Cougar: "Ghost of the Maine woods"

The Bangor Daily News has published an excellent and extensive article about cougar sightings in Maine.

Despite hundreds of sightings, cougar’s status remains in doubt
12/3/10 04:50 pm Updated: 12/5/10 06:57 am
By Kevin Miller, BDN Staff

Roddy Glover said he will never forget the day a decade ago he came face to face with the fabled ghost of the Maine woods, a predator that according to virtually all scientific accounts no longer existed in New England.

It was mid-September 2000 and Glover, then 39, was scouting out some easily accessible spots along railroad tracks in Monmouth where, with an injured foot, he could more easily bowhunt for deer.

Standing on an embankment above the tracks, Glover saw a large, tawny-colored animal strolling toward him in the mud beside the railroad ties, he said.

“I thought, ‘That looks weird. It doesn’t look familiar,’” Glover, a lifelong hunter as well as a taxidermist, recalled recently. “It was friggin’ huge.”

But when the animal turned sideways, revealing its characteristically long tail, Glover said he realized with a shock what was headed his way: a mother mountain lion with its good-sized offspring in tow.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I just laid down … because I couldn’t run because of my foot. They started coming closer and closer, and they got within 50 yards of me when they turned and went into the woods.”

A biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife later would say in media reports that the tracks he documented at the scene were “the most solid piece of cougar evidence we’ve ever had.”

In the decade since, DIF&W has received scores of reports — and even some grainy photos — from people throughout Maine convinced they spotted a mountain lion crossing a road, stalking prey in a field or lounging in the sunny backyard like a gigantic house cat.

Reports of mountain lions — including one sighting near Greenville last month — have come in from all around the state in recent years. But officially at least, self-sustaining populations of wild cougars or mountain lions exist only in Maine’s history books.

[...]

Read full Bangor Daily News article here (this excerpt is only the tip of the iceberg!):
http://tinyurl.com/2b2zfah

Sasquatch sighting near Maine border!

Loren Coleman reports on this fresh sighting from earlier in August (click here).

The incident, reported by one witness to be "quite chilling," occurred in the Skiff Lake area, just north-east of the Maine/Canada border with New Brunswick. You can see the area for yourself using Google maps, here.

"What we saw was a black sasquatch,” said Dale Tompkins. He and his wife spotted the creature crossing the road. Close behind them was another car, which they subsequently waved over, and verified that the strangers in the other car had seen the same thing they did. (full article here: http://bugleobserver.canadaeast.com/front/article/393032)

According to Loren Coleman, "what is being seen in the area is a 'Black Sasquatch.' Specifically, it is described as a “pitch-black, sleek, hairy, approximately 8-and-a-half foot [tall] Sasquatch.” [Source]

1808 UFO report in Camden

Found online at Frank Warren's blog, Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est, this article about an 1808 UFO sighting was originally published in the Courier Freeman newspaper on March 28, 1978. I've transcribed it for the blog:

Diary Describes UFO Seen In 1808
by Hal Stokes

Back in 1808 in Camden, Maine, there certainly were no weather balloons or Air Force jets to be confused with flying saucers. George Washington's soldiers had barely gotten back home to their farms. But something odd happened one summer night that year which was recorded in the diary of a Potsdam man's great-grandmother.

Today the passage is interpreted by his wife, an historian who is studying the diary, as a first-hand account of a UFO sighting in the early 19th century.

"I thought she was describing a UFO when I first read it," said Dr. Judith Becker Ranlett, an historian who teaches at the State University College at Potsdam. "If she had seen something normal, she would have attempted to explain it as a natural phenomenon," according to Dr. Ranlett, who is using the diary as the basis for scholarly research on women's history.

The diary was written by Cynthia Everett, a Massachusetts-born school teacher who taught in Maine during the early 1800s. Born in Rutland, Mass., in 1785, she moved to Maine in 1804 with her family and kept the diary between 1804 and 1815, the year she married. The diary remained in the family.

The past year, Dr. Ranlett undertook the task of transcribing the manuscript into 600 typewritten pages. It was then that she first read the passage that she believes describes a UFO sighting. The account is written in a firm hand on yellowing rag paper that is in remarkably good condition. The entry begins as a new paragraph to her recollections of the events of July 22, 1808; it is quite unrelated to the passage that proceeds it.

"About 10 o'clock I saw a very strange appearance. It was a light which proceeded from the East. At the first sight, I thought it was a Metier, but from its motion I soon perceived it was not. I[t] seem to dart at first as quickly as light; and appeared to be in the Atmosphere, but lowered toward the ground and kept on at an equal distance sometimes ascending and sometimes descending. It moved round in the then visable Horison, (it was not very light) and then returned back again, nor did we view it till it was extinguished."

That is the only passage in the entire diary that mentions the sighting, according to Dr. Ranlett. She finds it significant that Cynthia Everett did not explain what she witnessed as a natural phenomenon, since she was well-educated and had first-hand knowledge about the night sky. "She was the kind of person who would have explained it as a natural phenomenon, if she could have," said Dr. Ranlett, "In fact she did, her first thought was that it was a meteor."

