All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 10, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:31
Edition 573 - Gary Opit
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 Unexplained.
Well after a couple of days of really hot sunshine in London, things are back to grey today, but the residual heat from it all is still here, so it's pretty pleasant sitting here.
It's an image you probably don't want to conjure up, but in a pair of shorts recording these words.
It's one of the great things about working at home, actually.
You know, if I want to sit here in a toweling robe or in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, I can.
You can't do that in anybody else's studio.
And that's why I love the freedom that I get doing this.
But that's, by the bye.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Very kind of you to send me your emails.
I'm hearing from new people all the time.
And when I say new people, as I've said before, quite often people who've been listening for years and have only just decided to tell me, and it's been kind of them to get in touch, that they have been listening.
So thank you very much.
You keep me on the straight and narrow, and it's nice to know that there are people out there.
Please spread the word about these shows.
Without you spreading the word, then the show can't grow.
It can only stay in the same place.
So it's very important that we do that.
And you know, I've been here for an awful lot of years now.
A lot of people starting podcasts in the last year or so.
But I've been here since the beginning of podcasting almost.
I think podcasting started when, about 2005 or so, I was there from 2006.
And I knew nothing about it.
I still don't know nearly enough, but that's another thing.
One of the emails that I got recently, it's about 36 hours ago, a listener emailed and thank you, you know who you are, to tell me that did I know that Art Bell, my radio hero, had mentioned me on the air?
And I didn't know that.
We'd had conversations.
He wanted me to work with him at one point before his retirement, but I didn't know that he'd actually mentioned me.
Apparently, during one of his shows, a caller said, have you heard of Howard Hughes?
And I presume he was talking about me and not the billionaire in America, the eccentric one.
My namesake, a fine man.
And Art Bell said, yes, I am aware of him and said, I think he's good.
Now, that is praise indeed from the great man.
You know, none of us will ever match the standard of Art Bell.
He was the man who set the tone for everything all of us do.
And we will always be, all of us, pale reflections in this modern era of what he did in his era, which is now, you know, in the rearview mirror very, very sadly.
But it's good to be able to hear in some places some of his archive shows.
So for me, it was a great honor and made me smile in a particularly miserable time to think that Art Bell, the man who started all of this, thought something nice about me and actually said so on the air across all of those American radio stations.
So thank you very much for bringing that to my attention.
Now, the guest on this edition, it's something from my radio show I thought you might want to hear.
Gary Opitt in Australia is a zoologist and cryptozoologist and has extensively researched yaoi, the Bigfoot equivalent in Australia, and also researched many other odd creatures.
I didn't realize there were so many of them.
But if you use logic, I guess that's going to be the case because Australia is an ancient and separate landmass.
So of course there will have been separately developed species within Australia.
I just didn't realize how many of them there might be and how frequently people report them.
So Gary Opit is a great gift of a guest because he knows so much not only about zoology but also about cryptozoology.
It's not often you find those two things so neatly intertwined in one person.
So I think you're going to enjoy Gary Opit here.
Any thoughts and suggestions about the show, guest suggestions, anything gratefully received?
Just go to the website theunexplained.tv.
That is theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam at Creative Hotspot.
And you can find the website that way.
And you can email me by using the link there for contacts.
And I get to see, as I say, every email that comes in, if your email specifically requires a response, please write in it, I require a response to this email, and then I will make sure that you get one.
And if you haven't had one and you were expecting one, please remind me.
And then I will get back to you.
Okay, I don't think I've got any more to say at the moment.
That's unusual for me.
So let's get to the guest on this edition from my radio show, Gary Opitt in Australia.
And we're talking not entirely, but quite largely, about Australia's yowie.
Now, we've talked about cryptozoology many times on this show.
And once before, we talked about the Australian version of Bigfoot, the yowie.
It seems that every continent, every area more or less, has its own stories of a creature that appears to defy all of the standard rules of zoology.
In Asia, you know that it's the Yeti, in the snows of China, Tibet.
In America, North America, it's Bigfoot.
In Central, South America, it's more like Sasquatch.
And down in Africa, we spoke on the podcast about the Otang and the many legends and the evidence, the real evidence that appears to be mounting for the existence of the Otang, which appears to function in a way that is almost telepathic at times, which also goes for many Bigfoot stories.
So this time, we're going to go down to Australia and catch up with Gary Opitt, who is an Australian zoologist, cryptozoologist, and author, radio broadcaster too.
He's been collating for many years reports of yowie and other cryptozoological creatures.
