Small or far away?

This article first appeared in Fortean Times FT 474, September 2026

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.

A still photo showing a suspected "puma" captured by a trail camera in Upstate New York in 2022. Photo: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation





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.

My Life in the Fort Sort Cohort

This article first appeared in Fortean Times, FT471;June 2026.

The new plastic Sort Engine

Since the beginning of 2025 I have taken part in monthly Fort Sorts, I even hosted the Fort Sorts at the family home in Islington throughout that year. This has allowed me to monitor recent trends in background cosmic weirdness.

The Fort Sort involves a small band of volunteers sorting newspaper cuttings sent in by FT readers into the “sort engines” – towers of labelled pigeonholes for the various categories of weirdness. One of the original cardboard “sort engines” were showing their age and has recently been replaced with some much smarter and more user-friendly plastic ones. After a lunch break usually featuring a leisurely walk or drive to the chip shop, at the end of the day the piles of clippings in their pigeonholes are carefully sorted into labelled cardboard envelope files and eventually make their way to FT co-founder Bob Rickard. Bob in turn arranges their collection and shipping to an archive for anomalous phenomena in Sweden.

The old school cardboard Sort Engine in situ in the former Salusbury family home in London N1. It's still seeing action in a new Fort Sort location.

There is a lag of at least six months between the articles appearing and them turning up as cuttings in an intimidatingly large, full box, while there were seams of cuttings that went back all the way to 2020. (Some cuttings have already passed through the hands of FT’s editors and found their way into “Strange Days” summaries.) Some readers seem to be clearing out their old cuttings libraries – the “folklore” category is heavy with neatly sourced photocopied articles from 1940s Country Life. The self-imposed work ethic of us Fort Sorters means I give each cut-out article only the most cursory glance as I speedily file it by category in its correct pigeonhole, so in most examples below I can’t give a source or date.

An intimidatingly big box of cuttings, in which there are considerably fewer at the end of the Fort Sort day. Contributor's names blurred for reasons of data protection.

One extraordinary phenomenon revealed by the Fort Sort is the surprisingly rude health of physical print newspapers – still widely read by FT readers, with sometimes half a dozen duplicates of the same sweary parrot story sent in. It’s a shame, though, that 21st century print media still insist on referring to scientists and researchers with the cringeworthy term “boffins” in headlines, or if it’s the Daily Star, “boffs”.

The Daily Star's extensive coverage of astronomy includes the latest discoveries by "boffs".

Anecdotal evidence from the Fort Sort suggests that some strange phenomena are in decline. Spontaneous human combustion seems to have fizzled out almost completely, as have crop circles now that we know how they’re done.

Other categories of forteana are now being reported so frequently as to be almost at the point of being so mundane as to be no longer fortean. Once extraordinary skateboarding dogs are becoming increasingly pedestrian. In the field of inept crime, burglars arrested after falling asleep in the house they were burgling has now become so commonplace it’s not fortean anymore, except in one 2025 case in which a repeat offender burglar was back in court after falling asleep on the job multiple times.

Dumped sex dolls – especially those floating in rivers or the sea – being mistaken for corpses has become so routine that they now also fall into the not-fortean-anymore category. A resuscitation training dummy floating at sea leading to a call out of air sea rescue still makes the grade, though.

The “animal behaviour” pigeonhole has been particularly full of late. Sweary parrots are increasing in frequency. Reports of cats making epic journeys of hundreds of miles while napping in the engine housings and wheel arches of cars, vans and trucks is becoming much more common too. Killer whales are escalating their attacks on boats, bears are stealing sausages and luggage and crashing swimming pools and ice cream parlours, while symbiosis between ocelots and opossums has been caught on camera.

The “animal deaths” category is also a busy one, featuring mystery mass die-offs of crabs in Tyneside in August 2025 and seagull die-offs in Yorkshire in February of that year. There was also more coverage of celebrity animal deaths – “world’s oldest wombat dies”, “world’s oldest penguin dies” and so on.

The beginning of 2025 also saw a global odd crime wave involving fake whales and fake sharks used to smuggle drugs ashore, with controversy on whether there was a human inside the fake whale, piloting it ashore with a motor.

Two new Fort Sort categories were created this year with files of their own. Men up in court for a roadside set act with a traffic cone or sex with a pile of leaves made it into the Fort Sort’s new “sexual oddities” category. A new “AI” category split off from the “technology” category as most tech stories are now about AI. Such AI stories are generally along the lines of “we’re all doomed”, with a cheesy library picture of a skeletal T2 Terminator from the film cycle of the same name. More cerebral articles on AI, especially via the New York Times, dwelt mostly on the stupidity of humans trusting ChatGPT as a life coach.

There has been a surge in new animal species being described to science of late – mostly invertebrates but also tiny, fly-sized species of frogs. Out-of-place animal stories for 2025 included many well-documented wallaby sightings in Nottinghamshire, with the county’s Wildlife Trust on the case cataloguing these. Meanwhile, drones revealed a healthy population of wild wallabies on the Isle of Man.

Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust are on the case re: British wallabies.

“Foreign” tropical ticks are showing up in the United States. Coyotes are turning up in Chicago and New York City – they’re moving east due to deforestation, and growing in numbers due to slump in the fur trade. (Economist 19 June 2020.) Obama nungara, a three-inch long multi-eyed slug-eating and snail-eating flatworm, has become a threat to garden ecosystems on the continent of Europe, where it had established itself by 2020.

In simulacra and spontaneous images news, simulacra of celebrities are pushing out the now much rarer gods and messiahs. Jesus appearing in an orange in August 2025 was a rare exception, you’re now much more likely to see Elvis than Jesus in toast, or the profile of Welsh crooner Tom Jones in a huge shadow near Talgarth in the Brecon Beacons (Daily Mail, 29 March 2020).

UFO reports coming into Fort Sort are increasingly mystery drones, burning up space debris from satellites or Chinese spy balloons. The Daily Star uncritically reports the latest theories on “Rendlesham”, probably not peer reviewed. CETI projects, the approaching 31_ATLAS object and the discovery of markers in a rock suggesting “life on Mars” also dominated coverage of UFOs and “aliens”. The lag between reporting and cuttings ending up in that big box means that with frustrating frequency I come across cuttings about a spectacular astronomical conjunction that I’ve just missed.

A depressing Fort Sort trend is a deluge of lame ghost stories with a wafer-thin celebrity connection. This seems to have started with claims around pop star Adele’s house being haunted. Such celebrity ghost stories are along the lines of Cher seeing a ghostly face in some curtains, Friends actor Courtney Cox telling the Daily Star (21 May 2024) that co-star Matthew Perry visits her from beyond the grave and – according to the Daily Mail (2 August 2025), Nadine Dorries “called in a priest” after “sinister encounters” in her home.

Another lame celebrity ghost story, this one from the Daily Mail of 2 August 2025.

The late summer of 2025 saw an uptick in mummified bodies kept by families. There were a lot of witchcraft stories in this period too – mostly involving witches taking each other to court.

But the most striking among Fort Sort trends was the rise and rise of stories about animal swarms – “swarms” having a pigeonhole of its own in the Fort Sort “sort engines.” Some such swarms are apparently fuelled by climate change – or at least by temporary heatwaves (which could of course be part of climate change). Warmer weather was sending swarms of Asian wasps and bees into the UK, and swarms of small octopi into UK coastal waters, even the occasional locust was being blown to the UK by thermals. European praying mantises are establishing themselves in Cornwall and are surviving its warmer winters, having either arrived “in luggage” or been blown over from the continent.

The now well-established “gulls gone bad” phenomenon was taking a sinister new turn as well, with seagulls “drunk” after feasting on a “toxic” species of flying ants that had become suddenly abundant due to a heatwave across the British Isles (Daily Express August 12 2025.) While chip-snatching and pasty-snatching gulls hardly warrant reporting anymore, gulls have now reportedly graduated to snatching and smashing phones – although whether this is exacerbated by intoxication on poisonous flying ants is unclear.

Chip-snatching gulls, like these ones in Littlehampton, are now so commonplace they no longer make the grade these days - unless they're "drunk" after eating poisonous ants, or snatching people's phones.

Meanwhile, China had mobilised an “army of 100,000 ducks” on standby to gobble up an expected locust plagues in Pakistan, driven by record-breaking temperatures. (Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2020.) “Swarms” of grey-headed flying foxes were turning in Adelaide, also due to a heatwave, according to the Adelaide Advertiser of 7 March 2024, while more rain than usual predicted in South Queensland was expected to lead to an influx of bats there too.

There was even a “swarm” of blue whales around South Georgia, with a 2020 British Antarctic Survey count finding 55 of them instead of the usual one or two. (Climate change doesn’t seem to have been a factor here, though.)

Climate change is also causing sharks and other large fish to move around in the waters surrounding Australia as ocean temperatures rise. Bull Sharks are migrating north when it’s cold and south when it’s warmer, so recently they’ve been staying longer around Sydney due to global warming, with an inevitable increase in those “Shark Attack!” headlines in the healthy Australian regional print media. Tiger sharks, zebra sharks and manta rays also are showing up outside their usual range and are now found as far south as Tasmania. (“Sharks seek sea change as ocean temperature rises with climate change”, ABC News, 18 January 2026,).

With thanks to the Fort Sorters.

The Fort Sort, assisted by Doja Cat, takes over the Salusbury family sofa.

The trouble with reporting spycops

This first appeared in the June 2026 issue of the Freelance, magazine of NUJ London Freelance Branch, ahead of "Tranche 3, Phase 3" of the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Tranche 3, Phase 3 deals with the managers who ran the Met's Special Demontstration Squad unit of undercover police officers. It's still possible at the time of writing to turn up on the day to follow Inquiry hearings from the public gallery in person, or to negotiate being able to follow it online via the Live Link.

