UFO – Pain In The Bud

WASHINGTON –The caller was breathing heavily and speaking in rapid-fire sentences as if he had only moments to get the words out over the air.

“I’m telling you, Art, it’s the cats — the cats are piloting these drones!” the caller told Coast to Coast AM radio host Art Bell shortly after 1 am ET on Friday.

“Hold on, hold on,” Bell said theatrically. “You’re saying this has nothing to do with aliens or the government?”

The caller sighed.

“The cats may very well be in league with aliens, but I’m telling you, felines are behind…oh God! They’re here!”

The radio broadcast crackled with distorted hissing and yowling, punctuated by the caller’s pleas for mercy.

“Caller? West of the Rockies, are you there?”

The caller screamed a final time and the line went dead.

“Wow,” Bell told his audience of several million overnight listeners. “There you have it, folks. You be the judge, but that sounded like the real deal to me. Cats are piloting the mysterious drones!”

For weeks, Americans have been asking for answers about swarms of suspicious drones operating above homes, businesses, military bases and government buildings at night.

After rampant speculation that the drones could belong to rogue states, or could be part of some secret government flight test, the FBI confirmed Friday that felines are behind the frequent sightings.

Drone at night — A drone flies above a farm and ranch as the sun fades. Drones have been spotted circling chicken and turkey coops, as well as fish markets.

Biden administration officials confirmed to several media outlets that intelligence supported the theory that cats — not Iranians, Russians or some secret Pentagon operation — are operating the drone swarms that have been lighting up the night sky in states like New Jersey and Maryland for several weeks, befuddling local and state officials.

“At first we thought the idea was absurd,” said a high-ranking official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Then we received reports of drone swarms circling several meat-packing plants, a Chewy distribution center in Trenton, and two PetSmarts in northern New Jersey.”

So far, the felines’ motivation remains shrouded in mystery, but experts on the small, furry animals ventured guesses on what may have motivated their sudden interest in aviation and airspace.

“No one’s claimed responsibility, so we’re left to speculate,” said Norah Grayer, a feline behaviorist with NYU’s Gummitch School of Veterinary Science. “But it may be that felines, as a whole, have decided the meow is insufficient for getting their demands across. Humans have become adept at tuning out those vocalizations, so this may be the next step in an attention arms race, so to speak.”

Noted cat expert Jefferson Nebula offered a different explanation.

“Cats are notoriously subject to FOMO, which is one reason why they can’t abide closed doors,” he said. “If someone managed to convince them that we humans were holding out on them, and there are entire worlds of yums we keep for ourselves, well, that would spark the wrath of these otherwise friendly little guys.”

Cat with drone — Felines have mastered control over aerial drones despite their lack of thumbs.

For his part, Bell consulted with Michio Kaku, the physicist and science communicator who has been a regular presence on Coast to Coast.

“We physicists have been saying for decades that cats are much more intelligent than we give them credit for,” Kaku said. “This could be retribution for the Schroedinger’s cat thought experiment, or felids may be looking to surpass humanity’s understanding of 11-dimensional hyperspace.”

“Professor, we’ve spoken quite a bit about the Kardashev scale [of civilization progress] in the past,” Bell said. “If we separated human and feline societies, where would we each fall on the scale? Humans are about a zero point seven, are we not?”

“That’s right,” Kaku said. “We physicists believe humanity is on the cusp of a Type I civilization, with things like the internet as a Type I telecommunications system and fusion power on the horizon. However, if you break it down and cats were separated into their own civilization, cats could plausibly already be a Type I civilization.”

“They’re ahead of us?”

“That’s right,” Kaku said. “We physicists believe cats can tap directly into primordial energies and have mastered quantum teleportation. In Star Trek, the Federation is a Type II civilization, and the Caitians — a species of alien cats — are part of the Federation. Yet it’s widely understood that the only reason the Caitians haven’t conquered entire swaths of the galaxy, like the Borg and the Klingons, is because of their strict adherence to their napping schedule and their inherent laziness. These drone swarms may be a signal that real-life cats are fed up enough to disturb their napping schedules, in which case we should all be terrified.”

Header image of drone light show credit Wikimedia Commons

For all the advances in optics and camera technology over the last 20 years alone, there are two kinds of people who love blurry, low-resolution footage: UFO enthusiasts and people who are convinced the UK is like a cold, rainy Africa with big cats lurking in every bush and field.

To be a member of either group you’ve got to shut down critical thinking faculties, suspend disbelief and put faith in the highly improbable. (Or the impossible when it comes to people who insist little green men are zipping across the night sky in sleek ships that defy all we know about physics and aerodynamics.)

The UK’s big cat believers claim the country is home to a thriving native population of large felids. Some of them think they’re “panthers,” not specifying which species of cat they think is out there, while others claim jaguars, leopards or tigers are prowling the English countryside, spotted only fleetingly at the edges of fields or in the brush, and only by people who own two-decade-old Nokia flip phones with rudimentary cameras.

