Big Cats and UFOs

Every year in the UK there are over 2,000 sightings of big cats in the wild. These usually manifest themselves as black panthers and are given names such as "The Beast of Bodmin" by the media.

There might be more sightings of big cats than there are of UFOs but they are no more credible from an evidential point of view. And, as with UFOs, no-one has yet come up with a single good, high-resolution, well-lit photograph. No-one has found a corpse that's not a dog or sheep and no-one has found a specimen of panther turd -- except in the case of a Big Cat that has been released by its former keeper.

In 1995 the British government sent a team to investigate (and, presumably, try to catch) the Beast of Bodmin. They spent months checking the photographic and video evidence in the exact locations where the cat was seen. The team's findings?

"They examined the famous video sequence, broadcast widely on television, which shows a cat leaping cleanly over a drystone wall. It looks impressive, until you see the man from the ministry standing beside the wall with his [measuring] pole, and realise that the barrier is knee-high. A monstrous cat sitting on a gatepost shrinks, when the pole arrives, from a yard at the shoulder to a foot. In one case, where the Beast was filmed crossing a field, the investigators brought a black domestic cat to the scene, set it down in the same spot and photographed it from where the video had been taken. The moggie looks slightly bigger than the monster."

That's a quote from George Monbiot's excellent new book Feral (serialised in The Guardian). I was struck by the similarities between Big Cat sightings and UFO encounters, a thought that also occurred to Monbiot. This is especially true when looking at (a) the reliability of the evidence and (b) the way in which the pursuit is like a religion in the sense that it is belief-led rather than evidence-led. The author says this:

"Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival, memories that must incorporate encounters – possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced – with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind." 

And those yellow eyes all have vertical-slit pupils like small domestic cats; big cats have round pupils.

George Monbiot: Feral. Allen Lane, 2013. (To be published on 30th May.)