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July 11, 2018 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
59:18
Edition 353 - Yowie

This time Australian bigfoot researcher Tony Healy - on the trail of "Yowie"...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for staying in touch with me.
We are still in the grips of a heat wave here with temperatures in the high 80s, in the low 30s, depending on how you measure your temperatures.
So it is certainly going to be one of those years.
Whether it's going to equate with years like the long hot summer they keep talking about of 1976, I don't know.
But it's certainly warm.
And of course, our homes here in the UK are not really equipped for dealing with heat.
So if you live on an upper floor, which I do, then the heat tends to rise and just hang there.
And it makes it a little bit uncomfortable.
So, you know, I'll be sipping water, I think, as I read and do this, I think.
But, you know, we'll be fine.
And eventually we'll probably be complaining at the back end of the year that the weather is too cold.
It's part of being British.
I'm doing this show with a little bit of Americana.
I've dug out my famed Shur 545 microphone.
This is one of the great microphones, beloved of Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys.
The one that I'm using here, I think, was probably made in the early 70s, very well preserved, and obtained very cheaply on eBay.
But I just thought I want to try my microphone again.
So this is the legendary Shaw 545, which is the earlier version of the famous SM57, if you know about these things.
Just to let you know, I know some of my listeners are interested in the equipment that I use to do these shows.
Sometimes it's very simple.
Okay, shout-outs before the guest, and on this edition, the guest will be something from my radio show that I've had so many requests to put here on the podcast to preserve it.
So that's what we're going to do.
Tony Healy, expert on the Australian phenomenon of yaoi, the Australian version of Bigfoot, essentially, but so many other things too.
What an interesting guy.
Recently on the radio show, got a lot of email from people who missed that.
For people who never heard that and want to hear him on this show, stand by.
We're going to run that interview here.
You know, I don't put a lot of interviews from the radio show here on the website and here on the podcast.
But the simple fact of the matter is that I do try and preserve some of them because it's not like the famous Art Bell archives.
The radio station eventually just erases all of the interviews.
They don't hang around for a long time.
So if I don't keep as much of it as I can, then it will just disappear and go forever.
And I think in the case of some of the interviews, that's a very big shame.
So Tony Healy, you're going to hear on this edition of The Unexplained, a lot of shout-outs to get into.
I promised I would do this.
And if you don't hear your name, please know that I have seen your email.
I see them all as they come in.
First thing I do when I get up in the morning is to turn on the computer and check email.
You can always get in touch with me to make a guest suggestion, whatever, by going to the website theunexplained.tv and the website designed by the hard-working Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
All right, shout-outs.
Paul Kaye in Liverpool, thank you for your comments, Paul.
Connor in Liverpool and Connor in Belfast, thank you for getting in touch.
Brian Conlon, thank you for the amazing email about synchronicities.
And yes, Brian, I think that most people have synchronicities, even if they don't notice them.
Heidi in Somerville, South Carolina, nice words, Heidi, and a guest suggestion too.
Rogier in Groningen, the Netherlands, good to hear from you.
Alex, nice to hear from you again.
Scott in Dallas, I will look into the issue that you raised.
Scott, thank you.
Eric is asking if there's another way to make donations to the show.
Not at the moment, Eric, but I will look into this for the new website.
I will.
Piers, Godwin, and Steve were three of the many people who kindly suggested remedies for my South African flu, which is still sitting on my chest and deep in my throat.
But I think it's heading the right way.
And that's away from me now.
But thank you very much to everybody who made suggestions.
Eric in Roncorn, Cheshire, wonders if time slips might be associated with cryptids.
So in other words, you might slip into another time briefly and see a creature that was native to that time.
I think that's a fascinating idea, Eric.
Thank you.
Chris, thank you for the guest contact details for the UK director of MUFON.
I might do that on the radio show.
Thank you, Chris.
Fellow broadcaster Daniel Ruiz in London, thank you for making contact, Daniel.
And you even remember me on London's Capital Radio.
That's becoming a long time ago now.
Debbie, thank you for the guest suggestion.
I'm on it.
Debbie, thank you.
Mark in Surrey, nice to hear from you again.
No men, talking about Andrew McGrath and the Beasts of Britain, says that he lives near Box Hill.
There are tunnels that run under the hill and the old World War II gun emplacements that also go in and under the hill.
He says, I've personally seen stick structures, the kind that might be left by Bigfoot, in the new forest, which is Hampshire Dorset Way.
Take a trip yourself, he says, and walk through the forest, specifically areas where the forest is not disturbed by tourists and walkers.
You may be surprised and shocked.
Thank you.
Carl gets in touch and says, Andrew McGrath was a damn good episode.
I myself have seen a big cat trying to get swans from a canal in Pensnet in the Midlands.
I thought I was seeing things, says Carl.
Another time I was on a school camping trip and myself and a friend heard a low growl behind us while we were sat in a large open field near Glanbreimair in Wales.
We never saw anything, but it took off at a fast pace.
My friend was also stalked by a large cat on Kings Winford railway walk while riding his bike.
Boy, it's all been happening to you.
Jason in Blackpool, thank you.
Anne Claire in Texas says the Bosnian Pyramids show with Dr. Sam was a fantastic show.
So much new and interesting research going on.
Thanks for that, Anne Claire.
Also liked the Titanic show.
