Recent Yowie Sighting
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on September 30th, 2010
MATTHEW Jones was totally unprepared for what he saw as he stood in his garage in suburban Canberra in October last year.
Packing boxes for a house move, he was confronted by a stocky, hairy monster standing in the corner of the garage staring at him.
The creature, according to James, was a juvenile covered in hair, with long arms that almost touched the ground.
“It was inquisitive about what I was doing,” he said. “It was definitely trying to communicate with me.”
At the time, James had no idea what the creature could be. A friend later told him it could be a yowie – the creature described in the newly-published Something Is Out There as “the big daddy of all Australian mystery monsters”.
It is, according to the book about the paranormal, the Aussie cousin of North America’s Bigfoot, the Himalayan Yeti and the Abominable Snowman.
The Aussie monster is as elusive as he is controversial, often seen but never photographed, according to the book’s authors Julie Miller and Grant Osborn. They claim the yowie is an important part of folklore, making numerous appearances in the Dreamtime legends.
The yowie is most often described as a solitary, nocturnal creature with a frightful growl.
If you are chased, the best thing to do is jump into a waterhole, because they cannot wet their feet.
The book claims that there have been almost 10,000 reported yowie sightings during the past 200 years.
Something Is Out There also lists other Aussie monsters, including a mega shark, giant lizards, panthers on the prowl and phantom kangaroos.
The authors have divided their book into three parts: UFOlogy, cryptozoology (the search for bizarre creatures) and the general supernatural.
As they admit, the paranormal is “generally viewed through the prism of pseudoscience”. It lurks in the murky corners on the borderline of accepted knowledge.
Source: Sunday Herald Sun
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Canberra is our nation’s capital – all sort of strange creatures roaming about, especially when parliament is sitting…..
The Yowie is one of the most interesting creatures of Cryptozoology to me. If one were ever discovered, it would mean alls kinds of things for concepts of evolution and human migration. Yowies would have to have made it to the Australian continent somehow. Modern science has a hard enough time conceiving how the Aboriginal Peoples made it to the Australian Continent.
Exactly – and my thinking is, if one type of primate made to Oz, why not another?
In a garage….in a suburban part of a capital city??????
I’m sorry but this is where I think some people must be smoking some strong stuff.
I live in Colorado in the most populace city, and many wild animals come right into town…We’ve had bears, cougars, coyotes, foxes, deer etc…Right in our suburbs.
It’s not uncommon at all. Usually if it’s a bear, or cougar they find that it’s a young juvenile that hasn’t learned the ropes yet. I.E.-people are dangerous, highways etc.
should be avoided, blah, blah blah…I don’t immediately think someone’s loaded when they see an “out of place” animal. So I don’t think a different standard should be applied to cryptids, and those who claim to see them in our midst upon occasion.
“Modern science has a hard enough time conceiving how the Aboriginal Peoples made it to the Australian Continent.”
Er, presumably they walked and boated here (a land connection is theorised).
“Kopite” and “sasquatch”:
By North American standards, the city of Canberra is really just a big town located not very far from some pretty bushy areas (national parks etc.), but to me a suburban Canberrian encounter still seems a little far-fetched.
sasquatch,
I completely disagree. These animals are called ‘cryptids’ for a reason. If they came into suburban areas of major cities to hang out in garages then they wouldn’t be ‘cryptids’ for very long and we’d have bona fide proof of them.
The animals you refered to are all known and scientifically catalogued and aren’t cryptids so it IS a different standard. If such creatures as Yowies are out there and uncatalogued then it’s because they are very good at avoiding man. Passing through a suburban part of Canberra and ending up in someone’s garage is the kind of behaviour that would preclude them from remaining as cryptids.
David-Australia,
I know Canberra. I was there in Canberra during my year long travel around Australia. I know it’s not London or New York but all the same it’s still a big town and the countryside surrounding it isn’t wilderness.
Anyway I’m glad you agree that a sighting in someone’s garage in suburban Canberra sounds far fetched.
