Incredible footage shows 'black panther' bounding through Aussie farm
A video showing a massive black cat running through the long grass has been watched over 1.2 million times. We spoke to the man behind the camera.
An Aussie prospector made a surprise discovery near the historic mining town of Ballarat. But it wasn’t a nugget of gold that Angus James stumbled upon last Sunday, but rather what some believe was a "black panther" bounding through the long grass.
“I was metal detecting when I saw the blackness in the paddock. Whatever it was, was quite a big cat of some sort, maybe it had just been eating lots of farmyard mice. But it was moving in a straight line and it had a very heavy run,” the 40-year-old father told Yahoo News.
Since James uploaded the footage to his Gold Coins and Relics Australia social media account the footage has been viewed over 1.2 million times. The slow-motion one minute clip shows what appears to be a large black cat running in front of grain silos and tall trees.
It was definitely bigger than anything else I've ever seenAngus James
James' video has excited thousands of internet users, many who claim to have seen other big cats around Bendigo, as well as Grafton and Tamworth. Another person wrote, “There has been many sightings of a big black cat west of Sydney." Someone else suggested readers, “Research South Gippsland".
Of course, a sceptical minority have tried to stamp out the fun and called “bull sh**” on the footage. But James isn’t having it — he insists he doesn’t have the computer skills to fabricate something like that. “It’s definitely not a hoax. I definitely didn’t edit it, I’m no good with that sort of thing,” he said.
When you the footage below what do you see?
What's so exciting about the big cat video?
Feral cats in Australia are known to grow to a massive size — there's famous footage of one in the Northern Territory taking out a small wallaby. And on a sad note, they've caused more extinctions in Australia than any other animal except for humans.
Whether the footage shows a fat domestic cat, a feral cat, or even a panther, it doesn’t matter to James. Big cats are the stuff of legend in Australia, and being drawn into this mystery is what excites him.
He's a history nut, who loves uncovering Australia's recent past with his metal detector. Sure, he found a $10,000 five ounce gold nugget in 2014, but more exciting than that was a World War II US soldier's ID that he dug up in Victoria.
"I tracked down the family and it was a very sentimental find for them. He'd passed away but his family members were still around," he said.
Have there been other big cat sightings around Australia?
When he filmed the big cat, James immediately thought about legends of travelling circuses who released their wild animals into the bush last century. Closer to home, he grew up listening to old family yarns about panthers.
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“My dad, he was in the First Armoured Regiment and their mascot was a big panther. There's stories of them letting them go in the wild after they finish with them too," he said.
“It's like the Tasmanian Tiger, people reckon they’ve seen them and they couldn't be there. We're not talking about a mythical creature. We're talking about real animals. So you just never know.”
“It was definitely bigger than anything else I've ever seen.”
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