HECKER, Ill — There’s been a rumor going around a small Illinois town about a mountain lion sighting.
It all started on Nov. 9 when a 5 On Your Side employee caught a ‘big cat’ on camera. Shortly after the sighting, a crowd gathered in the parking lot of Hecker's Wine and Dine restaurant.
"We walked over to the edge of the gravel and once we got over there, we could see over the little horizon there, and there was a pretty big cat," One person in the crowd said.
The rumor was put to rest on Nov. 20. A spokesperson from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources said they went out to the site where the video was taken and took pictures at the spot the animal was seen, using a 28-inch traffic cone (at the same distance) and the animal would have been well short of the cone, which confirmed it wasn’t a mountain lion.
Officials did find tracks, which they said were a quite bit smaller than tracks from a mountain lion.
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