Self-proclaimed “Yowie Man” Rex Gilroy said he was preparing to search in the Bowral-Canyonleigh scrublands after claims of sightings of ape-like (i.e. Australopithecine-type) hominids by farmers and others in past months.

“If anyone believes they have seen a Yowie or found whatever traces of their presence we are eager to hear from them,” Mr Gilroy said.

He said news of filming on the Blue Mountains by a US Animal Planet television team for a documentary on the Yowie and Bigfoot had prompted people to call him about sightings and discoveries of often large human-like footprints in forest soil in the Bowral, Mittagong, Canyonleigh and Goulburn districts.

Mr Gilroy, who has been researching Yowies, UFOs and other mysteries for 55 years, says he now has enough evidence to show there are three races of “relict hominids”.

“The term ‘Yowie’ means ‘Hairy Man’, or ‘Hairy People’, in Aboriginal lore,” he said.

“In the case of two of the races involved, they are called ‘hairy’ because they wear marsupial fur cloaks (like the early Aborigines) and they also manufactured stone tools. One form is of average human height, the other a giant at least 3m to 3.66m tall. Both are omnivorous hunter-gatherers.”

Mr Gilroy said the third race was believed to be “very primitive”.

Mr Gilroy believes, on the basis of fossil skull-types he has found over the years, that tool-making Yowies are forms of surviving Homo erectus of one million years ago.

“If all goes well we may turn up more new evidence of the ‘Bowral Bigfoot’,” Mr Gilroy said.

Mr Gilroy, together with his wife, Heather, operate the “Australian Yowie Research Centre”, which they established in July 1976 to gather evidence on these elusive beings.

He can be contacted via

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