For almost two weeks, residents of a rural Texas county have been looking, mostly up, for a missing giraffe called Gracie that wandered off from a private game ranch.

On Wednesday, the mystery of the free-roaming mammal’s odyssey deepened further, when a local sheriff disputed an account that it was reportedly found safe a “little farther out than expected” from its hill country home, and said the search was most definitely still on.

“The giraffe has not been located. It’s still at large,” said Nathan Johnson, sheriff of Real county.

“It’s frustrating, and it’s more appalling that there’s people who have no idea what they’re talking about, putting things on the internet as if it was fact,” he added.

During the almost week and half she has been missing, Gracie, a reticulated giraffe native to several eastern African countries, has become something of a celebrity in the region around Cedar Hollow Ranch in Leakey, a town of about 700 residents a two-hour drive west of San Antonio.

Word spread quickly on the internet, and Johnson’s office appealed in a news release for citizens to keep their eye out for the roving giraffe. It even provided a detail-heavy list of the animal’s distinguishing features in its “be on the lookout” advisory, presumably to avoid confusion with any wandering long-necked, non-native game animals people might encounter.

“They gave a description, ‘Gracie has rounded ears,’” one observer posted on X. “So if you spot a giraffe out and about in the Texas hill country, check its ears first before calling it in. Wouldn’t want to flood the hotline with mistaken identity.”

Vick Jones, the ranch’s manager, told the New York Times that Gracie was between three and a half and four years old, and had wandered off into hilly grassland when she “came down on the wrong side of the gate” after reaching up to eat leaves from a tree.

“This giraffe, like none of the others ever did, she would walk around,” he said.

Jones put up a $5,000 reward, and hired helicopters and drones in the search, according to San Antonio’s CBS News affiliate KENS.

Johnson said he chuckled when he received his first missing giraffe report, but had taken the case seriously, and was confident the giraffe would be found.

“All the adjacent landowners are aware,” he said. “It’s a big area, it’s very rural, not very many people living in that area, just ranches.

“We’ve had wildebeests and monkeys and zebras and other things go missing off game ranches, and eventually they show up at feed or somewhere, or you know for the most part they do. We just never had had a giraffe.”

Hopes were raised briefly late on Tuesday when, as the Guardian reported, the website of San Antonio’s CBS News affiliate News4SA posted happy news that Gracie was found safe.

“The giraffe that disappeared from a ranch in Leakey has been found alive,” the report said, offering no details of the location or circumstances of the animal’s discovery other than it was a “little farther out than expected” from the ranch.

It later backed away from the claim, stating that its original report “couldn’t be confirmed”.

According to Johnson, the story was a hoax: “That’s just idiots in their pajamas in their mother’s basement on the internet with nothing else to do.”