1950s Thylacine Encounters
Posted by: Nick Redfern on April 17th, 2012
Over at his blog, The Cryptodane, Lars Thomas relates a fascinating story that involves his mother, a family friend, and the thylacine…
Lars writes: “It seems to me that Danish cryptozoology (i.e. me!) is besieged by letters at the moments. During a recent clean-up, I came across a bundle of letters that used to belong to my mother. She died almost 17 years ago, so I had completely forgotten their existence. Never mind – I was just about to throw them away, when a single word caught my attention; ‘pungulv’ – that’s Danish for ‘thylacine.'”
And what, you may well ask, do those letters reveal? Nothing less than the details of two encounters of the thylacine variety, one in Tasmania and the other in New South Wales, Australia, and both of them in…wait for it…the 1950s.
If that has got your attention, you can find the full article right here. And, as you’ll see from his post, Lars is continuing to dig into this potentially very significant story, so hopefully we may get more data on this as matters progress. I’ll keep you posted.
About Nick Redfern
Punk music fan, Tennents Super and Carlsberg Special Brew beer fan, horror film fan, chocolate fan, like to wear black clothes, like to stay up late. Work as a writer.
You know, if this species had survived up to the modern era, it would no doubt have been targeted for the exotic pet trade. Some Aussies kept them as pets. Recently Russians have been promoting a domesticated form of Fox that was bred there: if Thylacines could be rediscovered, and brought up in population to common levels, would they be the next target for domestication? And what would that look like?
Remember, all dogs descended from Wolves: that includes the pint-sized Chuhuahua to the 200 lbs Mastiff!
Several typos in the Danish link, and I can assure you that “New South Wales” (a state) is definitely NOT “some 300 km west of Melbourne” (capital of the state of Victoria)! The only thing NSW is immediately “west of” is the Pacific Ocean . . .
It makes we wonder what will be the fate of the soon to be returned to production mammoths.
Will they be confined to zoos?
Bred to be slaughtered on hunting preserves?
Or turned loose to live free with free range bison?
I vote for the last option.
The geography is certainly correct for the 1954 Tasmanian sighting. Most experts consider Northwestern Tasmania as the last stronghold for the tiger on Tasmania.
There are reports of people shooting thylacines into the 1950’s.These reports were recorded in select documents as native cat shootings and most people put these reports down to large quolls or tasmanian devils, however it has been speculated that these reports may refer to thylacine shootings! I have read several good books on the subject and it seems quite logical that they survived up until the 1950’s