Some good ideas from Natalie in Inverness in Scotland.
Thank you, Natalie.
Johanna Kristen Ellerup, many thanks for the feedback on the Mars show and also suggesting that varying methane levels, which is what NASA Was talking about can be caused by inorganic substances.
It doesn't have to be life.
Thank you.
Roger in Brighton, thanks for getting in touch.
Nick near Bar Harbour, Maine.
Good to hear from you.
Linda Lee Murdoch, great guest suggestions, Linda.
Thank you.
Peter says about Richard Hoagland, who was on the radio show recently.
Howard, I hope you're able to ask Richard about his latest book, which he said 18 months ago would be a game changer.
It still hasn't been published.
I understand, Peter, that the book is a work in progress.
It is a big book, but I will ask Dick about that.
Tyler in Vermont, I love the unexplained tattoo, Tyler, that was sent to me by Kerry.
What a tribute.
A person who got a tattoo.
Please don't go out and do this.
But Tyler in Vermont had an unexplained logo tattoo made.
Such a fan is Tyler.
Thank you.
I'm humbled.
Larry Delanoy, who's a FedEx driver in Arizona, who listens a lot.
Great email.
Thank you, Larry.
Drive safely.
Daniel James in Michigan, thank you for telling me about your UFO sightings back in 1975.
Jameson Faulkenbrock, who's an editor and guitarist, would like to see The Unexplained on television.
Now, that's a thought, isn't it?
Satdev Bakker, thank you for the kind email, Satdev.
Lee.
Now, Lee does a podcast and wants me to give him some tips about audience building.
God, this is hard work, Lee.
And all I can say is that what you've got to do is be yourself, be unique.
And if your audience finds something in you and what you do that they like, I promise you, you know, you build it and they will come.
Let me know how it goes.
Edna Zarrow in Sierra Vista, Arizona, takes issue with Titanic author John Hamer.
He says there's never been a debate about the sinking of the Titanic.
Only conspiracy theorists make that claim.
Noble, who's a Glasgow black cab driver.
Noble, nice to hear from you.
Fantastic name.
Noble Whitelaw.
Says I've been binge listening, sometimes eight hours a day, to my podcast back catalogue.
I've only 50 or so shows to go now.
You probably listen to them already now.
I feel as though I've been on a journey with you.
Boy, it has been a journey, Noble, but I'm really pleased to know that you're there in one of my favorite cities.
You know, I used to go up and train broadcasters for real radio in Glasgow and also for Radio Clyde.
I went there a couple of times and knew some of the greats like Jimmy Gordon and the now late Alex Dixon at Radio Clyde.
They trained me when I was very young and years later they asked me to go up and train them.
Adam Hill in the US, thank you for your thoughts on Steve Bassett and disclosure, Adam.
Bernie Taylor, can you let me know after your email a little bit more about yourself and what you plan and propose?
Aubrey says that I just started listening to your show this year.
I'm obsessed.
I'm an outside sales rep from North Carolina and I listen to it all the time.
Linda Moulton Howe, Stephen Greer are some of the favourites.
Thank you, Aubrey.
Julian in Australia, thank you for suggesting UFO researcher Paul Dean.
I'm going to try and get him on the radio version.
Also, thank you to Adam, Kathy, Helen Diskin, Vin Yohal, Danielle, Elder, Matt Russell in Penzance in Cornwall, Susan Brooke, Gary in Great Bar, Birmingham, nice to hear from you.
Mark, thank you for the shortest email I've ever had.
Half a line, not even that, very short.
He says, I love the show.
That's all.
Thank you, Mark.
A man of few words, but thank you.
They mean a lot.
Caro in New Zealand had both a guest and a health suggestion for me.
Thank you, Caro.
Jim in Minnesota, thank you.
Steve at Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.
Good to hear from you.
Nora Tricello.
Nora, I've passed your details on to my radio show producer.
Glenn on the Bosnian Pyramids, thank you for your thoughts and feedback.
And finally, this time, Keith Luttman on the Victoria Coast in Australia.
Thank you for your suggestions, Keith, and it's nice to know you're there.
So the guest on this edition is in Australia also.
It is Tony Healy, and we're going to be talking about the phenomenon of yaoi.
This comes from my radio show, and you have requested that I put it here on the podcast.
So here is the great and a new friend of this show, I think, Tony Healy.
So Tony, tell me a little bit about you then.
Well, I've been, as you say, I've been chasing our big hairy friends, the yaois, for many years, probably about since the early 1970s.
I've been interested in the yaoi phenomenon.
I've been researching the Yeti mystery in the Himalayas and the Sasquatch mystery in Canada before that, before I was even properly aware that there was an Australian version of this strange phenomenon.
So it's been a big, long trip, and I've been all over the world on about three occasions now, big trips.
Malaysia, Nepal, North America, the Bahamas of all places.
Fiji has a little hairy man.
So it's a very strange business.
Well, no, listen, it's truly international, and I certainly haven't heard of anything being reported in the Bahamas.
What is in the Bahamas?
Well, they call it the Yahoo, which is strangely similar word to the yaoi, really.
Sometimes they call it the Yahoo as well, which is a dead match to one of the Aboriginal terms for the yaoi.
And of course, it was a term that was used by Jonathan Swift, wasn't it, in his writings?
