The "Nemesis" Sea Serpent of 1900

     In In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, Bernard Heuvelmans mentioned two alleged sea serpent sightings reported in The Wide World Magazine which he declared to be bogus. One was the Tresco sighting, which  I dealt with in my October post. The second was described on p 366 of his book.

     I shall therefore deal only very briefly with the dramatic tale of Captain Laurence Thomson of the steamer Nemesis published in Wide World Magazine, which specialized in 'true adventure' stories. In 1900 he saw what he called a sea-serpent off Cape Naturaliste. There is a photograph of the sailor and his ship to convince us they existed - but one still cannot believe in the truth of his story for a moment, nor in the drawing in the magazine. It was a rubbery worm-like animal some 300 feet long and 3 feet in diameter, which rose out of the water in three huge arches in a way that was both mechanically and dynamically utterly impossible. In front of these arches a head rose on the end of a long neck, and on the spine was a sort of high soft fin that could fold up like a parasol.

More Forgotten Sea Serpent Sightings

    Pity poor Dr Bernard Heuvelmans! He wrote In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents before the advent of the internet, which means he had to carefully cull bits and pieces of information from the far corners of the world, squirreled away in obscure newspapers and magazines, often having to rely on brief summaries in secondary sources. These days, at least in Australia, you will find the vast majority of newspapers, even minor local ones, digitalised on Trove to at least 1955. This means that a some casual references made by Heuvelmans can be investigated in more details. Let's try a few.

The "Tresco" Sea Serpent of 1903

      On pages 368 - 369 of In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, Bernard Heuvelmans describes the sea serpent allegedly seen by the crew of the Tresco near Cape Hatteras in 1903. His opinion was that the story "reaches the peak of fantasy", and I have to admit that, from the summary provided, it did seem to suffer from credibility problems. Nevertheless, one always wishes to refer to the original document, which was cited as the October 1903 issue of The Wide World Magazine. Now, The Wide World was a monthly magazine in which members of the public related their own adventures in various parts of the world. It was a requirement of publication that they certify that the story was true in all particulars and, in most cases, I suspect they were. Most of them lacked the normal structure of fiction - the beginning, middle, and end - and had the air of truth about them. Just the same, there was no method of confirmation, and a number of hoaxes certainly did make their appearances in its pages.
     I have been an avid fan of The Wide World ever since I was introduced to it as a boy, and have collected every edition I could lay my hands on. Regrettably, this includes only a couple before World War II. Then, a couple of months ago, a light bulb went off in my head. The Internet Archive contains a number of the early bound editions, including volume 12, where the relevant article appears on pages 147-155. I would really like to introduce you to this wonderful magazine, and I would seriously suggest that you read it. But for those who lack either the time or the inclination, I shall publish the article here.

Another Queensland "Black Panther"

     At last! People are using the "How to report a sighting" function at the top of this blog. On Saturday 15 August this year I received an e-mail form Mark and Bronwyn (Bronnie) Welbeloved [4 syllables] about an experience they had six days before. The site was just outside the Cordalba State Forest, a reserve of 11,000 hectares [about 27,000 acres, or 42½ square miles] which, as the name implies, lies just west of the village of Cordalba. The latter is situated at 25° 10' S, 152° 13' E, and the site itself would have been somewhat to the north of that. The nearest significant town is Childers, to the south. As is appropriate, they each wrote a separate account.

Up de Graff and the Giant Anacondas

     The green anaconda, Eunectes murinus, the great water boa of the Amazon, is the heaviest, and one of the longest snakes in the world, but how long does it grow? It certainly reaches 20 feet [6.1 m], although the vast majority are shorter. Any individuals longer than that are officially unconfirmed but, since they grow throughout life, and since every species contains freakishly large individuals, we should not doubt their existence. It is the truly gigantic forms which remain controversial. Perhaps it is natural for the white man to project onto the hostile wilderness monsters two or three times the known maximum (though we never hear of 30 foot long alligators). However, the fact that the Indians also tell of them might give us pause for thought. Percy Fawcett, we know, claims to have shot and measured (? by pacing it) an anaconda 62 feet [18.9 m] in length. So, either he was a bare-faced liar, or there really are such monsters out there.

     With this in mind, and since the aim of this blog is to rescue reports which may have got lost, I should like to share with you a record which, until now, appears to have been largely overlooked.

The Barcelona Satyr, 1760

     A couple of months ago I published a translation of Michel Raynal's article on the legendary "wild man of the Pyrenees". This time, I shall follow it up with a translation of a follow-up article by the same author of the possible capture of such a creature in the mid-18th century. The original article is entitled, Une figuration de l'homme sauvage dans les Pyrénées? and it was published in Bipedia 4, 1990, pp 16-18, the original of which can be found here.

Journal of Cryptozoology, Volume 3

     Volume 3 of The Journal of Cryptozoology is now out, containing 97 pages, compared to 80 for the second volume and 62 for the first. The reason I have chosen to depict the rear cover is that because it is more interesting than the regular boring front cover, and by now you will have probably guessed that the contents involve ducks and dinosaurs. As in previous issues, the five papers are all of scientific journal quality, but it is interesting to note that none of the contributors cites a scientific establishment as an address. So what does this say about cryptozoology - that it is dominated by amateurs, or that it is dangerous for professionals to be associated with it?