REPORTING THE Undercover Policing Inquiry is complicated, not least by secrecy orders that are themselves secret. The UCPI is the public inquiry into undercover police officers who infiltrated over a thousand political campaigns and groups from 1968 onwards. It resumes on 15 June, with another “tranche” of hearings - this one questioning and cross-examining the managers who ran the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) unit of “undercovers”. Read more...

A likely big cat kill from Dunwich, Suffolk

I was sent this photo of a muntjac carcass – possible big cat kill(?) – found in Dunwich, Suffolk on 01/03/2026. Read more...

Suffolk big cat sightings update – November 2025 to March 2026

Above is another of my hand-drawn maps with an update on big cat sightings and kill signs in and around Suffolk. It covers the period November 2025 (when I last did an update map) up to March 2026, so just four months, which were averagely busy. Most of the big cat activity of late has been in Suffolk Coastal District near the coast or in the area around Woodbridge and in the nearby Bawdsey Peninsula. Read more...

Zwarte Piet update

This first appeared in "Fortean Follow-ups" in Fortean Times, FT470, May 2026.

A window display featuring Zwarte Piets in a random bakery in Amsterdam in November 2018, when such scenes were still fairly typical. By 2025, such displays had become vanishingly rare.

Zwarte Piet, “Black Pete”, Saint Nicholas’s controversial blackface helper, seems to be disappearing from the Netherlands. St Nicholas’s Day, 5 December, has long been the day when St Nicholas – Santa Claus but thinner and he’s a bishop on a white horse – brings Dutch children presents. For generations, he’s been accompanied by a gang of Black Petes – mischivious helpers in blackface. Black Pete wears the elaborate livery of a Renaissance servant boy and until recently sported large fake gold earrings, a curly black wig and spoke in a "silly" voice. (While St Nicholas has been in business for at least 1500 years, Black Pete was invented by schoolteacher and children’s book author Jan Schenkman in 1850.)

Mid-November sees the “arrival of St Nicholas” in a boat, from Spain. Towns and villages have their own local “arrivals of St Nicholas” parades with a national, televised “arrival of St Nicholas” as well. It is during these parades that trouble usually kicks off. Since 2015, peaceful protests against “Zwarte Piet” have occured, usually organised by pressure group Kick Out Zwarte Piet (KOZP). Trouble would usually start when KOZP protesters were attacked by crowds that often included “firms” of football fans.

Starting in the late 2010s, Black Pete has gradually been replaced with Rootveeg Piet, Sooty Pete. While retaining the Renaissance costume, Sooty Pete’s face has only a light dusting of soot, as if he'd just come down the chimney. Dutch parade organisers gradually switched from Black Pete to Sooty Pete. In 2022 Instagram and Facebook banned images of Zwarte Piet.

In 2025, though... nothing. KOZP had planned a protest at the “national” arrival of St Nicholas on the island of Texel, as there had been Black Petes in blackface on the parades there previously. The national St Nicholas parade was briefly cancelled as its organisers couldn’t guarantee security, then there were talks between KOZP and Texel Council, and between KOZP and ten other local councils whose parades had Black Petes on show in recent years.

The result was that KOZP called off its protest after Texel’s assurances it would prevent any Black Petes appearing. The national St Nicholas parade at the time of writing was set to go ahead. A similar outcome was achieved in the town of Middelharnis in South Holland, which had also seen trouble in its 2024 parade, with four arrests.

In 2024, the village of Yeserke in Zeeland held a parade with Black Petes, some 20 people attending a KOZP protest there were pelted with stones, apples, eggs and fireworks until many police officers intervened. Yeserke Council said it would still allow blackface in its 2025 parade, so KOZP announced it would proceed with its protests. The parade was cancelled due to security concerns over “risks to children,” although an unofficial parade reportedly took place through the village on 15 November with some 100 Black Petes in attendance – without the Council’s knowledge and apparently arranged by word of mouth.

KOZP announced that it was celebrating St Nicholas’s Day 2025 by winding itself up, with a farewell party, as all its “aims had been achieved,” one of which was that Black Pete has “disappeared.” Jerry Afriyie, KOZP’s founder, appealed to Dutch people to “continue our work.” A columnist in the broadsheet newspaper De Volkskrant noted on 18 November 2025 that “Black Pete has become an obscurity, a clandestine phenomenon.”

©️ Matt Salusbury 2025



2021 Zwarte Piet update from the Freelance.

An even earlier Zwarte Piet update from 2020.

A big cat kill sign from Ufford, Suffolk - and recent lynx sightings in the area

I was sent this photo apparently of a muntjac carcass found in Ufford, Suffolk, showing signs of predation by a big cat. The copyright-holder is known to me. There were also several sightings of a lynx-like cat locally in the weeks before and after the discovery. There's an update on bigcatsofsuffolk.com.