During my crime reporting days I wrote an unusual story about a guy who’d been picked up on armed robbery charges. The suspect’s face was visible, the security camera footage was unusually sharp, and the suspect himself had a previous armed robbery conviction from years earlier.
It looked like an open and shut case.
There was just one problem: The man had an airtight alibi. He had half a dozen people willing to go on record saying he was at a party 70 miles away when the robbery happened, as well as ATM receipts showing he’d withdrawn cash that night far from the site of the robbery. When he retained a lawyer, the attorney was able to show his cell phone records placed him at the party, and forensic videography showed the man in the armed robbery footage, despite bearing a striking resemblance to the suspect, was taller and moved differently.
In the end the police dropped their case and found the real robber, but I never forgot the story, nor my conversations with forensics experts who explained how something as simple as taking measurements at a crime scene, from the same angle and using the same cameras, could prove a case of mistaken identity. Things like gait, observing the dominant hand and other body language also factor heavily.
One forensics expert told me it’s like watching the replay in a baseball game: You can be absolutely sure a runner is out by watching footage from one angle, but footage of the same slide from another angle can clearly prove the runner’s foot made contact with the base before the fielder’s glove tagged him.
That kind of attention to detail is what helped Thomas Keller rule out the possibility that a mountain lion was roaming the fields of Lower Macungie Township in Pennsylvania. On Sunday, Pennsylvania state police issued a warning to people in the area that “a large feline was seen in the fields” near a residential road.
Keller, a furbearer biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, headed down to the area earlier today and found the exact spot where a local homeowner had photographed the supposedly wild cat. Using a life-size cut-out of a puma, which he placed carefully where the cat was standing, and a camera placed at the same height and angle used in the original photograph, Keller proved the cat in the photo was much smaller than a puma.
“It’s just a house cat,” Keller said flatly after producing his own photos of the spot.
Like the forensic videographer who helped clear a man of a robbery charge, Keller was able to disprove the immediate conclusions of people who saw the image. He says the work is important because “there’s a lot of fear and panic that can spread.”
“We will generally go out and try to talk with who reported it and get perspective on where the photo was taken,” Keller told the Lehigh Valley News. “We look at original picture and measure what we can … We look at things in the picture that we can get scale from. It might look like a mountain lion, but we need to know what those measurements are to get the scale.”
Confusion over what the camera shows is compounded by the optical effects of zoom, which can throw off the observer’s sense of scale, he told The Morning Call, a local newspaper. He said people who aren’t sure what they’re looking at should call their state game commissions, or comparable offices, to get help from experts.
As for Pennsylvania, while there have been historical reports of mountain lions, most were decades ago and the handful that panned out were cases in which the large felines escaped from private captivity or traveling circuses.
Although it’s not unheard of for pumas to migrate east, they’re no longer extant in the region and sightings of the elusive cats are almost always cases of mistaken identity when people see bobcats or large housecats.
“There’s none,” Keller said. “We get hundreds of these reports every year and we haven’t been able to substantiate one yet.”
Header image credit Cindy Lou Photos/Wikimedia Commons
Pain In The Bud 
We have a lot of animals visit my backyard. Usually the only ones I see are cats, since the raccoons, possums, and groundhogs usually stop by after it gets dark. From the upstairs window, for some reason, the cats always look VERY big, like almost medium dog size. If they’re still in the yard by the time I get out to the deck, they then look regular cat-size.
Perspective is everything.
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I hear ya, Bud is often mistaken for a hulking Amal tiger and I have to reassure people he’s really a cuddly house cat.
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Who’s stupid enough to be afraid of a puma… Rhetorical question ’cause there’s a lot of stoopid people out there.
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Unfortunately it’s true. It’s surprising how many people confuse pumas with African lions and think they’re a danger to humans.
The stats show people are 74 times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a mountain lion in the US. P-22 used to take naps beneath porches and hang out within sight of people in Griffith Park, and for 10 years the most aggressive thing he ever did was pick off a small dog when he was old and sick and couldn’t hunt wild animals any more.
