Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your favorites, so like to say to subscribe and rade it five story and meat just to go on yesterday and listening, oh watching.
Always keep it's watching.
And now you're hosts Cliff Berrickman and James Boobo Fay.
What's up, Cliff nothing man, gonna podcast a little bit? What about you?
I just got off the phone with a researcher. I don't want to be a big foot tease, but he's got pretty good footage, he said, comparable baby to the Memorial Day. Footage was taken on the iPhone at about two hundred yards, but he's got three creatures in the video at two different points.
Fantastic. Let's hope that's true. I've heard a lot of things like that before they didn't quite pan out. But man, if this is true, it's good news.
Uh for sure. But I saw those little videotips. You send me those hands, those probable hand Prenchy got.
Dude, it's been going crazy. I mean when we couldn't get you the other day for that episode. I just did a forty plus minute monologue about all this stuff that's been happening at one of our research spots, so our members got to hear about it. And then, of course, if you're listening now and you're not a member and you want to be a member, it's a good move.
You can go to Bigfoot and Beyond podcast dot com and click membership, or hit the link in our show notes and become a Patreon supporter of this podcast and get an extra forty five minutes or an hour of Cliff and Bobs every single week. Coming doing it to you're in your ear holes. As Parliament Funkadelic used to say, you know, we probably need to move on because we have a fantastic guest from the other side of the planet on with us today.
Hell yeah, I've been waiting for this guy. I mean, you know, it's funny because I feel like I know him and I've never met it, but I feel like I have because I've read his books and I've talked to people that know him, and I've listened to him on a few other interviews, and I've been a big fan for a long time. So I'm excited for this one.
Yeah, I have met it. I have met this gentleman one time when in two thousand and nine, I think it was, and it was at the Bigfoot round up organized by Tom Yameron and you and Paul Graves, I believe as a tribute to the Bob Gimlin out there in Yakima. I sat down having a wonderful conversation with this gentleman. And he has written several books with a partner of his that we're gonna get on the podcast
at the later dates. But he has a new book out called The Yowie File Encounters with Australian ape Men. And of course his first book was fantastic. I think it's just called The Yowi one of the best Bigfoot books on our bigfoot Yowie, well, it's the best Yowie book period, but one of the best cryptozoology Harry Mann sort of books available anywhere, because he goes to the history and the indigenous knowledge and contemporary sightings. That's right,
ladies and gentlemen. As if I need even need to say his name now, because you all know it, it is Paul Cropper. Paul, thank you very much for coming to us from the other side of the planet and joining us on Bigfoot and beyond.
Hey Paul, Hey, good, Hey, guys. Heank Clay, Hey, Bobo, thanks for joining us.
Yeah, I really appreciate it, and thanks for being patient with our technical issues and all that sort of stuff where you finally got it rolling and you're here with us, So thank you.
Hey, no problem, it's great to be here.
So your second book is well, your second Yaowi book, I should say, because you've also written some general cryptozoology books, But your second Yowie book is now out, and I think that's probably a good lead. You sent me an advanced copy and I really appreciate it. Thank you, And I've been going through it, and I'll tell you, people in this field love citing reports. They just absolutely love sighting reports. For a lot of people, it's the endgame.
That's what they're trying to get as many sighting reports as possible, and this book is chalk full of them. Holy smokes, how many siting reports are contained in this book now?
I think probably around three hundred something like that. There's a lot.
Yeah, it's an extension on your first book.
Yeah, that's right. I mean the first book we did back in two thousand and six, and I mean in the last couple of years. One of the really big things, not just in Australia. But I think we'll ride is that a lot of newspaper archives have come online. We have this fantastic resource in Australia called Trove, and almost all of the Australian newspapers from the early eighteen hundreds up to about nineteen the middle sixties, late sixties are
all online and all available free. So I mean for people like me and Tony who really had an interest in, you know, the early reports and we and in our first book we had a few, but not very many. And the few that we that we had we kind of dug out my hand, right. We go in the library and open the old you know that the big hardbound copies, and you get your all your fingers covered in black ink, and like it would take a long time and so but with these new online archives, it's fantastic.
You just go in and all you got to do is plug in words like gorilla sighting and just I mean dozens of cases would come up. So it's been fantastic. And those older cases are really really interesting because I think what they prove, and what the book proves is that you know, there's this consistent tradition of these big hair covered ape like kind of creatures in Australia right from the beginning of European colonization in the late seventeen
hundreds right through the character there isn't a gap. It's this consistent thread of reports. And I mean also with the indigenous stories, it's even older than that.
You guys got one hundred and sixty five before nineteen hundreds. I mean just in the eighteen hundreds you got one hundred and sixty five in your book. That's I love those old ones. So they're just phenomenal.
