Location: Helensburgh (Royal National Park) New South Wales
Event: Yowie Sighting
Date: Summer, 2002
Terrain: Thick lantana/ Forrest
[Accompanying Report: https://www.yowiehunters.com.au/new-south-wales/2123-helensburgh-new-south-wales-2003 ]
Witness would like to be known as Matt. At the time of this interview Matt was 23 and the actual sighting occurred 3 years previous to that, while bushwalking with his friend, Dan, through the Helensburgh National Park.
My friend and I were walking through the National Park, and not being extra quiet in the process. As we got down the track we stumbled onto a patch of very thick lantana. Before we knew it, we had taken the wrong track and hit a dead end. So we turned around to come back. As we were on our way back down the track, our noise woke an animal that seemed to have been sleeping about 3-4 metres off the track we were walking along. We heard this massive noise and the animal was crashing around in the bush. The bush was so thick that you couldn’t see what it was, but just hear it.
Then suddenly it gets up and pauses, as we had also done at this stage in astonishment of what was going on. It then took off in front of us at about a 5-6 metre range where we caught full view of this massive…….MASSIVE animal that was running upright on two legs. It had huge shoulders with hair similar to that of a grizzly bear and was brown in colour. It stood at least 8 ft tall. We decided to follow it, and it wasn’t a problem with the trail it left behind on its quick departure. We tracked it to a thick patch of lantana, where it had made a tunnel through. The tunnel led to a really dark place which we were tempted to go and look but then had a second, more clearer thought and chose not to.
At a guess, I would say this animal would have weighed at least 300kg without a doubt in my mind. The noise that it made was like nothing else I’ve heard, a very strange noise like an extremely loud horn or birdlike call. So loud you could hear it echo across the gully. Another unusual thing I noticed while it was in side on view to us, were the huge shoulders that sloped upward towards the ears and made it appear as though the head was set into the huge set of shoulders. It was running way too fast to make out any actual facial features, but our first impression of the thing was that we had seen some kind of “Yeti”.
We went back down to the sight for the next three days just chasing it around. It would go off, thrashing around in the bush and going maniac sounding like a silverback gorilla throwing a tantrum. So I threw a rock in its direction, and it went manic and took off into the bush about 10-15 metres. I threw another rock and it took off again. We took chase through the clearer bush paths but the creature had taken a track clear through the middle of the thickest parts of lantana and did it with ease flat out. It took off over the top of the hill and all we got to see were the trees and palm leaves moving as it ran off. The next day, we only spent 15 minutes so as not to scare it off.
The third day the weather had turned and was raining and we had left it until late in the afternoon until it was almost dark around 7:30pm. This time instead of being noisy we crawled in on our stomachs like snipers and made sure we were down wind from it. This did not help however, as he was already aware of our presence. We went up to his tree he sleeps under and waited for something to happen. We then hear this huge stomp. So big it could be felt through the ground.
It just sat there, 10 metres away from us. I then climbed the tree to get a proper view of it, but saw nothing. It had disappeared and for such a big animal, I don’t know how it did this. Then we moved about 50 metres further, and heard this BANG…BANG…two massive stomps that were much louder than the first one we heard and we thought…This thing is warning us to get out of here.
We thought for a minute and said stuff it, we want to see this thing so we moved toward where we were hearing the stomping and I climbed a tree to see if I could view the animal and again, could not see a thing. It was getting dark by this time so we thought let’s get out of here, as we didn’t have torches or anything with us.
We left it alone for a few days. Then we started leaving food out for it. Raw meat, lettuce snow peas, tomatoes and bananas. It left the lettuce and snow peas and ate the rest. We took a live chicken down there and tied it carefully to the tree he lays under, very carefully so as not to choke it and left it there to see what would happen. When we came back the next day, the chicken was sitting under the tree headless with an egg sitting beside it and its insides spread out around it.
Other evidence includes extreme tree damage, tracks used by it and a few areas of ground that had been used by the animal to roll around and wallow like a pig does.
I’m surprised at how close to civilisation this thing is living.
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