Wispy, aromatic vapor wafts like a genie from the coffee cup to my left as I sit once again wondering where this hard walnut chair softened by a suede cushion will take me.

The faint scent of coffee, 13 bucks a pound, fills my nostrils and temporarily wanders me off to Japan, where those runaway nuclear reactors continue to belch poison gas skyward for all to inhale, regardless of what the fancy-pants sources want you to believe. It gets me thinking about the terrible news, just today or the day before, about Vermont Yankee receiving a 20-year extension to churn power, danger looming like a Sword of Damocles, Chernobyl waiting to happen. But why focus on the foreboding? What good does it do? Better to skewer Charlie Sheen or Liz Taylor or Lil Wayne or Paris Hilton, or praise some unfortunate soul who saved her sister and lost her leg. Anything to escape reality … maybe even the extinct Eastern cougar, Pan of our north woods, a satanic beast some swear to have seen where it doesn’t exist.

Similar to the great Atlantic salmon myth — the one that assures us they were once here in great numbers and are coming back — press-release copycats took that United States Fish & Wildlife Service cougar-extinction story hook, line and sinker and ran with it two or three weeks ago. The news was everywhere, went nationwide, probably into Canada. Extra, extra! Read all about it: Eastern cougars extinct. At least 10 people emailed me the MSNBC link alone, like, “Hey, idiot, what do you say now?”

Well, my response is wait a second. Think about the people delivering this news on TV and radio, in the morning paper. Had they ever before read about the subject, talked to credible sources who say they’ve seen the long-tailed, tawny demons, examined the historical context, looked into the emergence of a new wild canine — Eastern coyote — which literally popped up out of nowhere in our hills some 50 years ago? Did they query the Eastern Cougar Foundation for its reaction? No sir. That’s work. These media megaphones of misinformation just accept what the government agencies tell them, report it verbatim, accept it as fact and read it as gospel from their sacred media pulpits. The story is believed by most, just like they believe dispersants used during the Gulf oil disaster pose absolutely no long-range dangers to the ecosystem, and that the Exxon Valdez debacle is over and done with, coastline again pristine. Hey, if the government press release says it, it must be so. That’s the tired rationale, one that’s seldom safe when evaluating “news.”

I have in this space over the years reported on scores of local cougar sightings by credible sources. And while I don’t claim to be an expert, concede that wildlife biologists paid by the state and federal government know much more than me, and admit that their theories about wayward Western cougars or released exotic pets passing through could have merit, I refuse to rule anything out. I find it curious that now, with cougar-sighting frequency on the rise, the government has decided to change its classification from endangered to extinct. Hey, it may be so. An Eastern Cougar Foundation spokesperson who has investigated hundreds, if not thousands, of eastern U.S. sightings over the past two decades admitted two or three years ago that there probably were no “pure” Eastern cougars left. Instead, she said, we are probably dealing with young, displaced Western cats or hybrids — perhaps a mix of Florida panther and Eastern cougar, or Eastern and Western cougars, or Eastern and Western and exotic jungle cats. Yes, the possibilities are many, and potentially real. But maybe, just maybe, Eastern cougars, pure or otherwise, are not extinct. So why not leave the avenues of discovery open until we know for sure?

A stiff, annoying thorn has been standing upright in my boot’s heel since the announcement. I picked it up off the Quabbin forest floor, where less than a generation ago a professional wildlife tracker found and reported a suspicious beaver-kill site that included several fresh scat samples that were collected and sent off for analysis to two professional laboratories. The labs’ findings were troubling indeed for anyone trying to support Eastern cougar extinction. Why? Because both identified the DNA as Eastern cougar. That tells us there was at least one of these now-extinct cats prowling our nearby woods then, so how to reconcile that with this latest news? It appears to make no sense. And how about the Eastern cougar reported to be our last that was pictured in the recent online press release with the Maine man who killed it in the 1930s? Wasn’t that cougar the offspring of two before it, and weren’t its parents the product of four before them? Seems like simple mathematics to me. Not to them, I guess.

This latest re-classification by wildlife specialists seems to be following the same path as the Florida panther, which was said to be extinct in response to many sightings in the 1970s and 1980s. Soon after this “official word” came down, lo and behold, it was discovered that Florida panthers were alive and well, in fact making an extraordinary comeback. Today this big cat is not uncommon in the Sunshine State and southern Georgia. Wouldn’t you think the authorities would be wary of repeating their error so soon? Apparently not. But there could be a hidden agenda. With sightings of Northeastern cougars increasing in recent years, maybe the government wanted to sidestep potential red-tape headaches related to logging and development. Endangered species are no friends to such commercial pursuits, a bane for landowners and Realtors alike, who hate delays.

All I can say is that maybe this extinction verdict is valid. Perhaps the Eastern cougar is gone for good. But I’ll reserve judgment for now. Call me conservative if you will — few do! — but I would rather be remembered as a cautious observer and hardened skeptic than just another clueless foot soldier, who parrots widely circulated press releases and trumpets their message as breaking news.