And it's interesting. The first like the first rule sighting in the book is about eighteen forty three. That's where you know, someone claims we saw this big seven to eight foot tall hair covered creature and dogs dogs, it was basically kind of challenging some dogs that was in central New South Wales. And it's exactly it's exactly the same as the reports you're here in the last couple
of years. And it's the I mean, it's almost identical to South Squats reports, right, the older South Squatch report. So you know, one of the arguments when we first came out with the Yawi was, oh, look you know, the aUI is basically kind of feeds off the Bigfoot mania of the sixties and early seventies, right because in Australia, I mean Australians hadn't heard of the AOI until Rex Gilroy started talking about it seventy five. They thought, what
the heck is this? But if you look at the reports you can see that quietly, maybe not nationally, but these stories and these reports are consistent right from the beginning. It's just the public wasn't aware of it. I guess it's like the Bigfoot thing, right. It took the Jerry Crewe thing to kind of bring it into the cultural awareness stage, but it was bubbling along before, just kind of at the fringes of culture rather than in the middle of it.
Well unless, of course you're an Indigenous person, in which case, and sure it's still maybe not the center of your life, but it's much more of a central thing now now you are actually indigenous.
Ah. Yeah, my father's on my father's side, my mother's English from my father's Walbanja and Wadi Waddy from the south coast of from the south coast of New South Wales.
Do you feel that that has given you some unique access into some of the indigenous insights by hearing things that perhaps they wouldn't tell outsiders.
Not really, Cliff, because I didn't grow up in culture. I was adopted at first, so I only really reconnected with my family in the last couple of years, which has been fantastic, and actually it sparked an interest in me to go back and re examine some of the some of these indigenous reports because it's really interesting, right.
I Mean, in our first book we talked about Aboriginal reports of the hairy Man, and in the Yew we were kind of saying, the hairyman reports are the same thing as the HOWI write that was that was a that was our conclusion, right I Just these days I kind of got a different view. I don't I'm not
sure it is. I although some in indigenous people absolutely say it is, but others, I mean, it's the same thing with the with I guess, you know, the traditional American reports, and there's that spiritual element to it that doesn't exist in the European stories. I guess my thing is, I'm not sure you can say that it's necessarily the same thing, because I think we've just assumed that it is because we're looking through a kind of European lens at it. But I'd like to I mean, to be honest,
that might be my next project. I need to go in and look nationally at all of the indigenous traditions around this, and there's lots. I mean, it's and you know, and a lot of the indigenous people that were spoken to say, you know, these things are here right now, and you know, we know about them, or we encounter them, we see them effectively kind of have a relationship with them.
So it's really interesting. But yeah, I wonder where, you know, investigation would lead down that space, whether you know whether it is exactly the same thing or whether it's something different. Maybe we just always assumed it's the same.
You never know, because there's all sorts of strange happenings down in Australia. I mean, I was surprised when I went down there on the Finding Bigfoot episode to learn about the brown jacks, for example. I mean, I'd read your book, but it doesn't doesn't quite registrate. I guess I didn't hold it. This is so interesting that there's two distinct species of these things down there.
Indigenous people, you know, they have a really interesting perfective on it. But you have to understand that in Australia there's something like maybe two hundred and fifty different cultural groups. At the moment, I mean, at the time of colonization, there might have been something like five hundred different culture groups. And different cultural groups have different stories and sometimes different
explanations for what it is. But if you were going to look I mean, and as I said, it's always a bit dangerous to generalize, but it seems from the material we looked at that Indigenous people say there's little ones, little hairy people, and there's bigger ones, and they're different, and the little ones seem to be, you know, mischievous. It's almost like, how would you put like European elves.
They can be tricksters, they're sometimes mean, sometimes they kidnap kids, and in a lot of the cultural stories around them, they punish bad behavior. So often parents will say that the kids don't go outside, you know, because the little hairy people will get you. But yeah, you're right. I think the brown jacks was one description of the little creatures. But there's lots and lots of different names, and.
You know what, the discovery of Homo floresiensis and now Homo lozon ensis from the same island chains just north there, and Indonesian and Philippines and stuff. It gives a lot of credence to the possibility that there are smaller varieties of unknown homonoids, Harry homonoids running around in Australia because of these recent Perea anthropological finds.
Yeah, I mean, certainly when Homo floresiensis hit and even losing ensus, you know, there was a lot of discussion in the field down here about the relationship between that and particularly the stories about you know, these smaller creatures in indigenous tradition. I mean, my thoughts on this are you know, and this is after I guess being in the fields into that nineteen seventy five is I don't
believe that these things are traditional zoological creatures. And I think the evidence the evidence for that is that just in all of that pew we're just you know, there's never been a creature now by a fall whell drive or a body found. They just seem, you know, they seem remarkably elusive. I'm not kind of the but I'm not of the school that sort of indicates that leads to anything paranormal. I think my view is just, you know,
that people are having real experiences. I certainly believe the witnesses and what they're describing, and in many cases there's pretty clear physical evidence that something was there in a physical you know, physically where the witness described, doing what the witness described, you know. And of course we have multiple witnesses as well. Lots of the stories, lots of the cases in the book are multiple witnesses, sometimes more than more than two, you know, two and three people.
But I just think my view is kind of I think these experiences are real. I don't really think that it's a physical creature in the sense of, you know, a kangaroo or a wallaby. But but I just think more evidence is required as to exactly what all of this means. I think I think Yooi's are just part of the broad spectrum of weird experiences that happened to human beings.