Exactly, exactly.
And he was talking about a race of hairy, uncouth, hairy ape men in an island called the Land of the Wynnams, which he placed, interestingly, just off the coast of South Australia, well before any European colonisation of Australia.
So, yeah, the field of cryptozoology, as you may have noticed, Howie, is full of weird coincidences.
It is, and full of connections.
When you think that the yaoi phenomenon in Australia, I understand, goes back 200 years or more, then it's surprising, isn't it, that similar things are being reported in different parts of the world as well?
Exactly.
Yeah, weirdly enough, I just spent 10 weeks in New Zealand, and the Maori over there have myths and legends and beliefs of big hairy man-like cannibal beings, which they know by various names.
Mero or Mohau is a couple of the words.
Before I went there, I had a slim file of 19th century newspaper articles and journal articles by British settlers who had interviewed Maori about the hairy giants.
But when I got to New Zealand, I had a hard time finding any contemporary Maori who had even heard of them.
Eventually I did, but the weirdest thing was I stumbled across two pākehās, that is white New Zealanders, who had run into these hairy giants.
Actually encountered them?
Yes, yes.
Both of these men, interestingly, well, logically, they're both logical, sensible, intelligent men.
They said, well, look, what we saw couldn't have been real animals.
Whatever these things were, they were something paranormal.
And I think they were right.
One of these fellows, Paul Braxton, is now quite a good friend of mine and we correspond all the time.
He took me to the spot where he saw his creature, which was in the town, right on the waterfront in New Plymouth, in the North Island.
That was 1964.
The other young fellow saw his hairy giant just south of the town of Palmerston North, again in the North Island, in the foothills of the Tararua Range, mountain range.
Both of these guys had no idea about Maori hairy giant lore when they saw their creatures.
And I found it interesting that one of the colonial era articles I had about the Maori belief included the detail that one of the refuges of the hairy men was the Tararua mountain range, just where this young fellow I interviewed saw his creature.
So that's a little bit of corroboration, isn't it?
That kind of backs it up.
If it's been documented there and you spoke to a couple of sensible people who've seen something there or thereabouts, it suggests something is going on.
Yes, yes.
But as I said, neither of these guys thought that the mystery, the phenomenon that they encountered was just a real genuine flesh and blood zoological event.
They both had the distinct impression that they were dealing with something supernatural, if you will, or paranormal.
And how did they describe, Tony?
How did they describe the encounters?
You know, was the thing, the creature, the hairy biped aware of them?
Was it looking at them?
Did it react to them?
Yes, yes, yeah, it did.
They did.
Another coincidence is that both of the men had been looking at strange lights just before the creatures appeared.
Pretty odd there.
And when you say strange lights, are you talking about UFO-style lights in the sky?
Have you heard of Min Min lights or spook lights, that sort of thing?
I haven't.
Maybe up here they have a different name.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, well, you know, you have the Will of the Wisp and Jack the Wisp.
Yeah, Jack-o'-Lantern.
Yeah, that sort of thing.
The young fellow and his friend down near Palmerston North, they were out looking at these small floating lights.
They'd seen them on numerous previous occasions, and they used to go out there and try and get close to them.
And they went down a dark country road, as I said, at the foot of Tararua Mountains.
And they were standing outside of their car adjusting their eyes to the dark.
And thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
It's big heavy bipedal footsteps came across a paddock.
And then this great shaggy, hugely tall, hair-covered, apparently man-like creature appeared.
It took me to the spot.
They were very close to this thing, seven or eight metres from it.
And it just looked at them and then appeared to crouch down.
And by that time, they were jumping in the car and making an exit.
Yeah, but the first fellow, the other case, the 1964 case at New Plymouth, my friend Paul Braxton was only about 14 years old at the time.
And now I've never listened to your show.
I've heard it's a good show, Harry, but I can only imagine that you've talked to a few people about ghosts and paranormal events.
We've bought the t-shirt, sent the postcard, we've been around the block, yep.
Okay.
Well, perhaps you won't find this particularly weird then, but Paul and his mates used to go to this beach to cut bamboo and make bows and arrows.
Paul lived just up a short street and around the corner from this beach.
On this particular evening, it was getting quite dark and he just thought, I must go down to the beach.
I really should go down to the beach and get some bamboo.
But he knew that it was going to be too dark for that.
Yet he wandered off, knocked on the door of an acquaintance, a kid he'd never had much to do with, and said, do you want to go down to the beach and we'll get some bamboo?
The kid said, yeah, okay.
They went down there.
When they got down there, they realised it was too dark to see what the hell they were doing.
And then they saw a light approaching from out on the sea, a white light, and it came closer and closer.
It seemed to have lights, a blue light and a red light, or a blue light and a green light, and a red light on either side.
So they thought it was a fishing boat.
And it approached, came right in, and they thought it's going to hit the rocks.
There was a reef of very sharp rocks right there, close in.
They thought it's going to crash.
We should go and call the police.
But it seemed to stop, and they thought, that's funny.
What the heck is it doing?
Then they started talking to each other.
And then all of a sudden, crash, crash, crash, out of the scrub to their right comes this eight foot tall, Bigfoot-like creature.
Oh, my God.
I mean, you say that in such a deadpan, matter-of-fact way.
I wasn't expecting that to be the kicker.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, of course.
