in every year are seized in drug busts or domestic disputes….

In Townsend last month, two gigantic alligators dumped in a remote residential area were finally corraled after worried residents holed up in their homes and checked their backyard pools for the feisty creatures.

And two weeks ago, one Norwood man fishing in Attleboro reeled in the biggest catch of his life when he netted an 8-inch baby alligator taking a dip in secluded Mechanic Pond.

Meanwhile on August 10, 2006, at Scottsdale, Arizona, a 3 1/2-foot-long alligator in a lake at the McCormick Ranch Golf Club, 7505 E. McCormick Parkway, was captured. One news article said: “Unlike false reports of a gator that drew crowds to Mesa in June, 2006, this one was for real.”

Is a sighting of an alligator that is not captured all of a sudden a “false report”?

BTW, one of the best articles with a sense of humor about this entire out-of-place alligator business just appeared on Sunday, August 13, 2006, by Mark Hinson at the Tallahassee Democrat. Hinson went in search of the French Broad, Transylvania County (yes, that is not at joke), North Carolina, alligator. He writes, in part:

Three days before my voyage, a live, 3-foot-long alligator was lassoed and pulled out of the river. According to the laws of nature and complicated tax codes, alligators are not supposed to live in the French Broad. It’s too far north. The climate is wrong. And, compared to Florida, there aren’t as many Yankee tourists for them to eat.

The rogue gator, who was named Wiley by its captors, made big news around the region where North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee all bump heads.

The alligator is all people can talk about. It’s the gator this, the gator that. You’d think the Loch Ness Monster had shown up wearing a feather boa made out of ivory-billed woodpeckers and started beating hippie kayakers with the petrified corpse of a Bigfoot.

“People kept coming back and telling us they’d seen an alligator on the French Broad,” Headwaters Outfitters river guide Sid Cullipher said before setting me adrift in my “Purple Rain” raft.

“We kept saying, ‘Sure you did.’ We have a thing up here called the Hell-Bender Salamander. It’s a pretty big salamander, so we thought that’s what they were seeing.”

When some canoeists brought back a digital photo of Wiley’s beady eyes and unmistakable snout, the river guides knew moonshine was not involved. Cullipher rounded up a posse and went on a gator hunt.

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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