They say monsters don't exist,
but since the dawn of time, these demons have haunted us,
creatures immense and terrifying.
Could there be some kind of truth to these legends?
A real-life band of monster hunters
is setting off to find out
on a search that will take them deep into the unknown.
Ripped By mstoll
Ever since mariners first took to the sea,
they feared the monsters of the depths...
dragons said to attack ships and devour hapless sailors.
But close encounters with sea serpents
aren't just a thing of the past.
In recent years, a sea monster has been sighted
by hundreds of people off the west coast of Canada.
The cadborosaurus or the serpent
was about 20 feet, probably, from the beach.
It was like going back thousands of years
and actually seeing something prehistoric.
We proceeded to land,
and we landed beside this log that moved.
We then realized that it was the cadborosaurus.
There was this huge neck and head came out of the water,
and about 15 feet, maybe, behind that,
there was the first big curve of a body with fins,
and about another 15 feet behind that was the second fin.
For as long as anyone can remember,
there have been stories about a huge snake with a horselike head
writhing its coils
through British Columbia's coastal waters.
For centuries, this sea serpent
appeared in Native-American mythology on stone carvings
and on the sides of whaling canoes.
Settlers named it cadborosaurus
after the bay in which it was thought to live,
near the provincial capital of Victoria.
But most Canadians dismissed it as a myth.
Then one day in 1937,
a northern whaling station made an incredible discovery.
What looked like a juvenile version of the creature
was pulled from the belly of a whale.
It was considered conclusive proof by many
until the carcass vanished without a trace.
Scientists Ed Bousfield and Paul LeBlond
have been chasing the cadborosaurus for 30 years.
Now joined by cryptozoologist Jason Walton,
the team is trying to gather concrete proof
of the creature's existence.
How far is that around? 10 feet?
On most days, Jason gets up at 4:30 a.m.
To begin an early morning vigil on the beach.
He's talked to enough people
who know the cadborosaurus is out there.
He just needs the pictures to prove it.
There's got to be some reason
this animal comes into this part of the world.
The sea serpents and these mysterious animals
are sighted all over the place, all over the world in every sea,
but this animal is sighted every year.
And we just have to think that it's here for some purpose,
whether that's reproductive reasons.
And it if wasn't for the fact that you have hundreds of people
seeing exactly the same thing,
there probably wouldn't be a point to all this,
but it's the one thing that drives us all on.
The cadborosaurus has been spotted as far south
as San Francisco and as far north as Alaska.
But each year, this is where the most frequent sightings occur...
Deep Cove, near Victoria.
The amazing consistency of these reports
from housewives to commercial pilots
is what brings Paul LeBlond and Ed Bousfield
back here each year.
Hello, Skipper.
How you doing?
Deep Cove is a very remarkably deep inlet,
and there are some observations that suggest
that the females actually come ashore onto some beaches here
and bear their young nocturnally, at night.
So, we are hoping that someone can at least obtain
a small baby specimen which has been taken.
Then we can come to grips
with the second level of knowledge that we need
to convince all our scientific colleagues of its reality.
Caddy is still in the realm of cryptozoology.
That is, it's somewhere between having been seen, observed,
but not caught yet,
and so the specimen in the lab is not there, right?
Unlike most of their colleagues,
Bousfield and LeBlond
are so convinced of the creature's existence
that they tried to have it classified
as a new form of marine reptile.
They believe
that the now-infamous Naden Harbour carcass of 1937
was a true specimen.
Unfortunately dismissed
by the Provincial Museum and lost forever.
But there is still someone alive who remembers.
Ed and Jason pay a visit to the home of Jim Wakelen,
a worker at the whaling station
where the creature was discovered inside the whale.
I don't know what it was, but it certainly wasn't a fish,
and it wasn't an unborn whale, I know that.
No doubt about it.
Seen in this photograph holding a fetal baleen whale,
Jim knew the difference
between the freakish creature on the dock
and a young whale,
as the carcass was classified at the time by Francis Kermode,
curator of Victoria's Provincial Museum.
And the head did not arrive in Victoria,
and I don't think a lot of it arrived in Victoria.
So when this fellow Kermode had a peek at it,
he didn't have very much physical evidence to go by,
so he did not take it seriously.
How you gonna know what it is
unless you can compare it to something?
I couldn't say it was a horse, could I?
