Fresh bid for evidence of Tasmanian Tiger

There is to be another bid to search for evidence that Tasmanian tigers are alive and well.

Representatives from the UK-based Centre for Fortean Zoology will join local searchers venturing into the wilderness of Tasmania's north-west.

The British cryptozoologists have previously tried to find Australia's so-called "big foot", the Yowie.

Expedition member Tony Healy says the team will use a range of equipment.

"[We'll have] a lot of trail cameras, game cameras and we've all got infra-red devices... just spotlighting, looking for tracks," he said.

The group will break into small parties to stake out different areas.

Long-time tiger enthusiast Col Bailey has spent decades trying to find evidence that Tasmanian tigers still exist.

He has reservations about a group of 10 people searching together.

"That's a lot of people to take into the field at the one time because low numbers is essential as far as I'm concerned in this and they also say two weeks they're going to be out," he said.

"Well, two weeks is nearly not enough time, you really need three or four weeks to do this properly."

The centre, founded in 1992, is a not-for-profit group set up to investigate unusual or extinct animals.

The last Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, died in a Hobart zoo in 1933.

The carnivorous marsupial was widely hunted by early settlers trying to protect livestock.

Read more at the ABC: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-30/extinct-or-elusive3f3a-fresh-bid-to-find-tasmania-tiger/5057664

Yowie spotted in upper Blue Mountains, NSW

The new Blue Mountains Cultural Centre opened on the weekend and thousands of locals poured through the doors to see firsthand the flash new library and art gallery, and the breathtaking views of the surrounding landscape from the expansive lookout/verandah.

But as the CFZ posse wandered the large, spacious rooms and admired local art created by local artists both new and old, we were gobsmacked to see...a Yowie!

Not a real live hairy beastie, you understand, but an artistic representation of one created by Aboriginal artist Shaun Boree Hooper of the Wiradjuri people in 2009.

It's quite an eye-catching piece of artwork as you can see.

If you're visiting the Blue Mountains, be sure to stop in at the centre and check it out.

MYTH - Yowie movie premieres in Sydney

The official poster.

Last Friday night some CFZers attended a private screening for actors, friends and family associated with the mockumentary Blair Witch-style MYTH movie, a creature feature starring Australia's very own hairy hominid horror the Yowie!

And they were in for a surprise because a very real and unintended special effect occurred while the film crew was shooting its movie overnight in rugged bushland.

Eight seconds of strange and compelling 'eye shine' (the visible effect of Tapitum Lucidum where the pupil of an animal appears to glow) was captured in the background, mystifying everyone as the images only came to light during the editing process, although some of the actors confessed to feeling uncomfortable filming at the location.

CFZ Australia will be getting hold of the footage shortly to share with readers of the blog.

Mike Williams and Rebecca Lang, authors of Australian Big Cats: An Unnatural History of Panthers, attended the premiere, as did Neil and Sandy Frost, whose experiences in the Blue Mountains have become legendary themselves.

Mike was wrangled in as official 'creature adviser' for the film and his house featured as one of the sets for the 'Professor' character who, along with an American documentary maker, goes in search of the hairy myth of the Blue Mountains.

A prop from the film - not bad!

Here's the official blurb: "The film takes place in the summer of 2009 when a party of four people go in search of the legendary Yowie...They were never seen or heard from again...This film is actual recovered footage of their final days."

The horror film was highly enjoyable, and took the two men behind it - Justin and Rob of King Hit Productions - almost two years to bring to fruition. In that time they spent many days shooting in and around Hazelbrook, one of the well-known Yowie 'hot spots' in the World Heritage-listed wilderness an hour west of Sydney.

Drop by and Like their Facebook page. And stay tuned for more news!

We caught up with the men behind the film for a quick chat on the night...

Yowie looked like 'big black person'

"The trees...sounded like they were exploding, rather than being knocked over..." according to this witness, whose Blue Mountains yowie encounter left him shocked and shaken.

Source:LiveScience

The Live Science website has made this cracker graphic freely available to promote its story on bigfoot-type creatures, so pop on over and check it out!

"The big hairy monster we call Bigfoot has both eluded and fascinated many, with blurry photos and even blurrier video being some of the best evidence the creature exists.

