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Big Cat Sighting In Peterborough?

A

Anonymous

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Paul Hughes, Peterborough,

I'd like to report a sighting of what I believe may have been an Alien Big Cat in the Peterborough area.



It was a little after 11:30 at night, two days ago (04/10/2003). I was outside the back door to our house smoking and talking to my wife who was standing just inside the door.



The other side of a chain link fence at the bottom of our garden is quite dense woodland used by the owners of the local Fitzwilliam estate during the hunt, and it's not unusual to hear them passing through during the right season. The wood is populated with game and several times we've seen deer and pheasant either in the garden or woods.



We were standing talking for a few minutes before we became aware of sounds in the woods of something quite large moving through the undergrowth. We listened for some minutes - straining to see anything in the dark - when I remembered the torch we keep by the back door in case of power cuts.



I left the torch turned off as I didn't want whatever was making the noise to disappear before I could get the light trained on it properly, then pointed it at the spot where I judged the noises to be coming from before turning it on.



You can imagine our unease when the light illuminted the bushes beyond the fence - and two pairs of glowing eyes were already looking back at us!



One pair of eyes appeared to be roughly seven or eight inches apart and some three or four feet off the ground. The other pair were around four to five inches apart and somewhat lower than the first - perhaps two-and-a-half feet above the ground. They put us in mind of an adult and it's young. Both sets of eyes shone like a cat's in a headlight and were a light-yellow (from the torchlight I would guess) and slightly red in colour.



We stared directly at each other for perhaps thrity seconds before the eyes started to move around, coming and going, almost like whatever they were was ducking down or looking around and then popping back up to check if we were still there. this coming and going lasted perhaps another twenty seconds before they dissappeared for good. As they did so I heard a distinct "Reow" sound (it's the only way I can describe it in text!) like you sometimes hear in documentaries about big felines. I heard this but my wife didn't as I had moved further into the garden, while she didn't feel comfortable leaving the back door.



We watched for some minutes further but weren't able to see anything else that night.



It's only since this event that I realised something about what we'd seen. We had seen both eyes of each of the creatures when they were looking at us. Deer, like most 'prey' creatures have eyes placed to the side of their heads so they get a better field of view, and tend to prefer to look out of either one or the other eye when watching you. In this instance we would most likely have seen only one eye reflecting at a time. However we had seen both eyes of each pair staring at us at once and this would indicate a 'predator' with both eyes facing forward. The kind of view you would get if a big cat was watching you!
 
Paul Hughes, Peterborough,

I'd like to report a sighting of what I believe may have been an Alien Big Cat in the Peterborough area.



It was a little after 11:30 at night, two days ago (04/10/2003). I was outside the back door to our house smoking and talking to my wife who was standing just inside the door.



The other side of a chain link fence at the bottom of our garden is quite dense woodland used by the owners of the local Fitzwilliam estate during the hunt, and it's not unusual to hear them passing through during the right season. The wood is populated with game and several times we've seen deer and pheasant either in the garden or woods.



We were standing talking for a few minutes before we became aware of sounds in the woods of something quite large moving through the undergrowth. We listened for some minutes - straining to see anything in the dark - when I remembered the torch we keep by the back door in case of power cuts.



I left the torch turned off as I didn't want whatever was making the noise to disappear before I could get the light trained on it properly, then pointed it at the spot where I judged the noises to be coming from before turning it on.



You can imagine our unease when the light illuminted the bushes beyond the fence - and two pairs of glowing eyes were already looking back at us!



One pair of eyes appeared to be roughly seven or eight inches apart and some three or four feet off the ground. The other pair were around four to five inches apart and somewhat lower than the first - perhaps two-and-a-half feet above the ground. They put us in mind of an adult and it's young. Both sets of eyes shone like a cat's in a headlight and were a light-yellow (from the torchlight I would guess) and slightly red in colour.



We stared directly at each other for perhaps thrity seconds before the eyes started to move around, coming and going, almost like whatever they were was ducking down or looking around and then popping back up to check if we were still there. this coming and going lasted perhaps another twenty seconds before they dissappeared for good. As they did so I heard a distinct "Reow" sound (it's the only way I can describe it in text!) like you sometimes hear in documentaries about big felines. I heard this but my wife didn't as I had moved further into the garden, while she didn't feel comfortable leaving the back door.



We watched for some minutes further but weren't able to see anything else that night.



It's only since this event that I realised something about what we'd seen. We had seen both eyes of each of the creatures when they were looking at us. Deer, like most 'prey' creatures have eyes placed to the side of their heads so they get a better field of view, and tend to prefer to look out of either one or the other eye when watching you. In this instance we would most likely have seen only one eye reflecting at a time. However we had seen both eyes of each pair staring at us at once and this would indicate a 'predator' with both eyes facing forward. The kind of view you would get if a big cat was watching you!

Didn't mention colour of eyes. But would suggest it would be more likely it was an adult Fox and half-grown cub?
 
Didn't mention colour of eyes. But would suggest it would be more likely it was an adult Fox and half-grown cub?

With eyes 8” apart and four feet off the ground? The biggest fox ever killed in the UK weighed 38lbs and was 4’ 7” from nose to tip of tail. A typical dog fox would weigh about 25lbs.

People think they’re huge. They aren’t.

maximus otter
 
With eyes 8” apart and four feet off the ground? The biggest fox ever killed in the UK weighed 38lbs and was 4’ 7” from nose to tip of tail. A typical dog fox would weigh about 25lbs.

People think they’re huge. They aren’t.

maximus otter

Your right 'maximus' missed out that part - my fault entirely! (I thought I was reading the full text - but with the extra wide spacing I only caught the lower half of text)
 

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Anyway, thank you for posting your sighting

I was living in North Devon during the ‘Beat of Exmoor’ frenzy in the early eighties. My next door neighbour was the school bus driver who had a daylight sighting of a large black puma-type cat whilst on the school run. Interestingly, the boys at school who were from farming families had been talking about large cats on Knowstone Moor and beyond to Exmoor in the late seventies, and before all the media hype. Apparently the local farmers had organised shooting parties after a lot of sheep and lambs had been killed (this would have been 1979 or earlier).

Later, in about 1996/7, I became convinced of the existence of big cats when working on a large country estate in South Devon. Here I was privy to the witness testimony of a young farmer who had stumbled across a large black puma-type cat sunning itself in long grass. The big cat, taken by surprise, quickly jumped a large hedge to escape, a hedge way too high for a domestic moggie to jump.
 
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