Mysterious Big Birds

I have posted this essay on my Anomalies blog because, although there are a lot of reports of "thunderbirds", these specific accounts contain elements of weirdness which suggest there might be more than just a mystery animal species involved.

The Wild Man of the Pyrenees

     This is my 50th post, and it appears I shall have to go back to translating, because I have run out of English language material. It seems only yesterday, but in reality it was a quarter century ago that Michel Raynal sent me his paper, in French, about the alleged "wild man of the Pyrenees". In effect, it is a local form of a legend which extends throughout Europe, and which used to be portrayed in pageants, and on the façades of churches and other public buildings, not to mention coats of arms. In English the term was wose or woodwose. Classically, the wild man was conceived as solitary, hairy, speechless, and armed with a wooden club. Whether the idea related back to anything substantial is an open question. After all, the same people believed in the little people: fairies, elves, call them what you like. There is only a limited number of variations on the human form which the imagination can call upon to populate the local area. Very small humans is one variety, and another is the beast-man, who bridges the conceptional gap between humans and the natural world. Just the same, there is good evidence for similar such creatures in the Caucasus, so it cannot be ruled out that they once extended deep into the primeval heart of Europe, where they left residues on the collective memory.
     M. Raynal's paper was entitled, L'homme sauvage dans les Pyrénées et la survivance des néanderthaliens, and was published in an obscure journal, Bipedia, vol 3 (1989), pp 1-16. The original can be found here and, if you wish, you can use the "translate" facility to compare a human translation to a computer driven one.

Lake Monsters - What They Aren't

     They see them here, they see them there; they are - lake monsters. Now, far be it for me to reject or endorse every lake monster report, or to suggest that all of them, in every lake, belong to the same species. However, it might be an idea to consider some of the proposed explanations. For this, we could start with two propositions:

1. It is far more likely they belong to a known group supposedly extinct than something which nobody has every heard of.
2. They are part of the larger "sea serpent" phenomenon. The rule of parsimony would suggest that it is more likely that some unknown animals from the high seas have managed to get into freshwater lakes than that the sea serpents and lake monsters are two completely different phenomena. However, their presence in an enclosed lake raises issues not present in the open sea, as we shall see.

Footprints in the Sand

     I am not a footprint aficionado. They are hard enough to interpret at the best of times. Perhaps I am being unfair, for they have their use in cryptozoology. Several times I have seen a photo or sketch of a print left by an alleged "tiger", and recognized it immediately as having been made by a big dog. But the reverse is not the case. Although I have been shown prints which certainly looked like they came from a big cat, in no case could I be sure that they had been made by such a creature. Robert Downing and Virginia Fifield, who had been following "cougar" reports from the eastern U.S. for years, claimed that anybody who wanted to be able to distinguish dog tracks from those of "cougars" needed to first of all examine several thousand tracks of dogs of different breeds, under different conditions.
     In the Queensland Museum, Dr Ralph Molnar once showed me a cast of a footprint that was beyond weird. It was long and thin, with a groove down the middle. But apart from a couple of small side claws, the truly astonishing feature was the pair of huge, central clawed digits which bent downwards at a vertical angle of almost 90 degrees. It was hard to see how any animal could walk that way. Yet the explanation was simple: it belonged to a wallaby. Wallabies and kangaroos do not always hop; over short distances they walk, the large hindfeet moving in unison, and the smaller forepaws being extended for support. Often, particularly over difficult terrain, the hindfeet are placed right next to each other. This is what happened in the above case, making it appear a single footprint, and the long central toe of each foot bent vertically down to gain purchase, because it was travelling through mud. I have also been caught out in another case, where a wallaby's combined hindfeet produced a composite, apparently single footprint. Moral of the story: the simple explanation is more likely to be the case.
     With this in mind, I'd like to share some clippings Dr Molnar gave me of The Brisbane Courier  of 1918. They refer to footprints discovered on Stradbroke Island, one of the large sand islands which guard the approach of Moreton Bay, east of Brisbane.

More on the Queensland Marsupial Tiger

     The last I heard of Dr Ralph Molnar, he was looking for dinosaur bones in America, but during the 1990s he was the official Queensland Museum palaeontologist. He was also the one staff member with an active interest in cryptozoology. Thus, after he had read my book, he contacted me, and was kind enough to provide me with photocopies of his large collection of newspaper articles on the subject. Looking back through them, I was pleased to note that some of them were follow-ons from the Great North Queensland Tiger Hunt of 1923.

"The Tasmanian Tiger: Extinct or Extant?" - a Review

Rebecca Lang (editor)(2014), The Tasmanian Tiger: Extinct or Extant?", Strange Nation Publishing, available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

     As I pointed out in an earlier post, the extinction of various bandicoots and wallabies, not to mention those species which are holding on to the edge of the precipice by their little claws, has failed to register on most Australians, but the loss of the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, has really touched a raw nerve.
     Now, Rebecca Lang, co-author of Australian Big Cats and co-founder of Strange Nation Publishing, has assembled an array of contributors to express their opinion as to whether this iconic marsupial is now completely extinct, or whether it still clings to existence in some place or other.
     And since it appears to have been taken for granted that I would end up writing a review, I suppose I had better make two things clear from the beginning:
     First disclaimer: I am one of the contributors.
     Second disclaimer: I know the editor and some of the contributors, and those I don't know I nevertheless respect. However, a reviewer should, ideally, attempt to be completely objective - indeed, brutally honest. That sounds like a good way to lose friends and make enemies, and I now understand how some professionals, working in a very limited field, end up getting an easy run through the peer review process. With all this in mind, let us continue.