"The Down Under variety, dubbed Yowie, reportedly stands anywhere from 5 to 11 feet (1.5 to 3.4 meters) tall, and has yellow or red eyes deeply set inside a dome-shaped head."

We wonder what a similar survey would turn up in Australia?

Read more here.

A Blue Mountains Yowie?

In today's post we continue to 'get our Yowie on' with another witness interview from the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, NSW, carried out only this week with thanks to local researcher Neil Frost.

Our witness Sean shares his unsettling tales of camping trips with uninvited hairy guests and inexplicable showers of stones!

The Lake George Yowie

Over the years we've amassed quite a bit of interesting footage - mostly witness interviews but occasionally wildlife footage as well. We've also been given footage to share, and this latest offering from authors Tony Healy and Paul Cropper is a pearler - an interview with a man who saw the Lake George Yowie in the mid-1970s!

Lake George (also known by its indigenous name Weereewa - 'bad water') is an aquatic conundrum, a 25km long shallow, salty body of water that lies between Sydney and the nation's capital, Canberra. Its ebb and flow - the Lake will dry up completely for years at a time - has been the source of much local superstition and legend. Several fishermen and five Duntroon military academy cadets have drowned in its waters, and all manner of things have been found when the waters have receded - including a plane!

All kinds of phenomena has visited its unpredictable shore - ghosts, UFOs, and as you'll hear now, even Australia's own bigfoot, the yowie!

Author Tony Healy to speak at Braidwood's Cheese Factory

Authors Paul Cropper and Tony Healy.

In the early colonial era Aborigines often warned British settlers to beware of large, ape-like creatures that lurked in the forested mountains. They knew the creatures by many names, including jurrawarra, puttikan and doolagarl.

Soon the colonists, too, began to experience hair-raising encounters with the hulking, foul-smelling creatures, which they referred to as “Australian apes” or “yahoos”. Today they are generally referred to as yowies.

Tony began researching the yowie mystery in 1975. Since then he has interviewed more than a hundred eyewitnesses and searched for the damnably elusive creatures in every Australian state and territory. He has also ventured overseas in search of other semi-legendary ape-men such as the yeti, the orang mawas and the sasquatch.

In his talk Tony will outline the yowie saga from the pre-colonial era to the present day, concentrating particularly on stories from the Braidwood area, and will discuss some of the theories that have been put forward to explain – or explain away – Australia’s most baffling zoological mystery.

A few copies of The Yowie, In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot (Anomalist Books, 2006), which he co-authored with Paul Cropper, and which contains 300 carefully documented eyewitness reports plus a lot of Aboriginal yowie lore, will be available for purchase.

The Old Cheese Factory

~ Long Table Lunch with the Yowies ~

A presentation on the Yowie followed by a long table lunch at $33 a head. 

Bookings essential!

Sunday November 6th 2011, from 11am.

http://www.braidwoodmade.com.au/contact.html

Reidsdale Rural Enterprises

The Old Cheese Factory

92 Sawyers Ridge Road 

Reidsdale

NSW 2622

Tel: 02 4846 1999

Of crows and yowies...

Newcastle Herald columnist Jeff Corbett dips into the Yowie well again in his latest column...

"He is a beef farmer in a valley about 20 kilometres west of Kempsey, and Ron Clarke was with his sister, now Joan Delforce of Wallsend, and other brothers and sisters 50 years ago when they saw yowies many times on their family dairy farm not far from Ron's beef farm today. They describe them as covered in dark brown to black hair, with long hair around the neck, about the height of a tall man, bear like, and sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four.

Last December, after I wrote of yowies and an Elermore Vale couple's sighting of a yowie, Joan told me how she and her family members had seen yowies alone and in family groups many times around their dairy farm.

Late last week Ron told me how he had woken before sunrise one morning when he was 14 to find an adult yowie in his room, and that it stayed there for some little time until his father's alarm clock burst into life at 4.30, when it went hurrying off. Ron's father, by the way, had refused to believe his children until he had his own encounter with a yowie.

The Kempsey area has been a hotspot for yowie sightings, according to the definitive yowie book, The Yowie - In Search of Australia's Bigfoot, by Tony Healy and Paul Cropper."