It didn't look like a horse.
I don't know what it was.
But it was definitely something strange, that's for sure.
There we are.
If that thing was to wake up tomorrow I could say,
"Oh I saw a serpent." But did I see a serpent?
What was it I saw? I don't know, do I?
You guys don't either.
You still can't tell me it's a sea serpent.
Although it looked like one.
So, we'd like to think that somewhere out there,
someone has got a sea serpent skull
growing dust on their bottom basement closet,
and one day we may find this.
At the home of an eyewitness,
Jason sets up the first of a series of cameras
linked via computer to capture the creature on video.
This is the second year of the Caddy-scan project
and they're hoping for some promising results.
Bob Iverson, an experienced commercial fisherman
who knows his sea life,
believes he saw the cadborosaurus from this patio.
I saw this... thing, right?
And it was like tires coming up one here, one there, one here.
And I got up, looked, tried to see it. It was gone.
And then I saw it again halfway between here and the green buoy,
which is... it's a good distance out.
Good 15-minute row to get to that far.
So, it was moving fast.
It actually turned around and came back.
Ed and Jason check over the Caddy-scan gear.
The system only starts up
when it detects motion on the surface of the water.
Last year, it turned up some intriguing video evidence
of a creature swimming across the bay,
moving steadily forward,
occasionally lifting its head out of the water.
It didn't seem to move like a seal or a whale.
Something did pop up,
but it simply was too far away, and it was too obscure.
We do have these cameras set up
where there are multiple sightings every year,
so it's got to pay off.
We hope it pays off.
In one of the most famous Deep-Cove sightings,
Terry Osland was out walking early one morning
when she came face-to-face
with a 40-foot cadborosaurus on the beach,
rearing its head up in front of her.
And as I came up to where the steps go down,
this head popped up,
and I looked straight into the face of this creature,
which was, oh, I guess almost a foot wide in the face.
And then it dropped its head down, and I sort of backed off,
and I heard a splash.
And I went to look over again,
and I saw it going into the water... just the tail end.
I definitely knew I'd seen something
because not only did I see it, but I could smell it.
And it left a funny taste in my mouth,
which was sort of metallic-like.
So, I feel that definitely did see it,
because those three senses... taste and sight and the smell.
And the next morning,
I phoned the Provincial Museum to ask them about it,
and they said that they thought I'd seen an elephant seal.
But that was definitely not an elephant seal.
There are other things, I'm sure, that are in the ocean
that we don't know about.
Megamouth... a very large, very strange-looking shark,
was caught by accident in a submarine cable in Hawaii.
No one had ever seen that before.
This is a shark that's almost 20 feet long.
Didn't even know it existed.
So, if today we caught a cadborosaurus
and were able to bring it into a museum
and identify it as clearly another form of marine life
that had never been described before, then it would be real,
then we've actually got a body that scientists could work on
and test and examine.
Only two hours up the island from Victoria,
scientists have unearthed
some of the best preserved marine reptiles ever found.
Jason is investigating these ancient bones
to determine a possible link with the cadborosaurus.
50-foot marine reptiles like this elasmosaur
used to navigate the deep waters of Vancouver Island
80 million years ago.
Is it possible that some survive to this day?
Do you think there's some physical characteristics
between this fellow and these remains here?
Well, they both had a long, slender body.
This almost looks like it has a very long tail to it,
similar to this guy here.
Right.
But on this photograph, at the very tip of the tail,
there appears to be like a telson
like you'd find on the tail of a lobster.
Do you think it's an actual living entity
or do you think it's...
Oh, I do.
I believe this is the carcass of some animal.
When you have two marine zoologists that are saying,
"Hey, there's enough evidence here to..."
Continue, at least.
"...to continue looking at this," then, yes,
I think they should keep looking at it.
In the meantime, the sightings keep coming in.
Recently, a seasoned commercial pilot
on a routine training flight
spotted a cadborosaurus in the waters off Deep Cove.
It was a training flight, so the idea of this training flight was
to just, you know, do continuous landings and takeoffs,
and we landed beside this object in the water
which happened to be the cadborosaurus.
We both looked at each other,
'cause there was two pilots on the plane,
and we looked at each other, and we, at that time, says,
"You know, I don't think
we're gonna tell anybody about this one."
It just, you know, was the ogopogo,
or the Loch Ness monster, and, you know, the mythical creature,
and we happened to see it.