Are you London Brown Jackson Yawers together on that when you said that, Paul, they're a book like that or just the Brown Jacks.
I think all of these sightings, I mean, that's you know, I think all of these sightings, Toney's got a different position on this, and he can talk about that. But I just think, yeah, as I said, I think these these experiences, these sightings are just part of this broad spectrum of phenomena that happens, that happens to people. And you know, weird experience has happened. We will know. We
read about it in the press pretty regularly. But you know, my expectation would have been if this was if this was a creature in a full physical sense, we would have found much clearer evidence find now.
And of course this is Paul Cropper, and he mentioned Tony earlier. I want to bring that up. But Tony is Tony Healy, Paul's co author on this book, in his previous book that we're talking about, his new book, The Yowie File. So in many ways, this book is an expansion on your first book and kind of digging deeper into some of the reports that were previously mentioned,
and of course unearthing many, many, many new ones. I want to talk about some of the ones that you expanded on that were mentioned in the first book but you found more information about for your second tell us about some of those that you kind of rediscovered or plumbed deeper depths.
Of well, just it's been a long it's been a long gap since two thousand and six, and I think for quite a few of the cases there was just further documentation. And as I was saying a little earlier, you know, a lot of a lot of the early European explorer reports, a lot of indigenous traditions, everything has started appearing in some of those digital archives, in particular in Australia as the Saying Trope, which is just this amazing online resource of newspapers and journals and various various
other sorts of documentation. So and that allowed us to sometimes go back and find out, particularly on some of the older cases, we found new sources of data for a couple of the stories. And I'm thinking that there's a story from the late eighteen hundreds about a mister Maren finding a kind of the body of what he
said was like a hairy man. We even, you know, we're able to locate photographs of some of the participants, so it's interesting you might find a couple of a couple of the old the reports that were in the aUI are now in uh the HOWI file. But we've managed to turn up a photograph of the person was involved, And that's pretty amazing given that some of these stories back in the eighteen hundreds. I think there's a couple of those.
Yeah, yeah, And that's part of the corroboration of these stories, that that person was a real person in real place, in a real time. It kind of goes along ways instead of making up somebody's name and throwing it in a book. You know, stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo will be right back after these messages. So three to six months doesn't seem like a long time right in bigfoot Land. It's not very long because we've been looking for sasquatches for decades and
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You guys mentioned the black cast. Do you think that's paranormal? Like, also, do you think that's a physical like they're real large casts or you know, biologically based they're loose there.
Yeah, I think some of the cats stories are real large you know, really genuine large felines loosen Australia. Yeah, I believe that. But here's a strange thing, Like it's really interesting. You know, when I first started following up yawe stories, I was asking witnesses the question of what did you see? Where did you see it, and kind
of keeping keeping the questions pretty narrow. But as time went on, I just started introducing and Tony did as well, started introducing a few extra questions and things were asking people and that was have you ever had any other strange experiences? Have you ever seen any other kind of a strange animal? And people really regularly would tell us that they had either had other strange experiences, and in particular, and this happened a lot, that they had also seen
these mystery cats as well. Now, I know you can argue that that might mean that perhaps you know, these people in the country perhaps got a great chance of seeing other things, or perhaps you know, some people are more prone to prone to fantasy, you might say, But I just didn't get the sense of that, And that I think also plays the into the idea that it's not just an experience of a YAOWI of you know that something else is at playing here, you know these
people are, It's part of this broader spectrum of experiences of people are having, and perhaps the people that see these things are more prone to these experiences. I'm not sure, but yeah, I mean there were a lot of reports and the people we talked to about particularly seeing these kind of catlike creatures, it was very It's a sizeable percentage of the people we talked to it had other experiences.
Did you catch that news item this past week about them getting DNA of black panthers in the UK.
Yeah, Actually, there's I mean, there was a case in Victoria where DNA in Australia was tracked back to a leopard. But there's questions around it because they could have been contamination in in the laboratory where there is where the where the research was done, because they had other samples
in that same laboratory. So I saw that. Yeah, I did see the UK stuff for the DNA, but I think i'd you know, i'd probably wait to hear that that's verified and that you know, issues around contamination are sort of being adequately addressed. And also I think that report it didn't come out from independently. It came out from the people that were promoting the documentary around bigcats in the UK. So I mean it was interesting, very interesting, but I kind of, you know, i'd wait to see
that further documentary. I mean, the interesting thing is if there were really leopards, if you take it to the logical conclusion, if there were leopards in Australia or leopards in the United Kingdom, one would expect that they would be disappearing left, right and center. Because leopards are particularly partial with dogs, you know, there would be and occasionally leopards attack people. So why hasn't that happened in either place?
But interesting and interesting to see where the evidence leads.
Well, yeah, and certainly they're not indigenous to either of those places, but if one or two got loose at some point, I could see a small population of them living. And you know what, the dog thing, I get it, man Sochi, my dog looks delicious.
