Nearly two weeks ago, a fisherman said an ancient beast rose from the depths at Jayhawker Ponds, gazed at him with a reptilian eye, then turned and swam away.
Bryan Cox fishes for catfish at the ponds at the southeast corner of Taft Avenue and First Street now and again. He fishes in the evening, after it has cooled off, catches a fish or two — or not — then returns home.
On the evening of June 6, Cox and his now ex-girlfriend were fishing from the southeastern shore. They were sitting on the bank when a head rose from the water and looked at them.
“It looked like an alligator,” Cox said.
Hundreds of people pass the ponds every day. Jean Mooney, a spokeswoman for Agilent, said there have been no reported sightings of caiman or alligators at the ponds just north of the Agilent property.
On Tuesday afternoon, Cox, a 21-year-old Ferguson High School graduate, returned to the shoreline where he saw the animal.
The surface of the north pond was glassy, save the occasional swirl of fish rising for a meal.
A clock at a nearby gas station Tuesday afternoon read 87 degrees, and boys laughed as they jumped from the dock into the green water to cool off.
Cox pointed to the water, about 15 feet away, where some small fish swam.
“We saw its head first and then it just looked at us first, and then it turned around and swam away and you could see the rest of it,” he said.
He guessed the crocodilian was about 5 feet long.
He said he and his ex talked about the sighting, wondering what else it could’ve been.
“I didn’t think alligators were around here,” he said.
Amiee Ryel, a district manager with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, said a 5-foot-long reptile is likely a caiman.
“There isn’t anything else it could be. ... I don’t believe it, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” she said. “I may look for it, but I’m not going to be trapping it.”
Ryel said it’s illegal to own a caiman in Colorado, let alone release one into the wild.
Ryel said people occasionally sight caimans in Denver, but this is the first Northern Colorado sighting she’s heard of. Regardless, caimans are native to Central and South America. The cold-blooded reptiles will die come fall.
Bryan Cox said he’s talked to other people about the sighting.
“They think we’re crazy,” he said.
He said he’s concerned because people bring their children to fish. Cox has fished the pond since that day but hasn’t seen it again.
His mother, Sheila Cox, called the Larimer Humane Society.
Cary Rentola, spokeswoman for the Larimer Humane Society, said the Humane Society cannot capture a caiman.
“We don’t have boats,” she said. “We don’t have confirmation of what it is.”
But Bryan Cox knows what it isn’t.
“There’s a big turtle in here, too,” Cox said of the pond. “It’s really big.”
He paused.
“It wasn’t a turtle.”