I saw this one coming.

A chimpanzee escapes near the San Bernardino Mountains, California, and then the media finds itself being more open to publishing sightings of hairy primates in the area.

It is happening.

Of course, the media and the caregivers to Moe, the chimp escapee, are divided about whether they want these mystery sightings to be “their” ape or not. So we see confused news items, such as the following one. Here we go again.

You’ve been here before. A chimp among the nudist but not “their” chimp.

Ape footprints but not “their” chimp’s footprints.

This leaves us with the in-your-face question: If these incidents are not to be linked to the escaped chimpanzee, are we to consider southern California as a landscape overrun with other apes? If what this hiker saw is not Moe then what did this woman see?

Read on.

Moe might be swinging near Raywood Flat.

A hiker who was lost in the San Bernardino Mountains this past weekend reported sighting a simian during her two-day ordeal.

“I saw a monkey,” said Grace Carlos Hilario, 21, of Corona. “It was dark gray and brown and it ran like a monkey.”

Hilario became separated from her group while hiking in the San Bernardino
Mountains last Thursday. She was rescued Saturday morning by helicipoter near the Riverside County line, about 20 miles from where the celebrity chimp was last seen June 27.

“She was lucid,” said San Bernardino sheriff’s spokeswoman Jodi Miller. “There was never any discussion that she was hallucinating at the time of her rescue.”

Hilario said she knew nothing about a missing chimp.

“Maybe there’s something to this,” said Michael McCasland, a spokesman for Moe’s owners – St. James and LaDonna Davis of West Covina. “But it might have been a bear or wolf.”

For now, searchers will continue to focus their efforts near the Jungle Exotics compound in Devore where Moe was last seen.

News of the possible sighting broke after a helicopter spent Sunday scouring the canyons around Jungle Exotics.

“We need to expand our horizons,” said St. James Davis.

John Hockaday, a 40-year resident of the Devore area and author of two books on the area, doesn’t believe that enough food exists for a chimp to sustain himself.

“In order to teach a human or an animal anything, you have to be smarter than they are,” Hockaday said. “This monkey is making a monkey out of them.”

If Moe traversed through the mountains to where Hil-

ario’s sighting occurred, he may have found food.

“A lot of those abandoned ranches have old fruit trees,” Hockaday said. “He
could have found some peaches, and unripe apples.”

St. James Davis remains open to alternative search measures.

“If an animal psychic wants to volunteer,” St. James Davis said, “that would be great.”

Another followup article takes a decidedly more skeptical approach to Hilario’s sighting being Moe, but does that leave the door open for it being a Sasquatch encounter?

When rescued hiker Grace Hilario was reunited with her family, they asked her what kind of wildlife she encountered while lost in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Squirrels, birds and a monkey, she told them.

They initially laughed, she said, but then someone remembered news reports about Moe, a 42-year-old chimpanzee who disappeared from a Devore animal sanctuary on June 27.

Volunteers have been searching since then for Moe, who has lived most of his life in captivity and is owned by a West Covina couple. On Monday, Hilario spoke to Joe Camp, owner of Jungle Exotics, the sanctuary where Moe had been kept.

Hilario, 21, a Corona resident, was hiking Friday in the San Gorgonio Mountains when she became separated from her sister and friends.

That afternoon, while resting on a rock, she saw the silhouette of what appeared to her to be a monkey.

She described him as dirty grey in color and about 50 to 60 pounds, but she said she didn’t get a very good look.

“He just ran away quickly,” Hilario said.

The search party is taking all reports seriously, Camp said, but several factors raise doubts about whether Hilario saw Moe.

Moe is about twice the weight Hilario described and black in color. The area where she was found is almost on the other side of the San Bernardino National Forest from where Moe escaped.

“For him to get there, he would have to cross over numerous highways,” Camp said.

Moe also is more likely to approach a person than run away, he said.

Still, Camp said volunteers will pay more attention to that area of the forest, including possibly sending a helicopter to search the area if Moe’s owners, St. James and LaDonna Davis, decide it is necessary.

Camp said he is committed to continuing the search “until they (the Davises) tell me to stop.”

Sources: “Lost hiker may have seen chimp,” by Thomas Himes, Whittier Daily News here & “Primate seen by rescued Corona hiker not likely Moe, sanctuary owner says,” by Imran Ghori, The Press-Enterprise here.

Thanks to Chad Arment, author of Boss Snakes, for these news alerts.