The Piper Film: Steve Piper's yowie footage in the Brindabella Mountains

Australia has its own hairy wildman. The yowie has been reported in the bush for generations. The Brindabella Mountains rise on the border of the ACT and New South Wales, close to Canberra. Canberra investigator Tim the Yowie Man reported his own sighting in the same range in 1994.

August 2000. Steve Piper, a Canberra bushwalker and amateur cameraman, was filming for a video clip in the Brindabella ranges. In a gully, he saw what he thought was a large kangaroo. He kept filming.

Then it dawned on him. The animal was "far too big to be a kangaroo."

The tape shows a dark, upright figure on two legs, seen from a distance as it crosses the woods. One account describes "a dark bipedal figure limping through a forest in the Brindabella Mountains region." Tim the Yowie Man later called it a "black hairy ape-like creature."

Piper gave the tape to a research group investigating possible yowie sightings. The Associated Press carried the story in a report dated 8 September 2000. An unnamed researcher called it "the most conclusive evidence to date that a Bigfoot creature may be roaming the Australian wilderness." The report ranked it the best footage of its kind since the alleged Bigfoot sighting at Bluff Creek, which it placed in 1968. The Patterson-Gimlin film from Bluff Creek is usually dated October 1967.

No police, parks service or government body is known to have examined the tape. Tim the Yowie Man covered the case in his 2001 book, The Adventures of Tim the Yowie Man, Cryptonaturalist. He visited the site. He said they "were unable to rule it out as a hoax," while calling it "the best evidence they had seen in years."

In November 2001, the Australian Bush Apes / Yowies blog reported a field trip to the area. It placed the spot on a stretch of road close to the Cotter Dam outside Canberra. Even that is uncertain. The first report said south of Canberra. A later quote said about 50km west.

A rumour followed. University students, it went, had driven to a nearby hill, walked in wearing a gorilla suit and waited to ambush Piper. The Bush Apes blog dismissed it. There was nowhere to park and walk in, the terrain was "nearly impassable," and the stunt needed a "million-to-one" chance that Piper stopped in exactly the right place. Neither the rumour nor the rebuttal names a source.

Others simply see a man in a suit. Strangeology wrote that "it's hard to determine what exactly it is, or if it's just a man in a suit." A forum poster judged that "the stride with a fake limp looks too human." General yowie explanations, from upright emus to large kangaroos, hang over the case too. No forensic analysis of the film is known.

The Piper Film went viral. A 2013 blog called it "Australia's version of our PG film," and it sits in Wikipedia's table of yowie sightings. One forum thread even claims to spot a second yowie in the footage. For one reviewer it remains a "distant upright shape." Tim the Yowie Man saw the wider picture differently: "That many sightings can't all be hoaxes and they go back well before gorilla suits existed."