So he's a great guy to have on this show.
Let's connect with Queensland, Australia now, I think.
And Gary Opitt is there now, hopefully.
Gary, can you hear me?
Howard, I can hear you very clearly and loud.
This is very good, Gary.
You gave me a moment of heart stopping.
Now, listen, we spoke yesterday, just to set this up and check the technical operations of it, about your location.
You live in an exceptional location.
Just before we get talking about the crypto, talk to me about where you are.
Yes, I live, or my wife and I live on a six-acre property in northeastern New South Wales, so just 20 minutes south of the Queensland border, at the most easternmost point of the Australian continent.
And we're surrounded by 1,000 hectares of nature reserve adjacent wilderness beach just north of Byron Bay in the subtropics.
So temperatures at this time of the year, we're just entering our spring in the southern hemisphere.
And so temperatures are at about 25 degrees centigrade during the day and are about 16, 17 degrees centigrade during the night.
Sounds pretty perfect to me.
An ideal location.
Is it a good place to be a zoologist where you're in amongst nature there with all of your expanse of beach and the acreage that you have close to you?
Is that a good place to do what you do?
Yes, it is.
The region that we live in is a biological hotspot because just to the west of us is one of the largest volcanic craters.
It's a 20 million year old volcanic crater and it's covered with subtropical rainforest.
And the Australian continent, well you must remember the Australian continent is about the size of the USA, continental USA, or the size of Europe, with a population of about 25 million, most of which inhabit the southeastern corner of the continent.
So most of the continent is relatively uninhabited and to a great extent vast wilderness.
And the Australian continent was originally joined to Antarctica about 50 million years ago.
And before then, it was joined to South America and Africa around about 100 million years ago, part of the great supercontinent of Gondwana.
And it broke apart and the Australian continent's moving north at a speed of six centimetres a year towards Southeast Asia.
So the Australian animals and plants are unique and are distantly related to the plants and animals of South America and some plants in South Africa.
And the Australian continent has never had a land bridge with Southeast Asia.
So we have no Eurasian animals native to Australia.
So there are no deer or big cats, squirrels, or the whole array of European and Asian animals.
Our Australian animals are ancient Gondwanan animals, mostly marsupials, also incredibly ancient monotremes that date back 120 million years, egg-laying platypus and echidna, and 400 million year old living lungfish in the fresh waters of southeast Queensland and prehistoric plants have all survived because the Australian climate has remained relatively
stable because as the world has cooled during the ice ages, the Australian continent was moving into the tropics and subtropics.
And so the temperatures remain very similar.
We've had no great glaciation during the ice ages.
And so it's a land of incredibly ancient plants and animals and very ancient geology.
So quite different to the rest of the world.
So this is a location that in some ways is perfect for cryptozoology in the purest sense, isn't it?
Because if anything unusual is going to evolve, then it will evolve in a place like that that, as you say, hasn't been affected by glaciers sweeping across the place and destroying everything that went before and then having to start again.
You haven't had that experience.
You're physically separated from a lot of other places.
So there's a great advantage there.
But I suppose there's also a disadvantage because you have so few people in such a big area that if there are cryptids in Australia, then there will be fewer people to see them.
Yes, that is correct.
And our cryptids are probably the most numerous of any continent on Earth.
And there are literally every year, many hundreds of people encountering several species of large mammal completely unknown to Australian zoology, at least by their anecdotal reports.
Now, that's interesting.
We will be talking extensively about yaoi, Australia's version of Bigfoot.
But you say that these reports are regular, they're numerous.
What sorts of things do you get across your desk?
For the last 24 years, I've been broadcasting a wildlife identification program.
And so it's live to air.
It used to go for about half an hour.
Now it only goes for 10 or 15 minutes.
And people phone me.
It's on the ABC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation's North Coast New South Wales radio station, 94.5 FM.
And people phone in for identifications to report what they've observed.
And I've been undertaking fauna and flora and ecological surveys for most of my working life and working in wildlife parks, a wildlife ranger in national parks.
I spent a lot of time working with koalas every day.
I'd be cuddling koalas and giving people koalas to cuddle and taking photographs of them.
I've always worked with animals and in the field and in wildlife parks and as a national park ranger up in Lamington National Park.
And for the last 24 years, I've undertaken these weekly live-to-air programs and We've recorded about 400 different species of animals that people have talked to us and wanted identifications for.
I have to be able to identify every mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, or invertebrate in our region.
