Northamptonshire cat

 Northamptonshire cat - Mystery of beast sighting

A MYSTERIOUS black beast has been spotted prowling the Northamptonshire countryside once again.

The panther-like creature was seen by Michelle Deakin as she was travelling between Collingtree and Milton Malsor on Sunday night.

She believes the animal she spotted lurking by the roadside was in fact a puma, after doing some research on the Internet

At first the 32-year-old housewife, who lives in Bugbrooke, initially thought that it was a dog"The animal moved like a large dog but when we got closer realised that it was some sort of cat," she explained.

"It was black and also slightly grey in colour and had a very muscular build.

"The animal moved sleekly across the road and I also noticed that it had black rings around its tail. It was quite a shock to see something like that in the Northamptonshire countryside."

In the past three years there have been 14 reported big cat sightings across the county.

Sightings have been reported in East Hunsbury, Pattishall and Blakesley.

And last July a sheep belonging to a farmer in Moreton Pinkney was killed and paw marks, believed to belong to a big cat, were found on the animal.

Danny Bamping, from the British Big Cat Society, said that Northamptonshire remains one of the top five regions for sightings in the whole country.

"There have been many spottings of strange panther-like creatures in the region over the last couple of years," he said.

"The majority of them have been consistent which backs the theory that there are several of these creatures living wild in Northamptonshire and surrounding counties."

james.hall@northantsnews.co.uk

26 August 2005

Source :

• https://www.northamptontoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=255&ArticleID=1128168

Beast Of Ongar

The cat is thought to be a lynx with black colouring. An Essex woman has described what she claims is a sighting of the mysterious “Beast of Ongar”. Kay Hayden, the clerk of the local parish council, told BBC Essex she was shocked when a large black cat appeared in a field in Stanford Rivers near Ongar off the A113.

 Ms Hayden said: “All I can say is it was a great big leopard size. It was a muscular, completely black, strong-looking animal, much, much larger than a dog.”

 She said she was quite convinced the animal was the same “beast” spotted years ago by others in the area.

 The secretive animal seen near Ongar was identified as possibly being a shy European lynx by experts on BBC1 wildlife series X-Creatures, in 1998.

 A police officer at the Ongar station said there have not been any reports of wild animals of this type in the local area for years.

 Big cat experts have estimated there may be more than 100 wild cats – mainly leopards and pumas – roaming the British countryside, a claim that has been disputed by the government.

 From: https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/essex/3213535.stm

Beast of Bont

Gareth Morgan, The Western Mail

 THE LEGENDARY Beast of Bont has struck again by attacking livestock at night, according to a Mid Wales farmer.

 A black, big cat-type creature savaged a lamb at a farm near Talgarreg, Lampeter, on Sunday, and was spotted again on Monday night by farmer Diane Marshall.

 “It was dark but I saw two glowing eyes looking straight at me and knew it was not a dog,” said Mrs Marshall, who lost one of her rare Torwen lambs to the mystery beast.

 “It did not seem afraid but it did run off quickly – I am just worried it will come back as it was not concerned at all about my presence. “I am now out on patrol every night, with a suitable weapon, to stop a repeat of Sunday’s killing.”

 The Welsh Assembly has played down previous reports of animals being attacked by strange predators in the area. But for the past 30 years Welsh police forces have been filing reports about sightings of cat-like creatures resembling pumas, panthers, ocelots, leopards and lynxes.

 The main evidence for the existence of these sharp- clawed, but mysterious stalkers has been the death toll among vulnerable herds of sheep. Last month NFU Cymru announced its members would be questioned about any sightings through its magazine, Farming Wales.

 Local police said the latest incident bore all the signs of a “classic big cat attack” and Assembly wildlife officials have now removed the carcass for further analysis.

 “We will know within a week what the experts think, but I had a very interesting conversation with them when they came to collect the lamb,” said Mrs Marshall.

 “I certainly have never seen anything like this before.” She found the carcass lying in her field just after dawn on Sunday.