Actually. The other thing with those big cats, particularly black cats, if they're black leopards, you know the black the why haven't they slipped back to their standard spot right? Because I think the black gene is recessive. But if if they were, if it was a breeding population, you'd go back to spots, you know, you go back to the
to the normal rosettes. So I should say so, and you don't see that either, So that was always a really weird thing about the cats in Australia too, is if people are actually seeing black leopards, then why aren't we seeing what we you know, the standard, the standard marking phases of leopards, and we're not saying dog is you know, these dog predictions. So it's it's very it's very odd.
Yeah, we'll see what comes to that was I wasn't aware of the source behind that. I just saw the clipping or whatever. We'll see if that's verified, because at the end of the day, science is about reproducing results, you know, and so hopefully more people will look into this and verify that, because that's a pretty bold claim. I thought it was an interesting headline. And I'm not a black cat kind of guy, you know. I saw one on accident, but that's kind of the end of it.
But not really a black cat researcher, so I don't. I don't pay too much attention all that sort of stuff.
So I've seen one and it was there, and I'm like, okay, that's we know there's cats, we know they can be black sometimes. Yeah. You know, as a mentioned, Paul, did you notice that descriptions like the right, like the sketches done by eyewitnesses are maybe an artist from themselves. How the South American math l Guari matches really well with the Yawi, like the you know, the skinny legs and the potbelly, like it seem like the Vietnam rocket. It's
like they're not built like a big buff sasquatch. Like they're more you know, like not thin waist. They're they're bulky and like they got the potbelly, you know, and the skinny arms and legs. Have you noticed that.
I think you might be referring to one of the one of the particularly one of the sketches from like the early nineteen hundreds. Yeah, look, I think the points fair. You know, when people talk about Yowis, they're probably talking something five to seven foot. Not many are in the eight nine of you know, the kind of big hulking
sasquatch type stuff. But in general, the description is you know, is really really similar because the witnesses described you know, they talk about lots of them, the majority in fact, probably talk about it didn't have a neck, you know, it just its head sunk right into the shoulders. The head was a bit smaller, it was really solid. It was massively white in the chest. Mostly they're talking about,
you know, pretty solid. Sometimes they're described being like a well built rugby play, you know, really big and the big and broad. So it's it's pretty much like a sasquatch. But just the sense I get from, you know, from the American literature is they're bigger and ours are just a bit smaller, but kind of otherwise really similar. I think you could take a Yowi story if you took the location out, and it would read almost identically.
How dangerous do you think they are? Like you think that they're responsible for all those killings on other people say they are.
No, No, if something was killing people in the Australian Boys should be pretty quickly, it'd be pretty quickly obvious. I mean there's there's the stories about people being abducted, but you know, in particularly an indigenous law or children abducted, but no, I think if if that were actually happening, it'd be pretty much front page news and everyone would know.
There's not that many people down here, you know, people would notice if they were if they were disappearing, and and I mean in some of the always are and there's some in the book right where these things act. What seems to be aggressively, but it's kind of like, you know, and this is in the American stuff too, it seems like a bluff, you know, like a gorilla bluff, like I want to scare you away, or I want you to go and leave the space, so I'll scare you.
But I do know that Dean Harrison, you know, pretty much our best known field researcher here and a good friend of mine, he says he was kind of charged by one and knocked over, and he had he was black and black and blue. But again it was sort of like a more of a defense kind of thing or a bluff thing that maybe went wrong and they connected. But yeah, he's he's got a photo of being covered in bruises from head to toe where this thing bowled him over in the bush.
That was one of the questions I had when we went to go investigate Australia on the show, is like, because for so many the reports talk about how these things are super dangerous and terrifying and cannibals and this, i'll scary, scary, scary stuff, you know, But I mean we were lucky enough to run in to at least one over there. I mean I heard the thing, and I was clapping at it, and it was clapping back of me or doing whatever it was doing. But nearest
I can tell, all I did. All I observed was sasquatch behavior, you know, but it was I was on a different continent, but it seemed to me that everything I personally observed indicated, oh, there's a sasquatch there, except that I was in Australia, So I thought that was kind of nice.
You know, Cliff, Behaviorally, it's exactly the same. We have rock throwing, we have you know, those kind of stick structures. I'm not saying that, yawie, but you know, it's the same, the same kind of claims in the literature and even you know, occasionally things I've seen in the voice, So those tucked over tree structures, a tree, you know, wood knocking, rock stacks, rocks being thrown at people but not necessarily at them, but close by. But but you were lucky
having experience. I mean, I've I'm not really a field guy. I'm kind of a you know, I'm kind of more of an arm chair more of an armchair guy than in the field guy. But I've been able to feel quite a bit and the only time, only one time, I haven't ever had an experience that I think might
be connected with Yeah. I mean that was actually the Dean very early in the piece, and I think that was like in the late nineties, and I'd only just met Dean, right and he said, oh, come out, I'll take you to a place in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. It was about an hour hour outside of Sydney. I'll take you out where you know I've had experiences. And I was sort of like, okay, I was pretty skeptical. We went out to a spot when
this was in a national park. He said, just just sort of be quiet and wait, and so we kind of hunkered down in a spot night fell and then I distinctly remember that coming up from the valley because we were kind of on the top of her on the top of a valley that was in front of us,
I just heard what sounded like a person. I mean, we were pretty we weren't a long way to the National Park, but you know, it wasn't anyone around, there was no lights, and what sounded like kind of two sounded like people walking in the bush sort of came up and seemed to be aware that we were there and kind of will circle around us and then went back down to the bush again. So I'm not saying it was yowi, but it was kind of interesting and
certainly put the window on me. But beyond that, I've never had a I've never had an experience that I would I've never seen a yooi and I've never heard a yooi. Yeah, that was pretty much my my only encounter. So you were lucky coming out here, and but you go to the right places with the right people, and things tend to happen.