Driver spots Yowie near Grafton, NSW

Jeez, we put up a post about what Yowies look like and, bugger me, a Yowie sighting surfaces!

And now to the sighting...courtesy of the Daily Examiner. The above picture is a blurry track found near the scene - is it a Yowie or perhaps just a big foot?

~~~~~~~

WHAT'S more than two metres (six foot) tall, solidly built and covered in shaggy hair?

If your answer was “that guy down at the local,” you're probably right but it's also a common description of a mythical Australian creature known as a yowie, a specimen of which has been reportedly spotted near Centenary Dr, north of Grafton.

A Hunter Valley man named Dean, who did not wish to be identified further, thinks he may have caught a glimpse of one of the creatures, a kind of an Australian version of Bigfoot, as he was driving along the section of road in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Dean, whose work sees him driving more than 5000km a week around NSW, was travelling south along the Pacific Hwy, north of Grafton just before 2.30am when he took the Centenary Dr bypass. Shortly after turning into the road he saw something that shook him to the core.

“I reached the top of the hill and I was coming around the sweeping corner to the right when I noticed something a lot larger than a kangaroo in the middle of the road – my headlights weren't on it yet but it was a bright night and I saw what looked like a large person stooped over, with a big overcoat on,” Dean said.

“At the time I thought ‘you silly old thing, what are you doing in the middle of the road at this time of the morning', but next thing I knew my headlights started to light it up and it took one giant step off the road, it went from standing up like a person to going down on all fours and then it disappeared into the scrub in about three bounds.”

Dean, who is used to night-driving and fatigue management, slowed down and was looking into the scrub for the creature and said he saw it silhouetted against the sky.

“It had an almost sort of a square, shaggy block head sitting straight on its shoulders – I'm a pretty big guy but it made me absolutely awe-struck how huge its body was – it had its arm up against a tree and it had about a foot of hair hanging from under its biceps.”

He estimated the creature to be at least two metres tall and covered in what looked like jet-black hair.

Dean said he had no idea what to think until he described the incident to colleagues later who said it was similar to yowie-sighting stories they'd heard in their travels.

Since then Dean said he had been researching ... to rationally explain what he saw but has yet to find a satisfactory answer.

“Anybody who knows me knows I'm the ultimate realist but this was an awe-inspiring moment, it's definitely made me a believer,” Dean said.

During his search for answers however, Dean came across the website of Australian yowie researcher, Paul Cropper who was very interested in his story.

Mr Cropper, who has also co-written a book on yowies, said Dean's story wasn't unusual.

“In our book we recorded around 350 reports going back to the late 1700s, early 1800s, but I imagine there's a lot more than that which don't ever reach the media – people have these experiences and then just keep it to themselves,” Mr Cropper said.

Theories abound as to what yowies could be, including an unknown species of ape or even an undiscovered close relative to homo sapiens, he said.

“One thing you can say with absolute certainty is that Aborigines and Europeans have been recording these things for a long time – the Aboriginal stories go back to the Dreamtime and the European stories go back to basically the first settlement ... there's just this consistent thread of stories up until Tuesday morning,” he said.

Anyone in the Clarence Valley who has had a similar experience can contact Mr Cropper, in confidence, via email on yowie99@gmail.com

Meet the Cryptozoologist: Tony Healy

The first guest in our new Meet the Cryptozoologist series is well-known Australian Fortean and author Tony Healy (above right) one half of a dynamic duo that includes co-author Paul Cropper.

Welcome Tony!

How did you first get involved in researching strange and mysterious creatures?
When I read Constance White's More Than A Legend, about the Loch Ness Monster - that was in about 1957, when I was 12 years old. Then, when I was working in Canada in 1969/70, I heard about the sasquatch mystery and, once or twice, wandered off into the forest around Pitt Lake, BC, hunting the critters (armed with a little plastic camera and a heart full of hope!).

What were some of the early influences in your life?
In terms of crytozoology, it could have been hearing news bulletins about the Emmaville Panther episode, in the late 1950s.

Have you personally seen one of these creatures?
