70's Blue Mountains sighting

[grey468]

I just thought this may have been of interest , back in 1977 from memory I was working in the blue mountains with a government agency during university holidays. I may have the year wrong but it was over the Christmas period and there were quite big bushfires at the time , houses burning down and again from memory at least one fatality.

I had a commercial pilots licence at the time and the department used me to fly some reconniasence flights early in the mornings to photograph and map the fire boundaries. This involved me flying from Katoomba clockwise around the cliff edges relatively close to the fire areas with an observer in the right hand seat sketching and photographing .

Now the mystery sighting , as we flew along past Kings Tableland my observer virtually shouted WTF is that .I only saw the back of it as it lumbered around a cliff edge It was big , brown animal like a bear but wasn't , it was bipedal . The interesting thing was it was on one of those little plateaus with cliffs above and below and the fire had burnt most of the vegetation of it. By the time I pulled the plane around to where it had gone we couldn't find it again but could see a dust trail still hanging there . We debated what it could be and decided it must have been a horse or a bull , it wasn't . Again , we just got a glimpes of a big brown animal of some sort on a plateau ledge , for a few seconds early in the morning . I'm an ecologist by training and know Australian animals pretty well and it wasn't a roo, wombat etc.

We didn't report what we saw . It still has me mystified what it was ,?

[Buck]

I imagine it might have been doing the same thing as you were. Checking out the landscape after the fire. Having been on foot through that area it is littered with huge rock formations with deep cavities. Plenty of places to hide and shelter from people or fires. I wonder how many other ariel sightings there have been around there. There is the Blaxland hangliding club as well as the Katoomba airstrip. Thanks for your report.

[Dion]

hey there grey468

Thanks for sharing your story with us,

[Shazzoir]

Thanks for your report, Grey, I know I too would be saying "What the hell was THAT?!" if it had been me there. Did your colleague do any sketches of what he'd seen or was it all too brief? Buck's right - there are still a lot of wild places where we cannot easily go that would make good refuges for the big hairy guys.

Kind regards,
Shazz

[SAB 8]

Thanks for that report Grey468 very interesting.

I wonder how many other ariel sightings there have been around there. There is the Blaxland hangliding club as well as the Katoomba airstrip.

There was atually an aerial sighting reported the previous summer in 1976 during the bushfires of that year... In Rex Gilroys book Giants from the Dreamtime (pg. 172) he reports the encounter involved a National Parks Ranger onboard an Iroquois helicopter which was monitoring the bushfires. Apparently the Ranger observed a yowie (black in colour) in the Springwood Creek/Grose Valley area and it appeared to be retreating from the nearby fires.

[grey468]

Didn't take detailed notes /sketches from memory but would have recorded something in my pilots log book which I have stored somewhere , I'll mission tracking it down . It did make an impression on me though , just literally a glimpse of something bigger than any native australian animal , too broad for a roo , too short for a wombat, more like a big brown bear on its hindlegs facing away, I'm familar with bears from flying in Canada Alaska , but it was moving too fast and bears dont move fast when on too legs , they drop on all fours . It was definately alive and gait was fast lumber , not a run .

The other thing that sticks in my mind is how did it get onto the ledge , miniplateau. Vertical cliffs above and below and the ledge merged into vertical cliffs at either end from what I could see.I hopefully will be able to give time, date and map grid if I can find my logbook as used to comment on anything of interest I saw on flights.

[rob ross]

The Wonders of the Kings tableland! got 2 Luv iT!