Yeah, this is a place of I think that the same as Ray and the who really looked into things for a long time.
Majority Yeah.
Yeah, he had a lot of stuff, I guess at this one particular location, which is why he brought us there, and we just got lucky. I guess.
You know.
That's what it is with Bigfoot for the most part. You can go to the best spots, but doesn't mean they're going to be there.
I had some great experiences down there. I was with the Slab family.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you went with them all fantastic.
Yeah, yeah, I spent I spent about ten days with those guys and yeah. So before we filmed Finding Bigfoot, I went down there a couple of weeks early because the episode was falling apart. And I had met this guy in Hawaii and he said, oh, yeah, I live where there's Yahwei's and Gingeries. Is that right, Gingeries right?
Injuries? Yeah?
Yeah, And so I was down in the Blue Mountains, I said, man, I know this guy north. So I talked to the network and I flew up there. As you know, it's whatever like a nine hour, ten hour car drive up there, and I caught a plane up there and they were they were nice enough to take me around, and they took me up this one of those national parks east of there, and we went and
they had an encounter. I don't know if you might have talked to me about this, but they got attacked by they said, a bunch of gingeries that were swooping down and like jumping down, like swinging on vines and swinging on branches, and they'd come down and they actually snapped a pair of sunglasses off one of the guys. Heards.
Wow, I hadn't heard that story. But Cole's lab and his family and his experiences there are really really interesting because he's on single peninsula, so that's pretty close to the border. It's a little peninsula and it's almost right on the border of New Southwales and Queensland. And he's part of his family is part of an indigenous community that's lived on that little peninsula, which is only about ten k's long and about I think it's less than
a k wide and about ten ks long. And he got in touch with us and we did just before we did the Alley book, and was talking to us about it. So his family say that on that peninsula there was a hairy man that lived there that had a relationship with the cultural group there, and in fact that lived on a cave and when his family and when they're cultural group, because the cultural group would stay down in winter, they'd stay down in the beach area
and in summer they go up into the mountains. And he said the hairy man would actually mind this cultural group all of their things in the cave. So they had this kind of relationship. But it wasn't when he was talking to me too, he said only a few when he was when he was quite young at school, he'd seen this hairy man sitting by the road and walked up to it, and in fact, in the Yowie
there's a sketch that he did. So he said, you know, this wasn't just some kind of loose cultural tradition, so this thing was known, it would actually be in the bush. But it's such a small peninsula, you know, it was like hard to imagine, but he was saying it was. It was effectively still there, you know, in this tiny place.
They said they saw it when we were there. We went and filmed with them when we were there, and I got there ahead of times, so I got to spend a lot of time with them. And they took me up to the river where they had that incident with the jungu is up there, and we were walking up they were they were really afraid of those things, and we were going up. There was a gum tree
that was snapped. I think there was about a seven inch you know diameter, you know, fresh and we heard snap crack and come down on the river because we had to walk up the river. Did you say what to that spot with those guys or not.
I haven't caught up with Kyle and this Slab family for quite quite a long time, so we only kind of connected when we talked about that initial stuff. So that's really interesting. I'd always wanted to go back up to fingle but just across so that little peninsula that they live on, that his family lived on fingle Head, just across the river on the kind of on the
mainland side, less than two kilometers away. Independently of that, Paul Kronk, an environmental scientist, wrote to Tony and I and said, hey, back in nineteen seventy seven, when I was really young, I grew up just opposite Fingle and me and this friend, we're kind of playing in this gully and we saw this tree shaking, kind of thinking what the heck is that? And then they saw this yowie kind of walk down a gully into the bushes, like the stories and the stories in our bowie. But
I thought, wow, that's amazing. So his report was only like two kilometers across this fairly shallow kind of inlet across to the across the single where the you know, Carl and his family was saying they've been a hairyman seeing there for years. I thought that was like really interesting. I mean there was a long distance, a long time between the sightings but I thought just this very small, small geographical area.
They said they saw one when we were there. We let them used that you were there a cliff when I gave him thermal imager and they walked out and they came running, tripping over themselves, running back into the house scared. They said they saw a gingerye on the thermal imager, like just a hundred meters from their house.