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Love this article! Keller did the right thing by using a properly sized prop, demonstrating how misleading guessing the size of an animal can be. But there are probably still locals who’ll swear they saw a catamount …
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I just saw another interesting article about similar cases of mistaken identity, with a wildlife expert in the south saying he’s gotten lots of reports of supposedly melanistic pumas over the years, and they were all either domestic cats or super rare melanistic bobcats.
Did you see the “bigfoot sighting” reported in the news last week? It was a guy in a ghillie suit messing with people on a tourist train lol.
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Where did that ghillie suit guy mess around? I haven’t heard of this before.
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Here are some articles about it:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article280461874.html
https://www.cleveland.com/nation/2023/10/a-bigfoot-sighting-caught-on-video-in-colorado-has-some-people-believing.html
This story mentions locals who have been known to mess with people by wearing ghillie suits and notes that the “bigfoot” in the footage appears to be wearing sunglasses:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/bigfoot-sasquatch-longtime-resident-reveals-legends-pranks-after-latest-proof
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I distinctly remember an article saying someone had owned up to the train sighting but I can’t find it now. Kind of frightening to think I may have dreamed it up, unless the article was taken down for some reason.
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You might be interested in “Path of the Puma – The Remarkable Resilience of the Mountain Lion” by Jim Williams
Provides some very interesting view points on the “puma problem” – and solutions to said “problems” that involved people, the cats and their prey animals. This is conservation that the news never seems to report – probably never will, either. Excellent book.
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I’m not sure if most people who work in media understand conservation issues, why they’re necessary and what the challenges are. I certainly did not when I was younger. The California-area media does a good job because pumas are pretty common out there, and there’s been a big push to educate people so they don’t understand the pumas aren’t out to kill people.
I’ll check out that book, thanks for recommending it.
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It’s good there is a way to evaluate the photos now! I live where there are many cougar reports. Wildlife officials always say no. On at least one official wildlife fb page, posts of sightings were so common that the page banned cougar posts. I can’t find that page at the moment. The last confirmed sighting in AL was 1956, when one was shot dead. I’ve seen a picture of that online a few years back, but now I can’t find easy access to it. I don’t have a fixed opinion. In the 80s there were reports in our area. We also had an aural encounter at that time we felt was a cougar, and I recorded that in my book. It may have been a bobcat. I’ve only ever seen a bobcat in the zoo (sad), but they’ve been seen near us. Sadly, that story came from someone who shot all the bobcats around because he was afraid they’d attack his kids. Not likely, though they will prey on domestic cats. I did do a lighthearted post on my site about all this, Big Cat Identity Kerfuffles, based around our Lynx, who looked exactly like a bobcat when younger. Big Buddy, if this is too long, or if I shouldn’t have mentioned my own book and/or blogpost, please delete or edit as you wish. No worries from me. I tried to find a post on another blog I thought I’d seen about a Florida black cougar sighting but could not find that either.
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Not at all, in fact I had been meaning to reach out to you about doing a post about your book.
I’m thinking it’s possible that maybe the Florida population of pumas had some wander up around AL and other areas. We had sightings here about a decade ago and from what I recall they were taken seriously, with the local wildlife experts suggesting the mountain lion could have been an escaped or abandoned pet.
When I took Bud on walks I was always cautious because there are coyotes in the area. I live in a downtown area with busy streets, but there are stretches of wooded areas and a coyote took a woman’s small dog one night years ago as she was taking the dog out for a walk.
As for the person who shot the bobcats, I know it’s Alabama but there should be criminal penalties for that sort of thing, as well as for people who shoot mountain lions. Ignorance is not a good excuse for killing animals, especially when a few minutes spent on Google is enough for someone to learn they’re not aggressive toward people.
It’s a stain on American culture that the default attitude toward wildlife is “Let’s shoot them!”
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Agree completely about the shooting of wildlife. It’s not “sport”. Teach children how to co-exist safely with wildlife. There were reliable reports of panthers in south AL near the FL line when the hubs was growing up. That 1956 thing was in the middle of the state. I think the larger cougars were all over the east at one time. Faulkner mentions them in MS and more recently, there’s the song by Mike Smith, Panther in Michigan. Coyotes are indeed dangerous to pets, and must be watched out for. We used to hear them in the woods but not as much recently. They’ve been seen in town, too.
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