The author walking around the yard of a North Suffolk free range chicken farm with a "biggest possible domestic or feral cat" cut-out, attempting to recreate an alleged big cat caught on camera. The ghostly image of an alleged "big cat" overlaid on the photo of the exact same location reveals it to be a smaller domestic cat.
Oops! CCTV footage of an alleged big cat overlaid on a photo of the author moving around the yard with a measuring pole reveals it is a small domestic cat.
Fans of Father Ted may recall the scene featuring an exasperated Father Ted trying to explain to the simple-minded Father Dougal McGuire how toy cows in 1/32nd scale held up in front of him, which are “small”, appear the same size as real cows outside and visible through the window – because “those ones are far away.”
While few us us are as hopeless at Father Dougal at judging size and distance, do we still have a tendency to misperceive the size of an animal or its distance away from us? In British big cat investigations, whether that dark blur is really a black leopard seen far away or just a black-coloured large feral domestic cat not so far away is of crucial importance. Understanding perceptions and misperceptions of size and distance are essential for other areas of cryptozoological research, such as the study of sightings of water monsters.
How good are witnesses at estimating the size of the animal they’ve seen and the distance away from them, on land and sea? It’s an important question for cryptozoologists and not one that’s been tested that often. How likely are witnesses to mistake – for example – a bog-standard domestic cat for a puma or a floating duck or swimming deer for the Loch Ness Monster?
In psychology there is the term “egocentric distance perception” or “egocentric distance estimation” and there are various different methods to test an individual’s perception of distance, with different methods often yielding different results regarding how accurate people are at judging distances. All these various methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. Training people to estimate distances is a thing, especially in endeavours such as whale surveys.
There have been a handful of experiments (not all written up yet, see below) to test the accuracy of witnesses’s judgement of the size and distance away of an animal – in the water and also on land. And anecdotal evidence also suggests we easily misperceive photos or footage of cryptids in which there’s a lack of clear background detail that can help us judge the size of the creature.
Dr Charles Paxton of St Andrews University, an FT contributor, carried out a statistical analysis of sightings of sea monsters going back all the way to 1758 and up to 2000. Titled “The plural of ‘anecdote’ can be ‘data’: statistical analysis of viewing distances in reports of unidentified large marine animals 1758–2000,” (C. G. M. Paxton, Journal of Zoology, 279 (2009), pp 381–387. See also FT290.) A few of the reports it number-crunched were from Royal Navy ships’ logs. These reports are particularly valuable – ship’s logs are treated as legal documents, they are generally filled in soon after the event and are usually conscientiously kept up to date.
Dr Charles Paxton’s number-crunch data from sea monster accounts from 1758-2000 led him to the conclusion that there seems to be not much difference between sightings from a ship and sightings from the shore in terms of the spread of distances away from the witnesses of reported “sea monsters”.
Victorian fisheries magazine Land and Water of 1877 investigates alleged sea serpent sightings, attributing some of these to misidentified basking sharks. Photo: courtesy the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
But Dr Paxton concluded from his survey that the creatures seen were probably “closer than you’d get by chance alone”, suggesting witnesses had misjudged their distance from the observed alleged animal. You’d expect a more random distribution of distances but there was a “spike” in the data in “nearest recorded distances” of 200m (656 feet) or less. Random distribution should have had a bigger spread of nearest reported distances than there was, although we cannot be sure of this in the absence of any “control sample”.
The predominance of large sea animals seen up close can only partly be explained by ships moving towards the animal to investigate, by reported attacks on ships by the animal, or by reports of floating carcasses that come really close or even bob up against it but are not recovered.
Paxton suggests that the absence of really distant large sea animals may be partly down to a “reporting bias” –Victorian newspapers were interested in reporting a spectacular sea monster seen in lurid detail, less interested in a vague shape seen on the horizon. It could also be that sightings at a considerable distance are just less often reported as witnesses are less confident that what they’ve seen so far away really is a “sea monster” and not something else. (See here for a sceptical contemporary take on Victorian "sea monsters".
I note the same phenomenon with big cat sightings reports that come into my website bigcatsofsuffolk.com – there are plenty of reports of a big cat seen in the beam of the witnesses’s headlights after dark 10 or 15 feet away, (3 or 4.5m away) much fewer reports of a vague black blob on the horizon, with the witness less sure about what it is they’ve seen anyway. Yes, I do receive the odd photo of a tiny dark blob right at the other end of that field, but these are a bit rubbish and we can conclude absolutely nothing from them.
You’d also expect more distant sea monsters to have a longer recorded length, as bigger animals are just easier to see when they’re further away than smaller animals further away, as an exasperated Father Ted would no doubt explain to Father Dougal. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.
In Dr Paxton’s database there were slightly more reports that include a length given for the animal than there are reports that include a distance away from the animal. As Dr Paxton says, “however it is often unclear what the witness means by length...estimated length of whole animal or just what was seen,” a lot of the animal could of course be under water and so not visible.