Thylacine Fever in the Wonthaggi District

     In my last post, I documented the "monster" which frequented the environs of the South Gippsland town of Wonthaggi in the years 1955 - 7, and for which I attempted to provide a mundane explanation. Of course, it didn't end there. No, I shan't impose upon you a transcript of the whole 86 additional photocopied pages - some bearing two separate articles - which my friend, Paul Cropper sent me. Sufficient it is to say that, on October 9, 1958 the same newspaper, the Wonthaggi Express announced the return of the monster. Then began a series of reports, all of which are consistent with rather large dogs, all different from the original "monster", and mostly from one another. But on December 18, 1962 something new was introduced: the witnesses claimed they had seen a Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), a species which officially became extinct in Tasmania in 1936, and on the mainland about 3,000 years ago, with the arrival of the dingo. Gradually, but not immediately, this identification became more common, until the 1980s and 1990s, when it tended to be used indiscriminately and uncritically for most strange animal sightings.

At Last, the Double-Headed Bunyip of Tuckerbil Swamp!

     Now that the National Library of Australia has digitalised a vast quantity of old newspapers and magazines under the title of Trove, I've been able to discover the originals of very old "bunyip" reports, and I published them in my post of July 2013. However, the weirdest story of all still eluded me: the "bunyip" of Tuckerbil Swamp, near Leeton, which was supposed to have been able to swim in either direction because it had a head at either end. So, at the end of that post, I asked if anybody knew of the original source.
     It turns out nobody did, but just recently I received the following e-mail from a Mr. Brian Marsden:

I grew up 2 km south west of Tuckerbill Swamp  [ 34 deg 29 min S ; 146 deg 21 min  E ] and yes remnants of  the swamp remain. Family history has it that the Bunyip in Tuckerbill Swamp was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (?) at the time. The source of the report was supposedly attributed to my grandfather who had taken up irrigation land nearby in 1914. Within the family, the so-called Bunyip was attributed to the bellowing of a bullock stuck in the mud of Tuckerbill Swamp. If you can find the original report, I'd be most interested.

      Well, I had performed a thorough search last year before the original post, but I now gave it one more try. And this time I succeeded. Perhaps the relevant local newspaper had just been digitalised in the interim.

The Wonthaggi "Monster"

     Of all those researching mystery animals in Australia, none is more energetic, or more generous, than my friend, Paul Cropper, the co-author of Out of the Shadows and The Yowie. In 1998 he sent me, out of the blue, a package of 106 - yes, 106! - photocopies of newspaper reports, covering 34 years, concerning the "Wonthaggi Beast". Anyone who has ever tried it will appreciate how tedious and time consuming such a task would be - especially with regional newspapers in a different state to his own. (Wonthaggi is a town in east Gippsland, 132 km southeast of Melbourne, at 38° 36'S, 145° 34'E.)
     Paul is a busy man, with not enough disposable time to publish it all on the internet. I, on the other hand, have more time, but to publish the whole 106 articles would merely bore the reader without edifying him. However, as a tribute to my friend, and for your edification, I shall publish the initial, most informative reports, along with the later ones which show some promise. It will also be interesting to note how public perceptions changed over the decades.
    These reports are all from the now defunct Wonthaggi Express.

A Thylacine in North Queensland?

    Black panthers, cougars, even big, hairy apes roaming the Australian bush: that I can handle. But I confess that what I find most perplexing are the reports of thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers on the mainland. The extinction of the thylacine has left an open wound in the Australian psyche. The three species of bandicoots and six species of wallabies which have gone the way of the dodo in historical times have hardly ruffled the public consciousness - let alone all those whose ranges have contracted to tiny enclaves, often on off-shore islands. Indeed, as far as the central hare wallaby is concerned, it is unlikely anyone but a real specialist has taken notice. It is known to science by only a single skull presented in 1932 by the only white man ever to see the living animal.
     But when the last official Tasmanian tiger passed on in 1936, the whole nation was aware of the tragedy. The thylacine can be found depicted everywhere in Tasmania: on its coat of arms, on Government department logos, on its beer. Countless expeditions have set out in search of it. Many people still believe it clings to existence. Almost everybody hopes it does. But what is really confusing are the reports which keep cropping up from odd corners of the mainland, where it is supposed to have been extinct for several thousand years. There exists a sort of "thylacine fever" in some areas, and every brindled dingo, mangy fox, or otherwise aberrant carnivore is uncritically labelled a thylacine. By now I refuse to take such claims seriously unless they are very detailed and well documented. The trouble is, some of them are.

