More Tales of the Australian Bigfoot

     In my last post, I mentioned that not everybody wants to have their name published when they report sighting a yowie. Indeed, I have noticed that the more bizarre a sighting, the more the witnesses request anonymity.
     In 1997 I was able to contact a Mrs Roma Ravn who, with two other associates, belonged to a group called "Omega International 'Research'", dedicated to investigating anomalies near their residences in southeast Queensland. She kindly sent me print-outs of the reports held on the group's hard drive, but without the witnesses identified. When she contacted a few, they reminded her that their stories had been provided under the conditions of strict confidentiality.
     I shall therefore give you the stories essentially as they have been written - not all of them by  Mrs Ravn. By and large, the sites can be located only on maps of the highest resolution, but in general, they belong to the crescent of low mountains west of Gympie, in southeast Queensland. In this area, valleys and other low areas are heavily cultivated or grazed, but the mountains have been left rugged, timbered, and rarely frequented.
     (1)    In that same area [Widgee Mountain], K.S. was fitness running with his dog. A well trained animal who, if it spotted something in the forest, would stop and freeze until given a command and this included dingoes (and there are heaps of them) and any other fauna. The dog simply props and stares. But on this occasion the dog went mental, growling, snarling, baring teeth and K. stopped and stared into the timber, naturally looking at about 3 feet from the ground and down to the ground. The dog's actions were so different and so threatening that he sat down beside the dog to get a line of sight from the dog's head. At that moment he heard the crashing and breaking of someone coming through the undergrowth, making plenty of noise, and then he saw it. An 8 or 9 foot being, covered with black hair, came into view. The dog whimpered and tried to turn to run. It saw K. and they stared at each other for a moment and It turned and crashed back through the bush at great speed. K. controlled the dog and then walked after it, and said you could have driven a bike through the clearing It had made, getting away. Up to 6 inch saplings were snapped off, clean as a whistle.
     When he had mentioned this to other loggers with who he worked, he found that there are a couple of places that no loggers will go, not for money, not for anything.

     (2) The next couple of anecdotes were collected by the same K.S., and are therefore second hand.
     Above Widgee there is a place called Rattanday Flat (or something like that) where there have been many sightings of yowies and aerial sightings.
     This was told to K.S. by S.I. of Curra, who works at the gravel pit there.
     One group went into there with their machinery, that is, a dozer, to clear a track for the timber cutting access, and the group of men had with them all the necessary spanners for a dozer, which are so large it requires a strong man to manipulate them. Well, this massive spanner was lying on the dozer and the men went to work marking some of the timber as they went, and when they returned this huge spanner was missing. It could not have fallen off, and the men thought someone was playing some sort of joke on them. However, a good 3 years later and 4 km away they found it cast aside in a clearing.
     No-one would or could carry that spanner that distance. The men all complained they felt eyes burning into them every time they were in that area, they continually felt uneasy and they stated that the turnover in men to work in that area was great. People would could and go, come and go so constantly, and they all complained of the same thing: being watched.
     One other fellow was driving in the forest out of the site and coming over a small hill with another in front of him, when he saw on the second hill a person 8 feet high, appearing black in the early morning light. The sun was not up but it was piccaninny daylight, and this being appeared to be furry. It took off with one leap off the track and disappeared, and the driver, needing to hear a human voice, phone his cousin and asked in a silly voice, "What's your brother doing out her at this time of the morning?"
     Another tale - one guy at Kandanga working, decided it was not worth his while to come back in to camp for the night, so he settled on a ledge about 10 feet up a rocky crop. The ledge was quite wide enough for him to sleep on and turn over without fear, so he settled down there. At about 9.30 pm, he heard panting and huffing, and bush crashing down on him. He thought it might be a wild pig, but there was no snorting, and as he was safe from everything, he decided to just lie there. Then, suddenly, a figure jumped onto the ledge from below, landing on the ledge right there in front of him. It was bright moonlight, and they saw each other instantly, and this thing spun around and leaped off the ledge with a short cry and disappeared into the scrub down below.
     The timber cutter said it was a man, but enormous - 10 feet or so and built like a battleship. Those long legs had carried it up to the ledge in one leap.
     He could hear it crashing through the growth for ages, and he won't go back into that area ever again.
     K.S. himself says nothing would ever entice him into Rattanday Flat again, night or day.

