About

Utah Hiker Cougar Encounter refers to a viral video of Utah man Kyle Burgess backing away from a cougar. Still images of the cougar, later dubbed "Gougar" by 4chan and Tumblr users, later appeared in various ironic memes.

Origin

On October 10th, 2020, Kyle Burgess uploaded^[1] a video to his Instagram account @cougarkyle (formerly @kunkyle) of his encounter with an aggressive cougar while hiking. In the video, Burgess backs away from the cougar while it follows him along a path. Burgess survived the encounter without injury. The video received widespread coverage after going viral on October 12th, with the video being reposted^[2][3] by news outlets and other Instagram accounts and being covered^[4][5][6] by the New York Times, TMZ, and Daily Mail. Burgess uploaded^[7] the video to YouTube on the same day, receiving over eight million views in two years (shown below).

Spread

Images of the cougar from the video went viral on Tumblr in August 2022. It was dubbed a "gougar" or "gouger." A post made^[8] by user enbyedgeworth on June 26th, 2022 featuring a repost of a 4chan meme^[9] of the cougar received over 34,000 notes (shown below).

Over the following months, Tumblr users crafted numerous ironic memes centered around the "gougar." For example, user @manaphysics posted an image of the "gougar" in the position of Weezer's Blue Album Cover (shown below, left), though the post has been deleted. User memorycycle posted an image of the animal photoshopped into an MS Paint drawing, gaining over 3,700 notes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References