New Yorkers’ Panthers
Posted by: Loren Coleman on June 1st, 2009
People are seeing large cats this spring in the Northeast, and getting serious about finding proof.
One resident had had as a lab partner in college the renowned tracking guru Tom Brown, Jr., who had started an organization called Tracker SFI (for “search and forensic investigation”).
Tracker SFI applies the ancient Apache art of tracking to police investigations.
SFI deployed a Brown acolyte named Shane Hobel….
The construction site where Hobel first saw the cat tracks was just south of the lot. A crew was there grading gravel. “You guys looking for the phantom panthers?” one of the men said.
What is a panther? What is a phantom panther?
The magazine The New Yorker, June 8, 2009, has published, in their famed section, “Talk of the Town,” a level-headed and insightful column on cryptic large cats being reported in the Palisades of New Jersey. It is authored by Nick Paumgarten. The piece is entitled “Suburban Legends: Panther(S)!”
Hobel replied that the panthers were not phantoms. The man said, “People actually saw them? Did they have a couple of cocktails in ’em?” Hobel laughed politely and then dropped into a thicket off the road.
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.
If Tom Brown is involved (or any of his higher up students), I’d trust their judgment more than any other ‘expert witness.’ Whenever I read a new cryptid story I just scream in my head “Why doesn’t someone contact Tom Brown!?”