     (3) The next one is a humdinger.
     V.M., Gayndah, sighted a series of lights when he was working at Kandanga Forestry several years ago. He worked there on and off for 20 years from the late 50s into the early 70s. His job was collecting seed and nuts directly off the trees. One morning, very early because of the promised heat to come, he had set out collecting. He carried with him a longish pole type affair with runnels down each side of it, rather like a fishing rod, and fine twine threaded through them, for him to manipulate the clutch type affair at the collected end. The sun had not yet penetrated the forest, so he was working in semi-dark, and looking up he noted a series of strange lights fairly high above the forest. These lights were not moving, quite stationary, and he rested this pole against the tree while he moved backwards to try for a clearer view of this thing. It was large - about 150 feet across, with a row of white lights around the edge - and it seemed to him about every fourth light there was another red, smaller one directly above  it. These red ones were flashing, and he simply stood and stared for several minutes. Then, when this thing was not going to move, he stepped forward once again to the tree that he was working on. He moved slightly around the tree, and once again looked up, and froze.
     He was attempting to look through the heavily laden branches, which radiated out at roughly nine feet above the ground, and he found himself staring into a pair of eyes. He shook his head, rubbed his free hand over his eyes, and looked up again, and he could then make out the head shape, which he states was as big as a bucket, eyes very large and very round with no whites, just brown or black, and the rest of facial features were also in shadow against the lighter sky. He actually decided he was seeing things, when he jagged the pole, which startled the animal, and it took off into the forest, breaking branches and making much noise as it went. He estimates it to have been 10 feet high, probably 20 odd stone [280 lb/127 kg]. He does not claim to know whether it was hairy, naked, etc.
     On his return to camp he told other men about the experience, and four of them stated he had seen a Yowie. They had seen them many times, but as they always ran away at great speed, they knew them to be harmless. However, they also agreed that they often saw strange lights in the sky before or during their Yowie sightings.
     That second last paragraph confirms something I once said in Bunyips and Bigfoots: one of the reasons the unknown bipedal primates of the world remain unknown is that they tend to be shy of humans to an almost phobic extent. In this case, the reason the yowie did not leave before it was noticed was possibly that, like its human counterpart, it was fascinated by the aerial spectacle. I know that many American ufologists believe there is a connection between UFOs and bigfoot, but in this case, I suspect the relationship was fortuitous.
    The same might be said for the following circumstantial account, by another witness, of an encounter much farther to the west.
     In 1968, about March I think, early in the year anyway, at Carnarvon Range, I saw together with four other witnesses, UFOs exercising in the skies for over one hour. It wasn't until almost 50 minutes had passed that one of us suggesed they may have been trying to contact us, so we all grabbed our torches and began signalling. Within about four or five minutes they disappeared. Whoosh! they went in different directions. There were seven of them - all round, all larger than the moon, all bluish green in colour.
     And the odd bit about this experience was that once they had gone, the bush all around us erupted with sound - crashing, branches snapping twigs - and we dropped our torchlights down to ground level and scanned the bush. We saw nothing actually, but we could see the branches being broken off at about 10 [foot] height, we could see some of them whipping backwards as if something had raced through the area, but it was happening in all directions at once.
     The following morning we checked the area; broken twigs, branches, scattered leaves and foliage lay strewn about and two footprints in the softer edges of the creek about 40 feet away, two on one side of the creek and one  on the other, almost 11 feet away. Sketch here approximates sizes, although I could be exaggerating. [No sketch provided.] The second footprint was deeply embedded at the front in the sand.
     We call them Yowies, and we have seen several in time, in deep forest. We could normally smell them before we saw them too. They smell like rotting meat, and one of our lumbermen said they took three of his dog's pups one year, leaving two behind, and they broke his bitch's back by flinging it against a tree. The pups had been born two weeks earlier.