Strange Striped Animals in North Queensland

     Alleged big cats are not the only mystery predators reported from north Queensland. Some of them have stripes, and a blanket explanation for all of them is not immediately obvious. Nowadays, witnesses and journalists tend to leap to the conclusion that they are thylacines, extinct for several thousand years on the mainland and officially extinct in Tasmania. In most such cases, the resemblance to a real thylacine is far from exact, and an identification as a brindled dingo, or some sort of mangy dog would appear more appropriate. However, every now and then the word "stripes" occurs in the same account as "cat", and if there is one thing the average Australian knows it is the difference between a dog (long faced) and a cat (short faced). Some, I am convinced, are overgrown (sometimes much overgrown) feral tabbies. But just the same ...

More Big Cats in Far North Queensland

     Last month I described sightings of apparent big cats in North Queensland, mostly as reported in letters I had received in response to my book, Bunyips and Bigfoots. This time I shall record information I received predominantly by telephone through other leads. These are essentially from Cape York Peninsula - which means we are getting sightings all the way along the coast from southwest Western Australia almost to the northernmost tip of the east coast. I am not at all certain that all of them are cats, but it is clear that a lot of them are, and it is rather frightening.

Big Cats in North Queensland

     As readers of this blog will be aware, the presence of Alien Big Cats, mostly black, is no longer confined to the southern states of Australia, but is fully established in southeast Queensland. (If you are new to the site, you may care to check my posts of June and December 2013, and January and April of this year.) I would like to be able to say that this disastrous spread of a mysterious invasive species is limited to the southeast, but that would be false. They are well and truly established in north Queensland, more than 1,200 km away. Let us have a look at a few cases.

The Original Deception Bay "Monsters"

     Deception Bay is not far from where I live, but I can never hear the name without thinking, "monster". The reason is that the first time I heard of it was in 1960, not long after I came to Brisbane as a boy, and a local Sunday paper, the Truth (now defunct) carried stories about the mysterious visitor. In my post of August 2012 I called it the best documented "sea serpent" sighting in Australia. I wrote about it in the former journal, Cryptozoology, and in a more condensed form in my book. But one of the good things about the internet is that you have more space to provide the full text of all the documents, so here goes.

Still More Big Cats in Southeast Queensland

     In my January post, I quoted a letter from Bruce Thomson, a senior conservation officer with the  Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. I contacted him, and he sent me a follow-up letter dated 28 April 1997. Here, then is the text of letter, except for the names of the witnesses, which I have deleted to protect their privacy.

 *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Journal of Cryptozoology, volume 2

     I have just finished reading volume 2 of The Journal of Cryptozoology, which was dated December 2013, but whose publication was slightly delayed. Being both inexpensive, and the only peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to cryptozoology, it really ought to be on the to-read list of everybody interested in the field.  (I might add that I am left to speculate as to who is who does the reviewing. Normally, prospective papers are sent to whomever looks like they might possess an expertise in the field. I myself was once asked to review a short paper on koala behaviour, because I had already published on the subject. However, in this case, they would need to find experts who would also be prepared to treat the subject of cryptozoology seriously.)
     In any case, it is clear that the journal is shaping up to solid professional standards, with four excellent papers covering 65 pages of text.

     The first was entitled Three remarkable tales and two challenges for anthropology - an evaluation of recently reported eyewitness accounts of unidentified hominoids from Flores Island by Gregory Forth, a cultural anthropologist who has been studying the societies of the Indonesian island of Flores since 1984. In the process he became intrigued by the folklore concerning small, usually hairy "wildmen", first of all in Flores, then in the remainder of Indonesia, and finally in mainland southeast Asia itself. Here is a review of a recent book he wrote on the subject. Then, of course, in 2004 came the discovery of the fossil remains of the "hobbit", Homo floresiensis, a diminutive offshoot of the human family tree which could, theoretically, give rise to such legends, especially since there is disputed evidence that it may have survived until little more than 6,000 years ago.

Video of Speech at Geelong

     In my post of September 2013, I gave the text of my speech at the Wool Museum at Geelong about bunyips and sea serpents in the local area. The video of the speech is now available, and Dr Waldron has kindly added it to Youtube. You can access it here. Unfortunately, it does take a while to upload.
     If you click on the button underneath to subscribe to David Waldron, you will also be able to access the speeches of the other two speakers: Simon Townsend, and Dr Waldron himself.

The Year of the Sea Serpents, 1934

     1934 was a very good year for sea serpents. Over a period of three months, they put in appearances all up and down the east coast of Australia. Much of the information has been published before, but now Trove has made it easier to uncover the original articles and provide full details. So let us start in chronological order.

More Big Black Cats in Southeast Queensland

     In my last post, I described sightings of what appear to be "black panthers" in southeast Queensland. They mostly involved witnesses I had interviewed by telephone. This time, it will be necessary only to quote the witnesses' own words from their detailed letters.
     We shall start with Toowoomba (27° 30' S, 151° 57' E), the large city on the top of the Great Dividing Range, just west of Brisbane. The letter was dated 26 March 1997, and it was originally addressed to another cryptozoologist, but I have since contacted the author. His name is Bruce Thomson, and his credentials are obvious.

Big Black Cats in Southeast Queensland

     I've heard them called zoology's flying saucers, because they turn up where they couldn't possibly be, then disappear before any investigation can be done. They are ABCs: alien big cats. In Australia they are big and black, and tend to be labelled "black panthers", a term I shall retain for the sake of convenience, without conceding its accuracy as a formal identification. Reports are particularly common in Western Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales but, at the time I wrote my book (1996), I was able to include only a few cases from my home state of Queensland. Since then, however, more reports have arrived - in most cases by people actively contacting me. You have already heard about the black panthers of Tamborine Mountain, and the "pink panther" of Cooyar. Let us now examine a few more case histories.