They believe a native, breeding population not only exists, but for centuries has eluded capture and avoided leaving compelling evidence.

Cheetah in London — “Pardon me, mate, could you point me toward Aldersgate Street?”

The phantom cats have remarkable stealth abilities. They’ve never tripped a trail camera or appeared in a single frame of CCTV footage. Not a single tree marked for territory, not a single pile of cow bones picked clean by giant barbed tongues, not a single clump of panthera dung. Not even a hungry cub drawn into a village by the smell of barbecue on a summer night.

The reported sightings say more about human capacity for imagination — and how poor we are at estimating size over distance — than they do about the crypto-pumas and melanistic tigers some people swear they’ve seen.

When alleged big cats are spotted in the UK, they’re always seen fleetingly and from afar. When witnesses try to confirm what they’ve seen, the animals are gone.

“I was coming up to Jolly Nice from Oxford at around 7.50pm and the car in front of me was travelling at a steady pace. I looked to the verge of the other side of the road because I saw a bright pair of eyes low down. Upon further inspection, I suddenly realised there was a large outline of a low and stocky cat that was huge.”

That’s the testimony of a UK man who told the Stroud Times, a local newspaper, that he encountered a big cat a few minutes before 8 p.m. on Friday in Nailsworth, a town of about 5,600 people a little more than 100 miles west of London. His description mirrors that of others who say they’ve spotted large felids, mostly in the UK’s countryside and small villages.

Small Cats Looking Big — Photograph from a previous “big cat sighting.” It’s typical of the photos that surface with claims of leopards and pumas stalking the countryside. Blurred details and digital zoom make it difficult to gauge distance and scale.

The story’s headline reads: “Big cat expert’s verdict: beast spotted was a leopard.”

The expert in question is Rick Minter, an amateur biologist who has made UK big cat legends into something of a cottage industry by publishing books, hosting a podcast and frequently speaking to newspapers about the phenomenon. It’s not clear how Minter decided the animal in Friday’s sighting was a “black leopard,” but he’s said in previous interviews that he believes most alleged big cat sightings in the UK are leopards, with pumas accounting for most of the others.

Neither animal is native to Europe. Pumas range from South America to the American northwest and midwest, with isolated populations in places like Florida. Leopards are native to Africa and Asia, with ranges that overlap with lions on the former continent and tigers on the latter, mostly in India.

Puma at Buckingham Palace — “I’m originally from San Diego, actually, but the expat life suits me and the British are very tasty.”

Some have floated the possibility that the mysterious felids are escaped pets who have successfully adjusted to the countryside. Minter says the evidence points to breeding populations.

If there are thriving populations, the cats would need to exist in numbers, with at least 50 on the extreme low end. If they’re escaped pets, the authorities would know.

Unlike the US, where big cat ownership was banned in the vast majority of states even before the recent Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed, owning a massive carnivore slash killing machine isn’t illegal in the UK. But owners have to register their animals, seek approval for the habitats and enclosures they’ve built, and submit to annual inspection.

There have been a handful of escapes over the decades and each time the authorities were able to capture or kill the animals, often tracking them via livestock kills. Pet tigers and leopards might be dangerous, but they’re still at a disadvantage compared to their wild brethren, meaning they go for the easy, guaranteed kills when they’re hungry. Nothing’s easier than a docile farm animal that’s never seen a big cat.

Tiger at a pub — “Oi, wanna have a pint and watch Man U vs Arsenal on the telly?”

More recently, big cat hunters in the UK have tried to find more compelling evidence than a couple of blurry photographs of house cats out for a stroll. They’ve touted suspicious-looking pug marks, and in August 2022 found black fur on a barbed wire fence. According to the believers, a UK lab confirmed the fur belonged to a leopard, but there was no chain of custody, no documentation of how the sample was found and handled. Big cat experts remain skeptical.

Our research team carried out field work in fife over the weekend off the back of a recently sighted big cat 😊 #fife #BigCats #bigcatsightings #bigcatsscotland #bigcatsuk pic.twitter.com/CeUjEXJto0

— Big Cat Sightings In Scotland (@BCSI_Scotland) October 24, 2022

Indeed, Oxford’s Egil Droge, a wildlife conservationist, points out that in places where big cats live, you don’t have to go hunting for evidence. It’s everywhere.

“I’ve worked with large carnivores in Africa since 2007 and it’s obvious if big cats are around. You would regularly come across prints of their paws along roads. The rasping sound of a leopard’s roar can be heard from several kilometres,” Droge wrote, noting that leopards in particular are not discriminating about what they kill and leave ample evidence of their handiwork when they’ve hunted.

Still, as improbable as the sightings are, the big cat enthusiasts of the UK have one up on UFO enthusiasts and hunters of cryptics like Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and the Jersey Devil: the creatures they’re looking for actually exist and may surprise us yet.