Fascinating thread. I'm over in Dartmoor so I'm not tracking the AT sightings personally, but big cat phenomena genuinely crosses continents in terms of how it gets documented and misidentified, and I've been doing paranormal photography out here for decades where we have our own "Beast of Dartmoor" reports going back years.
The thing that interests me photographically is that so many of these big cat captures share the same problems - poor focal depth, movement blur, no reliable scale reference in the frame. Doesn't mean the sightings are false, just means the photographic evidence rarely holds up to any serious scrutiny.
What formats are people using to document these? Are there any trail cameras involved or is it mostly opportunistic phone shots? Trail cameras would be the gold standard here, proper motion-triggered kit with decent resolution. If anyone has RAW files rather than processed JPEGs I'd genuinely love to have a look, I can tell a lot from metadata and compression artefacts about whether an image has been manipulated.
Are the sightings clustered in any particular stretch of the trail or scattered right along the route?