The Great North Queensland Tiger Hunt of 1923

     You don't hear much about the legendary marsupial tiger of north Queensland, but it was all the rage in the first half of last century, and even had a semi-official status. It all began with letters to the Zoological Society of London in 1871, after which anecdotes accumulated, until they were collected in 1926 by Albert S. Le Souef and Harry Burrell in The Wild Animals of Australasia. The former came from a prominent zoological family, and was one of the founders of Taronga Park Zoo, while the latter was a naturalist most famous for his work with the platypus. Their material was subsequently republished by Ellis LeG Troughton, Curator of Mammals at the Australian Museum in Furred Animals of Australia, which continued in print until at least the early 1970s. Both books recorded the yet undescribed species as a large cat-like animal, presumed to be a marsupial, of a fawn colour, with black stripes which, unlike the thylacine's, do not meet on the back, and a short face similar to a cat's. Its height was estimated at 18 inches at the shoulder, with a length of five feet, including a long tail. For reference, this is the bottom of the size range for female leopards.
     As these two publications were the major reference material for Australian mammals for nearly fifty years, they carried a lot of weight. Unfortunately, being popular works, they bore no citations, so one is left to wonder where the anecdotes came from. Did they appear in earlier, independent publications, or were the authors informed by private correspondence received in their professional capacity? I do not claim to have reached the original sources. However, with the help of Trove, I think I have got partway there.

Thylacines in Indonesian New Guinea - Further Evidence

     My post two years ago on the possible existence of the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger in the Indonesian half of New Guinea appears to have been extremely popular, and is still attracting comments. So I think it is about time I updated it with evidence from a correspondent called Franz. He has asked me not to publish his last name, but he lives in Vienna, Austria, and has visited the country often for reasons unconnected with his career as a graphic designer. He usually travels with a doctor friend.

Bunyips, Sea Serpents, and Port Phillip

     Last Thursday, 29 August 2013 the National Wool Museum at Geelong had three guest speakers give talks on cryptozoology to a public audience. The first two were Simon Townsend and David Waldron, whose recent book has been reviewed on this blog, and they both gave enthusiastic and informative presentations on their respective subjects. The third speaker was me. I consider it a great honour that they should be prepared to bring me all the way from Brisbane, a distance of more than 900 miles [1450 km] for the purpose, and I hope they found it worthwhile. So here, for the benefit of the other seven-odd billion people who missed out, is the text of the speech.
     For readers outside Australia, I should explain that Port Phillip is the very big, triangular inlet in the centre of the Victorian coastline, with the state capital, Melbourne at the northern apex, and Geelong at the southwest apex. Corio Bay is a sub-bay next to Geelong. All the other sites mentioned are within striking distance of Port Phillip.

A Trove of Sea Serpents

     Last month I revealed how the digitalised newspapers of Trove can be used to research old "bunyip" stories. This month, I shall demonstrate its use with "sea serpents".

A Trove of Bunyips

     Everyone in Australia has heard of the bunyip, but since it appears I have more readers in the northern hemisphere, I had better explain. The bunyip is a mythical (?) monster which the Aborigines believe(d) frequents the inland waterways of southeast Australia. The name by which it went varied greatly between tribes, its description was generally vague, and its habits reputably dangerous. What is not often known is that it was reported not only by Aborigines, but by white settlers, every twenty or thirty years during the nineteenth century.
     Interesting though this unusual history might have been, a major difficulty has always been documentation. The original reports were squirreled away in the musty archives of many local newspapers, too voluminous to search. The result was, when I began my investigations forty-odd years ago, I had to rely on secondary sources. Sometimes these secondary sources referred back to the primary source, sometimes not. When I wrote Bunyips and Bigfoots, I was forced to list a number of sightings of which I knew practically nothing, except that I had noted some fleeting reference.
    Fortunately, time brings a change. The National Library of Australia has now digitalised an enormous number of newspapers and magazines up to the 1950s, or even later, on a website labelled Trove. As it is easily searchable, I have at last had the opportunity to follow up these stories. It turns out, many reports were copied almost verbatim from one newspaper to another, but I have attempted to cite the original as far as possible. I might add, too, that Andrew Nicholson appears to have beaten me to the Thargomindah Bunyip.

The Trouble With Eye Witnesses

     A major drawback with cryptozoology - and a lot of anomaly research in general - is that it has to rely to a large extent on eye witness testimony. Of course, we would like additional evidence: footprints, photos, films, hair and other DNA samples, and - the holy grail - a carcass. But, by and large, before anybody even looks for such evidence, somebody has to see something - and tell us about it.
     Now, eye witness testimony puts people in jail, so it shouldn't be scoffed at. However, as anyone involved in criminal investigation knows, there are eye witnesses and eye witnesses. To put it bluntly, some people's powers of observation and recall are less than adequate. To illustrate, let me share two double witnesses sightings I investigated. Even when two people see the same thing, there still remains the problem of cross-fertilisation, especially if they have discussed the matter before being interviewed, as is usually the case. Certainly, it is always important to interview both separately. Just the same, the bottom line is that two pairs of eyes are better than one. So, with these reservations, let us proceed.