 “The leg and shoulder had been completely bitten off – but the rest of the flock were still sleeping,” she said. “If it had been a dog then it would have cornered every last one of them, and they would have made a great deal of noise. Also the skin had been torn off and the neck snapped in a single swipe, again classic signs of a big cat attack.

 “I now have first-hand experience of what this animal can do and do not want a repeat performance.”

 Many farmers living in Ceredigion are convinced the Beast of Bont is behind a catalogue of grisly sheep and lamb killings. Big cat expert, Pat Davies, said she is certain the Beast of Bont is just one of many big cats in the area. Last year American tracker Tom Brown came to the area to search for clues.

 “He said firmly that there are definitely big cats in Mid Wales,” said Mrs Davies.

The Yowie

 The Yowie

From: https://www.n2.net/prey/bigfoot/creatures/yowie.htm

Its profound geographical isolation makes Australia an unlikely habitat for a missing link that could exist for millions of years without being documented by science, especially since no primates are indigenous to the continent. Nevertheless, the land down under claims its own version of Bigfoot, the Yowie, which has been reported primarily in New South Wales and the Gold Coast of Queensland. The creature's long history can be traced back to aborigine legends.

The earlier name for the creature was the Yahoo, which according to some accounts was an aborigine term meaning "devil" or "evil spirit." But more likely, the indirect source of the name was Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver's Travels (1726) includes a subhuman race called the Yahoos. Hearing the aborigines' fearful accounts of this malevolent beast, nineteenth-century European settlers probably applied the name Yahoo to the Australian creature themselves.

The first recorded sighting of a Yahoo by a European came in 1881, when an Australian newspaper reported that several witnesses had seen a large baboon-like animal that stood taller than a man. In 1894, another individual claimed to come face to face with a "wild man or gorilla" in New South Wales bush. A 1903 newspaper printed the testimony of a man who said he watched as aborigines killed a Yahoo, which he said looked "like a black man, but covered all over with gray hair."

In 1912, George Summerell was riding on horseback between Bombala and Bemboka when he saw a strange creature on all fours drinking from a creek. The animal rose up on its hind feet to a height of seven feet and looked at Summerell. Then it disregarded the horseman, finished its drink, and peacefully walked away into nearby woods. The following day, Summerell's friend Sydney Wheeler Jephcott rushed to the scene of the sighting and discovered an abundance of handprints and footprints. Jephcott described the footprints as humanlike but huge, and having only four toes per foot. He said he made plaster casts of the tracks and turned them in to a local university, but there is no record of a scientific analysis being rendered. Sometime in the 1970s, the term "Yowie" supplanted “Yahoo," for reasons that remain as mysterious as the creature. One possible origin of the newer name is the aborigine word youree, described as a legitimate native term for the hairy man-monster. The Australian accent could easily contort "youree" into "Yowie."

In 1971, a Royal Australian Air Force helicopter carrying a crew of surveyors landed atop Sentinel Mountain, a remote and inaccessible peak. Much to their surprise, the team discovered fresh footprints in mud, much larger than human footprints, in a place where no known biped could possibly be present. Yowie sightings continued steadily throughout the '70s. In 1976, backpackers in New South Wales reported seeing a five-foot female Yowie whose fur stank to high heaven. Also in New South Wales, Betty Gee reported seeing a giant creature covered with black fur outside her home in 1977. Shortly thereafter, her fence was knocked down and large footprints surrounded the scene. A man in the Gold Coast city of Springbrook (home of the Yowie statue shown on this page) said that a"big black hairy man-thing" appeared before him while he while chopping wood in 1978. "It just stared at me and I stared back," he said. "I was so numb, I couldn't even raise the axe I had in my hand."