In 1965, somewhere around Innisfail, north Queensland, I had a very brief glimpse - but at close range - of something that looked for all the world like an American mountain lion.

In addition, at monster-haunted Lough Bray, in Ireland, in 1979, I saw a sizable creature swimming within 60 metres of me. Took three photographs through a long lens, but as it was late twilight nothing showed up on the film.

At Loch Morar, in Scotland, I saw what looked like the prop wash of a motor boat - quite close up, in good daylight. An American guy, Todd Martin of Lincoln, Nebraska, and I took 18 35mm pictures of the "wake" and they came out ok - but of course, the creature, if that's what it was, didn't surface.

What creatures particularly interest you?
All of 'em - but if I had to pick, I suppose I'd say the yowie.

What cryptids are most likely to exist in your opinion?
Perhaps one of the Aussie mystery big cats - even if it proves to be "just" a humongous feral moggy. Also, hopefully, the thylacine - either in Tasmania or on the mainland. Also - maybe the Orang Pendek of Sumatra.

What’s your favourite?
Well - you gotta love those cute little junjudees!

What’s your favourite Australian cryptid?
As above - the yowie or its little bro, the junjudee.

Have you developed any theories around where the more unusual animals - i.e. yowies/bigfoot - have come from?
Yep - unfortunately, I think that a great deal of the evidence indicates that most, if not all of the mysterious hairy giants, plus the lake monsters and most, if not all, of the Alien Big Cats are connected in some strange way and that they are all paranormal: psychic phenomena - possibly intruders from another (admittedly hyperthetical) dimension.

Have you written any books/articles?
Yep; Out Of The Shadows, Mystery Animals Of Australia (1994) and The Yowie (2006) both co-authored with Paul Cropper, plus numerous magazine articles.

Do you have a website?
www.yowiefile.com

How many mystery animal reports would you receive a year?
Sometimes scores of them, sometimes only a few dozen.

What’s the closest you’ve personally come to finding something?
In 1978 I was camped with a couple of friends beside Mt St Helens in Washington state, USA when, apparently, a bigfoot came close and checked us out (devastatingly foul smell, thumping noises), plus the Loch Morar incident - if only "Morag" had surfaced!

What’s the farthest you’ve traveled to go ‘in search of’ mystery animals?
To Andros Island, Bahamas, looking for the Yayho (a 5-foot-tall monkey-like critter) and to the Largarflot, in north-eastern Iceland, looking for the Largarflotsormorinn (a  lake monster).

What’s next for you - any trips planned? Books or articles to write? Talks to give?
I will be going back to Ireland next year to revisit a few of the monster-haunted lakes, then back to Lake Bala in Wales, and then a bit of scouting around southern England looking for Alien Big Cats and phantom Black Dogs -  but I probably won't venture up to Scotland this time.

I have some vague plans to visit southern South America in 2013 to look for lake monsters, plus the Ucumar and Chupacabras.

Am working on another book with Paul - a round-up of Australian poltergeist cases - it's shaping up very well, and hopefully will be published early next year.

Could you share some of your favourite cryptozoology book titles with us?
While it's hard to go past that timeless classic Australian Big Cats, I'd have to say that, as my most lengthy and intensive cryptozoological expeditions have been in North America, Scotland and Ireland, the books I've referred to most frequently - as sort of guide books to locations -  have been John Green's books on the Sasquatch and Peter Costello's In Search of Lake Monsters.

What advice would you give anyone getting into the field of cryptozoology?
Have fun. Take it seriously, but not too seriously. Enjoy the trip - you'll meet a lot of nice people and visit a lot of interesting, out-of-the-way locations.

In search of yowies

 
Belinda Garfoot is 54 years old and lives in the Newcastle suburb of Elermore Vale in NSW with husband Peter. In 1996, while on a driving holiday, she and Peter watched a yowie cross the Kings Highway between Braidwood and the coast.

Peter had pulled to the side of the road to rest the car's brakes when he saw the creature in the rear-vision mirror, and both turned to watch it for five to 10 seconds. 

It was, they say, at least 2.1 metres, or seven feet, tall, with disproportionally long arms, no neck, shaggy and with an upright walk. So what was it?

Garfoot's encounter is included in The Yowie - In Search of Australia's Bigfoot by Tony Healy and Paul Cropper - a serious look at a great many reports of yowies stretching back many years.

Read Newcastle Herald columnist's Jeff Corbett's recent blog post about yowies and keeping an open mind here.