It may be a silly question, but let's ask it.
What did they do?
Oh, they ran for their lives, screaming their heads off.
And have you looked this Mr. Braxton in the eye, and you're sure he's telling you the truth?
He's not telling you what we call porky pies.
Oh, yes, yes.
It greatly concerns him that this happened to him.
And after all these years, he's trying to make sense of it.
And he's an intelligent, well-educated guy.
Oh, well, he's essentially half-British, so he's got to have a bit of the old common sense.
It's never a guarantee.
And you're sure he hadn't been on the Amber Nectar?
Well, no, no.
He was only a kid.
And of course, he didn't even know anything about the Bigfoot or Sasquatch or Yeti phenomena.
Well, that's the kind of thing.
I mean, joking apart, it's the kind of thing, isn't it, that can make an impression on you for the rest of your life.
Yes, yes.
And he said this thing seemed to be hunting them.
Hunting them?
Yeah, it was running incredibly fast, but it had a very, very peculiar way of running, a style of running that really makes no sense.
He said its long arms, reaching down to about knee level, were rigid by its side, yet its legs were going like crazy, and it was running as fast as Usain Bolt, as he says, these days.
And it appeared to be coming at a, well, it was coming at an angle, and he thought, oh, it's trying to cut us off.
And he said, I felt like we were the prey, and it was the hunter.
But as in many, many cases where yaois and Bigfoot chase people, we have many cases like that in Australia, where the thing seems to be running incredibly fast.
It doesn't catch the person.
You know, it either gives up or somehow or other, when they turn around, it's stopped or it's gone away.
But in any case, Paul thought, you know, he was dead.
But he turned around, looked over his shoulder at the end of the road, and it was gone.
It is a hell of a story, isn't it?
Something that's massive, hairy, very unusual, bipedal, with a strange gait and an odd manner of running and rigid arms that are long and hang by its side.
To actually, for that to drop out of some kind of craft and then chase you for your life is an astonishing story, isn't it, by any standard?
It is very, very, very strange.
Yeah, both of these guys, the young fellow down at, let's just call the young fellow Tom.
I'm not sure.
I'll be writing about his case and I will be using his full name, but at the moment, let's say the young fellow in the 2014 event, we'll just call him Tom.
Both Tom and Paul Braxton have had all manner of strange psychic experiences since their encounters with these apparent hairy giants.
And suggesting to you that the fact that they had the encounter was a trigger for those things to happen in their lives, you think?
Yes, yes.
Well, that's astonishing.
Yeah, yeah.
Paul does say that he did have some sort of other apparently mild psychic experiences prior to that when he was in the UK with his mother.
Haunted houses, you know, every second place you got over there is haunted.
It goes with the history, I suppose.
Yeah.
Anyway, Paul, he's retired now, and he's writing his memoirs, his biography, because so many odd things have happened to him.
And his good wife, who I also know quite well now, she testifies that she's been present when some of these other things have occurred.
Well, well, listen, we've gone on a path that I wasn't expecting we would go down.
We were supposed to be here talking about one phenomenon called yaoi in Australia, but we've discovered that such things exist in New Zealand.
Tony has been to the Caribbean and other places, including North America, investigating this phenomenon.
So we're hearing these kind of things are not just inhabitants, if they exist, of the northern hemisphere.
They're very much a part of the southern hemisphere.
We'll talk some more with Tony Healy coming soon here on The Unexplained Stay There.
Tony Healy in Canberra, we're talking around and about the yaoi.
In fact, it's kind of around the world with Bigfoot tonight, isn't it really?
And much more too.
I tell you what, Tony, you really surprised me with the connection between the yaoi phenomenon, the Bigfoot phenomenon, and other psychic phenomena.
I've never really heard that before, certainly with the people that I've interviewed and in the things and articles that I've been reading over the years.
That's something pretty new to me, that these things may in some cases be connected.
Yes, yeah, well, I think that's the case.
You know, I came to that conclusion reluctantly.
It took me some time, but I think it's inescapable, really, that there is something decidedly uncanny about these hairy giants that crop up all over the place, because the yowie phenomenon is exactly the same as the Sasquatch phenomenon in North America.
I mean, I've spent a long time in both of those continents, and the parallels are precise.
In Australia, virtually all the Aboriginal People believe in the hairy man.
They have many, many other names besides Yaoi, Dooligal and Thulegal and Jarawara, Noon Kuna, Gubba, many, many, many words.
So the native people in Australia, like the native North Americans, are all seemingly aware of the Hairy Man.
And as soon as the British turned up, the British settlers in North America and in Australia started to see these things.
It's decidedly weird.
There are many other reasons apart from this worldwide distribution of these things that cause me to believe the paranormal.
It suggests some kind of international connection and some kind of commonality between continents that is very hard to explain.
I printed out a piece from the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, before I came in, and I'm just going to read one paragraph from it.
It says, with alleged sightings of the mythological ape-like bush creatures dating back to the late 1800s, there is a community on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland that was marking this.
A community there revamped the tourist draw card.
The yaoi has been a longtime icon in the Kilkoi region, maybe Kilkoi.
It does great things for tourism, apparently.
It's been around since the 1800s.
And the Mayor Graham Lehman said after installation of a new yaoi statue, you know, it's good for the town.
It kind of brings people there.