And I actually wrote a scientific paper on the results of this citizen science study that I set up because everybody that phoned in, I recorded their name, their address and their locality and the description of the animal, its vocalisations, and the time and any behavior.
And so I wasn't expecting to receive reports of animals unknown to science.
I was only expecting to receive well-known reports of well-known animals.
And that, of course, I did receive.
But then right from the very beginning, I began to receive reports of animals that aren't supposed to exist.
And the most remarkable of them, of course, is the yowie or Australian Bigfoot.
But the most common reports I've received are of the Tasmanian tiger or thylacene, which is supposed to be extinct on the mainland.
And yet I've received over 100 reports of the thylacene in northern New South Wales and adjoining areas.
Also reports of a very remarkable animal that's supposed to be extinct for something like 40,000 years, and that's the marsupial lion, an animal known only as fossils and named Thylakoleocarnifex.
So this is an animal the size of a leopard and it's actually related to the opossum or the possum.
So originally a group of herbivorous animals, the diprotodonts, which include kangaroos and wallabies, koalas and wombats and our possums or phalangers.
They're not related to the opossums, not closely related to the opossums of North and South America, but they are distantly related in that they're marsupials.
And so, of course, they give birth to very immature young, only the size of, say, a jelly bean, a half an inch long, say, and the young climb into the mother's pouch and suckle and they develop into a normal-looking youngster that we refer to as a Joey in the mother's pouch.
And so we have many species of these possums, brush-tail and ring-tail possums, pygmy possums, only the size of mice, up to very large animals called cuskuses, which are about the size of maybe a small dog or very large cat.
And then, of course, we have these wonderful gliding possums, which have flaps of skin between their arms and legs.
And they range from animals around about a metre long, including the tails, and make 100-metre-long glides, all the way down to little feather-tar gliders that are only the size of a mouse.
And the thylakalia carnifex, or marsupial lion, is related to that group of possums, but supposedly extinct for 40,000 years.
And then as well as that, we receive reports of what sounds very much like the hobbit, which is a one-metre-tall, hairy, hominid-like animal, something like a chimpanzee, mostly seen both day and night, very elusive.
And on the Floresian island of, sorry, on the Indonesian island of Flores, some years ago, they found these skeletons of this brand new pygmy human species called Homo Floresiensens from the island of Flores, Eastern Indonesian archipelago.
And that's a group of islands that are actually on the Australian side of the Wallace Line.
So as I said earlier, Australia doesn't have any primates.
We don't have any monkeys or apes.
And the only primates that ever arrived in Australia are the humans, of course, people.
And the original Australian people, the Aboriginal people, they've been here for maybe as long as 120,000 years.
They found a fireplace or hearth dated at around about 120,000 years, otherwise thought to have been here at least 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 years.
And so there shouldn't be any primates, but people, of course, arrived in Australia a long time ago.
We also have evidence of Homo erectus, the species that preceded our species, Homo sapiens, and they crossed the Wallace Line, which is a channel of very deep water that runs between Bali and Lombok in the Indonesian archipelago.
And on the western or northwestern side of the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines, it's all Asian animals.
So we have plenty of deer and apes and monkeys and cats and wild dogs, etc.
And on the Australian side, which includes New Guinea, which was attached to Australia for most of its time, we have the Australian fauna, these ancient prehistoric Gondwanan animals.
Right.
And then as well as that, we also get reports of what appear to be feral panthers, black panthers and leopards, and also feral American pumas or mountain lions.
And it is generally believed that these were introduced into the country during the Second World War as mascots by American Marines.
And there were several camps around Australia.
And virtually in every locality, there are reports of feral mountain lions and leopards And reports of witnesses seeing the American soldiers releasing their mascots,
releasing these panthers and leopards and American mountain lions into the wilds, into the bush, before they went off to fight the Japanese in New Guinea.
And Gary, can I just ask you, the big cat phenomenon is very, very live here in the United Kingdom.
The numbers seem to be increasing, certainly during lockdown, curiously enough.
They seem to have been increasing in numbers.
People have been reporting them.
Never a week goes by without the newspapers reporting a big cat recently in Scotland, but in every part of the UK, really.
Are you having the same phenomenon in Australia?
Are the big cat sightings, the Puma sightings and other big cats, are they increasing?
Yes, they appear to be increasing.
However, the problem with Australia, as you earlier said, we have this small population of 25 million, most of which are city dwellers.
And of course, we used to have vast numbers of people living in rural localities as farmers and rural workers.
