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Reports of Alien Big Cats in the British countryside are all in a day’s work for MERRILY HARPUR, but an apeman on Salisbury Plain and a Gollum-like creature in Lancashire suggest that far stranger things than mystery felids stalk the land…

If Britain’s Alien Big Cats (ABCs) live in the interstices between the real and the unbelievable, there seem to be other – even odder – creatures which share that intermediate, daimonic reality. People who see them often report them to the national ABC research group Big Cats In Britain for want of anyone else to tell. Their testimonies present a picture of legion existences, shading in and out of ‘species’, categories and dimensions in an agreeably fortean way.

For instance, it was while asking a Gotham farmer about a conventional (if I may use that word) ABC sighting that researcher Nigel Spencer unearthed the man’s previous sighting of a different, weirder animal.