Photo courtesy of Big Cats in Britain

Read Beastly Rumours in the latest issue of Stranger and wondering what's really out there? Check out these photos and eye witness stories and decide for yourself...(Stranger 16 is on the streets now, to bag yourself one, head to our shop)

All of the images supplied are courtesy of the Big Cats in Britain Society and have been verified as genuine photographs that have not been tampered with.

“There was a cat caught on video camera in Lincolnshire and it was analysed by the BBC in conjunction with the police and hairs were sent over to a lab in America for analysis and it came back confirmed that it was a leopard, so we went down there and while we were there we got a phone call that there was a sighting about five miles away so we all actually went down there to have a look around.
That was the first time that I actually saw a cat and it was running across a field and I thought, I am not going to let this one get away from me, it was about 10.00pm and dark so I got out of the car and I chased it down the field and I got half way down the field and thought “I must have lost it by now,” so I stopped and got my torch out and it was just sat there behind me.

But it wasn’t a leopard, and it wasn’t a puma and it certainly wasn’t a lynx, it was a cat that was about the size of an dog, all the features of a domestic cat but about Alsatian size kind of like a jungle cat, I mean, if it had looked like a leopard I wouldn’t have chased it.

Then up in Scotland I saw a brown cat with a white patch and in Ireland we caught a large black cat on camera. Again we had been there a week staking it out, it was our last day out there and we were actually packing up to come home walking through the fields, we actually saw it in the corner watching us, it was twilight and we realised it was a large cat just sat right there.”

Mark Fraser, Big Cats In Britain Society 

Photo courtesy of Big Cats in Britain

Photo courtesy of Big Cats in Britain

"We were walking along a footpath from Oare to Malsmead beside the river at approximately 4.30pm. This is where we saw the cat, approximately 20 yards away, and we were able to see it quite clearly as the leaves were not on the trees. It was sitting very still, watching us. It was about 4 ft in length, 2 ft high, all black, a definite cat's head, with ears pricked up, whiskers, oval yellowy eyes, very stocky body and legs, short-haired but with longer coarse looking hair on the belly. We all froze with fright even though I had a camera on my shoulder I was scared to use it in case the creature felt threatened and attacked us.  We stared at it for some seconds and it turned and walked off, turning its head to look back at us several times. The head looked more angular when turned back. My husband, who until that day had been extremely sceptical about the existence of a beast, thought it was a panther and he also thought it was slightly brownish-black.

Anne Waterson, Woolston talking of her sighting on Exmoor (from Big Cats: Loose in Britain, Marcus Matthews, 2007)

Photo courtesy of Big Cats in Britain

Photo courtesy of Big Cats in Britain