In 1997, a woman residing in Tanimi Desert was awakened at 3 a.m. by a horrible animal-like noise just outside her bedroom window. When she went out to investigate, she was confronted with an unbearable stench that sent her into the dry heaves, and she saw a seven-foot hairy creature tear through her fence as it made a hasty retreat. The next day, police discovered a number of giant ootprints and a somewhat shredded irrigation pipe that had seemingly been chewed upon. Some Yowie theorists speculated that a current drought had forced the creatures into inhabited areas to find water. The Yowie may be nothing but a tall tale, and it may be rooted in a fanciful ancient legend. An aborigine folk tale explains that when their people first migrated to Australia thousands of years ago, they encountered on the new continent a savage race of ape-men. The aborigines' ancestors went to war against the ape-men, and in the end the humans triumphed, thanks to their ability to make weapons. Some have wondered if this tale might contain some element of truth, and it is a few diehard survivors from this unknown primate species that would later be known as the Yahoo and the Yowie. 

Orang-Pendek

 Orang-Pendek

From: https://www.angelfire.com/ak/darksecret/zoo.html

Although mysterious hairy bipeds are stereotypically imagined as giant, hulking brutes, there have been reports of exceptions to that rule. The Orang-Pendek of the Indonesian island of Sumatra is described as a petite creature standing about two and a half to five feet tall. Its name means "little man" or "short person." The creature is said to have a pinkish-brown skin covered by a short, dark fur with a mane of long hair around the face that flows down the back. The Orang-Pendek is sometimes called the Sedapa, and in the forests of nearby Borneo there are similar reports of a creature known as the Batutut.

Considered more humanlike than apelike, the Orang-Pendek is said to walk mostly upright and to possess relatively short arms. Pint-sized footprints about six inches long, shaped very much like human footprints except for being proportionately rather broad, have been presented as evidence of the creature. Some accounts indicate that the Orang-Pendek walks with its feet reversed so that its toes point backward. According to Bigfoot investigator John Napier, this peculiar podiatric condition is a long-recurring theme common to man-monster stories around the world.

Natives of Sumatra have generally accepted the Orang-Pendek as a genuine animal for centuries, and because they believe it to be a gentle creature that only attacks small animals for food, they regard it with tolerance and respect, rather than fear. Skeptics argue that people have mistaken the island's orangutans, gibbons and sun bears as this creature, but Orang-Pendek eyewitnesses insist that what they have seen is none of those animals.

In 1910 there occurred one of the first Orang-Pendek sightings by a European, who reported "a large creature, low on its feet, which ran like a man, and was about to cross my path; it was very hairy and it was not an orangutan; but its face was not like an ordinary man's." A Dutchman named Van Herwaarden reported a similar encounter in 1923. He was an experienced hunter and armed with a rifle, but as would also be the case with Bigfoot spotter William Roe, he found himself unable to shoot the creature because it looked so human. "I suddenly felt that I was going to commit murder," Van Herwaarden said. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the Orang-Pendek, thanks primarily to the efforts of British travel writer Deborah Martyr. During a tour of southwestern Sumatra in 1989, Martyr's guide pointed out areas where Orang-Pendeks were frequently spotted, claiming that he had seen the creature twice himself. This was the first Martyr had ever heard of the Orang-Pendek and she was highly skeptical, but she was intrigued enough to investigate further. Before long, she had the opportunity to examine firsthand the characteristic tiny tracks allegedly made by the creature, and she judged them to be unidentifiable. Martyr was thorough enough to address the most obvious explanation for scaled-down humanlike footprints:

"If we had been reasonably close to a village, I might have momentarily thought the prints to be those of a healthy

seven-year-old child," Martyr reported. "The ball of the foot was, however, too broad even for a people who habitually wear no shoes."

Martyr took a plastic cast of the tracks, but unfortunately she sent it to the Indonesian National Parks Department and never saw it again, leaving some to speculate whether the evidence was lost or purposely suppressed. But Martyr continued her search, making a second career out of stalking the Orang-Pendek. In 1994, while on an expedition with an organization called Flora and Fauna International, Martyr reported making a personal sighting of the creature. She has since claimed to see the Orang-Pendek a total of three times.

There was a confused flurry of news reports in 1997 that a Flora and Fauna International group had succeeding in taking clear and convincing photographs of the Orang-Pendek, but these proved to be unsubstantiated rumors. The only photographic evidence yet collected is dark and blurry, leaving us to consider nothing more substantial than a series of odd footprints and scores of colorful stories of the short man of the Sumatran forests.