But of course, machinery has taken over the jobs.
So we have far less numbers of people living in the countryside than we once did.
However, those people, yes, regularly observe these Australian big cats, unknown species, unrelated to anything native to Australia.
And they don't see them very often.
So most people, most farmers say they may only encounter one of these animals at close range, only very rarely.
It might be only once every decade, something like that.
And though, of course, the closer people live to a forest country, the more encounters they have.
The only problem is because the population primarily lives in the cities, the city dwellers don't have much interest in the countryside and they don't have much knowledge of the wildlife beyond what they watch during a David Attenborough documentary.
And so they tend not to believe that any of these animals actually exist and regard them as an urban myth and imagine that these reports are like ghost stories or UFO reports or something being talked about by urban dwellers.
Gary, one question before we talk about the daddy of them, Yaoi, the Australian Bigfoot.
One question.
How do you think, and maybe we've partly answered this question by talking about the size and scale of Australia, but how do you think it is possible for so many, such a diversity of strange creatures, some of which were believed to be extinct, some of which we simply don't know, to exist almost, almost in plain sight?
Yes, that is because these animals are only found in generally very rugged country.
And on the east coast of Australia, we have this magnificent mountain range called the Great Dividing Range, which runs from Victoria all the way up to North Queensland.
And the sections through New South Wales, they're sandstone plateaus with sheer escarpments and they're very remote.
They're completely almost uninhabitable.
There's only the occasional road over them, such as the Blue Mountains in Katoomba west of Sydney.
And it was only about 20 years ago, only about 150 miles northwest of Sydney, that National Park Rangers in the Wallamai Wilderness found a colony,
a remnant species of Jurassic pine that grew to a height of over 100 feet, existing in one narrow gorge, only about, I think, 40 individual trees.
One of the greatest discoveries of all time, these are dinosaur food trees.
The dinosaurs, the long-necked sauropod dinosaurs, used to graze on them, and we knew them from fossilized leaves.
And here was a colony of them like 100 million years after they're supposed to have gone extinct, still growing.
And they're now growing and you can purchase them in nurseries and grow them in your own backyard.
How wonderful.
But you know, if there aren't ice flows or major storms or the action of human beings ruining their habitat, I presume if Australia is a large and wild place, away from the cities.
So presumably if you have that kind of environment, if something is existing and there is nothing there to wipe it out, then there's every reason, like that tree, to think that it will keep existing.
Yes, exactly.
And the animals that are seen are generally carnivores, large mammalian carnivores, including the yowie, appears to be a carnivore.
And consequently, carnivores exist in very small numbers and have very large hunting ranges or territories, because obviously you must have very large numbers of prey species to support a single carnivore.
So like say with a tiger, each tiger has a very large territory and literally hundreds of prey animals available in its territory, as well as that they're ambush predators.
So they're naturally cryptic.
They don't like being seen because they don't want their prey species to observe them.
And so they're naturally cryptic.
They're perfect at hiding.
Carnivores are intelligent and they take their prey.
They consume them usually in remote areas.
They den and breed in remote areas.
And they're also very careful about not encountering Other carnivores or even members of their own species.
You can imagine with tigers, say, or lions, the last thing a tiger or a lion wants to do is encounter tigers or lions from another territory.
And so it may be the same thing with these animals.
They seem to be very few in a locality.
So you may only get one family of them in, say, a national park.
And we have very large national parks in Australia.
Not agricultural land.
All of the fertile agricultural land has been cleared for over 100 years and grows vast amounts of crops.
But it's in the large, rugged sandstone mountain ranges.
And across the top of northern Australia, it is almost complete wilderness.
We have tropical rainforests in Cape York.
It's one of the largest wilderness areas with only a single road running up the centre of Cape York.
So it's similar to the United Kingdom with only one road running up the centre.
Then we have the rest of the Australian continent.
You can imagine Europe or say the United States with one road running around the outside of the continent, you know, because we've got thousands of kilometres of beaches that virtually no one's visited and one road running around the continent and we've got one road running north to south from Darwin to Adelaide and a few roads,
one or two roads running east to west, fairly close to the coast as well.
And that's it.
The southeastern Australia and other parts of the east coast are well populated.
And of course, in distant southwestern Western Australia, in Perth, another isolated population.
And in otherwise vast deserts, and the deserts aren't sand deserts, they're deserts covered in native Australian vegetation.
They'll be spinifex grasses or there'll be all kinds of native trees, eucalypts and acacias or wattles.
