Bigfoot's 4am howls?
R. Sittamparam
KOTA TINGGI, Feb 17:
Did residents of Kampung Lukut at the foothills of Gunung Panti wake up over the past four mornings to the call of the "Johor Bigfoot"?
Some believe the spine-chilling howls they heard about 4am could be coming from the creature.
Dicky Darwis Abdul Rahman, whose family owns a 40- hectare oil palm plantation at the foothills of the mountain, said plantation workers had reported the phenomenon to him.
He said they had described it as a cross between the cry of a monkey and a wild pig.
"The workers who regularly go hunting in the nearby jungle know how to differentiate the calls of the various animals in the jungle and they are convinced that the roars were unlike that of any known animal."
Dicky Darwis said some of the workers had gone into the jungle to investigate and found many large footprints, especially at a nearby riverbank and hilltop.
They also found branches and leaves of trees in the area stripped clean up to a height of about 3m.
He added that before his father set up the plantation, the area was virgin jungle, where tigers and elephants used to roam.
"All the recent sightings of the Bigfoot and cases of elephants in this area, which is connected to the Mawai area, could be due to logging activities in the jungles."
He said his father, a former Johor Baru city councillor and retired factory manager, was excited about the new Bigfoot evidence and felt the whole area should be protected.
Dicky Darwis' family had a visit today from a television crew from the British Broadcasting Corporation, which wanted to interview him for a preview of a television documentary.
The crew was led by BBC's Kuala Lumpur-based correspondent, Jonathan Kent.
The crew had earlier visited the adjoining Kampung Temening Lama area where villagers found 50cm-long footprints last month, believed to be that of the Johor Bigfoot.
There were also many footprints found in the jungle, where the creature was believed to have climbed a hill and disappeared into the interior.
The NST had earlier reported Dicky darwis's account of how a search for Bigfoot conducted in the 1990s at Air Hitam by his late game warden brother had produced faeces samples and cement casts of the creature's footprints.
He said the analysis of the faeces indicated that Bigfoot survived on leaves.
He added that the search party led by his brother, Abdul Jalil, had found an area in the jungle which was unusually clean with most trees bare of leaves up to a certain height.
Despite the announcement by the State Government that foreign media would only be invited to cover the Bigfoot story after local scientists had established a proper databank on the creature, two foreign media groups besides the BBC arrived here today.
They included a seven-man crew from a United States-based firm producing documentaries for television networks, and a cameraman from KBS 2TV, South Korea.
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