Alien Big Cats

Eyewitness: Big Cats Taunted

The mystery remains as to what happened at the SF Zoo on Christmas Day, but slowly the full story perhaps is being revealed. According to a new published report of Thursday, January 3, 2008, in the San Francisco Chronicle, at least one eyewitness has come forth to describe what happened before the tiger attack of Christmas Day. Below are the witness quotations from that account. You can visit the hyperlink noted to read the complete article, if you wish. However, I am only sharing here what the witness says she saw. I have expunged all the rest, such as the [...]

What Pumas In Vegas, Stays In Vegas

Are the performing lions and white tigers the only big cats in Las Vegas? Are there mountain lions there too? Were people seeing things there the second day of the New Year? Mountain lions, also known as cougars, panthers, or pumas, have a wide range throughout the West, including in Nevada, and populations are increasing. But are there panthers wild in Las Vegas? History would tell us that they are around. In 1991, at the Nevada Test Site, north of Las Vegas, Nevada, Mary Saether, was attacked by a 120-pound female mountain lion. She suffered minor cuts and received 21 [...]

First ‘08 Media Report: Oz Mystery Cat Sighting

Lake Elizabeth in the Otway forest. If there is one thing that is predictable, it is that most new years will open with a published report of a mystery cat sighting, usually in the UK or Australia. Australia didn’t let us down this year. Of course, this is different than the actual first eyewitness account of the year, which might take a few days to be published. For all we know, there might have been more pterodactyl sightings last night in Washington State. The Great Otway National Park is a national park in Victoria (Australia), 162 km southwest of Melbourne. [...]

Year Ends With Zoos in News

Goodbye to Nonja. The final days of December seem an appropriate time to talk about death, a metaphor for an internal feeling of the artificial human construction of a year ending. Death drives the mainstream news. How can we extract something useful out of all of this? This year thoughts of death have occupied many due to the assassination of Bhutto in Pakistan, of course, and also because of the deaths of two unfortunate victims, Carl Sousa Jr. and the Siberian tiger Tatiana, both at the San Francisco Zoo on December 25, 2007. Zoos are in the news. Zoos are [...]

Desi Pondering: SF’s Tiger Event

One of the most important components to living, to me, is to always be open to learning new information, new things about the mundane and the extraordinary, and to understand how the new interacts with the old. As I read it, the mystery of how the tiger escaped from the grotto at the San Francisco Zoo remains. The riddle of why the two Indian brothers were there and what they were doing continues. Part of what has been an enigma is the role of the humans involved. But who are these individuals? As it turns out, the three men involved [...]

Lists of Zoo Incidents: Dangling Feet & Trails of Blood

In December 1985, at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan, pregnant zookeeper Gayle Booth, 30, was fatally mauled by the above jaguar. Wild animals are dangerous, inside zoos and outside. The mystery surrounding how the San Francisco Zoo’s tiger (below) escaped from the grotto may be slowly becoming solved. Human intervention could have been part of the cause. San Francisco police are investigating the possibility that one of the victims in the fatal tiger mauling on Christmas Day climbed over a waist-high fence and then dangled a leg or other body part over the edge of a moat [...]

Clemson Panther Alerts

In an era of university shootings, campuswide notices from college law enforcement that there is a danger on the grounds of the university are taken a lot more seriously than they use to be. On Sunday, December 16, 2007, such warnings went out across the campus of Clemson University in South Carolina, not about a rampage shooter, but regarding the sightings of a cryptid cat, a panther. One Cryptomundo reader forwarded the following note and two campus alerts: I work at Clemson University in upstate South Carolina. We receive news alert broadcasts from time to time, through email from campus [...]

Maine Mountain Lion Study Group

A group of Dexter Regional High School students and their teacher-adviser Regan McPhetres plan to investigate and prove the existence of mountain lions in Maine. McPhetres, who along with another teacher ran a similar program from 1992 through 2001 in the Winslow-Waterville area, believes there is plenty of evidence that the elusive creatures have a presence in Maine. “There’s evidence they exist around us,” McPhetres said Sunday, despite the reluctance of some state officials to embrace the findings. He said confirmed sightings have been reported in Vermont, New Hampshire and New Brunswick. Mountain lions are supposed to be extinct east [...]