Dr Paxton also did a statistical analysis of Loch Ness Monster reports since 1930, from which he concluded that the average duration of the sightings was rather longer than you’d expect by chance and that this may be down to “misperception” – could witnesses also be misperceiving how long their encounter lasts, as well as potentially getting the animal’s size and distance wrong? The reported duration of Loch Ness monster sightings, though, seems to have dropped over time, according to Dr Paxton’s statistical study. (“Identifying Biases and the Relevant Statistical Population: The Case of the Loch Ness Monster", Charles G. M. Paxton, Adrian J. Shine and Valentin M. Popov, Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2025, linked from here..
Results from the Exmoor Zoo experiment, into perception of size and distance of cut-outs the size of a big cat, were encouraging. Over a day at the zoo, under the direction of naturalist Trevor Beer, a film crew from the History Channel set up a series of cat-shaped cut-out silhouettes of various sizes, from domestic cat to jungle cat to lynx, puma and up to leopard-sized.
Over 100 visitors to the zoo were tested from distances of 50, 100 and 150 feet. (around 15, 30 and 45m.) Taking into account perhaps too ideal conditions – a flat landscape, good lighting and fair weather – witnesses did surprisingly well. Around 96 per cent of the zoo’s visitors were able to judge size and colour accurately. (Big Cats – Facing Britain's Wild Predators, Rick Minter, Whittles Publishing, Caithness, 2011.)
Rick Minter's wooden cut-outs sillhouettes, on display at a meeting in Eye, Suffolk in early 2026. These are similar to the ones used in the Exmoor Zoo Experiment. Top: Eurasian lynx; bottom: melnistic leopard.
I was told of another experiment conducted some time before 2007, which has yet to be published. The experimenters – who I’ve been asked not to name yet – aimed to test witnesses’ ability to correctly estimate the size and distance away of an alleged sea monster.To do this, they installed a two-metre high model of an F-shaped “monster” floating on the surface of a lake and asked people to describe it. It was “deliberately rubbish” and made of plastic pipes. Most subjects in the experiment over-estimated the distance away from them that the fake monster was. There were differences in results for different demographics – children, adult males, adult females (women made more accurate drawings when asked to draw the “monster” they had seen from memory, for example.) We’ll have to wait a while, though, before these findings appear published in a peer-reviewed journal – if ever.
Anecdotal evidence from a couple of investigations into alleged “big cats” caught on camera seem to show these are misidentifications, with the size of mystery cats captured in such images sometimes greatly exaggerated by misperceptions of distance.
The author's caracal-sized cut-out used in a 2016 North Suffolk investigation.
My own misadventures in mystery moggy identification in North Suffolk back in 2015 demonstrate just how easy it is to misidentify a small but odd-looking domestic cat caught on nocturnal monochrome CCTV footage as showing something much bigger and more exotic than it really is. This is especially true when there’s nothing in the background of the image to give a clear scale.
The author's "average-sized domestic cat" cut-out used in the same 2016 investigation (see above.).
A similar phenomenon appeared to be at work in a 2022 investigation by officers of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation into a “mountain lion” (puma) caught on a daytime trail camera.
Pumas have become officially Out of Place Animals in New York State, generally regarded as having disappeared from the Empire State by the end of the 19th century. A 2011 US Fish and Wildlife Service report declared the “eastern puma” subspecies Puma concolor couguar – once native to North America’s eastern seaboard – officially extinct. The same report did note, however, that sightings of pumas had persisted in New York State and other nearby US states and Canadian provinces up to that date. These were thought by the report’s authors to be the result of occasional wanderings of individuals from the currently still extant puma populations known to live in the western USA and western Canada, or escapes from captivity. Canada, whose provinces of Ontario and Quebec adjoin New York State, confirmed eastern pumas as already long extinct in 2018.
There is a small relic population of “Eastern panthers” (pumas) at the southern tip of Florida, some 1,400 miles (2,250km) due south of upstate New York. While these “Eastern panthers” have a somewhat different look to “Western pumas”, more recent genetic studies suggest these Florida “Eastern panthers” are genetically closer to Western pumas.
So there was much excitement in 2022 when trailcam photos appeared to show a slim “mountain lion” (puma) on the edge of a field of maize somewhere in upstate New York. An investigation by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation involved its officers revisiting the scene and parking a life-size plywood puma cut-out there, as well as measuring distances on the ground and the height of the maize crop. This immediately showed that the animal caught on camera was a small domestic cat with unusual colouration. (New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Facebook post, 13 March 2022.)
A warden places a puma-sized cut-out at the exact spot where the suspected "puma" was filmed. Photo: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The puma-sized plywood cut-out overlaid on the original trail cam footage, revealing the Out of Place Upstate New York puma to be in fact a domestic or feral cat with unusual colouration. Photo: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
With thanks to Dr Charles Paxton, Rick Minter, Benjamin Bober of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and to the Association of Cryptzoology Fieldwork and Analysis Facebook group.
©️ Matt Salusbury 2026
Update (10 September 2026): The BBC's 2026 documentary Our Lives - The Big Cat Investigator includes a scene in which footage of an very convincing-looking alleged big cat filmed at a distance is revealed by Surrey big cat investigator Gary Ridely, walking around the location with a measuring pole, to be a domestic or feral cat less than 2ft (60cm) tall.