It was like an elephant on two legs wearing size 20 boots.’’ That’s how Blue Mountains resident Neil Frost would later describe the ape-like creature he encountered in thick bush near his backyard to local police.

It was February 1993. The schoolteacher and father of a newborn son was loath to wake up his youngest child with a midnight trip to the toilet. Instead, he chose to sneak out the back door and relieve himself in the bush-fringed yard.

It was just as he finished his business that a large shape loomed out of the shadows, surprising him before itself taking flight.

"I’d just finished and taken one or two steps and this thing got up out of the bush and just took off," Neil recalls.