Yowie Year in Review: 2019

Part I: January to March

 

 

 

 

AUGUST

 

It was reported that a pair of anonymous men claimed to have been stalked by a huge Yowie in the popular Glow Worm Tunnel in Wollemi National Park near Lithgow earlier in March this year. A long eerie howl was recorded via their camera/phone but no pictures of the supposed 10ft creature. Despite the dubious nature of the claim and recording, renowned wildlife expert and cryptozoologist Gary Opit believes it's the best yowie audio he has heard 'without question.'

 

A Yowie was claimed to have been captured on camera by the side of a road in Tambourine, Queensland, by Google Maps. A subsequent investigation attempted to recreate the photograph but failed to get the right camera angle and position or the same time of day.

 

John Zada's In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch is "not really about sasquatch. It is about how we see what we want to see and don't see what we're not prepared to see. It is about our disconnect from our ancestral roots - our 'wildness,' Thoreau called it. It is about the power of myth to give our lives meaning."

 

Is there a conspiracy to repress the existence of Sasquatch? No. “My main goal is science education and outreach, and to me this is a unique opportunity to reach a really big audience… to explain scientific methods, skepticism, how DNA analyses are carried out,” explains Professor Todd Disotell who has tested alleged Bigfoot samples. "Primates went extinct in North America 30 million years ago. If you find out one didn’t… that’s cool!"

Some enthusiasts are of the opinion that Yowie-research is a form of citizen science whereby enthusiastic amateurs work to help sustain and drive research projects. That would be true if the enthusiasts were collecting specific data under the direction of an academic researcher - which they are not. A couple of enthusiasts may falsely claim to be academically qualified but they are not. All Yowie research has thus far been conducted solely by enthusiastic amateurs - including mine.

 

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If Nessie doesn’t exist, why do eyewitness accounts of the Loch Ness Monster persist? The answer is likely to be a psychological phenomenon called “expectant attention”. This happens when people who expect or want to see something are more likely to misinterpret visual cues as the thing that they expect or want to see.

Meanwhile, a Chinese version of the Loch Ness Monster was recorded on film slithering among the waves near the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province created much media excitement until a group of workers fished out the 'monster', which turned out to be a 20-metre-long industrial airbag - likely to have been discarded from a shipyard.

 

Beware the Yowie, an episode filmed in 2015 from the Canadian series Boogeymen was made publicly available. An article on the rural town of Kilcoy, 100km north-west of Brisbane, unknowingly featured how historical facts can be exaggerated and even made up in the name of tourism. Finally, to end the month, a catoonish Yowie featured on a new series of $1 coins featuring Australian icons.

 

 

 

SEPTEMBER

 

Canberra Historical Journal published The Braidwood Project: A Joint ANU/Flinders Attempt to Find the Remains of an Unknown Animal Buried There in 1893 by historian, Graham Joyner, which outlined an unsuccessful attempt in July 2012 to locate the mystery creature reputedly encountered by Arthur Marrin. In October, 1893, it was reported that Marrin had been accosted by a hairy bipedal creature which he then stoned to death. The strange creature was subsequently buried on Marrin's property but not before being put on display and viewed by the locals who gave somewhat conflicting accounts although most concur that the Terror of Captain's Flat was a wombat, albeit a big one. Is it even possible to stone a wombat to death? Unfortunately, such a thing was confirmed when an off-duty police officer, Waylon Johncock, was filmed doing just that in South Australia on October this year. Despite public outcry, Johncock was not charged. 

 

Bushwalker Jonathan Fearne shared his experience of capturing a Yowie on camera in the Burragorang area west of Sydney. Fearne was surprised to see what looked like a dark human-like shape lurking among the trees at the edge of a clearing and snapped a photograph of it. Keeping his eyes on it, he approached but soon discovered it was no creature. "I think this was just a dark bush through an opening between trees that looked convincing and even made me think it was swinging back and forth," revealed Fearne. Some he shared his photo with continued to insist it was a Yowie rather than a shadow.

 

Neil Gemmill of University of Otago in New Zealand revealed the results of his eDNA study of Loch Ness. The study detected over 500 million individual organisms from some 3000 species but nothing exotic - not even shark, catfish, or sturgeon.

 

OCTOBER

 

Tony Jinks, Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, published  Psychological Perspectives on Reality, Consciousness and Paranormal Experience which examines the various origins of explanations for paranormal experiences - including the Yowie - from the 19th century to the present.

 

Payton Leutner, the girl stabbed 19 times and left for dead by her friends in the name of "Slender Man" in 2014, was interviewed for the first time. For further information on the role of myth in the contemporary world see Vivian Casinos' doctoral thesis The Slender Man Mythos: a structuralist analysis of an online mythology.

 

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NOVEMBER

 

New research showed that more than half of adult Australians are not getting enough quality sleep and are suffering from at least one chronic sleep symptom which affect cognition and abilities. Could this, then, affect how people experience and interpret unusual or paranormal experiences? For example, the truck driver who claimed to encounter a Yowie at Smithereens (see JANUARY) mentioned he had difficulty sleeping.

 

TRACK - Search for Australia's Bigfoot, part of the Paranormal Investigators series, had its premier screening. The documentary focused on amateur researcher, "Yowie Dan", and was accompanied by a newspaper article outlining the potential evidence Dan had collected previously and how he became involved in the first place. Both the doco and the article also feature psychologist Tony Jinks (mentioned above in OCTOBER). Amateur cryptozoologists have traditionally ignored or rejected psychological explanations for the Yowie phenomenon - is this beginning to change?

 

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DECEMBER

 

Gary Opit rounded out the Yowie Year by providing ashort description of the Australian Yowie for a spiritual website - did you know that Yowies often call out "Hey you" to people in the bush? That some Yowies have moved permanently into small towns to regularly tease the inhabitants by leaving big dirty handprints on doors? That Yowies regularly play with soldiers on military exercise? Hopefully, Opit concludes, he'll be able to take people out to meet the Yowies by the time a cryptozoological conference is scheduled for the Gold Coast in 2021.

 

A new Travel Channel documentary series "Expedition Bigfoot" debuted on TV. Claims of capturing "compelling evidence" of Bigfoot sounds impressive but was misleading (see thermal image on right). Maybe something less ambiguous will turn up before the series concludes.

 

The thesis - An ethnographic study of perceptions of and ideas about mystery hominoids by Amira Arshad - explores perceptions of and ideas about mystery hominoids and further examines why some people, both local people and scientists, are convinced or unconvinced of its phenomenal existence.

 

Finally, the journal Nature published the latest analysis of Homo erectus remains and found that erectus existed in Java (Indonesia) 100k years ago - making them contemporary with other south-east Asian hominins (Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, and the Denisovans). Little is known about H. erectus who somehow managed to colonize much of the world a couple of million years before modern humans left Africa. The next question is, "How/why did H. erectus go extinct?"

 

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