Etter1 wrote: 20percent of everybody in my state has seen a “black panther”. I’m positive they’re incorrect so I’d wonder pretty hard about that situation too.

Yeah, stories like this exist persistently in the blue mountains a continent away in the south, and funnily enough they have the exact same mythology surrounding them as up here… US military mascots etc etc. I did a bit of research (which is to say I read someone elses research) and a cougar was actually shot and killed in Victoria just after WW2. It was a mascot left behind.

I read a book about cougars in Colorado. One of the most outrageous ‘false positives’ recorded was a local man, lived in Colorado his whole life, claimed to be stalked by a cougar while walking his dog. He even caught it partially exposed in long grass on film, which he gave to tv news which featured for a couple of days on local nightly bulletins. Until a field biologist called in and informed the local news that the animal on the video was a fox.

Eye-witness reports are shaky at best 😉

Hahaha 😆

Honestly I reckon it’s otherwise normal people getting excited about possibilities, or what they hope/fear to see. False positives occur so regularly, across so many fields of study. Our brains are just so good at tricking us 😉

I was in a remote recce site one time on exercise, well camouflaged into the side of a wooded hill, watching down into the creek line below. The first night at about 2am I noticed an animal moving through the dry creek. Within minutes of first noticing it I was convinced it was a wild dog, maybe a dingo, and it was starting to head right at me. I raised my night vision scope to get a better look. It was a possum. About the size of a house cat. Night time, moon shadows, unfamiliar reference points and a hopeful desire to be the one to see something spectacular all went together to trick me quite nicely. If I hadn’t used the NV scope I’d probably be swearing to this day that I saw a wild dog out there 😳

I heard some other great facts about Australia’s top end yesterday…

It has 45% of Australia’s land mass (works out to about 1.3 million square miles – about 5 Texas’s) but only 5% of the population (about a million people – half of which live in the three bigger coastal cities of the north). Kenya has about 240 times the population density.

Oh the possibilities!