US SIGHTINGS: 6 MAY/13 7 Large Cat Sighting in Simsbury

Between 8:30 and 9:00 a.m., Sunday, May 5, 2013, my husband and I spotted two large cats in the Mountain Farms neighborhood in West Simsbury. We were talking a walk around our front yard, when movement from the cul-de-sac's common area caught my eye. I looked up to see two large objects running from the street to Ethel Walker woods that butt up against the neighbor's yards.

The first figure slipped off into the brush before I could note anything other than movement, but I pointed to the second one, and my husband and I got a good look at it before it also disappeared into the woods.
The figure was backlit, so we couldn't make out any color or markings. I immediately looked at the head, thinking it was a coyote. Realizing the head shape wasn't canine, but feline shaped, I checked body size, thinking it was the neighbor's cat. The animal was much too large to be a housecat. My husband and I estimate it to be about three and a half feet long- NOT INCLUDING THE TAIL.

The tail is what stopped us. The tail was at least a foot and a half long, and it was held in a very distinct angle. The first six inches or so were held up and away from the rear of the animal at a 45 degree angle, then the rest of the tail sloped down from that point. There was no white visible on any part of the tail, which, even though the animal was backlit, would still have been able to be seen given how close we were to them (we were about 100 yards off).

The last impressions we were left with before the animal was gone from our view was that it had very thick legs and paws, and it didn't run like a dog.READ MORE