So it's a phenomenon that is rather like the Loch Ness Monster, which we talk about a lot here on this show.
It's a phenomenon that actually draws attention from around the world, even if ordinary people and tourists who come to experience it don't really understand what they're being told.
Yeah, Kilkoi, though, the Aoi phenomenon hasn't been exploited by tourism to any great extent.
Kilkoi is virtually unique in Australia.
They've had that statue or a statue there.
I think it has been revamped recently.
Honestly, I doubt whether they draw many people there.
Well, maybe after this they will.
Do they?
We have enormous reach and great power.
We have people listening all over the world to this show, including many listeners in Australia.
Well, that's good, Matt.
That's great.
So as far as you know, what happened in and around Kilcoy?
Well, years ago, the first we heard of the Kilcoi area was there was two young lads.
They were about 15 years old and they were hunting rabbits with 22 caliber rifles.
And they claimed that they encountered a yowie close range in a sandy creekbed and fired a couple of shots at it and claimed that they couldn't have missed because they were so close.
They told their school teacher who went there and made a couple of plaster casts of footprints.
I've only seen photographs of the footprints and they're, well, they're rather large, the casts, and they're three-toed, which makes no sense zoologically or in terms of anthrop, you know, they're not human feet in anything.
Three-toed, I mean, there have been various casts of feet, footprints, that have been collected in places like North America, and as far as I'm aware, none of those are three-toed, are they?
Well, in fact, yeah, quite a lot of them are in North America.
Almost all are five-toed, but some are three-toed.
We're talking about the possibility then of subspecies even within Bigfoot.
Well, look, I think these things are, as I said, I think they're paranormal.
I think honestly, my best guess is they're interdimensional somehow, and they may be shapeshifters.
I know that sounds pretty weird, even to perhaps some of your listeners, but I mean, having interviewed hundreds of people now and gone to hundreds of sites around the world, there's good reason to believe that these things can materialize and dematerialize.
And that's not as stupid as it might sound in that, you know, not implying that it's stupid in any way, it's not as daft as it might sound, because the history of Bigfoot, if we look at it in North America and where you are, is of something which is somewhat elusive, that is very high.
I mean, you can't go out, and I know you do, and try to hunt it because the chances are you will not find it.
Those people who have encountered it, it has found them.
Yeah, yeah.
I think the best way to see a Bigfoot, if you really want to, is to leave your camera and gun at home and to go out in the bush with a couple of people who you trust who have seen them previously.
In all likelihood, those people will be slightly psychic.
We call some of the people here who have had repeated sightings, well, logically enough, we call them repeaters because there are some people who seem to, you know, wherever they go, they seem to run across these things.
And certainly, I think one reason, I always say one reason I never see them is because I always have my yowie repellent camera with me.
So maybe on some level, they are aware that people might try and capture images of them.
And perhaps they can be even more elusive on those occasions when people like you have cameras.
I don't know.
I think that's the case, crazy as it seems.
We have numerous cases of people whose cameras malfunction or they have a camera hanging around their neck or in their hand.
They forget that they've got it.
These things give them such a terrible scare.
Well, that's understandable, especially if it's legging it towards you.
Oh, sure, yeah.
But also game cameras malfunction, you know, trail cameras.
We have numerous cases of people leaving out tasty treats like dead kangaroos and hunks of steak and all kinds of other goodies on a stump right in front of a game camera.
And the game camera Records everything else, every little bird and every little movement of grass in front of it all night.
And then in the morning, the camera is checked.
Oh, well, the dead roux and the tasty food is gone, but there's nothing on the camera.
Oh, my God.
Which implies that it is somehow able to disable the camera function.
How astonishing.
Well, I can just hear the various skeptics of the words.
Well, you know, you and I, we must be psychic, because I was about to say that exactly.
I know that my more skeptical listeners will say how very convenient.
Yes, it is, isn't it?
But look, honestly, it would take a long, long time for me to really explain why I, fully explain why I'm pretty sure these things are paranormal.
I'm going to be at a conference in about a week's time going head to head, as they say, with an American skeptic lady, Sharon Hill.
And I can imagine I'll be outlining all these various reasons why I think the yaois are real and why I think they're paranormal.
And she'll say, well, everything you say from my perspective could be interpreted as proving that this is a psychological or sociological phenomenon.
Well, you know, it might be if the people who see and experience these things are all the same, if they're the same kind of people, if they have the same kind of proclivities.
But in the cases that you've talked to me about, especially in the cases we talked about at the top end of our conversation, you know, we're talking about sensible people.
We're talking about people who up to that point were not really regularly having psychic experiences, but did afterwards.
So on that level, we can't say it's people who are inclined towards these things who are having the experiences, because in the cases that you talked about, other psychic experiences started after the encounter with Bigfoot.
Yes, yes.
Another thing I could mention and points I'll raise during this head-to-head dialogue with the sceptic lady is that several of our witnesses are recently arrived migrants to Australia.
They've never heard of the yowie, never heard of it.
Yet they see them and they're shocked to their heels by this.
Can you think of a good example of that?
Yeah, there was an American guy, what was his name, Jason Cole.
He was cutting down some trees at a place in the Gold Coast hinterland in Queensland, and he had a chainsaw, and he saw something looking at him from over some scrub just at the bottom of the slope, reasonably close, 30 or 40 meters away.