Littlefoot in Australia?

     For a storyteller, there are only so many variations on the human condition you can invent. People with animal heads or other features can always be placed in far off, exotic lands. The wild man, who lives like an animal, can be placed in the depths of the wilds. Giants - well, they are too big to be living right next door. But tiny humans can fit in anywhere, so perhaps that is why such stories abound all around the world. Europe has its fairies and elves, while among the Australian Aborigines, the little hairy men, under various names, take their place. And just as Europeans who still believe in fairies still claim to have seen them, the same is true of the Aborigines.
     For instance, during the Gayndah episode, which I reported in my last post, the term,  jongari was introduced to the white community. Here is what was recorded by the Fraser Coast Chronicle of 10 February 2000, on page 5.

     According to Mally Clarke, anyone who sleeps at the Scrub Hill farm runs a fair chance of hearing the Jongari at night. "One Islander fellow who stayed here once got a real fright," she said. "He was out chasing cows one night and came back shaking because he had seen a little hairy man. We all laughed because we knew what it was."
     Four years later there were three separate sightings. "Someone once rang the police to say they had seen them running across the road from the old drive into the farm," Mally said. "Years ago they would play with the kids. I saw one once and thought it was a monkey because it was all hairy."

     Such legends, however, are completely unknown to the average white resident. So when they claim to see them, I start to take notice.

The Weird Little Visitor to Gayndah

     I appear to be out of the loop as far as mystery animal reports are concerned. When the "bear" or "jongari" paid a call to Gayndah, I was the last to be told. Steve Rushton, who lives nearby, heard about it. The message got passed to my friend, Paul Cropper in Sydney, and to Tim the Yowie Man in Canberra. Heck! Even the BBC got into the act before me.
     Gayndah, at 25° 38' S, 151° 36' E, stands inland, in a valley on the Burnett River in southeast Queensland, with a current population of 1745. The story began with an article on page 3 of The Fraser Coast Chronicle of 28 January 2000.

The Cryptids of Mount Tamborine

     I fell in love with Mount Tamborine as a very little boy - when my mother took me down the chasm walk (since closed), and I marvelled at my first sight of a rain forest. Mt Tamborine, at 27½° S, 153° 12' E, a short drive west of the Gold Coast in southeast Queensland, is a fragment of a huge volcanic shield. Crowned with a tourist mecca township on top, it is surrounded by a wide variety of habitats: from rain forest and eucalypt forests, down to pasture land in the valleys. Just the place, in fact, for a wide variety of animal life. And unofficial animal life as well - mysterious black "panthers", and one small, but very strange striped entity. At least, that was what was related to me by musician, Phil Manning in a letter mailed on 27 August 1998. I shall present the full text here,  with no changes except to shorten the names of third parties to their initials.

A "National Geographic" Cryptid

     As every schoolboy knows, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel, The Lost World was inspired by the tepuis: the 100-odd mesas towering on perpendicular cliffs up to a mile above the jungle in the borderland of Guyana and Venezuela. Of course, even as a schoolboy, when I read the novel (twice), I sensed a problem: huge animals require lots of living room, and a "plateau" only 20 miles wide was far too small for a breeding population of even a single species of dinosaur. No, dinosaurs do not, and cannot, inhabit the cloud-masked, rain-soaked, infertile tops of the tepuis. But that does not mean they are not ecological islands, with populations isolated one from the other and undergoing divergent evolution. You cannot throw a net in this jungle without finding a species of something or other unknown to science. Therefore, we should take seriously any account of unknown species somewhat larger than the run-of-of-mill.

Snarls from the Tea-tree: A Review

Snarls from the Tea-tree. Big Cat Folklore by David Waldron and Simon Townsend (2012), Australian Scholarly Publishing, available here.

     Several years ago, an envelope arrived at my former address, containing photographs of animals which gave every indication of having been killed by a big cat. A quick bit of research indicated that the sender, a certain Simon Townsend, was empoyed in the Victorian branch of the same government department as me. He was most surprised when I pointed it out. Since then, we have been retired, but he has kept up his interest in the topic, and has now collaborated with Dr David Waldron on a new book.
     This is about alien big cats in Victoria and the adjacent parts of South Australia. A couple of areas in other states are mentioned, but not Western Australia. Although the subject is of major concern for cryptozoology, it is not a regular cryptozoological book as such. You will not find a proposition, evidence, or a conclusion. Rather, it is a history and analysis of the phenomenon, and advice on dealing with it. There are 168 pages of text, eight photographs, four pages of index, and 400 end-notes, the greater part being of not-easily-assessible newspaper reports. Whatever else may be said about the book, it cannot be faulted for lack of documentation!

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.

Tales of the Australian Bigfoot

     What is more unbelievable: a ghost, a flying saucer, or a yowie? Obviously the last. We know very little about the intermediate state of the soul, we know even less about life in outer space, but we know that a big, hairy ape stomping around marsupial land - and quite undetected by science - is impossible. Bats flew here, and seals swim to our shores. But apart from that, no regular (eutherian) mammal larger than a rat has even reached Australia without human assistance. So you should not be surprised that, when I first heard about yowies, I was sceptical. My scepticism was not lessened by the fact that the main proponent of the legend (not mentioning any names!) was a well known crank. I therefore wrote an opinion for the journal, Cryptozoology debunking the early reports. When it came to my book, Bunyips and Bigfoots, I started the chapter on yowies as an unbeliever, and ended as a believer. As far as scepticism goes, I have been there and done that. Then, after the book was published, new reports started coming in. And since they have not yet been published, or published only in summary, I think it is time to put them on the net.

