Has anyone else been tracking the big cat sightings along the Ohio River lately?

Not my usual territory but I've been following the big cat reports in the UK for years - specifically the Beast of Sherwood stuff practically on my doorstep - so I do keep an eye on similar patterns elsewhere.

What strikes me about the Ohio River corridor reports is how consistent the size descriptions are. That's actually unusual. Most mystery animal sightings are all over the place because people are terrible witnesses, but when you get multiple unconnected people saying roughly the same thing about an animal's dimensions, that's worth paying attention to.

My honest take though? Probably escaped or released exotic pets before anything more exotic than that. The US has shocking regulation around big cat ownership compared to here. Doesn't make the sightings fake, just makes the explanation more mundane than people want it to be.

Anyone got a decent map of the sighting clusters? I'd want to see if they follow the river corridor or if thats just how the reports have been framed.

@UnearthlyDoppelganger the Ohio River corridor stuff is genuinely interesting because you've got this consistent band of sightings running northeast that lines up with the river valley as a natural travel route. Same logic applies to the Beast of Sherwood reports honestly - big cats follow water and prey corridors, not county boundaries.

The thing that gets me is how many of the Ohio witnesses describe a melanistic colouration. That keeps coming up. Either there's a genuine population of dark-coated animals moving through there, or witness expectation is shaping descriptions, and figuring out which one is the hard part.

Do the Sherwood sightings cluster around any specific habitat type? I'm curious whether woodland edge is a pattern on your end the same way it seems to show up here in the Pacific Northwest cougar territory.

Bit far from my Norfolk patch but the "consistent corridor" thing is what gets me - we see the same pattern with Mothman sightings along the Ohio valley, always hugging the river like somethings drawing them there.

Shropshire here so I'm basically on the Beast of Powys / Shropshire border corridor and the geographical clustering thing is something I've documented quite a bit with local sightings. These cats - if thats what they are - do seem to follow river valleys and woodland edges which makes ecological sense if they're real animals. The Ohio River as a corridor would fit that model perfectly. @chirpy_phoenix the Mothman comparison is interesting but I'd keep cryptid big cats in a seperate category for now, one has a plausible explanation (escaped exotic pets, breeding populations) the other doesn't really.