And these areas extend to the horizon over thousands of square kilometres.
And we have big cattle stations that'll have, you know, run cattle wild virtually.
And the cattle are rounded up with helicopters trying to find them.
They're running wild.
And so we've got cattle stations that are the size of some small countries.
So you've got a vast area and it's all full of native Australian wildlife and also array of introduced animals, which include goats and wild pigs and donkeys and wild horses, wild camels.
Australia has the largest population of camels on earth running wild in the desert.
We've got wild donkeys and we've also got exotic introduced feral foxes and of course cats and of course our native dingo, which they believe was introduced to Australia by Indonesian seafarers hunting along the northern coast of Australia for what we generally call sea squirts or veshtomir for the Asian market.
And we believe they introduced the dingo maybe three or four thousand years ago.
So it's related to the Asian wolf.
Interesting that you talk, and sorry to jump in, interesting you talk about the camels and we must get to Yaoi very soon.
But you know the camels being there, I always forget about that.
But there is a train that I think still goes across Australia.
You know, it's got a place in your history called the Gan, and that goes from east to west, literally out to Western Australia, I think.
And isn't that named after the camels, the Afghans?
Yes, that's correct.
It actually goes from north to south or south to north.
It goes from Adelaide to Darwin and stops at Alice Springs in the centre of Australia, where Uluru or Ayers Rock exists.
And that's correct.
Originally, we had Afghan camel herders were responsible for moving cargo, merchandise through the desert regions of Australia.
And then when trains and then road vehicles, trucks took over, the camels were abandoned and ran wild.
And that's why they're there now.
I've got to bring you to Yowie because my listener's very interested in Yowie and we don't have many people in the UK who even know about Yaoi.
So talk to me about the fact that Australia appears to have its own version of Bigfoot.
What we know about Bigfoot from international sightings is that in general, Bigfoot tends to be hairy, bipedal, smelly, elusive, walks with a lolloping gait, sometimes very, very fast.
That's the overall blanket description that you can put on a coat hanger.
How does Yowie fit in here?
Look very similar, and I'll give you a very quick rundown of the history.
In 1827, the Royal Navy surgeon Captain Peter Cunningham published his book, Two Years in New South Wales, describing hearing powerful, strange cries echoing through the mountains behind Sydney.
And the Awakabul Aboriginal people told him that these were the calls of the Pudukin and that it resembled a man with a very hairy body and head and that roamed at night and was afraid of fire.
And then Alexander Harris published his book, 16 Years Labour in the Australian Back Woods, and he described the same thing in the 1830s.
And then the first descriptions of the animal from eyewitnesses was published on the 4th of May 1841 by the Melbourne Punch newspaper.
And the description of the animal was five feet high, slender proportions, arms long, legs like a human, chest and arm muscles well developed, back of the head straight with the neck and body, Front of the face projected forward like a monkey, and it was referred for the next 85 years as the Australian gorilla.
And the most detailed description with the very first published illustration of the animal was in the Sydney Sun newspaper on the 10th of November 1912 by a Sydney surveyor by the name of Charles Harper, who had described the animal in great detail.
And it came, they were camped around the fire and this animal came, they heard it roaring and it came running up on its hind legs and stood in front of them, in front of the fire.
And he described it in great detail.
And he also described a large sack-like thing hanging halfway down the thighs.
And it then turned around and it ran off on all fours.
So it's both quadrupedal and bipedal.
And interestingly enough, so that was published on the 10th of November 1912.
So then on the 17th of November 1912 in the same Sun newspaper, Mr. Horace Saxon from Hawkesbury River wrote in to say that he knew the animal well, that 20 people have heard its calling, its loud,
powerful, bellowing calls, that five people that he knew very well had seen it, and three of these people had seen it very close up and had actually seen that it's a marsupial and it has a pouch with a black furred baby in the pouch.
And so he believed that it was definitely a marsupial man.
Now, up until the First World War, so the animal was reported regularly and was usually called a Yahoo, though the original Australians had many different names for them because we've got around about 400 different Aboriginal Australian languages.
And so there's many, many different languages and many different words for the same animal.
And the original Australian people, they talk about the fact that when they got to Australia, these people, they describe them as people, were already here.
And they describe two different species, a larger one and a smaller one.
And the smaller one's known generally in different areas, southeast Queensland as a jungidi and in northeastern New South Wales is known as a Nimbingji.
And that stands about a metre tall.