The Kongamato

 The Kongamato

From: https://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/siren/552/af_konga.html

The natives of the Jiundu region of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) have legends of a strange flying creature called kongamato. The name means "overwhelmer of boats" and appears in a magic charm of the Kaonde tribe. The charm, muchi wa kongamato, is a recipe for a type of potion reputed to protect travellers from floods, which are caused by the monster.

Frank H. Melland was intrigued by this charm and asked several natives what sort of animal the Kongamato was, and their answer was "a lizard with wings like a bat." Melland gathered that the wingspan of the animal was between four and seven feet, and that it was red, featherless, and toothed. The natives identified it with a pterodactyl when a picture was shown to them by Melland. As to its whereabouts, a tribal chief from the Jiundu region said that it dwelt in the Jiundu Swamps. Melland wrote of the Kongamato in In Witchbound Africa (1923).

Professor C. Wiman of Uppsala University suggested that the natives' description was influenced by German excavations of pterosaur bones in eastern Africa. However, this did not discourage Kongamato reports: in 1925, British newspaperman G. Ward Price and no less a personage than the future Duke of Windsor were in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Here, they learned a local man had been attacked by one of the flying monsters in a swamp. Once again, the natives identified the creature as a pterosaur.

A. Blayney Percival recounted in 1928 how he found a set of odd tracks--tracks which the Kitui Wakama natives assured him were left by a nocturnal creature which flew down from Mt. Kenya. Capt. Charles Pitman recounted in 1942 that there were stories of a flying monster which dwelt in swamps on the borders of Angola and Zaire.

In 1956, the first real sighting took place when J.P.F. Brown encountered two flying creatures with a three-foot wingspan, long tail, and dog-like muzzle on a road near L. Bangweulu, Zambia. They doubled back and flew overhead once more, and then Brown saw their sharp fang-like teeth.

Finally, Roy P. Mackal launched an expedition to Namibia to search for the Kongamato in 1988. Mackal didn't see the fabled flying beast, but James Kosi (one of Mackal's group) claimed to have seen a large black gliding form with white markings--maybe or maybe not the Kongamato.

Other accounts of flying creatures that aren't Kongamato, but are nonetheless interesting in that context, exist. In 1932, author Ivan T. Sanderson was leading an expedition in the Assumbo Mountains of Cameroon. When crossing a river, Sanderson recalled, a flying creature nearly the size of an eagle dove at him. He said that that evening, the expedition saw the black, sharp-toothed animal again. Natives called the animal olitiau. Sanderson himself believed it was an exceptionally large specimen of the hammerhead bat (Hypsignathus monstrosus), a particularly repulsive type of fruit bat. However, he also noted in 1970 that the dentition of the animal, from what he noticed, seemed more reptilian than mammalian (Bernard Heuvelmans disputes this notion).

Heuvelmans believed that the Olitiau was actually a large, unknown, type of bat related to the hammerhead, its common name derived from the term ole ntya ("the forked one," the Christian devil). Other cryptozoologists suggest the creature may be a surviving pterosaur.

Another account with possible relevance to these flying creatures is recorded in Old Fourlegs by J.L.B. Smith, an account of the discovery of the coelacanth. Smith recounted a superstition, circulating near Mount Kilimanjaro, of flying dragons. Roy P. Mackal inquired to Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, another of the coelacanth's discoverers, who had done an investigation into the dragons.

Courtenay-Latimer told Mackal that she had investigated a report from Keetmanshoop, Namibia. A boy tending his father's sheep became aware of the sound of rushing wind. He looked up to see a large serpent hurling itself off a ridge. The boy was knocked unconscious (presumably because of fright) and recounted later that the creature gave off a smell reminiscent of burnt brass when it landed.

Courtenay-Latimer came to the conclusion that the animal could not be identified, although she suggested it may have been an injured python. However, Mackal points out that the python explanation does not explain the disturbance in the air at the time the snake appeared.

