Yowie Sighted by Motorist
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on May 24th, 2011
Originally published by The Daily Examiner on May 19,2011.
Motorist catches sight of a yowie
WHAT’S more than two metres (six foot) tall, solidly built and covered in shaggy hair?
If your answer was “that guy down at the local,” you’re probably right but it’s also a common description of a mythical Australian creature known as a yowie, a specimen of which has been reportedly spotted near Centenary Dr, north of Grafton.
A Hunter Valley man named Dean, who did not wish to be identified further, thinks he may have caught a glimpse of one of the creatures, a kind of an Australian version of Bigfoot, as he was driving along the section of road in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Dean, whose work sees him driving more than 5000km a week around NSW, was travelling south along the Pacific Hwy, north of Grafton just before 2.30am when he took the Centenary Dr bypass. Shortly after turning into the road he saw something that shook him to the core.
“I reached the top of the hill and I was coming around the sweeping corner to the right when I noticed something a lot larger than a kangaroo in the middle of the road – my headlights weren’t on it yet but it was a bright night and I saw what looked like a large person stooped over, with a big overcoat on,” Dean said.
“At the time I thought ‘you silly old thing, what are you doing in the middle of the road at this time of the morning’, but next thing I knew my headlights started to light it up and it took one giant step off the road, it went from standing up like a person to going down on all fours and then it disappeared into the scrub in about three bounds.”
Dean, who is used to night-driving and fatigue management, slowed down and was looking into the scrub for the creature and said he saw it silhouetted against the sky.
“It had an almost sort of a square, shaggy block head sitting straight on its shoulders – I’m a pretty big guy but it made me absolutely awe-struck how huge its body was – it had its arm up against a tree and it had about a foot of hair hanging from under its biceps.”
He estimated the creature to be at least two metres tall and covered in what looked like jet-black hair.
Dean said he had no idea what to think until he described the incident to colleagues later who said it was similar to yowie-sighting stories they’d heard in their travels.
Since then Dean said he had been researching … to rationally explain what he saw but has yet to find a satisfactory answer.
“Anybody who knows me knows I’m the ultimate realist but this was an awe-inspiring moment, it’s definitely made me a believer,” Dean said.
During his search for answers however, Dean came across the website of Australian yowie researcher, Paul Cropper who was very interested in his story.
Mr Cropper, who has also co-written a book on yowies, said Dean’s story wasn’t unusual.
“In our book we recorded around 350 reports going back to the late 1700s, early 1800s, but I imagine there’s a lot more than that which don’t ever reach the media – people have these experiences and then just keep it to themselves,” Mr Cropper said.
Theories abound as to what yowies could be, including an unknown species of ape or even an undiscovered close relative to homo sapiens, he said.
“One thing you can say with absolute certainty is that Aborigines and Europeans have been recording these things for a long time – the Aboriginal stories go back to the Dreamtime and the European stories go back to basically the first settlement … there’s just this consistent thread of stories up until Tuesday morning,” he said.
Anyone in the Clarence Valley who has had a similar experience can contact Mr Cropper, in confidence, via email on [email protected]The Daily Examiner
Download an interview with Paul Cropper regarding this reported Yowie sighting from last week here.
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.
Toss it in the hopper, Cropper.
Um, sorry.
All you can do with one sighting is: well, there’s another one. That sounds like other ones, a point in its favor.
I used to consider the yowie ridiculous. But of course I was going on the pat scientific model that says there’s no primates in Oz. But there’s still no certainty how the Aborigines – who basically lack the seafaring culture that appears a requirement – got there. (Based on what’s known about sasquatch, we could at least postulate that the yowie swam there.) And no fossils – yet – doesn’t mean anything, other than no fossils, yet.
Unless somebody puts in the time on long-term stakeout, we won’t know, unless we get really lucky.
Bottom line: one more story.
I’m sorry, DWA, but postulating that the Aboriginal People came from Yowies is a little far-fetched (And offensive and othering to boot). There have been scads of DNA tests done to ascertain how the Aboriginal people got here in Australia, and an island-hopping coastal route when the sea levels were lower is the accepted answer. Surely we can speculate on the existence of a hominin primate on the Australian continent without othering and separating the Aboriginal people from the rest of humanity? Plus suggesting that they couldn’t build boats to get here is also rather insulting to them as a people. If they’re ingenious enough to survive at least 40,000 years on this harsh continent with just their wits, then yes, they can build a small boat and hop islands in an earlier time with a lower sea level.
naplamnacey: one thing cryptozoology needs to do to raise its cred is read better.
I didn’t put a thing in my post that so much as implies what you’re outright stating. If you can’t see that, you certainly aren’t thinking like a scientist. No big surprise in this trying-to-be-a-field.
You can apologize whenever you’re ready.
(Totally junking something so useful as a seafaring culture seems a very unusual thing to postulate, to say the least.)
Wait… what? Did you or did you not say this:
I used to consider the yowie ridiculous. But of course I was going on the pat scientific model that says there’s no primates in Oz. But there’s still no certainty how the Aborigines – who basically lack the seafaring culture that appears a requirement – got there. (Based on what’s known about sasquatch, we could at least postulate that the yowie swam there.) And no fossils – yet – doesn’t mean anything, other than no fossils, yet.
Now, if you weren’t trying to say that the Indigenous Australian population were not able to get to Australia on their own, or didn’t have the technology to, and that is somehow linked to the Yowie, then I apologise.
If you did, however, then you’ll be waiting for an apology for a long time because it’s a rather insulting idea to the Indigenous Australian people.
napalmnacey: That’s what I wrote. It’s what you pulled from it I don’t get.
Unlike the Maori and other Pacific Islanders, the Aborigines don’t show copious evidence of a strong seagoing culture. I would think that this would spark discussion of possible alternative scenarios, not just for humans in Australia but for primates in general, rather than a presumption of humans “island-hopping,” which presumes that one would want or need to do such a thing. Yowie evidence seems to have more frequency and coherence than I initially thought, which means one of two things (other than crazy people hallucinating): either the Yowie – if, of course, it’s real – isn’t a primate, or there needs to be a better theory out there than no-fossils-equals-no-primates-thus-humans-had-to-immigrate.
No fossils means no fossils. Yet. Both the Yowie and humans could have immigrated; but a thesis needs to be worked out about when and how that holds water.
That the Aborigines “island-hopped” has to be carefully correlated with when that would have been feasible. A land-bridge hypothesis has to pass the same scrutiny. As I understand it, there are still sizable gaps in both theories. And again, Oz is, strictly speaking, an island. (Size alone has been used to disquallify it.) That a large chunk of the Aboriginal population would have simply trekked inland and tossed seafaring doesn’t seem to square with what we know about other cultures that obviously possessed the capability.