And the people talk about, especially the Aboriginal people talk about their parents being much more familiar with it because their parents were living more naturally in the bushland where today, of course, everyone lives in cities and suburbs or on farms.
And so they said there was this smaller one and there was also a much larger one and it was known in southern New South Wales and Victoria as a Doolagal and in northern New South Wales as a Tarawarra and in the Sydney area was also known as Yowie.
And so then during the 19, from the first, once the First World War started up, and for the next 60 years, there was virtually no reports of the animal at all because all the reports are on the war and then the First World War, the Second World War, and not much reported until the 1970s when we became affluent once again enough to, and the newspapers began to be interested in reporting what people were seeing.
And it was a pair of early cryptozoologists that are still working away today, Rex and Heather Gilroy.
And Rex encountered one of these animals near Katoomba in the Blue Mountains behind Sydney.
And he began writing to the local newspapers all over New South Wales and Southeast Queensland, asking if anyone had seen this amazing animal that he'd read about and finally observed.
And he began to receive hundreds of reports.
And he set up a cryptozoological museum.
And that's where I first met him in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And Rex and Heather Gilroy published several books.
And then various other people began to get interested in cryptozoology, including Tony Healy and Paul Cropper.
And then particularly Dean Harrison, who set up the wonderful Australian Yowie Research, Australian Yowie Research AYR, also known as Yaoi Hunters.
They don't hunt to kill yaois, of course.
They only try to photograph them with infrared cameras, etc.
And you can read up on literally hundreds of reports on their website of all the encounters that have been taking place up to the present day.
Right.
I don't think there is, but maybe there is, any such thing as a typical encounter.
I mean, you know, when an average member of the public, not somebody who's schooled in cryptozoology or zoology, comes across this creature in Australia, what's the encounter like?
I've heard tales of people feeling threatened, but not actually being threatened.
But, you know, how would you characterize an encounter?
Because they're a very large animal and we don't really know what it is.
There may be even, as I said, two or three species.
We've had reports from 1912 of a pouched animal.
And we know of fossil evidence from the New Guinea Mountains of a diprotodon.
So this is like a giant koala as big as a gorilla and known as the native gorilla.
It's called Holotherium tomasetii.
And so there's a possibility that's that animal, or it could be gigantopithecus that's only known from fossil evidence in China and Southeast Asia.
And so we're not 100% sure what we're dealing with.
However, the reports are generally people are walking in the bush.
And one of the best reports I ever received was recently from a gentleman who was just behind the city of Brisbane going for a bush walk in a place where he'd grown up and had walked many times.
And it was at the beginning of the lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And we're all in lockdown at the moment in New South Wales and Victoria.
Queensland was in lockdown, but they don't have any cases.
So anyway, you're able to go for exercise.
So near his house was the National Park.
And he was walking some kilometres through the National Park.
He began to hear rocks being cracked together.
And he thought, ah, there is somebody else here doing something.
Maybe it's a prospector.
So he walked up the creek, the stony creek bed with not much water running through it, until only about 20, 30, 40 feet away in front of him, he saw someone stand up.
And there was a, it looked like a person around about his size, but he was astounded to see it was entirely covered in thick brown hair and it was throwing rocks down, whether it was trying to catch something, kill something, he wasn't quite sure.
So he stood there in amazement watching this and he'd never believed in yaois, being a city dweller, he didn't think they existed.
He thought it was just a myth.
And then it turned around and looked at him and then it began to chirp like a bird.
So it made this very unusual chirping sound and then he discovered that this man-sized animal was actually a young one and a much larger one stepped out.
This thing's about 10 foot high and he said it was just like a huge gorilla-like thing and it roared at him and this gentleman turned and of course ran for his life and it was a year before he told anyone about it because he was, you know, he finally, he finally, I think it was Dean Harrison, the Australian Yowie Research group that he eventually contacted.
And then Dean sends the reports on to me.
And so that's another report not far from where we live.
A young lady was visiting her boyfriend on the outskirts of the town of Mullenbimby and it was at night and the boyfriend's mother said, the son's out in the shed fixing his car.
So she walked 30, 40 metres.
This is a rural property, a horse stud.
And so she walked out towards the shed and the only light was coming out of the shed and she could see in a tree growing near the entrance to the shed was what looked like a big black animal clinging to the tree like a possum.
We have these lovely brushtail possums that are black and furry.
