HomePossibly the worst cryptid sighting ever
A cryptid, at a distance, whilst zooming along a motorway
Ever since I was a wee girl, I loved Forteana. Tales of the unexplained. Creepy stories, earth mysteries, that sort of thing.
Most of them were remote, in relatively exotic places like Bermuda, the Harz mountains, or New Jersey. There were a few, though, that were a lot more local. Crop circles, even if they didn’t tend to pop up much in The North. The Loch Ness Monster, even further away. And alien big cats.
The classic alien big cat from that time period was the Beast of Bodmin, but they popped up all over the country. The Beast of Exmoor wasn’t too far from Bodmin, but they’ve popped up further and further north over the years. There was a spate of sighting in Lincolnshire in the nineties, for example. I always kept a lookout, but I never saw one.
Until, towards the back end of 2024.
They weren’t on my mind at all, that day. I was zooming south down the A1, just past Peterborough, just coming up to the Huntingdon exit, when I saw it. About here.
On the right, was a landscape of rolling hills leading up away from the road, arable fields, with woodland to either side. In the nearer field was a large, black animal. Too dark to be a stag. I thought at first, it must be a cow, but then realised that it was the wrong shape. It was moving, away from me, and it was stalking. Keeping itself low, its shoulders moving stealthily.
It was a big cat. Like nearly all British big cat sightings, it was a black one.
I would have left it at that—I had other things on my mind that day. But the next day I thought to search for other sightings; and a few of weeks earlier, another had been spotted only about twenty miles to the north, around the area where Lincolnshire starts to fade into Cambridgeshire.
I only had it in sight for a couple of seconds, to be fair. I could have misjudged the distance or the scale. No big cats have ever been reported as roadkill in Britain. But if there really aren’t any here, then many, many other people in Britain have made the same mistake as me over the past fifty years; and in one case now, genetic evidence of a big cat has been found. I’ve never seen a feral wallaby either, but nobody doubts that they exist in Britain.
More than that, though, I want to have seen it. They’ve been in the back of my mind since I was small, after all. Now—for over a year, even—I can genuinely tell people I’ve seen one.