Carnivorous Plants in Central America?

     The existence of insectivorous plants has long stimulated the imagination with the possibility that somewhere, in some remote corner of the unmapped regions of the world, dwell plants large enough to feed on large, four-legged animals, even humans. The idea has been the inspiration of any amount of fiction - both straightforward fiction, and fiction disguised as travellers' tales.
     Now, although my training has been in zoology, rather than botany, I find a few problems with the concept.

Thoughts on the Lake Labynkyr Monster

     Would you believe it? People in the mainstream media actually look at these sites! Someone at 612ABC, the government radio station servicing Brisbane, was intrigued by this report in the Daily Mail concerning a monster in Lake Labynkyr, of far eastern Siberia. She therefore conducted an internet search for a Brisbane cryptozoologist, and contacted me for an interview. So yesterday I got my 10 minutes of fame giving my opinion on the identity of the beast, as well as fascinating facets of cryptids closer to home. However, it seems a pity to allow all that sudden research to go to waste after just 10 minutes, when most of the world would not have been listening to our local station. Therefore, I have decided to share it with you.

The Whistling, Neck-Spouting Bunyip

     As every Australian knows, the bunyip is the bogey of the bush and billabongs: a mythical monster never seen except in the fertile minds of superstitious Aborigines. But what everybody doesn't know is that, every 20 or 30 years during the 19th century, bunyips were seen and reported by non-superstitious, non-Aboriginal settlers. To be sure, most commentators - and I concur - regard the sightings as consistent with seals which, having slipped into fresh water, have got lost, swum in the wrong direction, and ended up hundreds, even thousands of miles from the sea - even in lakes unconnected to any flowing water. Indeed, around 1850, a seal was actually shot at Conargo (35° 19'S, 145° 09'E), about 900 miles upstream from the sea, and its stuffed remains graced the local hotel for some years.
    But what turned up near Swan Hill in 1947 was certainly no seal. It was really, really weird. Nevertheless, it may have a simple, if unexpected, explanation.

Another Deception Bay Sea Serpent

     The best documented Australian "sea serpent" was an elongated, inquisitive mystery animal which frequented Deception Bay in the period 1959/60. Situated at approximately 153° 7' E, 27° 9' S, not far north of Brisbane, Queensland, Deception Bay is a sub-section of Moreton Bay. Roughly semicircular in shape, it is bounded on the south by Scarborough, the northernmost part of the Redcliffe peninsula, and on the north by Bribie Island. I can never hear the name, Deception Bay without thinking, "monster" because the first time I heard about it was in relation to the monster, not long after I moved to the Brisbane area as a boy.
    In December 1996, I was on talkback radio promoting my book, Bunyips and Bigfoots. When the compere referred to the section on the Deception Bay monster, a Mr Mick Scheirupflug phoned in to say that he also had encountered a strange animal in the bay. One thing lead to another and, that evening, I was able to interview all three witnesses independently by telephone.

My Coworker's Sea Serpent

     By 2002, word had got around my workplace that I was interested in mystery animals, so one of my colleagues, Toni Womal approached me about an experience she had had as a little girl.
    Our interview took place on 8 August 2002, but the events in question occurred when she was about ten years old, so it was probably 1974, during the summer school holidays ie about January. The presence of a king tide may help to localise it further in time.
    At the time, she was living at Bowen, North Queensland (20° 25' S, 148° 15' E), and went to the seaside with her eight-year-old brother, Stephen and her grandfather, Les Womal, now deceased. They had gone out to a rock, known locally as Womal's Rock, about 100 metres off shore, and while Grandpa was fishing from the rock, the two children amused themselves in a rock pool. It was only about 9 o'clock in the morning, so the weather was still a bit cool, although the day was fine, and would later turn hot.There was a king tide, and the water was choppy. Suddenly, their grandfather, without uttering a word, beckoned to them to come out of the water and stand beside him. He then gestured towards a creature about 100 metres further out. The sighting probably lasted only a few seconds, but it was very vivid. They were all mortally afraid of snakes, so they stayed on the rock all day, until the tide went out, and was about to turn. Then, their grandfather announced: "Get changed; we're going home", and he carried them back to shore. He didn't mention the animal again.
    What was it like? After all these years, it was hard for her to provide more than an impression, but it was essentially a series of vertical undulations. The creature was very wide - perhaps a metre thick - but certainly, its body was bigger than that of their grandfather, who was "a big Island man" (Toni is of Kanaka descent). It was glistening, shiny black,  and rolling like a python. The head was not visible, and it just disappeared. She was unable to be precise about the number of undulations.
     So what was it? Sceptics will have legitimate reservations, considering the brevity of the sighting, the youth of the witness, and the lapse of years. Against this, however, one must put the extreme fear reaction of the mature man accompanying them. No matter how much we pare it with Occam's razor, we are still left with something very big, elongated, and undulating. No fish sticks out as meeting that description. Sea snakes are much, much smaller. And, if her memory is correct that the undulations were vertical, this could only refer to a mammal. Readers will also no doubt be aware that reports of similar elongated, vertically undulating "sea serpents" have been received from all corners of the oceans.