So she walked up to it thinking it was a possum and they're lovely friendly animals and then she realized it's not the body of an animal, it's the head of an animal looking around the side of the tree and it then stood, it then stepped away from the tree and she was face to face with it and it was as big or larger than she was and it was just like a big hairy human-like thing and of course she was shocked and
like put her hands to her mouth or staggered or whatever and it imitated it perfectly and then she yelled out to her Fred, to her boyfriend, you'd better come out there.
There's a thing, there's a thing here, come and see.
So he came walking out and it ran over to the shed a few meters and was walking beside him, but he was inside the shed and she was outside the shed.
It was outside the shed where she was.
Now they're not generally aggressive.
They don't actually attack people, but they're sort of, they'll interact with you.
So she yelled out to him, don't get, go back in, go back in.
So he jumped in his car and he drove out and he shone the headlights on it and it ran off and he chased it and it ran off into the bush with him driving after it, trying to have a good look at it.
And then another chap, so this was a young gentleman, about 26 year old, the name of Brendan, and a very keen cricket player.
And so he lives in Mullenbimbi and he drove over the Mount Jerusalem National Park.
There's just a gravel road that winds through over the mountains to the town of Yukai to play cricket.
And on the way back, he stopped and got out of the car.
It was just after dark and he needed to relieve himself.
And he heard this loud howl and he thought it must be a dingo.
And so he howled back to it.
Oh, God.
And the next thing, he heard this almighty roar and the thump, thump, thump, thump of something running up towards him.
And he was quite shocked.
And he jumped back into the car and the engine was turned off.
But he had big spotlights on the front of the car, as many rural dwellers have.
And it came up onto the road.
He put the spotlights on it.
And right in front of his car was a thing that he described as like a gorilla.
And it was a female.
So it was totally covered in hair.
It had large breasts.
So it was like halfway between a person and a gorilla.
And it stood there in front of his car a few meters away, swaying backwards and forwards.
And then it turned around and ran back into the forest.
And then he told me subsequently, sometime later, he came across it a second time while exploring bushland in the same national park.
And there was the same individual, a big female, thumping and tearing out limbs off a tree.
And he had a look at it and off he went again.
Now, I've visited that national park many times and I've never seen anything.
So to actually encounter one is quite rare.
And then they're coming into the towns as well.
So I had a phone call from a lady who's their religious ministers.
It's the Reverend and his wife living in the town of Lawrence in the sugarcane district of northeastern New South Wales near the Clarence River.
And she phoned up because she'd been listening to me on the radio and reported that the problems that they've been having, that they always thought they had a, so they're in a little country town on a hill and they were having, they thought,
some sort of intruder who would come around the house at night and thump on the walls and they could hear it walking around and then they'd run out or turn on the lights and they'd see something running away and look like a big hairy man or something and then they'd find big, big dirty handprints on the front door, like as if we'd been trying to open the door.
And they'd phone the police repeatedly and the police said, oh, there's a madman around the place.
You know, he's covered in hair.
We've never been able to see him and he never does any harm.
And he's only ever been seen at night.
And then eventually they actually saw, they were driving to their church and in the sugarcane fields they have these laneways where they're in between the different plots of sugar cane.
And they saw this man lying on the ground.
And they thought, oh my goodness, he's been bitten by a snake or something.
But he was covered in hair and he was just lying there.
And they drove past, they pulled back, but he'd gone by then.
And another time they saw him carrying two fox cubs with a couple of adult foxes following him.
And then I myself have actually encountered it.
And so has one of our daughters.
And they were not far from our house, about a kilometre from our house, when they encountered it.
And what they tend to do, they run at you.
So they were just on the track in the nature reserve.
And then they suddenly began to hear very heavy footprints, footsteps running at them through the bushes, if something was about to attack them.
And they hurried off and then they actually saw it run across the track behind them.
Just for a couple of seconds, a great big, hairy, long-legged bipedal animal ran across the track.
And I had an encounter just near our house and something came crashing through the vegetation, cracking two sticks together, literally dozens of times, and then walked back and forth just within a few meters of me.
And I pushed my way in to try to get a view of it, but I wasn't able to see what it was.
So another report just close to where we live, a gentleman was walking through the nature reserve and someone began to follow him, but always staying in the forest, just out of view, but something big and heavy.
And he was yelling at this stranger, don't you follow me?
What are you doing?
Why are you following me?
And eventually he began to run and got chased out of the nature reserve.
So they often follow people, but they don't actually harm people or if they do, it's very, very rarely.
They generally never harm people.
And very well known to the Aboriginal people.
And they say, oh, they're harmless, but they will try to frighten you and to try to chase you away.
