Not long ago, there were rumors and sightings of a big cougar-like cat prowling about northern Mexico. It had gotten the name of the "Onza". Professional biologists generally said it didn't exist, as usual, but local farmers/stockmen insisted otherwise. Finally the local people killed one and still no "professional" agreed. Five or so kills later, they finally admitted that something [either a "new" species or some cross-breed] DID exist. One of those dead Onzas is in the top right photo. It seems to take a lot of killing things to get the biology establishment to risk saying anything exists. It would be rare dark humor if we had to kill every one of a hidden species before "science" would say that they were alive.
Out-sized black cats seem to be running loose all over the place, particularly in England. Some cryptozoologists have almost made speaking and writing about them a cottage industry. Who knows what's behind all this, but a "recent" suggestion has been that some kind of probable(?) mutant or overly large [and retrogressed ?] cat tribe has arisen. A picture of this thing, the so-called Kellas Cat, is middle right above. But what of all the "really "weird cases? The glowing-eyed black stalkers, the uncanny Pookhas, the Vanishers? For most "respectable" cryptozoologists they are better left unsaid.
Frankly, I like Pookhas myself, but one of my rare attempts to do cryptozoology was a bit more academic than that. I was studying Egyptian mythology [well, why not?] and noticed that all the "theriomorphic" [animal-formed] gods were, when in their "animal head/human body" forms, representative of known animals except one. That one was a rather important one: SET. The dark lord of the south, the slayer of Osiris, and the forerunner of the image of the Christian Satan "didn't fit" the pattern. This turned out to be a matter of debate among Egyptologists, the vast majority of whose ideas I felt were obvious poppycock. Some baled out entirely and said, well they just made him up [when all others were real]. I said:B.S. Others tried to identify him with the most ridiculous of solutions, ridiculous because they never came close to matching the representations of the beast [sometimes being so far off that one wondered what medicines the guys were taking who suggested it--a lot like certain UFO theorists by the way]. I thought that if this was the best they could offer I could at least be forgiven for trying. Looking at a few dozen representations of SET across several dynasties, the vast majority of living animal candidates quickly fell away. Reading the religious texts which [surprisingly] described animal-like behaviors for SET, I became convinced that we were dealing with a real [at least at the time] animal, and not a myth. The animal was one of a very few choices: 1). an extinct violent wild dog breed, structured somewhat like a hound; 2). an early partly-tamed cross-breed hunting dog [old texts indicate a fear of bred dogs with certain SET-like characteristics]; or 3). a type of Hyena, with longer snout than today's, now probably hunted to extinction. I got valuable coaching from biological professionals so that my remarks weren't howling errors, and even got the paper published. SET was a Cryptid [I believe]. It was a dangerous man-killing, meat-eating thing and it was no myth. Though no longer hanging around the pyramids [if it ever were that far north], it "could "still be out there somewhere "just around the forest path" in sub-Saharan Africa. I wait in hope of someone discovering it...without being eaten of course.
Although my SETian foray was in the conservative area of cryptozoology [Hey, that's where the data led], my leanings, as you might guess are right past the liberal and onto the spiritually radical. Oddly, while dealing with this major spiritual icon [SET] I ended up grounded in the desert. But I don't believe the deep interest in the subject lies there, and there will be more about Pookhas later.
Credit: dark-sky-misteries.blogspot.com
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