SANFORD — On Dec. 21, Shirley Spaulding was driving on upper Oak Street in Springvale, about a mile from the Route 202 intersection, when she saw a flash of something tan.

Her immediate thought was that there was a deer coming out of the field. Then it leaped onto the road. And it wasn’t a deer.

It was a large cat, measuring about 6 to 7 feet long, Spaulding said.

The animal sprung from a ditch with its paws outstretched in a Superman pose, touched down briefly on the pavement, then leaped to the other side of the roadway, Spaulding said.

“When it sprung from the ditch, it was airborne,” she said. “… The size of the front legs were massive. I saw that flying through the air, and I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s not a deer.’”

It all happened too fast for her to get a photograph, Spaulding said. She estimated she was driving about 45 mph, and that the big cat was 50 to 60 feet ahead of her .

She called her husband, Doug Spaulding, and described what she saw. Doug, a registered Maine guide, showed her some photographs on a computer when she arrived home.

First he showed her a bobcat. Then a lynx. Neither looked like the animal she saw.

Then came a photo of a mountain lion.

“She said, ‘That’s it,’” said Doug.

The couple are both retired teachers, and own a home in a wooded area of Springvale and a camp in Caratunk. They’ve seen a lot of wildlife, said Shirley.

The official status of the eastern mountain lion, or cougar, is extirpated – which means there is no breeding mountain lion population in Maine, according to Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife spokesman Mark Latti.

“That does not rule out that there could be a captive mountain lion that was released in Maine, or that they could be wandering through the state (for) another destination,” he said in an email.

Latti said two mountain lion sightings have been confirmed in Maine. One was in Monmouth in 2000, the other in Cape Elizabeth in 1999. One was confirmed through casting paw prints, the other through DNA.

The Spauldings reported Shirley’s sighting to IF&W and posted her experience on Facebook, which elicited comments from others who said they too had spotted one in years past.

Maine IF&W wildlife biologist Keel Kemper said his department periodically gets reports of mountain lion sightings, and that it looks into each of them.

Kemper said some cougars have been moving east from western states and have been sighted in Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina. One was struck and killed by a car in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2011, and had originated in South Dakota, he said.

“That demonstrates the possibility exists,” he said. “It’s a possibility there’s a mountain lion here or there.”

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282-1535, ext. 327 or [email protected].