Tijuana’s Mystery “African Lion”

I was hoping to have an update on this one before posting the account, this morning, but there doesn’t seem to be any followup in the last 24 hours.

The San Diego Union reported that on Wednesday, September 4th, 2008, Tijuana, Mexico, police are on the alert for an “African lion” sighted in a rural eastern area of the city near La Presa Dam.

The city dispatched its Pegasus helicopter to the area Wednesday after a resident called in a sighting to the police command center, said Ernesto Alvarez, a police spokesman. Police and wildlife inspectors were attempting to track the animal on Thursday, September 5th.

“We’re trying to determine if it’s a lion or if it’s a native species such as a puma or a mountain lion,” said Marco Antonio Campoy, who heads the Baja California natural resources branch of Mexico’s environmental watchdog agency, known as Profepa.

A lion — the African type — might have come from a clandestine zoo (unspoken but as sometimes kept by drug dealers) in the city. Or perhaps it was from a traveling circus, officials said, bringing up that old chestnut. “We’re not ruling out either possibility,” Campoy told San Diego Union reporter Sandra Dibble on Thursday afternoon.

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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