It starts as a rumor of someone knowing someone who saw this first hand but when questioned further they are always a friend of a friend and once more removed.

In the world of hunting, fishing and the outdoors, rumors of trophy animals and of animals in extraordinary situations become legends. The most recent tales and legends have been assisted by the Internet and cell phone images.

Often, the pictures are real but the descriptions are inaccurate. At other times, the photographs are enhanced or doctored to represent a not-so-true depiction.

Recently, the tale of a cougar being killed by coyote hunters near Boyers was circulating like wildfire. I received at least a half-dozen inquiries and photos on camera phones allegedly proving the rumor.

I was skeptical and, after some research, found Pennsylvania variations identifying Boyers, Route 66 areas, State College and Altoona as the sites of the hunt. The information was then tracked across the country all the way to Texas and Colorado, which do have valid cougar settings and animal carcasses.

This led me to explore some other recent Internet stories and photographs, and to validate them or to declare them hoaxes and bits of made-up legend.

One such story was the 412-pound buck killed along the Clarion River in Clarion County. The photo was tracked to a hunt in the Midwest, where a hunter took him in an early archery season.

The hunter hadn't found the buck immediately and it was bloated due to the warm weather.

The Boone and Crockett Club routinely investigates the rumors for reported world records and dispels many rumors and half truths.

The current world record nontypical whitetail deer was found along a road in St. Louis County, Mo., in 1981 and scored a whopping 333M\, B/C score. Although a Ford was likely the deciding factor, the B/C Club recognized the score as a world record.

The story of an Amish lad harvesting a 30-point buck with a homemade longbow in Ohio was a hoax. The buck was real but it was harvested by John Schmucker in 2006 with a crossbow in Adams County Ohio.

The nontypical buck scored a tad more than a 291 and was one of the top bucks in Ohio's record books.

A recent 2008 photo of a 700-pound Wisconsin black bear is a true picture. The story goes that a farmer combining his fields hit something big in his corn field. He saw that it was black and feared that one of his cattle had somehow got in the corn field.

To his surprise the critter was a huge black bear that had been wounded by the combine. Later investigations found that although the farmer hit the bear, the fatal blow was delivered by a poacher's bullet before the bear sought cover in the fields.

Two true stories that are worth noting are that a new world record elk, the Spider Bull, was verified on Jan. 5 as a record for nontypical American elk. The elk was taken on public land in Utah in 2008 and scored 478B\, B/C points. This was a fair chase hunt and more can be read by contacting the Boone and Crockett Club.

Meanwhile, Arizona Game and Fish officials are excited to report that while working on a bear and mountain lion project, they collared the first wild jaguar in the United States.

Rumors and photos of jaguars near the U.S.-Mexico border country have been circulating for years. However, this is the first confirmed cat since the early 1900s.

The male cat, which weighed 118 pounds, was reported to be healthy, hardy and solidly built. A tracking radio was attached to him before he was released near Tucson.

The jaguar has been on the endangered species list since 1973.