So there are only two buckets of people....trained mountain lion biologists and everyone else? C'mon, you can't be THAT obtuse...or can you?

Yes, actually, it was right after dawn and it was lying down within 20 feet of the brush near the back of my yard. All this in a state with documented DNA evidence of mountain lions. Of course DNA evidence is not visual confirmation by a trained mountain lion biologist so I guess it doesn't count, huh?

Tell me this...so if one was killed by a car in Ohio, and you saw a picture of it, would you believe it? Or would you still deny it since you are not a trained mountain lion biologist and not believe it until a trained mountain lion biologist actually saw it and told you it was a mountain lion? Or are you above everyone else except trained mountain lion biologists and worthy to make the call? You conveniently side-stepped the question of how people huntingn mountain lions usually shoot mountain lions and not something else since by your standard even trained outdoorsman don't know what they look like.

You can't prove a negative, but you also cannot eliminate the possibility that they are there and affimatively say everyone who claims to see one is seeing things...which you are doing. MI is called the Wolverine state yet one had never been seen there, it was simply where the pelts from Canada where shipped through. Then a couple years ago one was found there. To my knowledge they are still tracking its movements. Everyone thought cougar sightings in Illinois were bunk, now there have been at least 2 firmly documented ones.