This is REALLY scary....UPDATE- Page 5

[StockardFan]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:29am

That thing is freaky. I don't think it's a panther? Why would his head be all wonky-crooked like that?

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:32am

The head is crooked because I think the cat is trying to maneuver his way out of the tree. What we see is his head turned and his shoulder.

re panthers in Florida. I heard that there are people who have them as pets and when they are being searched by the authorities, they let the cats loose.

[JerseyGirl2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:34am

Or escaped from a circus or something. Florida's stance is that there are none in the state. People are stupid, though. But there are black bobcats. They are just rare.

[AbbaRabbit]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:34am

i didn't even know there were black bobcats. the ones around here look like mean tabby cats.

edit:
this is an article that was originally printing in the sarasota herald, and re-posted on mr. coleman's website... myakka is where the original skunk ape was spotted...

State officials trying to identify big cat.
Myakka City, Florida

State Fish and Wildlife officers are trying to figure out what kind of big cat attacked a horse in Myakka City on Thursday.

Officers took a plaster cast of a cat's paw print, left behind in the mud, Fish and Wildlife Officer Jeff Babauta said.

"It's hard to say what it is right now," Babauta said. "It's definitely bigger than a bobcat. It could be a young panther. We don't know right now. The print was not that great."

The print will be analyzed by a Fish and Wildlife expert. A panther in this area would be a rare find. Babauta has never seen one in his in the area. A resident spotted the cat, but couldn't say what it was, officials said.

The print will be analyzed by a Fish and Wildlife expert. A panther in this area would be a rare find. Babauta has never seen one in his in the area.

Source: UMI

Updated On: 2/27/10 at 12:34 AM

[StockardFan]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:46am

I like it better when we thought it was a skunk ape.

[AbbaRabbit]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:51am

there's a better chance it's a skunk ape than a giant bobcat or panther, just based on other sitings in the area.

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:53am

No matter what anyone says, I say it's a panther. Lord knows I've spent enough time studying that photo. I'm convinced.

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:57am

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 1:00am

If you look at the zoomed in one, you'll see that the face is the same as this panther.

[AbbaRabbit]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 1:14am

in the picture where it's zoomed out, if it was a panther, think of the front of it as the head turned to the side, and the back of it as the panther's body, kind of like how a house cat will slink around the legs of a table.

just a question... how big do you think it was? i know you took the picture from a distance, but was the tree you took a picture of big? the reason i'm asking is because as i was typing the bit about how a panther could be moving in a similar fashion to a house cat i started thinking about my mom's old cat... he was a bombay cat. they're specifically bred to look like a miniature panther.

could it have been small enough to be a house cat that someone had let out?

Updated On: 2/27/10 at 01:14 AM

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 1:27am

Abba, the tree is huge. I used to photograph it a lot, as it was beautiful. I have a few gorgeous shots of some tropical birds hiding in the branches from the rain.

And from the size of the massive head and just the shoulder which is bigger than the head, I think it's a panther.

I'm stubborn on this!

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 1:51am

I was in Key West last week, you guys. I could have been killed! I wish I had seen this thread before I went, I would have taken the necessary precautions.

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 10:50am

Fret not Namo. You were probably in more danger from some of those locals~

[Jane2]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 11:05am

This indicates the size of the tree and if you look closely you can see some birds seeking shelter from the rain.

Updated On: 2/27/10 at 11:05 AM

[StockardFan]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 11:59am

I wish it was something bizarre, like Bigfoot.

[ghostlight2]

Posted: 2/28/10 at 10:22pm

Exactly. What is so frightening about this? That an animal whose living area has been increasingly encroached upon by humans made its appearance in a tree? That's something scary? I think it's scarier that humans have taken animals out of their natural habitat and made pets of them much scarier.

[ErikJ972]

Posted: 3/2/10 at 10:53am

Well..she thought it was scary when she didn't know what it was....

[EVIE]

Posted: 3/2/10 at 3:01pm

"I wish it was something bizarre, like Bigfoot."

So do I...sigh, oh well.

[Jane2]

Posted: 3/2/10 at 3:13pm

Well..she thought it was scary when she didn't know what it was.

Exactly Erik, thank you.

Here I was taking pictures behind my mother's house in W. Palm Beach across a canal to the tree behind her neighbor's house, as I did hundreds of times before. These homes are in a private retirement community where nothing exciting happens except for an ambulance coming in for someone.

It was raining pretty hard and I was interested in capturing the drops against that tree in the background. I took several shots but didn't even look at them until weeks after I had already returned to NYC.

Upon inspecting the shots, I saw a black shape in the lower left corner in one of them. Without enlarging I thought it might be a part of a branch or some refuse which blew in the wind. But when I first zoomed in, I saw something that I had never seen b efore, nor could I determine what it was. All I knew was that it was something extremely foreign to the environs. It looked like some kind of monster in the neighbor's tree to me.

AND I WAS EXCITED AND FRIGHTENED AT WHAT I SAW . It really doesn't matter to me what anyone else thinks.

Anyway, I emailed my discovery to a few websites that deal with this "sighting" No one was able to tell me what it was and a few of them recommend I forward it to another source. I never followed up on these sites. I have a feeling some of them assumed I photoshopped the thing in there.

I brought the photo in to work. One of the staff members who was from Florida said he had heard of black panthers being sighted around there as a result of pet owners setting them free, or from a circus. Since this was the only person who seemed to know what it was, I zoomed in some more, did some research, and to me it looks like a panther.

It's still scary to me to look at that thing emerging from the neighbor's tree on a completely residential street.