Italian Mystery Cat Hunt

On November 3, 2008, police and animal rescue squads were combing the countryside around the southern Italian city of Benevento, in the latest in a 15-year-long string of panther alerts in Italy.

The teams moved in after a hunter said he saw ”a big cat, perhaps a panther” prowling near the town. Vets found prints and tracks they said were consistent with those of a large feline.

Forestry guards are beating the undergrowth to keep the animal in a wood where it is thought to have taken refuge, local authorities said.

The alert is Italy’s first panther spotting in two years and the eighth in 15 years. Many of the subsequent hunts have turned out to be fruitless. The last case was in April 2006 when a big game hunt was launched around the northern Italian city of Piacenza after repeated sightings
of a supposed panther. A few years before in the same area, hunters and farmers reported seeing a puma.

A similar scare hit the outskirts of Rome in February 2006 after six goats were found dead. Locals calmed down when experts said the tooth marks on the goats were those of a big dog.

In December 2005, Turin (home of the famed Shroud) was shaken by panther fears after a series of sightings sparked rumours that a visiting Moscow zoo might have lost one of its biggest draws. The zoo squashed the reports, saying it had no panthers but only dogs, camels and horses. But the reports revived memories of a wild cat chase near Turin six years previously. That 1999 report spurred copycat incidents as feline fever spread to the provincial border with Como.

Most of the other reports of predators on the loose have come amid midsummer news droughts known to journalistic insiders as ”the silly season.”

Panthers were reported to have been sighted in the harsh landscape of central Sardinia in 2001 and the rolling countryside of central Umbria in 1993 and 1995. After the second Umbria sighting locals said they had also seen a lion roaming in the vicinity.

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.

Email • Facebook • Twitter •