Cynthia Everett was a woman who was well aware of the occurrences of nature according to Dr. Ranlett. In her diary she recorded earthquakes and the appearance of a comet. Her son became the captain of a clipper ship and navigated by the stars on a ship out of Thomaston, Maine. Dr. Ranlett is quick to point out that she herself is personally not a fan of the extraterrestrial. "I have no feelings one way or the other on UFOs," she said.

The sighting must have been at night, Dr. Ranlett reasoned, because Cynthia would have been teaching school at 10 a.m. and besides she always made her entries in the diary just before she went to bed. Dr. Ranlett said she determined that the sighting was in Camden through the various people that are referred to on that day. Cynthia was 24 years old when she wrote about seeing the strange light. She was single but was living, as teachers did, with a family in the area of the school. She changed her lodgings about once a week, according to Dr. Ranlett.

The schoolteacher had a good education for the period, Dr. Ranlett said. She had attended Leicester Academy at Leicester, Mass., one of the few truly coeducational schools where women went to class with men. The diary was written until Cynthia was in her 30th year. Entries cease three days after her marriage to John Ranlett, a widower with six children. He later died, but she remarried and the diary went to her soon, who kept it in the family. Her grandson, who became a lawyer, did some work transcribing it about 1880. The manuscript was bound in a handmade cover made of cloth backed with newspaper.

The diary belongs to Dr. Ranlett's father-in-law, who loaned it to her. She said that she is not nearly as interested in the passage about the strange light as she is about the revelations of the woman earning her own living in the early 19th century.

[Source]

UFO in Vassalboro, Maine?

A letter to the Kennebec Journal raises the question! Is there anyone else out there who saw something interesting on the night of June 16th?

Regarding a possible U.F.O. in the sky on Saturday night (June 16) at 9:45 -- I saw a very bright light overhead moving slowly west to east over Vassalboro.

The light lit up the sky enough to catch our eyes and then, as we followed it moving slowly, it suddenly took off at an amazing rate of speed, faster then anything we've ever seen.

Did anyone else, curious or crazy, report this?

Robert Bryson
Vassalboro

maine02465[at]msn.com

Original article here.

Maine's "ghost of the forest" reappears

The press has been having a field day with a resurgence of interest in the increasing rumors of the Eastern Cougar's return to Maine. Even the Portland Press Herald has gotten in on the action, with an article on March 24th that followed up on the prior article run on March 13th.

Here's an excerpt from the March 24th article, which gives an idea of the response:

Since we ran a story last week about a federal status review of the eastern cougar, reports of sightings have flowed in over the phone, the Internet and even in a handwritten letter (talk about your endangered species).

Mountain lions, or what looked like them, were reportedly seen in Standish, Windham, Raymond, Scarborough, New Gloucester, Brunswick, Freeport and lots of other places.

Reports also have been posted on the federal eastern cougar Web site by Mainers and residents of other eastern states where the “ghost cat” also has a healthy following. You can read them, or post your own, here.
[Source]

And here's an excerpt from the prior article (March 13), which details a great sighting just a handful of miles from Portland:

A couple of Maine sightings -- one in Cape Elizabeth and one in Monmouth -- are considered the state's most credible cougar encounters. Rosemary Townsend is as sure about what she saw today as she was on that March day in 1995. She saw the cat while walking down a gravel road in a large wooded area near Ram Island Farm in Cape Elizabeth.

"I thought it was a dog originally. Then when I looked at the face I thought, 'Oh my gosh, that's a mountain lion," she said Monday.

The cat was drinking water out of a small pond about 25 yards from her. It lifted its head and looked right at her, Townsend said. She saw its long "bottle-brush tail," a feature that distinguishes lions from lynx or bobcats. Townsend slowly turned around and walked back up the road. "I lost sight of him as I walked away from him, and I didn't go back and look," she said.

Friends convinced her to report the sighting, and biologists checked the area around the pond. They found tracks and hair, which they sent to Oregon for testing, she said. The hair was found to be consistent with mountain lion hair, although officials say no DNA tests -- the most definitive -- were conducted.
[Source]

Brunswick Bigfoot (Smallfooted Variety)

The BFRO (Bigfoot Research Organization) site has a particularly enjoyable post on a mystery simian seen in Maine during the seventies. I remember the first time I read this, I had to giggle, especially when one of the young witnesses says, "I fell right down in front of him and all he did was look at me. I would have known if it were a hippie or something. But it had a regular monkey face. You have seen a monkey before, haven't you?"

Darn hippies.

At any rate, the sighting report is actually a list of consecutive sightings of the creature, all near the Brunswick/Durham area in Maine, during the summer of 1973. Most of the sightings centered around the Jones Cemetery. Witnesses include a variety of people, ranging from age 10 up well into the adult register.

The repetitive nature of the sightings provoked a full scale days-long manhunt, including helicopter scans, and resulted in a cast of a 5-inch or so footprint, which Androscoggin Deputy Sheriff Footman commented on thusly: "Whatever made it weighs 300 or 350 pounds and I can't tell you much more. It's definitely not a bear track. I don't know what's going on here and I'd rather not express an opinion."

Thanks to Nicole Duennebier for reminding me about this fantastic report, and to Loren Coleman for originally posting it on the site back in 1998.

Illustration by yours truly.