I’ve no problem with the idea of a yowie appearing near a Canberra house. The ACT is a well known hotspot for cryptids in Australia, indeed a yowie was supposedly shot by the Webb brothers in the Brindabella Ranges in 1885. If you doubt how close the bush is to Canberra, do a websearch on the 2003 Canberra Bushfires. The only other thing I wanted to add was that perhaps it wasn’t a juvenile yowie, but a Junjudee.
Comments:
“Modern science has a hard enough time conceiving how the Aboriginal Peoples made it to the Australian Continent.”
“Exactly – and my thinking is, if one type of primate made to Oz, why not another?”
My primary problem with the Yowie has been: why is there no evidence of any primate ever having lived in Oz; and how could they have made it without walking? (The sasquatch is reputed to be an excellent swimmer and a number of sightings have been made in the ocean, some off Alaska. But anyway.) The simple answer to the why-no-evidence? is, not yet, anyway. We’re finding new fossils all the time. Whether much of the extinct Oz megafauna coexisted with humans or not is still a big mystery; we’re talking similar timeframes here, and not a lot of time for fossil evidence to accumulate, more than enough reason for us simply not to have found any, yet. If the Aborigines are such a tough explanation, and yet there they are, scientists might want to open their minds to the possibility that an animal they simply don’t accept just might be there. Because people have been seeing it.
“I don’t immediately think someone’s loaded when they see an “out of place” animal. So I don’t think a different standard should be applied to cryptids, and those who claim to see them in our midst upon occasion.”
To that, and all preceding it in that post, thumbs up. I’ve never had a hallucination while drinking, and find that handy dismissal quite puzzling. It is indeed a double standard. If we are seeing all the other animals that we sometimes see in unexpected places, why not this one? It would be part of a pattern, not apart from it. (Many sasquatch encounters are of this type.)
“These animals are called ‘cryptids’ for a reason. If they came into suburban areas of major cities to hang out in garages then they wouldn’t be ‘cryptids’ for very long and we’d have bona fide proof of them.”
“If such creatures as Yowies are out there and uncatalogued then it’s because they are very good at avoiding man. Passing through a suburban part of Canberra and ending up in someone’s garage is the kind of behaviour that would preclude them from remaining as cryptids.”
The first statement is a presumption with no evidence to back it up. If no one believes anyone who encounters a cryptid, then how does the proof happen? Answer: it doesn’t. (It is a double standard; a profoundly unscientific one; and flat wrong.) The second statement is TWO statements with no evidence to back them up.
Evidence indicates that the sasquatch and yowie are no better at avoiding people than any other animal. The problem is that no one who sees one can get anyone to believe him. (Or simply doesn’t report it, thinking no one will.) THAT is why they remain cryptids. That animal could have spent a month on a garage tour of Canberra, and only one person reported it because well, sometimes someone takes the chance that he’ll be thought a nut. Most don’t.
Yowies could be encountered under these circumstances. If, of course, they do exist.
As to how something like the Yowie could have gotten to Australia, the idea has become less and less implausible in recent years.
We of course know that Homo floresiensis , or the “Hobbits of Flores,” ended up on Flores island. There have also been the mysterious remains of other hominids found on other islands in the Pacific, as well as various stories of miniature hairy hominids prevelant in many cultures in the region. This points to the possibility that these early hominids may have extended their range throughout the region to a greater degree than once thought.
Of course even during the ice ages, when sea levels were lower, sea crossings would have been necessary. This seems to imply that these creatures, or their ancestors, had the technological ability to build rafts and such however this is not even necessarily a requisite for making such crossings. Natural disasters such as tsunamis or other weather events could have swept away and deposited these creatures far from their homes, making accidental sea crossings a possibility. There are many examples, such as during the 2004 tsunami, of people being swept far out to sea on debris. In some cases large numbers of people have found themselves cast out to sea by such events. Is it not possible that the same could have happened with H. floresiensis or their ancestors, bringing them to new habitats? My point here is that while they may have indeed possessed some rudimentary sea faring ability, sea crossings could have been possible even without it.