And he said, as he described it, he said it was like a big, ugly gorilla man.
And being an American, he'd heard of the Bigfoot, but he'd never heard of the yowie.
And this thing was looking daggers at him and snarling.
And he thought, holy hell, that thing's going to come up here and kill me.
So he started going up the slope.
And it was so steep that he had to hold on to some of the scrub to drag himself up.
Meanwhile, he lost sight of this thing, and then he realised it was in front of him or off to the side.
As he said, he had no idea how it could have got up there so fast without making a noise through the scrub.
Anyway, he made a dash for his car and got away, but he didn't know that a fellow, a good friend of mine, Dean Harrison, was chased by a similar, or maybe exactly the same creature, just a kilometre away on, when was it, two years earlier.
So suggesting that there is some kind of colony or habitation for these things in that area?
Well, they sometimes appear, unsurprisingly, I suppose, when a scrub is being cut down or new home sites are being cleared in the bush or when a new road is being pushed through.
I've noticed that in Canada as well.
So the Aborigines seem to say that these things are more or less guardians, guardian spirits, you know.
So if you interfere with the makeup of the land, if you start chopping down trees, if you start changing the way things have looked for generations, perhaps the guardians may come and take you to task?
That could be it.
That's my feeling.
I mean, as I said, I mean, well, although we have hundreds of cases now, it's, you know, the database is not, you know, still a bit limited in some ways.
But certainly, yeah, people cutting down trees.
I'm just thinking of one in Florida, one of the best witnesses I had there.
Well, he was a preacher man, so he wouldn't tell a lie, would he?
Reverend Watley, and he was cutting down trees in central Florida, and seemingly a female Bigfoot approached him.
But interestingly, his new chainsaw cut out, the motor cut out, and he couldn't get it started.
And at that point, he turned around and saw the Bigfoot.
We have numerous cases where people's motorcycle engines have cut out.
So not only is this phenomenon affecting cameras and making psychic experiences happen, but it's also doing that, you think?
Well, it certainly seems to be the case.
Which is very common with UFOs, isn't it?
A lot of UFO stories, perhaps where people have missing time, maybe where people have been abducted, you know, they start with the car engine cutting out, all the electrics in the car failing.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
This isn't an original thought on my part, but me and some other investigators have noticed that various types of strange phenomena, you know, 40-inch phenomena, at their edges seem to merge into other areas of Strange phenomena.
That is to say, the Bigfoot and Yowie mystery seems to be all about a big, hairy, uncatchable ape men.
But there are, in a minority of cases, but a significant minority of cases, there seems to be hints of UFO activity at the same time and in the same place as the hairy men.
And also, on the other side, there is, in areas that big hairy men are seen, often, very often actually, other strange, uncatchable animals are seen, like black panthers, you know, like the Eggs Moore Beast and so on that you have.
Are you thinking that perhaps Bigfoot, not only in Australia but around the world, might in some way be a magnet for other forms of exotic wildlife that we know about?
Well, I think all of these things are just manifestations.
I think they come from the same place.
Whether they have the exact same source, I don't know, but I suspect that UFOs, big hairy ape men, black panthers, lake monsters, poltergeists,
ghosts, even little people, I think they're, I suspect that they're all sort of manifestations of the same strange source, you know, or strange power.
I don't know how to express it, but certainly I've investigated, I've interviewed a couple of witnesses who have seen things that could be described as a cross between a Bigfoot and a Black Panther.
Really?
So they might be breeding.
Listen, Tony Healy, I'm loving this conversation.
Stay where you are, don't move a muscle.
We've got more to talk about.
Round the world with yaoi, Bigfoot, chupacabra, Sasquatch, Yeti, whatever you want to call it.
It seems these phenomena may be connected.
Tony Healy in Canberra, Australia is with us tonight.
A fascinating conversation that's gone in a direction that I certainly didn't expect.
When you are hunting for signs of yaoi, physical signs of yaoi, how do you go about that when you're searching?
Well, it's not very sophisticated in my case, Howie.
Many cameras, I have several cameras, but as I said, I've virtually given up any hope of getting a photograph of one of these things.
So the cameras are mainly to take photographs of tracks, if I'm lucky enough to find any.
Presumably you have found those.
I've been taken to the site of a couple of apparent footprints, yeah.
Nothing too spectacular, but I'm pretty sure they were actually yaoi tracks.
One was on Mount Kembla, which is a notoriously haunted mountain near Wollongong.
And the young fellow who took me up there, it was two o'clock in the afternoon, and he showed me where he'd seen the yaoi that was looking at him from the edge of the scrub.
And he showed me the indentations where its feet were pushed right into the grass.
I couldn't stamp my foot hard enough to make an impression anywhere near as deep.
But what interested me about his, that incident, was I said to this young guy, well, there's a dam just down here.
Let's wander off and have a look around in the mud around the edge of the water.
We might find some tracks.
So I started walking off and then I realised he wasn't with me.
I turned around and he was standing as close to the car as he could get without actually being inside.
And his eyes were like saucers and they were darting around.
And I said, what's the matter?
And he said, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't.
It was two o'clock in the afternoon.
This guy was around about 25 years of age and weighed about 100 kilos.
Big, tough kid, but he was just shit scared, you know.