Yeah, I can verify they said that. Yeah, they took off with the fleer and they were they were tripping out, going what is this like, oh my god, passing it back and forth with each other. They disappeared off into the brush and amongst the sand dunes there, and then not five eight minutes later, they came running back with the fear of God put in them something that they saw out there. So who knows what it went on about there, but yeah, yeah, they definitely said that they
saw one of these things while we were there. Well, of course I immediately went over there and looked around, and there were footprints in the dune and stuff. But I mean which ones were human, which ones were not?
Who knows because none of that family wore shoes.
Yeah, oh right, yeah, Now I haven't seen Carl full but I'd love to get back up to there because I think it'd be a really interesting area to kind of look into a little further back in the early seventies, like this kind of middle to late seventies, there was a lot of yowi stories from the Gold Coast from northern New South Wales, just a ton and some of
them were fantastic and probably the best ever. I think the best yaoi sighting ever is the one by the Australian Senator Bill o' chee and a group of a group of students from Southport School that were up in Springbrook on a holiday camp and who all watched this yawi on the side of a hill kind of stomping around and like you really, Bill, when he was an Australian Senator still a serving senator, was willing to come out and say, yeah, it happened when I was a kid.
I'm going to stand by the story. I mean to me, that's like, you know, that's And we talked to another student that was at the school, who's still teaching at the school, still a tutor at the school, who said, yeah, Bill's right, I saw it. We all saw it. That's just the way that it is. So I thought, yeah, that's a that's an excellent report. Imagine how much Bill had to lose by standing up and saying I saw a yowie when I was a kid in the Australian Parliament.
Yeah, and Springbrook as what ten fifteen miles you know, you know, twenty thirty kilometers directly to the west of Finglehead, right.
Yeah, yeah, it's not it's a little Yeah, it's not far at all. So there was this big cluster of reports. When Paul had his experience that I was talking about, it was seventy seven, and that was basically the same year as billow Cheese starting in quite a few others
around the Gold Coast at the time. And you know, the is that in the late seventies there was a lot of development on the coast, right, so all of these stories were happening kind of just in the fringe where suburbia was starting to push into some of these into some of these more wilder places. And Springbook is a wild place. It's pretty heavy bush and solid.
So crap if I'm wrong, Paul, But isn't Springbook where that excellent footprint cast comes from?
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, now Tony shared a cup like three different footprint casts with Bobo and I when we accidentally stumbled across him way up Bluff Creek oddly enough out of the blue. So there's a whole story into itself. But of the three that I saw, the only one that I would even consider real is the Springbrook one because it's the only one that even kind of looks like the stuff here from North America. It's a very impressive footprint cast.
Yeah, there just isn't much footprint evidence here. I think. I think part of it is just the nature of our countryside, right, it's really dry. We don't have the same kind of fine grain dirt that you get in the Pacific Northwest. You know, that kind of fine dust that preserves the preserves footprints. And yeah that the casts and the photographs that have got they're just not consistent at all. So that's a bit of a mystery into itself.
So yeah, there might be some reasons why that. Just people aren't attuned to it like they had a bigfoot. Then looking for those things the ground might not whole prints as well. I did find some tracks after a I've got two track stories one was the tracks that I found up in Kempsey after a report by two boys that's in the Houri as well, but again they were quite small, very deep, very deep, but not a
lot of detail. And then only well, not that long ago I found another set of I got called up by someone that has found these kind of human like footprints on the edge of some highway work being done up in the same sort of general AIA can't see in the South Wales. But I took a lot of photos. I think I sent them to you, Cliff as well as doctor Melgum, and he said, that's a big person. That's a human foot. There's nothing particularly.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bogo. Will be right back after these messages when we're down there. One of the count confounding things for me is that the indigenous people there just don't wear shoes unless they're going into town. They just don't wear shoes. So when you're out in the woods. I did find barefoot human footprints in very unlikely places. But they were they brown jacks, were they yowis? Were they human? They looked human to me.
They're about human size, But I don't know anything about brown Jack Prince or ginger prints. I don't know anything. I don't know the first thing about them. I would assume that they would have like a flat foot in this and for flexibility and all that jazz, in which case it would mean that those were human prints that I saw. But man, they're in weird places in the ground, very strange places. But you know, the indigenous people there, they don't wear shoes ever in the woods.
So I don't know.
I found it very frustrating in that sort of way, you.
Know, working with Dean in his Yowi Hunter's team, Like they get lots of reports and lots of people send print photos, but often they'll just send one and you can't see the context, you don't see the size, so it's just very difficult to make a call. And again you don't have kind of we don't have like a reference print. We don't have the reference prints of what are you?
What are you?
Alway's foot looks like. So yeah, it's I think we mentioned that in both books, right, that just the track stuff is pretty inconsistent, and there's not much you can point to to say, well, we really, you know, we think this is a Yawi print. It's it just doesn't exist.
Yeah, well, that Springbrook one is actually very interesting. I'm very impressed by that one. To me, that's the best physical evidence that I've seen out of Australia, although those the thermal stuff was really good too. Last year a year before that was great too.
Oh that was the best best for the job. I love that. I mean, I have no doubt, no doubt at all. That shows two big yahoys.