The animal was swimming
in more or less in a straight line then, Don.
It wasn't zigzagging from side to side.
Yeah, it was just swimming in a straight line...
Dr. Ed Bousfield pays Don a visit.
With a plan to fly over the same part of the inlet
at the same time of year,
he hopes to spot the cadborosaurus again.
So, the loops actually came up high enough...
- That you could see through. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's no other marine animal that has that kind of...
And certainly none that would, you know...
if it was a seal or a dolphin or anything else,
I see them all the time, of course.
And if they're going to jump, they splash,
and they're gone.
At this height, spotting even a 30 to 70 foot
sea monster isn't easy.
In fact, Don first mistook the creature for a floating log.
But when it sprang to life and sped away,
it was moving faster than his plane.
This is the island up ahead where we actually saw the Caddy.
We landed just slightly on the west side of it,
right beside the Caddy.
Then Ed spots something mysterious.
I thought I saw a floating log
up ahead off the point.
Don, off here... almost straight ahead,
there's a floating log at the surface near the shore.
Okay. Well, we'll take a look.
It might be an immense log.
It might be something else.
But when they swing back around to have a look,
they can't find a trace.
Well there's a seal in the water.
You see the seal in the water?
Oh, yes.
Well this log was a little bigger than that seal,
but it's not there anymore.
Yeah.
Well, I saw a log down there...
two sections to the log...
and when we turned around and flew back, the log had gone.
Here I am with a camera,
and I didn't take a picture of the log.
This happens even to the best of us.
Unbelievable.
Who knows. Who knows.
Meanwhile, yet another sighting report has come in
from a tour-boat operator.
Jason gets to work
on a crime-scene-style sketch of the creature.
Right, right.
Certainly doesn't sound like an elephant seal to me.
No, the body's just too long.
These eyewitness drawings
are sometimes molded into three-dimensional models.
Jason returns to Terry's
to see if he got the basic design right.
Well, I've got something
here to show you. - Okay.
We've got something a little more three-dimensional.
Mm-hmm.
And maybe this might tally with what you saw that day.
Okay.
- Are you ready? - Yes.
- All right. - Oh, my.
Yes.
Other than the face being downward,
yes, it's very much so.
You think that might be close, eh?
Fairly close, yes.
As close as you can get probably, Jason,
without seeing it yourself.
That's very good.
All through May and June, the prime sighting season,
Jason will travel across Victoria
to spread the word about the creature,
hanging up posters, encouraging witnesses to come forward.
You have to keep your eyes really peeled or these things
will pop up and disappear.
You'll be looking at something or you're fiddling around
with camera equipment and then you look up
and suddenly it's right there.
But you're best to keep your eyes on the water.
If you take them down the Caddy's gonna get by you.
The posters are up.
The camera equipment is in place.
And now Jason believes it's just a matter of time and luck
until they get
that bona fide encounter with the cadborosaurus...
the one documented sighting that turns a myth into reality.
Until then, you'll find him in the early hours
stalking the beaches,
peering out into the cold, green waters of Vancouver Island.
The deep oceans still contain so many mysteries,
so much uncharted terrain,
so many creatures we have yet to discover.
But what about coming face-to-face
with a gigantic mythical beast
only hours from a major metropolis?
Here in southeast Australia, not far from Sydney,
people claim to have encountered a monster ape...
a bigfoot they call the yowie.
Said to be an intelligent and savage hunter,
it roams the back woods and the backyards,
just looking for something to feed on.
It's no wonder this massive 10-foot beast
has been scaring the living daylights out of people
for centuries.
The favorite means of death of animals by the yowie...
decapitation, quick break of the neck, and bodily dismemberment.
All those things don't sit very well with me.
I was told we have kangaroos, wallabies, wombats,
everything, but what I heard behind that bush
is something I have never heard
and nor could I describe that roar to anybody.
It was so menacing, so savage, and it was directed at me.
It made the hair on my neck literally stand up.
I break out into goose pimples every time I think about it.
To the aboriginals, this frightening, hairy man
was already here in this timeless land when they arrived.
Early Australian settlers had heard the legends
and soon tales of them firing shots at the ape man
filled newspaper reports.
To this day in some rural areas,
the yowie remains a terrifying beast of the night...
a ferocious creature who kills brutally without hesitation.
The sound of the foot was like a human, but larger,
just putting its feet down on the ground very carefully,
and you could hear small twigs and things just settling,
giving way under the weight.
The yowie stood up directly in front of me.
It was about 6 foot. It was standing on its side.
It reached across through the bush at me
and roared in my face.
It then took off through the bush at rather high speed,
pushing everything out of its road like a mechanical backhoe,
I suppose is the best way to describe it.
It pushed everything out of the road and roared as it went.
Dean Harrison
and the Australian hominid research team are on a mission.
Often working in total darkness,
they're using sophisticated night vision
and surveillance gear to track the yowie,
and they claim to play
a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with the creature.
Look at this.
A former body builder and Elvis fan,
Dean's a man's man,
leading his own team of makeshift commandos.
They've come to the Blue Mountains near Sydney
to stake out the forest
and the homes of recent yowie eyewitnesses.
We have more evidence
to suggest the creature does exist than not.
One person has an encounter, sure, could be a mistake.
It could be a hoax.
10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people...
where do you draw the line from fiction or reality?
People say it can't happen. My question is why not?
Besides Dean,
key members of the team include Ashley Mills,
an electronics and surveillance expert,
Trevor Smith, a jeweler and map specialist,
and a mix of businessmen, lawyers, and outdoorsmen
looking for a close encounter with the yowie.
And they haven't been disappointed.
Previous expeditions have revealed what they believe to be
yowie beds, footprints, tree bites,
not to mention several rock-throwing encounters.
Okay, Ashley's just had a visual sighting...
a perfect daylight sighting.
He had two rocks thrown at him,
and this thing ran through the bush,
and he said he saw him clear as day.
The incident that started it all for Dean
happened late one night while jogging in a thicket
next to the suburban streets of his hometown.
Stopping to talk to his wife on the phone,
he began to hear a commotion in the bushes.
You know, I see the foliage being parted,
and whatever it was was getting closer.
So, I said to my wife, "Donna,
I think there's some guy sneaking up behind me here."
When I did manage to turn that little bit
and see this massive, black silhouette
standing there behind the foliage,
and it just slowly crept down behind the foliage like so,
and I just thought, "Oh, Lord, what is that?"
My very first clinch to move my foot, roar!
It was the most gruesome, bellowing roar
I'd ever heard in my life.
It resembled something between a lion and a bear all in one.
As I'm running, this thing was in full flight.
It took the bush line, ran to my left,
and it ran about four times my speed
through foliage that I couldn't even walk through
in that sort of darkness.
It was bellowing and roaring the whole time.
With every step, there was a huge, guttural grunt.
It was nothing the likes I've ever seen in my life,
and nothing that Hollywood has yet ever depicted,
it was so powerful.
If this thing had got hold of me,
I wouldn't have had time to scream.
It would have snapped my neck like a toothpick...
just like that.
How could such a creature still exist?
Some scientists speculate that it may have descended
from the giant 10-foot primeval ape, Gigantopithecus blacki,
that once roamed Asia.
Based on dozens of sighting reports,
Dean and the group feel
the creature may have migrated here in the Blue Mountains,
now a world heritage site,
an ancient land containing many rare animal and plant species
found nowhere else on earth.
In the United States, I can imagine that some people
may see bears and mistake them for Bigfoot,
but in Australia, there's almost nothing of the size, weight,
and general appearance of the yowie.
And some of the eyewitness descriptions
are just close range and really impressive.
I mean, these people have seen something very, very close.
They just... they just couldn't be mistaken.
Back at their base, Dean and the crew
prepare their surveillance equipment for installation
at the home of an eyewitness.
We get call outs
right across the country for the yowie,
and we're, again, fortunate enough in the position
where we can go out and help people out.
There's something out there
which we've been told is taking the bait from the buckets.
We'll get it on film in Nikon.
Jerry O'Connor called the team
after several dramatic encounters with the yowie.
Now infrared cameras will determine exactly
what's been taking the food from Jerry's bait buckets.
What did you have in the basket?
Last night, I've left this like this.
I haven't touched it, right?
One encounter happened in the dead of night.
Jerry was woken by noises outside his window.
When he got up to investigate, he couldn't believe his eyes.
I came out the next morning
after I saw that silhouette go past.
I stood in this spot.
Now, I'm 6'3", and I would estimate
the head as it went past would be about there.
So, that looks to be around about 8 foot, I think.
As the team sets up
the array of infrared cameras and trip wires
around the perimeter of the site,
Dean checks out another nearby area
showing one of the yowie's calling cards... bite marks.
This is the biggest one
of all the tree bites you have.
This is quite incredible, Jerry,
but it's something that's very unique to the Blue Mountains.
What you have here
is very, very distinct canine indentations across here.
Dean and other yowie experts believe
the animals bite into the tree
to get access to the plump larvae, or grubs,
under the bark.
Okay, guys, can one of you guys turn the light toward the camera
and just see if they're working or not?
Yeah, stand by.
As work on the surveillance system
around the house is nearing completion,
the AHR team gets another call.
Only a mile away is a street that's had
more than its share of encounters.
We have one street in particular in this town
where we have 60 people... 60 people in the one street
that have encountered the same creature over the last 15 years.
The team arrives at Neil Black's,
a local schoolteacher
who claims he and his family have a yowie
living in their backyard swamp.
And what's more, they've been feeding it.
We found out that by putting food out for it
and going out looking for it,
that it actually enjoyed doing that,
and we came to the conclusion
that perhaps the yowie was a juvenile, very young,
and it certainly enjoyed the chase.
And every Friday evening after work,
looking forward to the weekend,
we'd go for a chase through the bush with this thing,
with the neighbors, and we'll pursue it for several hours.
So, we came to the conclusion
that its favorite game, perhaps, was hide-and-seek.
He's big, he's hairy, he's heavy.
I'd say, conservative estimate from actually looking at him,
when I saw him, all the times I was chasing him through the bush
trying to catch him,
I'd say door sized. Door height, door width,
and proportional matched together with it.
He's big.
Past encounters indicate
the yowie is attracted to food smells,
so they decide to lay out some freshly cooked sausages
to lure the beast in.
Surveillance is set up in a nearby shed.
What impressed me was his weight.
It was clearly extremely heavy.
It was clearly very powerful and also very fast.
That was probably something that impressed me enormously.
It was not like a person.
There was no way you could describe it.
You heard it once, anybody, anybody heard it once,
you would say, "This is not normal."
But even after a few hours,
there's no movement on the perimeter
and the bait is untouched.
The yowie isn't biting tonight.
It's time for a change of plans.
The next day, undaunted by last night's poor results,
the AHR team soldiers on,
heading out on a trek
into a snake- and leech-infested forest.
It may be dangerous,
but Dean himself has had a yowie encounter here before.
Try and find some sort of trail.
How much further, Dean?
...is very encouraging.
Fresh foliage breaks like this
generally means you've got something large in the area
that is moving around.
That's still recently fresh,
so I think we're on the right track.
I was here two years ago,
and the manner of action we had here was seconded by none
in any area we've ever been in in Australia.
Yeah. Keep the noise down.
Straight over the other side
is the track where he comes up from.
The team will bivouac on this rocky ledge,
scanning the darkness
in an all-night vigil to capture the beast.
One time, we made noise as he ran past.
He stopped in his tracks, walked all the way back,
and circled 'round us just on the other side of those trees.
And he followed us all night that night.
He stayed with us for about six to eight hours.
Trying to get a visual of the yowie,
stealth is very important.
You have to be very quiet.
Some yowies are inquisitive, but some, if they know you're there,
they'll just take another route
and go and find their food elsewhere.
But you do need to sit very quietly and not make a sound
and not even open a soft-drink bottle or anything like that.
You just sit there for an hour and not make a noise...
sometimes two, sometimes three.
But once he is in the area, and he knows you are there
by you, you know, making a little noise,
then you can have fun.
And we do that many times in Blue Mountains.
We can spend all night,
you know, playing hide-and-seek sort of thing.
The yowie's definitely very intelligent.
It learns and it knows.
It knows what tools are, it knows what weapons are.
We've had rocks, massive rocks thrown at us.
You can not be foolish enough to think that you're in the bush
so you're smarter than him.
He's lived there for many years. You have to respect him.
Now, we've had action here, here, and here.
So, I'd suggest that perhaps
Trevor and Mike go up to the end of the road this way.
Myself and Ash will follow this track all the way down to here.
Now, if anyone gets any action, jump on the two-way.
- What channel? - 23. Every half hour.
So roughly every half hour.
The group splits off,
each man taking a different track through the woods,
hoping to flush the yowie out.
The fear can get into a person
knowing that this creature is out there
and seeing evidence and hearing him
or actually seeing the yowie.
It is scary.
Eyes... that's the key one. These red, glowy eyes.
That will say, "There's a yowie."
In past experience,
this is the track that he's always come up on.
The first thing that you'll hear is a branch break
right here on the bottom of the valley.
Then you hear a few footsteps,
and then this thunderous running all the way up the valley.
It sounds like an elephant on two legs
just smashing and breaking everything in its path.
We ran it through it up here,
along the edge of the cliff there.
It went up around beside us.
The hunt lasts most of the night, and several times,
there are large crashes in the woods.
But in the end, the yowie remains unseen, unfilmed,
as elusive as ever.
The yowie is a master of his own habitat.
His ability to conceal himself is the secret of his survival.
The fact that he has survived for so long, for so many years,
with only brief encounters
only goes to prove the height of his intelligence.
He's the biggest predator, and I got to tell you, he is clever.
He is cunning.
We've seen him stalking from tree to tree.
He's a thinker... a real thinker.
He moves with deliberate action.
As long as we, as a group...
and we personally know that the yowie exists,
then I'm sure myself and Dean and everyone else in the group
will just keep going until we get good enough footage
that we can say, "Look, this is a yowie."
And then the skeptics will come out,
and we'll just get more footage
and say, "Look. Well, it's still coming here, you know?
This is all the footage. Why aren't you believing us?"
When it's in a cage or it's dead on the table
is the only time when someone will believe,
but we don't want to go to that stage.
We're caught between a rock and a hard place.
Ignoring the naysayers, the yowie hunters
continue their daunting quest
to prove the existence of a giant ape-man in Australia.
So far they've got no body and no footage.
But they continue to log the sightings
and savor their personal encounters
with the ferocious beast.
Monsters come in many forms.
Some, like the yowie, began as a legend
and remain in the world of cryptozoology.
Others, like the Tasmanian tiger,
clearly existed once
until they vanished from the face of the earth.
Or did they?
I picked up this strange animal
from about 400 meters away,
and it was doglike, really, in its appearance,
but then it wasn't a dog.
You can never say
when the last individual of a species goes extinct.
You know, I'd say that the Tassy tiger is still about
because there have been too many reports
for them all to be wrong.
Tasmania...
a lonely island off the south coast of Australia.
These misty jungles were home
to one of nature's great genetic freaks...
a strange missing link from the past.
They called it the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine,
a cunning predator feared for its immense jaws
and its ability to rip the heads right off its victims.
For the settlers of the 1800s,
the Tasmanian tiger was a mystery,
a phantom rarely seen, sometimes heard.
Stories of its frightening appearance and ghoulish ways
terrified them.
It was a primeval collection of spare parts...
kangaroo legs, tiger skin, and a massive 120-degree gait,
more like a reptile than a mammal.
It's easy to see why early settlers call this a monster.
Of course, there were also
the sensational reports of its feeding habits,
the way it would rip open the chest of its victims,
suck the blood, devour the heart and other organs.
It seemed as if a vampire was on the loose.
And so any attack on sheep became a thylacine attack.
Like the villagers in the tale of Frankenstein,
the Tasmanians set out to destroy the monster.
The tiger was an evil marauder that had to be stopped,
and soon enough it was hunted to extinction.
But Col Bailey, an outdoorsman and author,
believes the animal is still around.
Today he's on an ongoing hunt,
searching the mist-shrouded mountain valleys of Tasmania
for the elusive creature.
Researching and hunting the thylacine
has become a full-time job for Col.
There's nothing else that really fulfills my life
as much as trying to locate this elusive Tasmanian tiger.
The last report I had from this particular area
was only a few years ago, so they might...
I'm pretty certain the tigers are still traversing
this part of the countryside in the southwest.
How could this mysterious predator
have come back from the dead?
According to science,
the Tasmanian tiger disappeared some 70 years ago.
After a government bounty was put on its head
in the late 1800s,
traps were built, rewards were set,
the animals were stalked and killed.
And in 1936, the last tiger was declared dead,
the species officially eradicated.
But Col believes
that he has seen this ghost alive and walking.
It was three decades back on a river in southern Australia
when Col spotted something on the shoreline
that would change his life.
And it was doglike, really, in its appearance,
but then it wasn't a dog.
It was the strange way it walked.
It propelled itself like a kangaroo would.
The distinctive gait of its marsupial kangaroo cousin
convinced Col that he had in fact seen a thylacine.
He followed the footprints inland,
but lost the tracks in amongst dozens of other types.
This was the beginning of his long search
for the Tasmanian tiger.
Nearly 20 years later, on a routine camp-out in the bush,
he had another encounter.
It was early one morning.
Out of nowhere came this mysterious "yip, yip,"
like a fox-terrier dog... a high-pitched "yip, yip,"
and almost immediately, an echo, like that.
I was fascinated.
Now, this is exactly what this old bushman had told me
the tiger sounds like.
I knew then in my own mind that the tiger was there.
It gave me great satisfaction to hear that.
These days, Col goes out several times a week
to remote backcountry to search for the mysterious thylacine.
Hiking in the Tasmanian bush can be deceptive.
Col faces one of the most venomous
and aggressive reptiles in the world... the tiger snake,
not to mention giant leeches
and dense, often razor-sharp underbrush.
And this is pretty rough.
It's all uphill, and it's downhill coming back,
and it's dangerous both ways.
Along this corridor,
there have been several sightings
of the legendary carnivore in recent years.
Loggers and miners have sent in reports.
There are also intriguing tracks along the way.
...scratching.
And the further he goes, the more he's convinced
that this is the right path.
Most recently, Col has taken his search several thousand feet up
to a group of remote caves where he believes
the tiger has been spending the night.
Well, I got so close that I could smell it one day,
early one morning, and I was within a minute of the tiger.
He's very cunning. He's very elusive.
This is one animal that's got us where he wants us,
and he's very elusive,
and so people just aren't connecting with the tiger.
They might see him. Odd people see them.
The people that see them aren't expecting to see them.
And they get the shock of their life,
and it's only for a few seconds.
So the likes of me and others like me that go into the bush
looking for the tiger... we never seem to see them.
But you see signs, and I've seen many signs,
and this has convinced me that my search is not in vain.
It's just a matter of persevering,
and one day maybe my lucky number will come up.
And it is luck.
Hundreds of miles from the jungles of Tasmania,
there are plans afoot in Sydney
which will have a major impact on Col's search.
Torn from the pages of "Jurassic Park,"
a cloning experiment is being carried out.
If the thylacine is actually extinct,
then the Australian museum
intends to bring it back to life.
We've discovered that a pickled pup of a thylacine,
an animal we all thought and accept broadly is extinct,
has been extinct since 1936,
was actually preserved by a collector in Tasmania in 1866.
And in pickling this pup, he passed into the future
the possibility that its DNA could be preserved.
So, we dipped into this pickled pup just on the off chance
and against a storm of people who said, "It's impossible.
You'll never find it."
And when we came up, there was
this wonderful, high-quality DNA in vast quantities.
We have the thylacine's complete DNA.
Cloning makes a lot of people nervous.
The thylacine was scary enough to many,
but once we start genetically tinkering with its DNA,
are we likely to create a new type of monster?
There are people who have argued,
"What if you get some kind of miscegenetic monster?
Maybe you're gonna get some kind of a kangaroo with stripes
or if you use a cloned animal like a Tasmanian devil,
is it going to be as big as a thylacine,
but look like a Tasmanian devil?
What's gonna come out of this?"
'Cause the only thing that's going in
that could make an animal is the recipe for a thylacine.
It is the DNA of a thylacine.
So, I don't expect any kind of strange horror
that's gonna come out and eat Sydney overnight or anything.
I think we're gonna get a thylacine back,
and that's what we're all counting on.
A lot of rubbish.
Why clone an animal that's still here?
It's a million-dollar shot.
I mean, it's a long shot, and it's gonna take a lot of money,
a lot of time, and there's only a 5%/ chance it'll succeed.
I guess in many ways to those people,
this project is a kind of a threatening thing.
If we're saying, "Look, we're gonna cut to the quick here.
We're gonna stop searching
for will-o'wisps out there in the wild."
It may or may not be there,
and I personally don't think they are...
"And actually try to re-create one."
That kind of undercuts the sort of magic
of searching in the wilderness,
in the dark corners of the earth for mystery creatures.
