NZ Black Panther Film

Using the phrase “Black Panther” covers many felines, from the above melanistic jaguar from South America, shown here in a public domain photograph, to melanistic leopards from Africa and Asia. The term has also been used to indicate the reported cryptids from many locations, including New Zealand.

A new documentary film is being made in New Zealand, which will discuss the sightings of the “Mid-Canterbury panther.” The black cat has been seen by local residents around Mayfield, Mount Somers and Ashburton, New Zealand.

No indigenous melanistic or black felids are known from New Zealand. But several reports exist, including from as recently as August 2006. But are some of the sightings merely feral domestic felids, as one videotaped in 2003 appears to be?

The new film is being made by documentary filmmakers Mark Orton and Pip Walls. They have interviewed eyewitnesses, Conservation Department staff and an unnamed Australian cryptozoologist. (I’ve received word from the guy himself, Mike Williams who says he is the unnamed cryptozoologist who was filmed for this documentary.) Orton, studying for a degree in natural history filmmaking, has the support of Natural History New Zealand. The film is to be finished for a May screening.

Yes, its official Pip and myself are producing a documentary based on the mystery black cat of Mid-Canterbury. This is one story that refuses to die and to date nobody has focused on some of the important facts and asked the right questions. In our research we have uncovered some fascinating information, and are quite excited about the filming that we have planned for the next couple of months. Watch this space.

Mount Somers resident Andrea Thompson said she was in her garden about 6.30pm in October last year [2005] when a big black cat dragged a young lamb across a paddock. She was alerted by loud bleating from a ewe. Thompson screamed and the cat ran off after it dropped the lamb, which later died.

“It flew over the fence. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It ripped the lamb,” she said.

The cat was about the size of a five to seven-month labrador dog, but unmistakably it was a cat. “Its tail was very long,” she said.

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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