Fur Associated With Mystery Cat Found

The news being discussed in papers in Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts yesterday and today is of another recent event involving a possible “mountain lion” in central Maine.

On the 4th of July, the Blethen Maine News Service (named after the owners of the Seattle Times who purchased the Portland Press Herald and other related Maine newspapers a few years ago) put out a story about the turning over on July 3rd of possible “big cat” DNA samples from Oakland, Maine. The site of the finds, Oakland, Maine, is 12 miles from Sidney, Maine, where the Mystery Cat photograph (above) was recently taken.

All articles being published by the Associated Press in the wake of this new information are based on the Blethen Maine News Service renderings. The interesting point to know about the Blethen Maine News Service is that the broader organization has generally taken a skeptical slant to such stories, with editorial influence from the parent Seattle Times ownership. Historically, for example, the Seattle-based news giant has not been friendly to Bigfoot or cryptozoology accounts. Remember it was the Seattle Times that broke and misinformed the American public with their “Ray Wallace is dead, therefore Bigfoot is dead” stories.

Here is the Blethen-owned Portland Press Herald’s latest story on the Mystery Cat events:

State checks mountain lion report
An Oakland man provides fur and skin from what he says was ‘a big cat.’

Blethen Maine News Service

Oakland – State biologists on Tuesday [July 3, 2007] began investigating the second reported mountain lion sighting in the area in a week.

Mountain lions, also referred to as “cougars,” “catamounts,” “pumas” and “panthers,” disappeared from Maine in the 1800s, victims of indiscriminate hunting and trapping, habitat changes, and declining deer, moose and caribou populations, according to the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The cats are listed on the federal endangered species list.

The last documented mountain lion seen in the wild in Maine was killed in 1938, but reports of sightings still surface on occasion, according to department spokesman Mark Latti.

“But in my eight years, it’s always come back as something different than a mountain lion,” Latti said.

Adult male mountain lions weigh 175-200 pounds and are about 8 feet long from nose to tail. Adult females weigh about 75-175 pounds and average about 6 feet in length.

On Tuesday, Oakland resident Kelvin Higgins provided a sample of fur and possibly some skin to state biologists. He said a big cat shed the fur while grooming itself on a snowy rock in his wooded backyard in April.

“I’m not 100 percent sure it was a mountain lion, but it was a big cat, believe me,” Higgins said.

Higgins’ lawn extends a little more than 30 yards from his back porch, from which he said he spotted the cat.

“He was just down there preening,” he said. When the cat saw him on the porch, it “just stood up and stretched really casually” before loping off.

Higgins said the cat’s body and tail each were about 4 feet long, and he estimated its weight at around 100 pounds. Higgins later collected a pinch of fur from the rock, but didn’t turn it in until reading a news story last week about a possible sighting in Sidney. In that incident, an unnamed resident provided a grainy photo of what appeared to be a large cat to the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Latti said the photo was inconclusive.

The Oakland sighting is different, according to state biologist Keel Kemper, who said the sample appears to include both hair and flesh, and is large enough for DNA testing.

“This does not look like deer hair, to be honest with you,” Kemper said. by Joel Eliott, Portland Press Herald, Portland, Maine, July 4, 2007.

In the extended version of this Blethen Maine News Service dispatch published in Portland’s sister paper in Augusta, the Kennebec Journal

, the article also mentioned:

Biologists at Southern Illinois University, the laboratory chosen by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, should be able to determine what species of animal left the sample, Latti said. “We’ll be able to test it, no problem,” he said. “It’s a very good indicator, a DNA test.”

Update: August 16. 2007: The sample was from the fur of a red fox.

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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