Now, look, there are many reports, no shortage of them from what you say.
Why is it then that they are so very elusive is a word that doesn't really cover it.
Why is it that we can't, since they can find us at times, perhaps by accident, why isn't it that we can't, with all of the tools that we have available to us in science and all of the location aids that we have, how come we can't go and find them?
And how come we don't find signs of their existence, like their encampments or, you know, I don't know, things that they might have left behind or even, sadly, bodies of deceased yaoi?
None of these things we appear to find.
Why is that?
Well, it's the same thing as we have large numbers of kangaroos and emus, but you don't often come across a dead one because any animal that dies will be consumed.
And because they live in generally rugged countries, but they will come to the outskirts of towns, but that's generally only at night.
And they have been observed in the daytime, though in a remote country.
And I think it's primarily because they live primarily on escarpments.
And the Aboriginal people, they say that their main habitat is the escarpments.
So we have these incredible volcanic mountains.
We live adjacent to this giant volcanic tweed caldera, also known as the Green Cauldron.
It's a huge volcano covered in subtropical rainforest with sheer thousand, 3,000 foot, 1,000 metre, 3,300 foot tall, sheer rainforest covered escarpments that run for many, many kilometers and then very rugged countries with ravines.
It's all eroded from millions of years of rainfall and water running.
And so, and they're very thinly distributed.
So like, I've spent most of my life identifying fauna, doing fauna surveys And flora surveys, and I see and hear lots of animals here more than often than seeing them.
You hear rainforest wallabies hopping away, or you see the scratch marks of bandicoots, little marsupials digging in the ground, or the scratches of possums and koalas on the tree trunks, and you find their scats or fecal pellets on the ground.
But to see the carnivores is extremely difficult.
To ever encounter a dingo in the wild is quite a difficult thing.
And then we have carnivorous marsupials, the spotted-tailed quoll, used to be known as the tiger cat, which is not related to a cat in any way.
It's a cat-sized brown-furred, white-spotted carnivorous marsupial.
And even though they're not much larger than a cat, they have a range of about 100 square kilometres.
Right.
So you're saying that there are, and I'm sorry that we're having to wind this up.
It's only because you know what it's like with timings on radio, and we have to talk again because there is much more that we need to cover.
But you're saying that there are good reasons why they have remained elusive.
And I guess for their own protection, that's a good thing.
I wonder if you can talk to me about this in just a minute or so.
But just to tie this off, there'd be many reports, certainly to do with the Bigfoot phenomenon in North America, of telepathy or strange mystical aspects.
If you can do this briefly, and I'm sorry to ask this, do you get those reports in Australia?
Do people say that?
Generally not.
However, these are big, powerful animals and they appear to have infrasound, you know, like elephants and other large animals.
They produce sound at a very low frequency beyond the human hearing range.
And so if they produce this infrasound, you will feel very frightened.
And so this may be an explanation of what may be regarded as a paranormal phenomena or communication by telepathy.
Generally, I don't think I've ever recorded any report that included anything like telepathy, but people have become very fearful on rare occasions before they've actually encountered the animal.
And so I put that down to infrasound.
The animals producing this sound that can terrify other animals around it.
Ah, you can be aware of the rumble on an animal level.
Gary, fascinating to talk with you.
I would like to spend more time with you if you have the time.
So we'll do this again.
And I would very much look forward to doing that.
Do you have a website so that my listener can check you out?
Yes, look, I've got a Facebook site.
It's called Australian Cryptozoology, Gary Opert.
And that's my main website.
I've actually published a book called Australian Cryptozoology.
And you can also contact me at garyopert at gmail.com.
So that's G-A-R-Y-O-P-I-T at gmail.com.
Are you happy with your email address being broadcast to all the listeners?
Yeah, there's no problems with that.
And also look at my Facebook site and Australian Cryptozoology.
And I also published a scientific paper in the Australian Zoologist called Citizen Science and Cryptozoology, data received from listeners during 18 years of while I've talked back on ABC North Coast, New South Wales Local Radio.
That was published in 2017.
So that's something you could go to.
That's an awful lot to be going on with.
We're completely out of time, Gary.
Thank you very much for being such an interesting and charming guest.
We will talk again.
And my thanks to you.
Thank you, Gary.
Thank you.
Loved Gary Opit.
What a great guest.
What do you think?
Please let me know.
Any guest suggestions, gratefully received.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained Online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This is The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do and wherever you are in the world, please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection