On Australia's Yowie eyes red shining
New book by Tony Healy and Poul Cropper "THE YOWIE. In Search of Australia's Bigfoot" (2006, Strange nation Pbl, Sydney, Australia) has some observations on eyes shine. There are described cases of reflections from bright light pointed on hominoid at night and cases of eyes shining without any marked light sources in vicinity. So, many people have shone very bright lights on the creatures without producing any eye-shine at all.
Witnesses always show red or yellow shine in absence of outer light (p.136):
"Yowie eye-shine is usually bright red. Geoff Nelson's comment that the eyes were "vivid, red and glowing, like two flashlights shining back at you" is fairly typical.
A Sydney man, "R", in 1983 or 1984, then 19 or 20 years old, and his future wife were parked on the Mount Kembla Road when a huge animal approached the car.
"I was occupied doing something else," "R" recalled, "when I got this really bad feeling. It just struck me out of the blue ... and I looked over my shoulder. "Through the side widow, he could see the outline of a huge head, "four times the size of a human head", about four metres away. "It was a roundish type head, almost like the top of a human head, with flat sides". He couldn't make out much of the body, which seemed to be behind a bush, but thought it must have been immense. Although it seemed to be crouching, it was still close to six feet high.
The most alarming feature, however, was the animal's eyes: set four to six inches apart, they were "a deep, dark red, but with a brightness to it ... it's hard to explain — like a bright glow. There was very little light in the area, only the interior light from the car, and light from down in the city, which was really a dull light. But these eyes just glowed — glowed by themselves!
"My immediate reaction was to flee. I had this feeling I was being hunted - an immense feeling of dread ... like someone had drained all the life or blood out of you ... an awful, awe-inspiring feeling of like ... all your senses come alive ... it is very hard to explain. I remember thinking, 'this thing's going to come over here and rip your head off!' I started up the car and revved it really hard, to hopefully scare this thing [because] I had to reverse towards it. I really gunned it out of there and never got dressed until about three kilometres down the road."
The next most frequently mentioned colour is yellow. Neil Frost was told a yowie that lurked around a property at Linden many years ago was known locally as "old yellow eyes". Neil has observed yowies eye-shine changing from yellow to red and back again, as has a Sydney policeman who wishes to remain anonymous. Professional shooter Steve Croft has also observed the phenomenon and says that the creature's eyes glow red when it is facing both the light and the observer, but change to yellow as it begins to look away.
Eye shine reflected from electric light beam was observed as green:
"When her dog began barking hysterically, Jenny "X" opened a second story window and heard what sounded like two or more large creatures crashing through the scrub towards her back fence. She is sure they weren't human because of "the loudness and frequency of tree and branch snapping ... quite substantial trees [were] being snapped over a period of about 5 minutes. Then I heard voice sounds ... from a few metres behind our fence. The voice quality was so foreign that I knew it wasn't human and my heart started pounding". When the vocalisations ceased Jenny and her husband shone a powerful torch along the fence line and saw, about seven feet above ground level, a set of "bright, iridescent, greenish-blue" eyes. What may have been a different set appeared briefly about a metre to the right. In the morning they found "a lot of trampled grass and many dead trees pushed over and some snapped."
The last case shows that eyes of Yowie have both kinds of adaptation for dark vision:
Tapetum licidum layers like those of dogs and cats and
abilities to produce in their eyes intensive red luminescent light
(see main article on this site).
Michael Trachtengerts
March 2008