It may seem that something like H. floresiensis would be too small to account for Yowie sightings and that is true, but they could account for sightings of the smaller junjudee, which are like miniature versions of the Yowie. Also, keep in mind that it is speculated that H. floresiensis may have descended from Homo erectus, with the former becoming smaller on Flores due to an evolutionary process known as island dwarfism. Therefore the H. erectus on Flores may have gradually shrunk in size while those finding themselves in Australia, with plentiful food and megafauna, may have actually gone the other way and increased in size. We may even have had the situation of other populations arriving later from Flores and retaining their small stature, which could account for the presence of both the Yowaie and. It’s interesting to speculate on.
There is little in the way of any hard evidence for remains of any sorts of fossils to lead us to believe that any of this actually happened on Australia, but there are rational reasons to suspect that there is at least the possibility that this could have happened, and possibilities are what I’m trying to explore here. Considering what happened on Flores, and the remembering that Flores would have at its closest been only around something like 60 kilometers from the Australian mainland, the scenario I’ve described here is not completely far fetched.
There are no fossils that have turned up yet, true, but fossils are a tricky thing. The process is rare, the fossils could be far from where we may find them, and many fossil discoveries that we do have are made completely by accident, including actually those of H. floresiensis. Remember also that many fossils that are “amazing new discoveries” had actually been sitting around gathering dust on a collection, having not been properly recognized at first for what they were.
Whether a primate or an early hominid actually ever was in Australia remains in doubt, however it is not the daft notion some may have the knee jerk reaction to think it is. Considering this tricky nature of fossils and our quite patchy fossil record of all life on Earth to begin with, coupled with the Flores discoveries, the proximity of that region to Australia, and possibilities of sea crossings, I would not completely dismiss out of hand the possibility that at some point someone may stumble upon such fossils.
Am I skeptical of the existence of the Yowie? Yes I am. Can I say for certain that it is not there and that there is no scientific justification for it being there? In light of discoveries such as H. floresiensis and our ever changing understanding of early human migration, no I cannot.
Sorry, in my haste to type and post, I made a rather terrible typo up there. At the end of the fourth paragrah in the second to last sentence, the end should read “….account for the presence of both the Yowie and the junjudee.”
Sort of cut the end of the sentence off there. Sorry about that.
DWA- Well, there are situations I suppose when hallucinations could be at work in something like a Yowie sighting. You may be aware of something known as infrasound, which is basically sound below a human’s ability to register tham, typically below 20Hz.
Infrasound is interesting in that it has been shown in several studies to produce a wide variety of both physical and psychological effects in humans. Some of the effects include feelings of fear, sorrow, panic, anxiety, depression, and nausea, among others. It also can produce rather convincing hallucinations, since the eye operates at a level of around 18Hz and can be disrupted by the lower frequencies.
Adding to this hallucinagenic effect is that since the person recieving the infrasound cannot actually hear the sound producing the symptoms, they may be more likely to start filling in the blanks of what they expect to see, driven by the brain’s need to try to make some sense out of the inexplicable feedback.
Infrasound isn’t exclusive to man made sources either. Many natural sources abound, such as atmospheric phenomena such as storms, earthquakes, waves, wind interacting with certain structures, volcanic activity, and many others. Some places may even act as sort of natural amplifiers of infrasound, producing these sounds at higher levels. This could explain the otherwordly qualities of some mystical sites, and even the increased numbers of sightings reports found in certain areas. Many animals also use infrasound for a wide range of purposes. Elephants use it to communicate, birds use it in migrations, and tigers produce it in their roars, which may explain why the sound can cause such a deep dread in those that hear it.
The feelings of dread or unease produced by certain infrasound frequencies are so well known that they have sometimes been exploited in some music in order to instill these feelings in listeners.
Many Yowie sightings, and indeed Sasquatch sightings, are often precluded by, or go hand in hand with a profound feeling of unease or dread. Witnesses often report things like feeling sudden fear or having their hair stand up on end, all effects also associated with infrasound. Many Yowie sightings are concentrated into certain areas that may also be high level sources of infrasound, and there are sightings that have occurred during unusual weather activity, which is also a known source of potential infrasound.
Now before anyone here starts railing on me, let me state that I am by no means dismissing all such accounts as the workings of infrasound. Far from it. I am only trying to illustrate that it it is indeed a known factor in hallucinations and other psychological and physical effects, and so may be at work in some accounts. I’m saying that hallucinations should not be entirely dismissed as a possible factor in some cases
The effects of infrasound are not a result of skeptics grasping at straws, but rather have been demonstrably shown to be quite real. This is not something that can be swept under the rug and scoffed at either, and I would be remiss in looking at these things equally from all angles if I didn’t at least look at the possible effects of this phenomena on some sightings reports.
In short, while not a total explanation by any means, I feel that hallucinations as a possible factor in some sightings is a possibility.
mystery_man: Well, actually, it’s been theorized – and there appears some evidence for this – that the sasquatch produces infrasound.
Which could account for some encounters that – at least as to the possible cryptic source – aren’t hallucinations.
Not that this can be proven at present. But the anecdotal evidence for it (including, apparently, the unreasoning-fear reaction) appears not inconsequential, being reported in conjunction with other frequently reported earmarks of encounter.
I just don’t think that hallucination, or hoax, or any other false positive, can be considered significant discreditors of the volume and depth of the evidence. Not, that is, unless a significant number of false positives can be proven on followup of evidence that looks promising. Which doesn’t seem to be happening.
And yes, that there could be an unaccounted-for primate in Oz is starting to me at least to seem less and less farfetched. It could be.
To me Yowie is not an Ape, but rather a Procoptodon , aka the Giant short-faced kangaroo.
DWA,
Oh come off it.
A ‘crypid’ animal wouldn’t stay a ‘cryptid’ and uncatalogued for very long if it turned up in suburban garages. What evidence is there to back this assertion up? It’s called common logic and common sense.
There is a big difference between accepting a cryptid sighting in a remote and seldom visited location compared to a suburban house garage. In this sense the ‘context’ is completely different and there is little correlation between the two, otherwise what next? Do we have to equally consider sasquatch sightings at a bus stop?
Pulease!!
DWA,
How far do you take your position? Do you personally equally consider a bigfoot sighting in the British countryside every bit as much as a bigfoot sighting in the countryside of British Columbia?
There are limits to what I will consider. Amazing cryptid large primates in suburban garages of Canberra aren’t one of them.
If that makes me ‘unscientific’ then so be it. I don’t claim to be a scientist in the first place. I’m just me. No more, no less.
Kopite:
Actually, you have to come off of something. Which is a position that, subjected to common sense, simply doesn’t scan.
“Come off it” is what scientists say four years before they all universally accept what was “come off it” four years ago. It’s a close-minded attitude. That ain’t science.
“A ‘crypid’ [that’s crypTid] animal wouldn’t stay a ‘cryptid’ and uncatalogued for very long if it turned up in suburban garages. What evidence is there to back this assertion up? It’s called common logic and common sense.”
No. IT IS NOT. You say you’re not a scientist. You certainly don’t think like one.
(For example, I just told you there is no evidence to back up a single assertion you made; and any scientist worth his spectacles knows that ‘common logic and common sense’ don’t explain anything in the universe; only evidence does. Yours, please.)
These things aren’t being routinely seen – at least not routinely reported – from suburban garages. Nor are most wild animals. So you wouldn’t expect a slew of reports. But anybody who has watched Youtube more than twice knows that wild animals, all kinds, occasionally pay unexpected visits to civilization. If this thing is like any primate, it does too. (Like, you know, the sasquatch, and the yeti, are frequently reported to do. Oh, you don’t read the evidence.) There is no evidence – you clearly don’t read the evidence, do you? did I say that? – that this animal is any different from any other primate, any other wild animal, in its elusiveness. Except for one thing: you are a nut if you saw one. This guy sees one, in yes a rather unlikely location, and nobody believes him. You don’t; and yet you say that if this thing did this it would be catalogued. Well, common sense should tell you that’s wrong; and that’s what I told you. Don’t be silly. IF NO ONE BELIEVES YOU, NO PROOF. jEveryone in Canberra could have one building model airplanes in his garage; and if no one came by to check it out, and no one ever does, nothing. I have evidence for my claim: no cryptid hairy hominoid has been confirmed by science. Yours, please.
Thinking that this sighting could potentially have merit is not True Belief or gullibility or anything other than noting that, since otherwise sane people don’t seem to run around blurting this stuff out, well, maybe there could be something to it, and you file it until you have more.
See? Common sense. Don’t worry. I’m waiting for the mainstream of scientists to catch up, too.
You could just read my post again, because I essentially re-posted it. Don’t worry. I can wait.
And as to
“How far do you take your position? Do you personally equally consider a bigfoot sighting in the British countryside every bit as much as a bigfoot sighting in the countryside of British Columbia?”
I say: Well, how many reports are there from Britain? Do they appear consistent? (I know the answer.) You’re going to have to go somewhat farther to convince me there, now aren’t you.
See how science looks at stuff? Would be nice if scientists – and lay people who should know better – remembered it. If you don’t want to learn something from people who know something, grasshopper, what the HELL are you doing here? If I thought like you, I would never come to a crypto site, because, well, it’s all crap, right?
BTW: there aren’t nine (major) planets anymore. Because when some nobody amateur said: hey, I think I have a new planet here…
…SOMEBODY CHECKED IT OUT.
“There are limits to what I will consider. Amazing cryptid large primates in suburban garages of Canberra aren’t one of them.
“If that makes me ‘unscientific’ then so be it. I don’t claim to be a scientist in the first place. I’m just me. No more, no less.”
And this makes you, um, an expert? “I will not consider this. By the way, I don’t know what I am talking about.”
Imagine doing this on a physics website. “There are limits to what I will consider. Quarks? Relativity? PUH-LEEZE. Oh, by the way, I’m not a physicist.”
The only people who can understand these concepts are physicists. So don’t tell me they’re real. We don’t know that. All we know is that physicists say they are. You ever seen a picture of one? We pretty much go, OK, guys, we have to go with you on this, because you are the ones with the advanced degrees. We sure don’t go to international physics conferences and say, cut out the drugs, you idiots!
If you took the above tack on a hard-science forum populated by hard scientists, the mild form of the response would be: come back when you know something, sonny. And they would, of course, be right. You can contribute nothing to the conversation but braying ignorance of what they know. After the initial response, you would either be studiously ignored or blocked.
This is proper. And cryptozoology has to start understanding this if it is going to be taken seriously as a science. Braying ignorance of evidence can’t be catered to. I can appreciate the proponents’ problem: they have to bring the braying ignoramuses in the scientific mainstream over to their way of thinking, by first, hats in hand, bowing and scraping and slowly winning over the truly skeptical to actually consider the evidence.
Me? I don’t have to do that. This is good cop/bad cop. And as someone who knows how scientists have to work if science is to work, I feel free to bad-cop anyone who comes on here just to scoff. Based on everything we know about animals, it is irrational to simply scoff at this account unless you have in hand evidence that tells you that this did not happen. Animals do this, once in a while. If the yowie exists, it probably does too. Done.
There is only one thing keeping cryptids from being discovered: the braying ignorance that keeps science from touching the topic with a ten-foot pole. This has to be called out; because otherwise responsible people – like scientists, and I’m presuming without evidence you – are doing it, and they shouldn’t be.
Here is the only position a true scientist can hold on any unconfirmed phenomenon, including the Archangels’ Conference that met in your kitchen last night:
Show me the evidence.
And if you dispute me on this, you may just lack the chops required to make a positive contribution to the discussion.
Just sayin’. (And I’m right.)
