Case file · Folklore / legend
Highlanders meet the Leahy brothers
In 1933 gold prospectors Mick and Dan Leahy entered the Wahgi Valley near Mount Hagen; highlanders who had never seen outsiders took the pale strangers for returning spirits of the dead.
1933 CE · -5.86, 144.23 · status: official
The account
The Leahys filmed and photographed the encounters. Fifty years later the documentary 'First Contact' (1983) interviewed elders who described thinking the men were ancestors and searching their excrement to learn whether they were human.