And I've seen that look on a few people's faces.
But yeah, that was he saw it and you didn't.
Well, he'd seen it a couple of nights earlier.
And so I went there, drove down there and met him in the middle of the afternoon and went up there.
But it's an indication of how badly scared he was that he was still too frightened to leave the vicinity of the car at two o'clock in the afternoon.
And look, you can't fake that.
That's not something either.
If you are that scared, as scared as you said, it's very hard to put that on.
So that was a genuine experience the guy had.
I would say so, yeah.
That's another reason why I think these things are paranormal.
The level of fear they engender in people is just right off the scale.
Not everybody, not everybody.
Most witnesses just get very, very excited at having seen one of these things.
Some of them are a bit scared, but others are frightened almost literally out of their wits.
And they say that these creatures seem to project this feeling of fear onto them.
That's very common.
Any of your listeners who are familiar with the Bigfoot and Sasquatch.
I wonder if that's a kind of defense for them.
In order to make potential threats to them go away, you somehow, in ways that we don't understand, engender fear in the opposition.
Yes, yes.
It's only a thought.
Here's another thought, and this is tangential to what we're talking about, but connected to it.
We were talking about finding physical signs of evidence, of which around the world there isn't a great deal, but there is evidence, even film in a few celebrated cases.
You know, human beings, cats and dogs all regularly shed hair.
You know, I do like it's going out of style, but I think that's probably just called balding.
But why don't they shed hair that you can find and then say, oh, well, you know, DNA-wise and in every other wise, that is not hair that we recognize?
Yeah, yeah, good question.
Well, I think there are numerous people who have collected hair.
I've still got a couple of bits of hair here myself at home, but one supposedly yeti hair from the Himalayas.
I sent half of it away to the, what was it, the International Cryptozoological Society or something.
It was a group of, they were American scientists they were operating for some time, and I never got a result back.
That's disaffecting, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A fellow, Paul Compton, who has seen yowis on two or three occasions up near Glen Innes in Australia, New South Wales, he took me and showed me what he thought was a yowie bed where one of these things had been lying up apparently during the day under a tree.
There was a whole lot of grass pulled up and fashioned into a kind of a mattress.
He had found three of these beds.
Other people have found yaoi, apparent yaoi beds as well, including a fellow I'll get on to in a minute perhaps.
Anyway, Paul had sifted through a couple of these beds and found some here.
And I was looking at some of his reports there just a couple of days ago.
He said that he had sent it off to a laboratory.
I forget which...
It is a well-known laboratory in Australia whose name I conveniently forget, but I probably should.
It's a lady scientist who specialises in hair analysis.
Anyway, she said, oh, it's a dog hair.
My skeptical friend of mine, Mike Williams, then sent her some big cat hair from a menagerie, and she said, dog hair.
So there is a bit of a grey area here.
Even the experts may be potentially baffled.
It seems like everyone I've spoken to who sent off hair for analysis has not got any particular joy out of it.
I think there have been cases in America where the scientists say, well, it's ape-like hair, something like a cross between ape and human.
But I think in fact hair analysis is not particularly exact.
I think we lay people seem to think it's an exact science.
But look, I'm not really up on that.
But certainly the yowie doesn't shed too much hair, otherwise it would be everywhere.
Neither does it leave many tracks.
That is to say we have hundreds of reports, but only a few score reports of tracks being found.
Whereas if they were real flesh and blood animals, normal flesh and blood animals, Yeah, of course, yeah.
There are more tracks in North America, but again, fewer than there should be.
And yet even with the paucity of evidence, you are convinced from the people you've spoken with and who've contacted you over the years that it's a real phenomenon.
Yeah, yeah.
There are some other physical traces.
There's stick formations that they seem to make, these sort of TP-shaped structures and twisting and breaking of saplings.
And those things are international, aren't they?
They're experienced in America, too.
Yes, yes, yes.
So as I say, it seems to be the same phenomenon.
You know, it's like when they get sick of rampaging around over here, they teleport over to Canada for a change of scene or something.
But the reason why I, I mean, there are many reasons why I think the witnesses are honest.
I was looking at our statistics from our first book about the yowie.
We're working on our second one now.
Out of 300 reports we have in that book, in 100 cases, there was more than a single witness.
So there were two or more witnesses to one-third of the cases.
Which is vital really for scientific style corroboration to have more than one person.
Well, yeah, I mean, a sceptical scientist would say, oh, yeah, you know, it's all just anecdotes anyway, but multiple witness sightings and 50% of our sightings occurred in daylight.
So that impressed me.
And also, as I said, there were these cases of people who had never, never, ever heard of the yaoi and they see them.
Another thing too is the fear that's engendered in livestock and wildlife by the yaoi.
Have any losses of wildlife, livestock on farms been attacked by yaoi, from what you know?
Yes, yes, quite often, quite a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
And what would, if you know, what would a yaoi-style attack look like?
I mean, we all know of these alien, so-called alien reports of cattle mutilations that are done in a perfectly clinical way, but I just wonder how yaoi would go about attacking prey.
Oh, they just grab them and run off.
That's kind of what you'd expect from something big, tall and hairy, I suppose.
That's what they would do.
Yeah, there was a fellow the other day we interviewed who I'll be going, in fact, staying on a neighbouring property up at Burram Heads in Queensland.