DWA- Well, remember that I’m by no means trying to write off all sightings as hallucinations. With the sheer number of reports, that they are all merely hallucinations would be a pretty tough pill to swallow. The instances of infrasound causing hallucinations would not reflect the number of reports. Also, hallucinations don’t leave behind footprints last time I checked. So no, I don’t mean to use this as a way to write off sightings reports by any means.
As to Bigfoot and infrasound, I have heard of the hypothesis that you mentioned. It would not be completely far fetched since there are already many animals well documented as using infrasound for a variety of reasons. I will not discount that notion.
However, with regards to considering hallucinations and infrasound, when looking at the possibilities, it is important to consider the known versus the unknown.
What do we know? We know that infrasound exists. We know that it causes a variety of physical and psychological effects, including hallucinations. We also know that it is produced from natural sources. These are facts, they are not in dispute.
Now let’s look at what we don’t know. We don’t know for sure if Bigfoot or in this case, Yowie, exist. If they do exist, we don’t know if they use infrasound. If they do use infrasound, we don’t know to what extent, or if they produce it in the quantity necessary to cause the symptoms I have already discussed. They may, sure, but we don’t know that. We don’t have the data, and therefore cannot completely rely on that as an explanation. It is a hypothesis.
Now considering what we know and don’t know, it seems to me that it may not be a good idea to completely write off hallucinations as the source of some sightings. We cannot dismiss that possibility. And if some sightings are caused by hallucinations, then that means we have to be very careful of which ones we consider to be authentic and which ones are not. Accepting a hallucinatory sighting as real can muddy the waters and give us innaccurate information about any possible real animal that may be there.
So really, I’m just being careful, as any scientist has to be. Does the Yowie or Sasquatch use infrasound? Sure, maybe. But we don’t know and until we do, we can’t just throw out the data that says naturally produced infrasound can cause hallucinations and feelings of fear and unease.
Throwing out the known in favor of the unknown is never a good idea. The unknown may pan out to be exactly like you say, and for that reason should be explored. But I’d say let’s not chuck out the possibility that indeed hallucinations may sometimes be the source of a percentage of sightings of the unknown.
This is not a blanket dismissal of any kind. You know I would not do that. But it is something in my mind that had to be considered.
M_m: We know each other, and I think you may be the least dismissal-prone person on this site.
And like you, I tend to, well, not discount utterly but hold back for future consideration, anything for which evidence isn’t available. I also look for the evidence to happen frequently, and consistently.
(e.g. One report of a sasquatch shape-shifting, or one report from a Lansdowne pub, or even only one report from a Canberra garage, aren’t going to be more, to me, than interesting stories. Hey, could have happened. But I’m not spending good money on chasing it. Even though I may have no evidence that the person making the report is a nut, it’s simply insufficient to go on. You can’t just toss it. But you won’t mount a search on it, until you start seeing it a lot in a given place.)
There are direct eyewitness accounts of sasquatch apparently disabling prey with a loud roar, similar to the tiger’s inferred use of infrasound. Now, there aren’t many of these. (I am directly aware of two.) But eyewitness accounts of animals actually capturing prey are rare even for known species, so you wouldn’t expect many. And, of course, if infrasound is causing a hallucination, a source needs to be present, and reasonable to speculate. Many encounters I have read in conjunction with the “fear reaction” don’t seem to be the kind of thing one would hallucinate; and they seem consistent with other reports, something I wouldn’t expect from a hallucination.
What it comes down to is this: there isn’t much one can consider “hot” in this search, other than that a lot of people appear to be having consistent experiences. (Most of them, granted, not in their garages. But a number of those – garages; front porches; driveways; front landings; back doors; bedroom windows; chicken/rabbit coops; hog pens – definitely.)
In short: if a large primate exists in Oz, the kind of behavior documented in this, granted ONE, report is possible, and not at all unreasonable, given what we know about primates and about wild animals in general.
I’m always careful not to let incredulity get in the way of evidence. If the yowie is real, it’s real whether we think it is or not.