All the same,
there's an old-fashioned dignity to Col's quest...
the kind of determination you won't find in a test tube.
Here's where I suspect he was. Right here.
In this little overhang. I suspect he was in here.
He would've heard me coming down around the other side
of that tree and taken off through there.
And the smell wafted here for a good couple of minutes.
I mean, away it went.
And I knew the animal had gone.
If the thylacine is going to be found, some believe it's here,
100 miles to the North of Col's hunt.
We think that there are more thylacines in the Mile Creek
area than, say, the Northeast or South.
Being a female tiger hunter, the only female tiger hunter,
does become a problem.
It's a shame that the other enthusiasts can't get together
with me and share our information.
And being a woman, they don't really like to
go ahead in the bush with a woman.
What we've actually set up is
Tassie Tiger Research Center.
We've got the thylacine skull that we actually found.
I'll just get him out.
Right, now this is the guy we found on the northwest coast,
and it was found in a cave.
This is the one we had carbon dated, and it was found in 1995,
and it was no older than two years old.
So that's probably one of the best finds we've had so far.
There is some evidence, and it's very interesting,
I myself produced some of it,
to suggest there are remains of thylacines,
even on the Australian mainland,
that date in terms of radiocarbon dating to be modern.
And having been caught by one of these myself, again,
I'm a little bit cautious.
There are many things that can give you spurious
radiocarbon dates.
Contamination by modern carbon sources onto a specimen can give
a misleading date for the thing.
We've got some,
what we hope are, thylacine feces.
Now there's two there.
We normally go by size.
It's really hard to tell the difference between devil feces
and thylacine feces.
Thylacine hunters are a strange breed.
We never really get together.
We know of each other, we tolerate each other,
we even admire each other to a certain respect.
But we never get together and share information.
There's a certain amount of tried jealousy involved.
We've all got our own little methods...
One more odd fact keeps believers like Col on the trail.
Despite being officially extinct,
the Tasmanian tiger
remains protected as an endangered species,
leaving many to speculate
that the whole story is not getting out.
Well, only less than 20 years ago,
two men were prosecuted for trying to trap an animal
that officially was extinct,
and this is a ridiculous situation.
So, the government must know more than they're letting on.
There are some religious fundamentalists
who feel this is playing God...
you know, we're interfering with the way of things
and that this is a naughty thing to do.
My response to these people is very simple.
I think we played God when we exterminated that animal.
That's when we behaved inappropriately.
There was a time to censure our activity.
It was then.
Now what we're trying to do is play smart human
and undo that time when we behaved inappropriately.
Now, this room...
I suppose you could call it my shrine to the tiger.
We haven't learned from this mistake.
This is just one.
But this animal is probably the largest act of genocide
against an animal anywhere in the world
that happened against the Tasmanian tiger.
It was a total elimination.
But luckily a few survived, and the species still survives today
because those few managed to escape the net.
With the passage of years,
people have grown more sympathetic
towards the thylacine.
Maybe it's the images
of the last lonely animal pacing the Hobart Zoo,
or maybe it's the fact that wild dogs
were later found to be responsible
for most of the sheep kills.
As we stare into the face of genetic experiments,
we have to wonder what new monsters we might be unleashing,
and so Col's hunt for the real creature
becomes a race against time to prove its existence
before science moves ahead into the unknown.
This last animal,
this last representative of its species,
of its genus, of a family of the unique marsupials,
was treated with disrespect, was treated with scorn,
and it went out quietly with a whimper,
and it was gone
before anybody really understand what had happened.
Understanding that tore me apart as a biologist.
Who's the monster here? The thylacine or us?
It's a bit like going to war.
What are you gonna do when the bullets start firing at you?
And it's a bit like when you see a tiger.
What are you gonna do when you actually see the tiger?
Are you gonna go towards it or stand there or go backwards?
I've faced this question many times.
I've dreamt about it.
Many times I wake up, and there's a tiger,
but it's only a dream.
Will the thylacine walk out of our dreams
and into our world?
Is it there already?
Our planet gets smaller and smaller,
yet there's still so much about it we don't know,
so many unexplored realms,
so many fantastic creatures yet to be discovered.
Some shadowy corners we have populated with myths and demons,
the dark fears of our imaginations.
Yet who's to say that in one or two of them,
the myths might not be real?
Ripped By mstoll