He saw one chase a dingo across a road and just give it one mighty swap, knocked it flying up in the air.
And as that cart wheeled up into the air, he grabbed it with his other hand and ran off.
And dingos are pretty damn wily, aren't they?
I mean, they're used to getting away from things.
Yeah, this thing was dingo is going like hell to get away.
But they've been seen killing dingo, chasing deer, feral deer, chasing kangaroos.
In one case, it seemed to have the wallaby mesmerized.
The wallaby was just standing there, goggle-eyed, as the owie approached.
So, yeah, they certainly seem to be omnivorous.
They're not too picky about what they shove down their throats.
But the Aborigines in the colonial era often told the British that these things were man-eaters and they could carry off women and children and eat them.
But maybe they mean just to scare off the Brits.
Well, some of the settlers said that.
They said, oh, they're just trying to scare us.
But then of course they started to see the things themselves.
So...
But what about the...
The interaction between the native people, the Aboriginal people of Australia.
Look, I was lucky enough about 15 years ago to spend the thick end of an afternoon with an Aboriginal guy in Perth.
And he was one of the most wise people I've ever encountered in my life.
And his wisdom seemed to me to stretch back through generations that he was delivering to me.
It was a real education for me.
So I'm guessing that the native people of Australia are not surprised by this phenomenon and stories of it, and perhaps had their own way of interacting with it.
Yes, yes, yes, you're dead right there.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're very familiar with it, many of them.
I've only met one Aboriginal person who claimed not to have heard of the hairy man.
But some Aboriginal people say, look, I can tell you a little bit about this, but not much, because, you know, it's our thing.
They don't use the word taboo or anything like that, but it's our thing.
I think they consider them to be spiritual beings.
In southeast New South Wales, there's some indication that they're part of initiation of young Aboriginal men.
You know how the North American Indians have that spirit quest or some of the tribes, when they were about to become a man, they would go out and live in the desert or the forest until they had a vision.
And they weren't supposed to come back until they had a genuine vision.
I wonder if it's all tied in with Walkabat.
I'm not sure that maybe, maybe in some instances, yeah, but certainly Paul Cropper, my collaborator on these books, three books now, he interviewed a couple of the Ald Aboriginal guys down at La Perouse in Sydney, Botany Bay, you know, where the British first landed.
And it's funny, the Hairy Man or the Yaoi has been under the noses of Europeans ever since then because there's a formation of rocks just 800 meters from where the first fleet landed and those rocks are called hairy man rocks.
And as recently as the 1960s, the Aborigines were seeing yowis right there.
So this subject, this matter, has been right under the noses of the British from the very beginning.
And it seems to me to be no respecter of location.
Australia is, I mean, it goes without saying, is a vast country.
You know, I'm lucky enough to have seen Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef and then across to Perth.
So I've seen bits of Australia.
They're all very different.
I mean, Perth is the beaches and vast areas of nothing, of sand, all the way up and down that coast.
You know, Sydney and the more populous parts, well, we know about those.
And then further up, you've got the reef.
And then, of course, at the very top of Australia, you've got Cairns and places like that, which are tropical.
Is yaoi witnessed in all of those places?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right from the top of Cape York, right down to Victoria, right down the eastern seaboard, right around to parts of South Australia.
And even Tasmania.
Well, I wouldn't swear to that.
I've been down to Tasmania a couple of times chasing the Tasmanian tiger.
It's another hobby.
There's another conversation coming.
Of course, I ask about the yowie down there.
But of course, as you know, tragically, the Tasmanian Aborigines were virtually, I mean, almost entirely wiped out during the race war, the Black War down there in the 1820s and 30s.
But I know that they believed in a big, man-like, huge, big man-like cannibalistic creature that would come and lurk around their camps at night.
They called it the Wangio rapper.
One source says that they also called it Yahoo, which is, as I said.
It takes us back to where we started, Tony.
Tony, we're out of time, I'm afraid.
I think we've made a new friend here on The Unexplained, and how marvelous to be able to hook up with you in Canberra and talk about this.
I would love to speak with you again, perhaps when the third book comes out.
Ah, for sure, for sure.
I'll be banging on your door here.
Oh, you won't have to bang too hard.
You know, you can maybe enlist a Bigfoot to do it for you.
We'll certainly hear that.
Tony, thank you so much.
It's been very good, and thank you for persevering with us.
We will speak again.
If people want to read about you, have you got a website?
Where can they track down your books?
Yeah, there's a website called the Yaoi file.
Just the Yaoi file, if you type that in, what's it called?
The Yaoi file.
Yeah, you can Google there, and our books are available.
Oh, our first book was called, it's out of print.
It's called Out of the Shadows, Mystery Animals of Australia.
But the other two are still available.
One is called Simply The Yaoi, probably our best book.
And the other one, the third one, is called Australian Poltergeist.
Because, yeah, we were lucky enough to get mixed up in a full-on poltergeist event up in the middle of the year.
You tell me right at the end.
We've got a rich seam of stuff to mine in future.
Tony Healy, thank you very much.
You take care.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot, Adam.
Tony Healy on the subject of yaoi.
Fascinating and amazing stuff.
And I will have Tony back on the show, I promise.
Thank you very much for all of your feedback.
Keep the guest suggestions and emails coming.
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So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London, and please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
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