What Was That Big Fish?

      The megamouth shark is 14 to 18 feet long – a filter feeder not much shorter than the dreaded great white shark – but it remained undiscovered by science until 1976. Fish live in a different world to ours. They do not have to rise to the surface to breathe, and unlike whales and the giant squid, they are not in the habit of regularly getting themselves stranded on the beach. Thus, a large species which is nevertheless rare, might well remain unrecorded for a long time. This may have been the case of the thing which approached the beach in southeast Queensland in the mid-1990s.     On 4 December 1996, I was on talk back radio promoting my book, Bunyips and Bigfoots, when  phone call arrived from a listener, who wanted to report a sighting of a large fish off a local beach. I asked for the telephone number, and the upshot was that I was able to interview the witness by phone that evening.

An Extraordinary Underwater Sea Serpent

     In the first week of 2003, I was lying in bed at night, when I received a phone call from a Mr Mike Cleary. He was seeking specific information on Australian cryptids for the husband of his niece in the UK. Unfortunately, I was not able to help him. Then he told me an incredible story.
     He has been a diver for more than 35 years. About 10 years or so beforehand he was in a diving bell with a companion off the south-east coast of Japan, checking bottom sites for an oil rig. They were at a depth of 1,700 feet when an unknown creature approached the bell and circled it.
     It was about 25 foot long. It had no visible scales, and the skin changed colour in the light from the bell (which, I gather, is common occurrence at this depth). It swam with horizontal undulations. There was only a single, elongated dorsal fin, extending down the body. I got the impression that it was like an eel's. He couldn't say much about the tail, but didn't think there was a tail fluke.
      The head was like a sea horse's, the eyes like a cow's, and teeth like a barracuda's.
     There was no constriction between the neck and body, but one ran into the other. However, 8 feet from the front was a pair a limbs, about 4 feet long. There was also a pair of hind limbs. I questioned him about this in particular, but he was emphatic that these were not fins, but webbed limbs.
     What sort of creature could this be? The elongated dorsal fin and the horizontal undulations mean it had to be some sort of fish – but what? The obvious choice is some very large eel, or elongated shark – although none, to my knowledge, are of such a size. However, it is the limbs that are the real problem. As you are no doubt aware, the vast majority of fish, the teleosts, possess rayed fins, which could hardly be mistaken for limbs, or even paddles. The largest fishes tend to be sharks, but their fins are also hard to mistake for limbs, and most people – especially divers – would be familiar with them. But there once existed a vast array of lobe-finned fish, of which only a few relic species are now known to exist. One is the Dipnoi, or lungfishes. The other is the Crossopterygians, whose lobed fins evolved into the legs which all land vertebrates now walk on. However, except for the two species of coelacanth, they all went extinct about the same time as the dinosaurs, and were on the way out for a long, long time before that.
     So, if Mr Cleary's perception and memory were accurate, something very strange was swimming around off the coast of Japan.

What Terrifies a Congo Pygmy?

    The Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are hunter gatherers who live in a symbiotic relationship with the taller agricultural villagers. They hunt small mammals by beating the jungle and driving them into nets, but also go after larger game, such as okapi, and even elephants, with spears. As hunter gatherers, they would have an intimate knowledge of the local fauna. So what is the jungle denizen, which is heard but never seen, which terrifies even these knowledgeable children of the rainforest?

The Yeti of Pakistan. 1

     In India a bandicoot is a large rat, in Australia it is a marsupial. Americans call an elk a moose, a red deer an elk, and a bison a buffalo. In Spain and Portugal a tigre is a tiger; in Latin America it is a jaguar.

    What has this got to do with the issue of this post? Simple. Across the length of the Himalayas there are a host of mutually incomprehensible languages, and consequently a host of different names for a legendary giant primate unknown to science. Westerners have adopted one of these words, “yeti” and translated another as “abominable snowman”, and use these as catch-all terms for the animal. But how do we know that all these words refer to the same thing, or even that they are used consistently in the same language? We know that Reinhold Messner, for example, has made a good case (My Quest for the Yeti, 1998) that a couple of these words refer to the brown bear.

    Therefore, we must be grateful for the work of the late Jordi Magraner, the Catalan-born French zoologist who so meticulously researched the issue in Chitral, the narrow triangle of Pakistan squeezed between Kashmir and Afghanistan. During two expeditions into the region, he managed to locate, and question in their own languages, more than two dozen people who had actually seen the mysterious creature, and obtained information on 63 separate characteristics. He continued to make expeditions into the region, where he was eventually murdered in 2002.

    The following is a translation of his 1991 report. The original was sent to me by Michel Raynal, to whom I am grateful.

    This is a two part post which, like the post on the creatures of the Caucasus, is published in a format such that they can be read in the correct order. 

The Yeti of Pakistan. 2. Eyewitnesses

    Dr Magraner next provided details of three eye-witness reports. The sightings are so explicit, and at such close range, it is hard to see how any mistake could have been made.
Addendum: I have since discovered a fuller report, and have translated several more testimonies here.