| Pennsylvania’s Bearsquatch
On September 16, 2007, Pennsylvania hunter Rick Jacobs placed a tree-mounted camera in the Allegheny National Forest, 115 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. His goal was to locate a deer that he could later track and shoot. Instead, the camera captured images of what appears to be a young Sasquatch. Paul Majeta, a spokesman for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), reviewed the Jacobs footage and pronounced its subject “a primate-like animal.” Jerry Feaser, speaking for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, disagreed, telling the press, “There is no question that it is a bear with a severe case of mange.”
Many local Clearfield County residents remain undecided. On October 28, Debra Nestor told reporters, “By the pictures it’s really hard to tell, but it doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before.” That was true for most observers lacking any field experience, but Pennsylvania forest rangers doggedly insist that they see many bears afflicted with infections that cause them to lose their hair.
In Search of Chupacabras
?Texas rancher Phylis Canion, who has suffered the loss of cats and chickens during recent years, found a bluish-colored creature road-killed on her property near Cuero, in July, 2007.
San Antonio TV station KENS paid for DNA testing on the carcass at Texas State University, which identified the creature as a coyote suffering from mange. A week after that proclamation, KRQE-TV in Albuquerque, NM, aired footage of a similar creature, seen and videotaped around Bosque School, in northwest Albuquerque. Witness Wendy Kalberg told KRQE, “Its tail is very slight and thin. I thought it was like nothing I’d ever seen.” A neighbor, who requested anonymity, agreed. “It’s those big ears that are so odd,” she said. Unlike the Texas specimen, however, Albuquerque’s prowler has remained at large.
Rick Janser, former curator of mammals at the Rio Grande Zoo, watched the video footage and declared, “This is scary looking. It reminds me of the character in American Werewolf in London.” Nonetheless, he identified the beast as a Xoloitzcuintli, a rare breed of dog bred in Mexico.
China’s Nessie Reappears
A month before the tiger flap began in Shaanxi Province, startling footage of another cryptid emerged from the Changbai Mountains, on the border of China and North Korea when Zhuo Yongsheng, a local TV reporter, announced that he had captured six lake monsters on a 20-minute videotape.
The setting was China’s largest and deepest volcanic lake, called Tianchi in Mandarin and Chonjo in Korean. (Both mean “Heaven.”) Sightings of large, unknown creatures at Tianchi Lake date from 1903, when a beast resembling a Buffalo reportedly attacked three people, then retreated to the water after being shot six times. In 1962, more than 100 witnesses watched two large beasts cavorting in the lake over a three-day period. More recent sightings describe a gray-skinned creature with a human-like head and a five-foot-long neck.
Zhuo’s videotape and his public statements seem to deviate from previous accounts. He described six “seal-like” animals swimming in Tianchi Lake. “They could swim as fast as yachts,” he told the Xinhua news agency, “and at times they would all disappear in the water. Their fins—or maybe wings—were longer than their bodies.”
Kim Li-tae, a senior researcher at North Korea’s National Academy of Science, dismissed any talk of winged cryptids at Tianchi Lake, suggesting that the creatures filmed by Zhuo were probably mutated offspring of nine trout released into the lake by North Korean researchers in 1960. The new breed, Kim suggested, should be called “Tianchi trout.”
Pig in a Poke
Since 1996, Dutch researcher Marc van Roosmalen has discovered various new species in Brazil, rescued others from the razor’s edge of extinction, and was hailed by Time magazine in 2000 as a “Hero of the Planet.” Nonetheless, the year 2007 subjected van Roosmalen to many trials, both figurative and literal. In June, Brazilian authorities slapped him with a 16-year prison sentence for selling off naming rights to some of the creatures he has discovered, as part of a fundraising effort to save their dwindling native habitats. Van Roosmalen is in the process of appealing that bizarre conviction.
Then on October 29, a German scientific journal reported van Roosmalen’s discovery of a new pig species in the Brazilian rain forest. Local natives confirmed the existence of a species called caitetu munde, translated from the Tupi Indian dialect as “the giant peccary that lives in pairs.” And, in fact, the pigs are giants by scientific standards, growing to roughly twice the size of peccaries found in North America. DNA analysis of three captive specimens revealed a divergence from their nearest ancestor—the collared peccary—around one million years ago, when the Madeira River grew in size and isolated specimens on one side from those on the other.
