Anyone else seen a big black cat near the Blue Ridge Parkway lately?

Not really my territory (I'm Edinburgh based so large mystery cats are a bit more on the doorstep here), but the Blue Ridge sightings have been cropping up in reports for decades so either there's a genuine breeding population of escaped exotics out there or something weirder is going on. The sheer consistency of the descriptions across different witnesses who've never met each other is the bit that gets me. That's the same pattern you see with credible poltergeist cases - independent corroboration is where the boring sceptic arguments start to fall apart. What were the actual dimensions on what you saw, rough estimate? Because "big black cat" covers everything from an unusually chunky moggy to a melanistic cougar and those are very different problems.