ALIEN BIG CATS (ABCs) HAVE BEEN STALKING THE NATION - AND OUR IMAGINATION - FOR 40 YEARS. PAUL SIEVEKING RECALLS THE BIG GAME HUNTS AND PUZZLING EVIDENCE FOR THESE SHADOWY FIELDS.
The actress Sarah Miles had a memorable encounter near her house in the West Sussex in 1994: "...a large jet black cat stood, posing almost, high on the bank... Roughly the size of Lovely [her Old English mastiff], but with enormous paws, quite out of proportion to the rest of him. His tail, longer than his own body length, was held straight out, with a little curl at the end. His face seemed square from his profile, with pointed erect ears. Sadly, without turning once in my direction, the majestic animal clambered down the bank and loped across the lane, hips rolling with a loose-limbed, easy gair, before leaping effortlessly up the bank and out of sight."ยน
Although there were sporadic earlier encounters with ABCs in the British countryside, it was in the early 1960s that they became a recognised Mystery, a major branch of forteana, just as flying saucers took on a public life in the 1940s, Bigfoot in the 1950s, and crop circles in the 1970s, though each had precedents. ABCs also appear in many other parts of the world, but there is no room to deal with them here.
While it is likely that breeding populations of ABCs have been established in the British Isles, there may be other dimensions to the mystery. Meeting the unruffled stare of an unknown large felid - as Trevor Bartle did near Falmouth on the night of 4 February 2000 [FT146:16] - can be a numinous experience, at odds with the animals' supposed retiring nature and reminiscent of encounters with 'black dogs' - known in different regions as Black Shuck, Pooka, Trash hound, Barguest, or Shriker - many of which might be a feline rather than canine.
Could some of these big cats have been teleported from their natural habitat, as Charles Fort playfully suggested (see "Historical Precedents" panel), or do they exist in our physical world only fleetingly, as other denizens of fortean menagerie seem to? It is certainly bizzare that numerous ABC hunts with state-of-the-art technology have always failed (with one or two exceptions), while the majority of large felids are known to have escaped from zoos are caught or killed. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, all but two of the 16 big cats that escaped into the wild in the UK between 1977 and 1998 were recaptured within 24 hours. However, talk of phantoms and teleportation will not appeal to cryptozoologists or strict adherents of Occam's razor.
In the mid-Seventies, the naturalist Maurice Burton wrote to Bob Rickard about the Surrey Puma: "All the eyewitnesses accounts that I was able to investigate at first hand proved to be either otter, badger, fox, deer, or feral cats and dogs." One is left wondering how such identifications could be proved after the actual encounters.
This is not to deny that many supposed ABCs are misidentifications of indigenous animals; but over the years, the scepticism of the experts has been worn away by the many anecdotal reports from experienced observers, and the evidence from spoor, livestock depredation, video footage, and alien felids trapped or shot (see panel). The orthodox explanation now invokes escapes from unspecified unlicensed private zoos or owners, and hypothetical overturned circus trailers.
THE SURREY PUMA AND FRIENDS
On 16 July 1962, water board official Ernie Jellett saw an animal "like a young lion cub" stalking a rabbit near Heathy Park Reservoir in Hampshire. It stood 18in (46cm) to 2ft (61cm) tall, with a flat face, large paws, and pale brown pelage. It was "definitely not a fox or a dog." A month later, it was seen again by Mr L Noble, another water board official. These first reports, and references to previous sightings and frightened cattle, were hidden away in the house journal of the Mid Wessex Water Company.
Not till the following summer did Britain's ABCs first hit the headlines. On 18 July 1963, David Back, driving through Shooters Hill in south-east London at 1am, saw what looked like an injured dog lying by the roadside. When he walked up to it, he realised it was a large cat with a long, upwards curling tail. It ran off into Oxleas Wood. Very shortly afterwards, a "large golden animal" jumped over the bonnet of a police patrol car in the area. No zoo or circus had reported any escapes.