Here, below, is the one photograph that has been released, thusfar, of the Maine Mystery Cat, taken from a homeowner’s backyard in Sidney, Maine.

The photo is from a digital camera, and the pixels give this felid a less than sharp configuration. But as you can see from reading the past blogs on this matter, the downloading of the camera, from the testimony of the photo lab owner, speaks well for this image to have not been Photoshopped.

But that has not stopped others from using various techniques to manipulate this image.

While no one seems to have seen a tail on this photographed cat, yet, that doesn’t mean others haven’t tried to make their own tale of this picture.

In terms of the created fakes, first there is this one, being passed around the internet, of a tiger put in place of the Mystery Cat in the original image. Additionally, so the weak debunking goes, this pic is being presented as the “source” of the original. In other words, whether for sinister or humorous reasons, someone created a hoax in an attempt to undermine the first Sidney Mystery Cat image by saying the tiger was there first. Sorry, but the Photoshop fogginess is clearly visible around the superimposed tiger.

Next is a fake produced to try to make an analytic point.

Terry Shumaker sent this one to me, with this note: “Just for your enjoyment, I Photoshopped a photo of a mountain lion I took in Arizona into the Maine original. To the left of the Maine cat I tried to reduce and degrade the image to match the original as closely as possible. The image to the right is the same photo, just reduced to scale. Please judge for yourself. For the record, I think the Maine photo is genuine. But my part of it is fake. Fake, fake, fake! The animal I photographed is not in the Maine woods; it is in captivity in Arizona.

I may have more factual info soon. In the meantime, I thought you would enjoy the above for more compare and contrast comments.