Every year I watch to see what is the first cryptid sighting that is mentioned in the media and what is the actual first cryptid encounter.

Take for instance 2000. On January 2nd, news services reported that in the rural Malaysian village of Kampung Chennah, durian farmer Liong Chong Shen, 50, smelling a strong odor and hearing a grunt, turned to see two mystery ape-like animals covered in long, shiny, black and brown hair. The mawas (as they are locally called) stared at the startled farmer, and walked back into the nearby rainforest.

As fate would have it, this 2000 media hiccup would foreshadow what happened six years later. As more details surfaced, the 2000 sighting had actually occurred a week earlier, thus taking place in 1999. Interestingly, it would not be until December 2005, when a similar series of sightings in Johor would play on the bigger global stage for weeks, then months into 2006.

We know from the history of the discovery of the coelacanth that the holidays can interrupt the dissemination of information on what is being found, when, and where. During the modern era, it seems, the first cryptid seen and reported during the new year is a mystery cat, perhaps because there are more of them around.

The Year 2001 began quietly in the United Kingdom, at 9:20 PM, local time, on the first day of the year, when a puma-like beast was seen crossing the road near Tiverton.

The first supposed sighting of 2002 was on January 4, when the guests and manager of a Tasmanian teahouse at Oatland said they saw a “Nessie.” The supposed encounter was of a monster in a marshy, shallow Tasmanian spot named Lake Dulverton. The lake had been dry for a period of 14 years, and apparently local resorts had suffered as a result. By the year’s end, the report was taken tongue-in-cheek by locals and nearby Australian cryptozoologists, as merely a tourism publicity stunt.

A more conventional appearance of an unknown animal took place on January 7, 2002, when eyewitness Michael Lefevre, 49, of Shoebury, Essex, United Kingdom, spied a black panther on his garden patio. The five-foot long, two-and-half-foot tall black cat with “piercing emerald green eyes” was eating some chicken bits Lefevre had left out for local wildlife.

On January 1, 2006, the first cryptozoologically-related media dispatch was from the Italian press, reporting that the country was experiencing a wave of Black Panther sightings. In an item entitled “Panther Panic Hits Italy Again,” one eyewitness interviewed was a Turin traffic cop who managed to identify the big feline as a Black Panther. After the second Umbria sighting of a Black Panther, locals said they had seen a Mystery Lion roaming in the vicinity, but the incidents happened before January 2006.

What will be the first actual reported cryptid sighting for 2007? Mystery Cat? Bigfoot? Nessie? Yeti? Yowie? Thunderbird? Perhaps a Giant Snake?