Yeah, it's pretty good, isn't it. I Mean we included in the book because we thought, yeah, that is that's quite you know, that's we were impressed. We were impressed by that. So yeah, and we know the guys, all of the guys involved, and they're all solid. It's difficult to explain, even if you were pitched that these guys were hoaxed. The size, you know, the reference having the human people stand in the location, and you know, the
comparison shops. Just so, no, this was something significantly bigger than a person, way bigger. Yeah, it's it's really interesting. So, yeah, we've got a chat. We've got kind of a quite a few pages on that in the back of the howifile.
So you said that someone in the Parliament actually has had seen a sasquatch and I s yowie. Rather, how often do you run into law enforcement? Are people who work for other federal agencies encountering one of these things or finding evidence of one.
I know actually quite friendly with an officer who a police officer in Queensland who's been who's had an experience in quietly investigating any spare time yari reports. So he's had his own experience and great guy, very solid, just does it quietly though not as part of do his official duties. Beyond that, I'm not really aware of any kind of police officers who are kind of claiming that they've had Yawi experiences. I don't think we have any
in the book. So yeah, I haven't come across anyone apart from him.
And this police officer. Is he keeping his own files and documenting like a proper police investigation.
No, this is all staff that he's done in his spare time with other researchers as an individual and outside of his official police duties here.
Oh yeah yeah, but but but but with the with the sensibilities of a cop.
Yes, yeah, so I've seen, yeah, I've seen police doing reports where where they're where yaw, He's been reported to them, but no, I haven't heard. I haven't heard of any others outside of him. But yeah, he's really impressive, really impressed.
Do you know anyone that's got good hair samples down there?
I've seen a few bouncing around, and I think Dean Harrison sent some across for analysis, but I've never seen anything really definitive come out of it.
No, this is a little off topic, Paul. How many people have you talked to the said they've seen a Thila scene?
Oh a lot, a lot, like maybe sixty or sixty. But I kind of I kind of stopped, you know, when we did Out of the Shadows. My my interests were wide. I was looking at big cat stories and firelessing stories. But then I think, you know, I kind of got zeroed in on the Yowie and a lot of that other stuff and the far on that I kind of put to one side. All of my all of my big cat files, all of my file acind files, all of my other my Bunyant files and everything are
with the State Library and New South Wales. You got reports, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, still not as many, I mean, not as many but
we still keep we still were getting some. But you know, the rivers today are pretty much way different to what they were like in the late eight hundreds and nineteen hundreds when all of those reports were, you know, were happening, I think and out of the shadows we said a lot of them might have been sea or reports, because occasionally seals would have made their way up into the river into our river systems as far as two thousand kilometers upstream, so from the sea. So we think a
lot of the bunnyt reports were potentially seals. And now that there's so many dams on those rivers, seals can't make it up as far as they used to.
Was there was there a concentrated spot, Was there like one general error that Thaasian reports were the most common.
There was a couple of spots where they were very common, almost in the south west of Wa. There were quite a few in central Victoria that were pretty much There
was a lot on the mainland of Australia. And to be honest, Bobo, I think almost all of the mainland reports, if not all, the mainland reports were misidentifications, probably foxes with mange, because when foxes get mange they can get this striped appearance and it's really really looks like it's alasting from a distance and if you see it quickly.
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo will be right back after these messages.
Is that thastine picture, you know that one, the thadasting picture of the people say, it's a stuffed one on a trail and like it's like going up the tails stick up. What do you think of that?
It just looked really artificial to me. Not convinced, Not convinced, that's what I thought. Yeah, it just didn't know. I think there are a few reasons to kind of be really doubtful about it. And you only see a part of the back of the tail, right, that's it. So yeah, I don't think it really convinced anyone. So I think there's a low possibility of thylacines still exist in Tasmania.
Low but you know, fingers crossed. But I think there's a zero possibility of thylacines still being alive on the mainland.
Do you get yowie or you know, hairy harmonoid reports of any type from the islands across you know, Tasmania and like even New Zealand for example.
Okay, the in Tasmania, there's a couple of reports, maybe five or six, so not a lot, but there's a few. None of them are you know, top tier reports. None. They're little kind of secondary kind of things. The New Zealand stuff. I know that there's a there's a cultural tradition amongst the Maori of wild people in New Zealand, but as far as far as the modern reports, I haven't seen anything so made me think that's legitimate at all.
And in fact, when I started looking into it, it did seem like a lot of the original reports of the Coromental hairy Man came out of one person who was like a media like a who was a reporter just really trying to kind of ge up a story out of nothing. So I have never spoken to it. I've never spoken to a firsthand witness to the New Zealand stories. As far as I can see, there's no
traditional historical tradition. I mean, apart from them, there's the marriage traditions, but there isn't anything like in the contemporary newspaper reports. You know that like in the Awifi, we've got all those stories from the late seventeen hundreds right through to early nineteen hundreds. You know, year after year, century after century. In New Zealand, they have their newspaper reports online, their older newspaper reports online as well. Nothing.
So there's no consistent European tradition before the modern day until the stories pop up in I think it was probably the fifties or sixties, a couple of newspaper reports and all of them came out of the same person at that time.
