Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, 2005

In late June of 2005, I headed south on Highway 169 from my home in eastern Kansas to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend a youth baseball tournament that my son's team was playing in. My wife had gone on ahead the previous day and I was traveling alone. It was late in the day, a few minutes before sunset on a bright sunny and hot day, and I was just north of Tulsa in a suburb whose name now escapes me.

Suddenly, a strange creature darted across the road directly in front of my pickup and I got a clear look at it (because of the time of day and the nearness of the creature). It looked for all the world like a small dinosaur out of a Hollywood film, perhaps a velociraptor from Jurassic Park or something like that, because it ran upright on the two large back legs, with the smaller, front legs carried close to the torso rather like a human sprinter would do. Its head was tilted back and the mouth slightly open exposing a set of fearsome fangs while the eyes had a wild, fixed expression and were so wide open as to be slightly bug-eyed in appearance.

It was shockingly fast, and appeared and disappeared in a moment, but not so fast that I didn't get an absolutely clear look at it. It was not a cat, dog, squirrel, fox, possum, raccoon or any other animal that I had ever seen, and I live in the woods and see these more common animals all the time around here. I have seen other references to this kind of animal on the Net, but now recently. What I haven't seen reported elsewhere though, is how absolutely feral and dangerous it looked. I count myself lucky though to have seen it, and hope to see one again.