     (4)  One elderly fellow who now lives at Injune, and is well into his 80s, was also a lumber man at Imbil once upon a time. I phoned him to hear the story. Seems he was thinning the forest with a chain saw. He hadn't had this chain saw all that long, and he was fairly respectful of them. He had been working for about an hour, deep in the forest, and stopped the saw, placed it down beside the tree on which he was working, and went back about 20 paces to sit, and light a smoke. When was sitting on one of the felled trees, and was looking down on this rolling [sic], when he sense someone close, and then he smelt this rotten meaty smell which had hadn't noticed before. He spanned around him, and then saw his chain saw (which was very bright yellow) being moved. He noticed its colour through the fallen branches being lifted up - however, he could see no-one. So he jumpted to his feet thinking someone was trying to steal the saw, and ran forward shouting, and these are his words verbatim.

     No man was visible to me, my eyes were on the saw, and one would expect to see a hand, an arm, and a man, but none of these were there; instead there was this great hairy trunk of something lifting the saw. I noticed the shiny black palm, shiny like a good leather glove the ladies wear, and my eyes followed this trunk along and upwards. Wide shoulder led to thick, short neck, and from that moment on it was all seen in a flash: the mouth was open - huge - and I could see the red tongue (no teeth, no). This mouth was wide open, and at that point I felt as it my sanity was slipping. I yelled without being conscious of it, and the hand released the chain saw, dropping it as it turned to lope away. I cannot honestly say I looked and saw the eyes and nose to any perfect detail, but I felt then, even now, that the nose was flat, like a nose pushed backwards into the face and covered with black leather, the eyes enormous and spaced at what I think would be 8 or 9 inches apart and round, perfectly round.
     Were you conscious of whites of the eyes? No, just big black shining orbs.
     Did the mouth gesture appear threatening? No, just wide open as if yawning, and I could see no teeth. It did not rush away, but rather loped easily down to the creek area while I stood in shock.
      The next day the two men who were to go out and clear away all the cut branches and small trees that I had felled, came back and congratulated me on being so kind to them. When I asked why, they thanked me for stacking all the smaller, heavily laden brances. It was their job to do this after the thinners. This stuff would be carted and placed into piles at edges or clearings in the forest. I hadn't done it. As a matter of fact, after seeing this ape I had collected my billy and saws and headed out of the forest.

     (5)   The next report consists of a circumstantial non-sighting attached to a fourth hand report, so make of it what you will.
     . . . On the way up, and well below the bottom of the escarpment, he saw two kangaroos lying side by side, on their backs, legs in the air, one leg missing, bellies ripped open, entrails sitting beside the carcasses, heart, liver, and kidneys missing entirely, and the men had commented on the neatness of whatever, and they wondered the why and who of the matter. They had also noticed that both skulls had been crushed.
    It wasn't until he told me about the cave, and I had asked him about the cave, and I had asked what sort of rock - sedimentary, such as sandstone, or ... He had interrupted me and stated granite.
    I then placed him in the Kilkivan area. His amazement at this was satisfied when I told him there was one long granite ridge running from Woolooga, through Kilkivan, Upper Widgee/Kandanga, and I didn't know how much further down it went. And I made the comment, "Wow! That's yowie country from the reports I have been getting."
     He immediately stated that that would account for the two kangaroo bodies he had seen whith those strange positions and mutilations.
     He told me that the mentioned to the elderly fellow about the two 'roos during his next visit to the area. This chap said, yeah, once he had been camping out there and he heard two trail bikes coming - he was with several friends, and they had been doing a bit of prospecting. Anyway, these two trail bikes kept coming, and in time the three men sat with them, had several cuppas, and set off again for home.
     However, the camping party heard the sound of the bikes, then another sound as if the bikes were revving up. Then they returned to the camp terrified. The story was that right in the middle of the bike track, in their headlights, they saw a huge figure standing, and in its arms was a wallaby. The animal made no attempt to get out of their way; it simpy grasped the 'roo closer to its chest. As the bikes hit the brakes wondering which was the animal would move to get off the track, both bikes headed well off the track into the bush - and when they were almost opposite the hairy "thing", it threw the 'roo down and spread out its arms as if to stop the bikers.
     They both did an abrupt turn and sped back to the camp with the story.

     (6) Finally, there is a brief note about a man who watched a snake move through the undergrowth, and then: The two tree trunks which had been directly in line with him, moved up the hill at speed. As he realised that they had not been trunks at all, but belonged to some form of being, ...