Without prompt intervention, van Roosmalen suggests, the giant peccary and other species yet unknown may be annihilated before they can even receive Latin names.
Lost and Found
One of America’s most enigmatic cryptids is the shunka warak’in, an unidentified wolf-like predator whose name means “carrying off dogs” in the Ioway dialect. A notorious specimen slaughtered livestock around the Hutchins Ranch, in Montana’s Madison Valley, before it was shot and stuffed in 1886.
It is rare enough for cryptids to be seen, much less killed and preserved, but after the years of public exhibition at a private museum in Idaho, the mounted specimen vanished. Only a single photograph remained, together with eyewitness descriptions of a creature 48 inches long from snout to rump and 28 inches tall at the shoulder.
From there, the shunka warak’in vanished into legend until November, 2007, when Jack Kirby, grandson of the beast’s slayer, traced it to the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello.
How was such a find misplaced and then forgotten? No answer was forthcoming from Montana, but curators have since released it on loan to the Madison Valley Historical Museum, where it presently resides—one again—in a basement.
The shunka warak’in still awaits formal scientific identification. Early viewers of the carcass speculated that it might have been a hyena, somehow transported from Africa to the wilds of Big Sky Country while the classic photograph was labeled Guyasticutus, a name used by 19th-century traveling showmen for various freaks of nature or hand-stitched fakes. Formal identification may require DNA analysis, but no plans for testing have been announced thus far.
Who’s Saving Coupans?
Alien big cats (ABCs) are an old story Down Under, with witnesses reporting cougars, black panthers, and other out-of-place felids for decades. Some investigators think the cats are offspring of U.S. military mascots, left behind in the confusion during World War II while others suspect relict specimens of some prehistoric marsupial predator.
The latest sightings—logged from Karridale, West Australia, on November 7, 2007—involve a cat locally known since 2004 as a “coupan” (a combination of the words “cougar” and “panther”). A vineyard manager told the Augusta Margaret River Mail that the large, black cat measured roughly six feet from its nose to the tip of its tail.
The witness, while a recent transplant to Karridale, had heard tales of the coupan since his arrival. “I used to think it was people just drumming up tourism, but now I’ve seen one,” he said. "I don’t know how it got here, but it’s definitely here.”
Tiger, Tiger
Farmer Zhou Zhenglong, from Wencai village, was hiking through Zhenping County on October 3, 2007, when he saw a cat and snapped 71 pictures of the animal. Experts examined Zhou’s photos and confirmed that their subject was indeed a South China tiger, long believed extinct in the wild. Zhou received 20,000 yuan ($2,666) as a reward from Shaanxi forestry officials for his discovery.
But Zhou’s sighting was not a total surprise. Lu Xirong’s 30-member team had been searching Zhenping County since 2006, after local villagers reported 17 unconfirmed sightings and described six other incidents of unseen tigers roaring in the woods. On September 13, 2007, an Asiatic black bear was killed and eaten by an apparent tiger in Zhenping County. Two days after Zhou snapped his photos, a tiger reportedly mauled a local farmer’s cow.
Still, there are skeptics who believe that Zhou’s digital photos had been altered. And expert analysis did not prevent anonymous Internet posters from denouncing the whole incident as an elaborate hoax. But Zhou’s defenders, including forestry officials, quickly noted that only 40 of Zhou’s 71 photos were digital; the rest were print photos from standard film.
A Spanish Panther
Spain is a popular home-away-from-home for British expatriates who seek a respite from Britain’s often-soggy climate—and from Britain’s prowling ABCs. For Ean and Valerie Ritchie, however, life in Mijas felt like Old Home Week. The adventure began on October 2, when the Ritchies spied a large, black cat from the balcony of their room on the Los Claveles estate in La Cala. They snapped a picture of the animal and showed it to a local veterinarian, who was concerned enough to notify police.
Officers from Seprona’s Environmental Protection Service, armed with tranquilizer guns, searched for the cat that night and through the next morning before giving up the hunt. They granted that the incident was “strange,” but suggested that the Ritchies had actually seen a large dog.
On November 1 the Olive Press reported that the cat—now dubbed the “La Cala cougar”—had been seen three times around Alhaurin, in April, by British resident Gary Jacks.
“It was big and very scary,” Jacks declared. It was bigger than our Great Dane, but smaller than a tiger. It was either a puma or a jaguar.”
—Michael Newton
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