“I was sitting here, just like I’m doing now and it was about seven in the evening, and I was looking this way, and I saw something, and I thought oh my gosh!”

Norma Ray says she saw a cougar walk out of the woods near her home, and alongside her pond Sunday night. Her dog, Sammy, ran after it, and it vanished into the thousands of acres of woods that surround their home.

The Rays' say this is not the first time they have had a close encounter with a large cat.

“It was probably five or six years ago when we saw our first one. About 1:00 in the afternoon, I was talking on the phone looked out the window, saw the cat walk out of the woods,” Robert Ray says.

The Rays' story is not the only one that is going around. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources tells us they have had a number of calls this month, reporting cougar sightings from different parts of the state.

The DNR is skeptical the large cats are pouncing around southwest Michigan, but they are not ruling anything out.

“I don’t want to say it’s impossible, it may be improbable. At this point we just don’t know what people are seeing, and quite honestly we’d like to verify one way or the other what people are seeing,” Steve Chadwick of the DNR says.

The Rays say they do not need anyone to verify what they know they have seen.

“I’m a hundred percent sure because of the way it ran and the long tail. You just can’t mistake it,” Norma tells us of her most recent sighting.

“Like anything else there’s believers and non-believers, and I say what I say not because I believe them, I’ve seen it,” Robert Ray says.