I'm so disappointed. I was so bowed out to find out the Moe how wasn't true because I've always wanted to go to New Zealand, like this is perfect combined squashing with going to New Zealand. Then looking at it more, I was like, I was like kind of crushing to find out, like they're probably out there.
Well go to New Zealand. It's a fantastic place and well worth a visit. But if you're searching for if you're searching for Squatch, I wouldn't be doing it in New Zealand. But yeah, there's just so it's very it's very suspicious, very suspicious. Well so, yeah, but there is a I mean, there's a cultural tradition, it's really clear, but there's nothing in there's nothing between you know, colonization
and you know the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. Then there's some secondhand reports, nothing firsthand, and then since then occasional stories pop up, but again there's never a single witness is quoted. There's nobody can talk to. And if there was somebody who could talk to I probably would have talked to them in the past thirty years, but there's never been anyone.
Well, it seems that most of the reports and correct me if I'm wrong, but by reading your first book and leading through these other ones, and most of the reports are east coast reports, generally South Queensland and New South Wales, a little bit of Victoria, right is that because that's where you guys live. Or is there a bunch of stuff down in like Western Australia by Perth or something and there's they generally got unreported or what do you think is going on?
Well, the majority reports are in the majority of reports to where the majority of people are, to be honest, So that's on the east coast Queensland, in Southwales, Victoria. But there's still a lot of really good reports in South Australia, in the Southwest of Wa, and even in the in northern Western Australia and in the Northern Territory
and some in Central Australia. But I think, you know, I think the reports reflect where people are to see them, So I don't necessarily know that it means that's that's the only places that yoois are, but you know, it's it seems to be. Yeah, it's where the most people are, where people are traveling and where they're driving and so forth. There's not so many reports from Central Australia, although there are indigenous traditions from Central Australia and there are some
reports that are pretty good from Central Australia. So it could be that yoois are you know that It could be that there's encounters that we just don't hear about them, or yeah, you obviously only get the reports where there's people to see them.
Sure, And I don't know have you done John Green the nineteen seventies, of course, discovered a strong correlation between rainfall and sasquatch settings. Have you found similar patterns here? Because Central Australia, correct me if I'm wrong. I've never been there, but it seems dry as a bone for the most part unless you run some springs or something. But as far as rainfall and whatnot, it's going to be mostly coastal stuff, I imagine. Is there a correlation there as well.
Yeah, but people are where the climates and isis and that's where the more where the rainfall is. So yeah, there is a connection. But again it's like the people are where essentral Australia is incredibly dry, so people tend to settle here with the climates a bit more moderate, which is around generally around the coastal fringes, and that's where most of the reports are. But that could be a reflection of as I said, people not necessarily Dowleys.
Yeah, it comes down to a people factor, just like I know we hear in North America sighting reports drop off pretty dramatically in the wintertime, and that's probably a people factor too.
It was actually it was kind of through John Green that I met Tony because I started corresponding with John in probably about nineteen seventy six seventy seven, and then I met him twice traveling to Canada, and one time he took me over to meet Bob Tipmas. I met him as well and had to chat with him.
Oh you're lucky. Never met the guy.
Yeah, yeah, he was interesting guy, and yeah, we had a long chat about Bigfoot. So when I got interested, I started kind of traveling around a bit trying to meet, you know, different people in the field, and met Rene to Hindon as well at the Vancouver Gun Club and had some Australian beers with him and talked Bigfoot. So yeah, it's kind of interesting meeting different people in the field.
Oh lucky, you lucky. And they met either one of those guys, and I would have loved them met either, let alone both all he smokes.
Those two and Roger Potterson, those are the two I want. Those three, Roger Potterson, Renee and Tetanus, those are the three I wish.
I could have met. You definitely need to talk to Tony because he actually spent more time with with Renee. I think he was kind of part of his crowd for a while because he worked in Canada and spent a long time traveling around so year. Definitely, he's got lots of Renee to Hinden stories and he actually went to the conference in you know the first kind of Sasquatch conference I think in British Columbia seventy seven. Yeah, yeah,
that big one. So he was there when all of that was happening, so he'll have some great stories to tell.
Well, we'll definitely get Tony on at some future point, but you know, why don't we close up the regular episode here and maybe if you can stick around for our members episode, I'd like to ask you about some of the specific and more impressive Yawi encounters that you've documented and your thoughts on them.
Yeah.
Sure, why don't we get into that with the members And it's a few minutes here, so if you can hang on for a second. Paul, thank you very much for joining us on a regular episode of Bigfoot and Beyond. And now we're going to go to beyond Bigfoot and Beyond for our members. Thank you for our members and everybody else who listens to this. We really do appreciate it. And then thank you very much to Paul Cropper who joined us today on Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
Yeah, thanks Paul. There, we're going to have links to the book and the show notes down below. Check it out. It's a great book. It's got all the all the history of the YadA in Australia from the beginning till now. It's awesome. I can't recommend it enough.
Thank you, Paul, Thanks guys, great to chat.
Yep, and thanks for listening to Bigfoot and Beyond everyone, And until next week, y'all keep it squatchy.
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