In the same book, Smith also recounts how he learned, in a letter, that similar winged dragons were occasionally seen by a German missionary family near Mt. Meru. Bernard Heuvelmans contacted a friend of the German missionaries (the Trappes), Dr. Laszlo Saska. Dr. Saska corroborated that a winged creature, which he (perhaps inappropriately) termed a "Pterosaurian," was seen in the forests near the Trappe homestead.

Heuvelmans also recounts the story of Earl Denham, an explorer and mountaineer. Writing in his 1957 book Animal Africa, Denham recounts an experience he had in the Ruwenzori (a region between Zaire and Uganda).

I turned my back on the peaks, and...I heard a sharp rushing sound...I looked up and was amazed to see the vague outlines of two unidentifiable birds as they hurtled into the mists below, diving almost vertically...

COLEMAN, Loren

1999 Cryptozoology A to Z (w/ Jerome Clark). New York: Simon & Schuster/Fireside.

HEUVELMANS, Bernard

1986 Annotated Checklist of Apparently Unknown Animals With Which Cryptozoology is Concerned. Cryptozoology 5 (1-26).

1996 Lingering Pterodactyls, Part 2. Strange 17 (18-21, 56-57). Translation by Ben S. Roesch of material previously appearing in Les Derniers Dragons d'Afrique (Paris: Plon, 1978).

MACKAL, Roy P.

1980 Searching for Hidden Animals. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

In May 1955, a man reported an unbelievably strange sight while driving home at 3:30 a.m. in Loveland, Ohio, northeast of Cincinnati. He claimed to have spotted three bipedal reptilian creatures standing by the side of the road, and pulled over to watch them from his car for about three minutes. One of the froglike beings carried some type of bar or wand above its head, and sparks were shooting out of the device. The driver notified Loveland police of what he had seen, although no evidence of the creatures was later found.

Almost twenty years later, in March 1972, an unnamed Loveland police officer was driving on Riverside Road at about 1:00 a.m., traveling slowly because of ice on the road. Up ahead he saw an animal standing at the side of the road, which he first thought was a dog. As the cruiser’s headlights fell on the animal, it rose upright from a crouching position, showing itself to be three or four feet tall with leathery skin and a head like that of a lizard or frog. The beast looked at the officer momentarily before jumping over the guard rail and heading for the Little Miami River down below. The officer returned to the scene with another policeman a few hours later, and they found scrape marks on the embankment where something had apparently slid down to the river.

Two weeks later, another unnamed Loveland policeman reported a very similar encounter. Driving on the same road, he saw an animal lying in the middle of the pavement, which he thought was either dead or dying after being hit by a car. He got out of his car to clear the animal to the roadside, when suddenly the animal jumped up and the officer saw that it was a strange froglike creature. It began to flee, limping as if it were injured, and headed over the guard rail towards the river. The officer shot at the monster as it went down the embankment, but apparently did not hit it.

Neither of the officers filed an official report of the weird creature, but word of their sightings leaked to the press, and the modern legend of the Loveland Frog was soon spread far and wide. A farmer in Loveland also claimed to see a froglike creature in March 1972. Investigators began to speculate on a connection with the 1955 sighting of reptilian creatures, and the possibility of a secret race of lizard men inhabiting Ohio’s rivers. Some have suggested that the officers may have actually seen a Nile monitor lizard or a large iguana, which can be over six feet in length. But if so, these reptiles would have to be escaped from a zoo or otherwise transplanted to the area, since they are not native to the region.

Abnormally large reptiles and reptile men have also been reported in other parts of the country, including the “Lizardman” of Wayne, New Jersey, and the “Giant Lizard” of Milton, Kentucky. The most celebrated successor to the Loveland Frog in recent years was the Lizard Man craze that swept Bishopville, South Carolina, in 1988. A man reported that a 7-foot reptilian beast with red eyes and three-fingered appendages chased his car along a country road at over 40 miles per hour. A large number of other sightings followed, and police officers discovered three-toed tracks. But ultimately, the only hard evidence the Lizard Man left behind was the fattened bank accounts of local bumper sticker and T-shirt vendors.

 From: https://www.parascope.com/en/cryptozoo/predators04.htm