Black Panther Sighting?

Yep, that's it! That black smudge in the centre...

• The story
• The aftermath
• Other sightings
• Who ya gonna call?

The story

In the UFO hysteria of the late 1990s, I often wondered about the people that reported strange sightings, and produced the occasional blurry photos. It came as something of a surprise to find myself apparently in this position! It happened on the way out of the "Prom" on 10 July 1997. My wife Marilyn sighted a very large, black cat, which we were convinced was a panther. (The Prom is Wilson's Promontory, a large wilderness National Park in Victoria, Australia, and the southernmost tip of Australia's mainland - see more at the Parks Victoria site, parkweb.)

We had stopped the car at about five o'clock to let our two girls have a closer look at some kangaroos. Marilyn stayed in the car, and spotted an odd black shape up on the hill. After first thinking it was a wombat, she eventually realised it was the head of a large cat, looking out from the scrub. When I came back and had a look, I managed to get one photo, and walked a bit closer to get a second. With Marilyn and the girls asking me not to get too close, I just got a second photo of head and shoulders as the cat sat up, and started running.

Just in case it was me it was running at, I started running back to the car as well, accompanied by screaming from the girls. I saw enough to see a very sleek, black shape speeding into the undergrowth, and a very frightened rabbit running out the other side. The rest of the family saw the cat running just like a panther in a wildlife movie, then disappearing into the scrub.

Two days later, we took more photos of the spot with the National Parks staff, so some more accurate estimates of the size of our cat could be worked out. I can't be sure if it is as big as we thought. We were quite convinced that this was the panther that the photo appears to show, but I may well have been running from an over-grown house cat!

My attempt at scaling the cat photo. The man is about 190cm tall.

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The aftermath

The text above was mostly quoted in an article about the event (Black Panther Sighting at the Prom) by Carole Williams in the local paper, The Foster Mirror, on 16 Jul 1997. We still can't be sure of what we saw. The Rangers at the National Park, after scaling the photo, believe it was just a big feral cat. We still think that is was too big for a cat, but we are not taking the line that there is some sort of conspiracy to hide evidence of strange animals in Victoria's National Parks.

There are no native big cats in Australia. The only native animal in that niche in recent years is the thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger), a marsupial that has been officially extinct for some years, and had only been found in Tasmania since European settlement. However, there are also many reported sightings of thylacines both in Tasmania and on the mainland in recent times. Talking to some of the experts (the ones that don't make a lot of fuss about this sort of thing), it appears that we have good reason to believe that what we saw was a small leopard or panther, based on the frequency of sightings in the area. Draw your own conclusion!

On 24 October 1999, The Foster Mirror ran a related article on Mystery kangaroo deaths at Prom. Apparently, "...about 15 dead kangaroos were found near the airstrip in the northern part of the National Park. Some had been torn apart and gutted while other bodies were not touched at all, just as if they had died of fright." The "researcher" reporting this story believed that an "...unidentified predator is living in the park. Whether it is a panther or a Tasmanian tiger that is doing the killing is unknown."

The Melbourne "Herald Sun" was keen to run our story, but the photo did not come out clearly enough for newsprint. The movie Alien Big Cats by Paw Productions was screened on SBS in Australia in April 1999. Our photo was included, with appropriate credits. The movie was nominated for "Best Music for a Documentary" at the 1998 Australian Guild of Screen Composers Screen Music Awards Nominations. It was shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Sydney Film Festival in 1998. The movie was available at the time from the international agents: Ray Atkinson Multi Media Marketing Ltd.

In July 1999, Mark Henson in the UK put up a mirror of this page on his Web site, called The British Big Cat Mystery. This site seems to have since been taken down.

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Other sightings

2 Aug 1998, from Margaret, Australia:

"Verification of puma sighting - Saw puma in Otways 1982 (2 adults 1 child witness) - reported sighting to the [Australian Rare Fauna Research Association]... Pumas regularly sighted in Plenty Gorge."

Dec 1998, from Cameron Lewis, Victoria:

Cool. About three years ago, myself and a friend saw what looked like a panther while climbing at Mount Arapiles (Western Victoria). We were about 30m up a cliff when the cat walked through the scrub at the base. We watched it for about five minutes until it disappeared into the scrub again. It was quite obviously a cat of some form. Large and black. No camera unfortunately but when we got down we scaled it against a log and estimated that its body was about a metre long. Looks like it gets around if it made it to the Prom...

21 Apr 2000, from Ben Gesch, Queensland:

About nine months ago, I had an encounter with a large panther while bowhunting near St George, Queensland. I didn't report the incident for a number of reasons but after seeing the Alien Big Cats documentary I don't feel so stupid. I was wondering how I should go about reporting the sighting and if there are any organisations I can contact or even Web sites I can visit about Big Cats in Australia.

20 May 2000, from Terry Trimmer, Cockatoo, Victoria:

This moring big cat prints were found next to the Cockatoo creek. Some people came and took casts of them and then left. Do you have any idea who these people would have been? I had a look at the prints as well as the local store owner and they are very big. Too big for a pussy cat of the home moggy kind.

The people that took the casts were from ARFRA.

Aug 2003, from Rosalie and Brad Lemon, Victoria:

Rose: I lived in the Kyneton area from 1993 to 1996, in the small township of Taradale. While living there, I saw with my own eyes a living, breathing, puma or mountain lion. ...it was no more than 25 feet from me at the time and scared the daylights out of me. This same Puma proceeded, over a period of time, to kill a great deal of livestock in the area, including sheep, lambs and calves born on the adjoining property to my own. My husband spent many a cold night hunting this animal. We have heard its "scream" - there is no other word to describe it.

Brad: The worst period of stock slaughter began with 27 sheep and one calf killed on the first night. Some other sheep were injured - about 14, and of those, I think 7 had to be destroyed. On the second night, another 4 were killed, and none injured. All the sheep were killed in exactly the same manner. Each sheep was killed by being bitten on the top of the neck, near the head, and on more than one of the sheep we found good impressions of what looked like an incisor tooth, and a matching wound on the jaw right below the top one. It looked like a very large jaw had inflicted the damage...

On one of the nights shortly after all the slaughter, my wife and I were sitting at our table in our kitchen... We heard what can only be described as a woman shrieking in fear or pain, and the sound kept repeating. It was very, very loud, and echoed around the valley we lived in...

I saw a puma at another time, a couple of years prior to the attacks. Two friends and I were driving down a dirt road when one ran across the road about 50 meters in front of us, maybe a little further. It was a black flash, but it left an imprint in all our minds, and the most distinguishing feature that I can describe about this huge cat is that it had the longest tail of any cat I've ever seen - completely out of proportion to its body.

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Who ya gonna call?

My personal recommendation for the best place to report any sightings of unusual animals in Australia is via the Australian Rare Fauna Research Association Web site. To report a sighting, just fill in their form. From my experience, ARFRA seems to be a reputable and well-balanced organisation. Their founder Peter Chapple sadly passed away a few years ago, but the organisation is still in operation. Another suggestion is to contact your local zoo or National Parks office.

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