A family in a broken-down rental car in Idaho were fearful of cougars so they did what stupid people in horror movies do: They left the safety of their vehicle and hid in nearby bushes where mountain lions like to hide.
Andy Jay, who monitors live police scanner traffic in Boise, thought he misheard the dispatcher at first, as did the trooper at the receiving end. But they heard correctly.
“It’s all as accurate as a single source dude and a police scanner can be,” Jay told USA Today/For The Win Outdoors.
The dispatcher sent a trooper to the family, whose car was disabled on the side of the westbound lane on I-84 on the border of Ada and Elmore counties.
“Trooper is out with the car now,” Jay reported Sunday on his Boise Dispatch Facebook page. “He can’t find anyone. His exact response: ‘Maybe the cougar got ‘em.’”
Jay added later, “The trooper arrived on scene and the family had already gotten a ride to Boise. Meaning, they were less afraid of hitchhiking than they were of cougars.”
Not surprisingly, the comments on Facebook were priceless. Among them:
“That was the first thing that crossed my mind when he found the car abandoned. They hitchhiked. Because serial killers never pick stupid people up off the side of the freeway.”
“I’m confused, can cougars open car doors now?”
“Darwinism at its finest, folks.”
“I was a dispatcher for a while and every time I thought I had heard it all, I found out I hadn’t.”
“They should have hidden behind the chainsaws or in the cemetery!”
The incident really is similar to the GEICO Horror Movie commercial in which the young people dismiss going to the car with the engine running and choose to hide behind the chainsaws instead.
“I’m dying,” another commenter wrote. “You just can’t make this stuff up.”
Wrote Jay on his Facebook post: “I spent years wondering how people in horror movies could be so stupid. Now I know they were drawing on real life.”
Generic photos courtesy of the National Park Service and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.