The mystery of Queensland’s eerie Min Min lights

THEY’VE been said to reduce people to tears, but what’s the cause of the bizarre lights that plague a remote Queensland town? “WE’VE heard about the lights all our lives,” says Genevieve Hammond, who lives in Boulia, an outback Queensland town, 1700 kms west of Brisbane. Seeing the “eerie” light — often described as intensely bright floating balls — has been said to reduce grown men to tears. It’s just one example of the folklore that has grown around them. Local kids were warned to behave or the glow would get them; Aboriginal people suspected them of being spirits while local legend decreed if the light ever caught up with you, you would surely perish. Ms Hammond had heard the stories but she’d never seen the lights until she went camping with her husband John in the vast tree-starved flatness of western Queensland’s Channel Country.

The sky was clear, the night was cold and there was nothing and no one near. Yet the Hammonds weren’t alone. “We were on a remote cattle station,” Ms Hammond, who runs Boulia’s Desert Sand motel, told news.com.au. “We were camping out and we saw this greenish oval shaped blurry light bobbing up and down.

“It was parallel to the horizon, about a kilometre away, and seemed to be a metre from the ground. It moved very slowly to the left and then came back on itself and it went on like this for about 15 minutes. “It was silent and very eerie. We were trying to think, could it be a neighbour? A car?” she said. “But the nearest homestead in that direction was 120 kms away. The next day Johnno went over to where the light was and there was nothing. “It couldn’t have been anything else, there’s no other explanation, it was the Min Min light.” Shelley Norton is Boulia Shire Council’s Tourism Officer. In the last year four visitors had reported encounters with the light, she said. “They come in and they don’t know what they’ve seen but you can guarantee that it’s the Min Min light.” 

Many visitors come looking especially for the light with the last sighting in September off the Boulia to Winton road. “A family were camping and the husband got up in the middle of the night and went out to look at what he thought was the moon. Then he turned around and saw the actual moon. It was like there were two moons. Then one disappeared.

“Sometimes it’s a lone object that stays the same distance away, other times it seem to follow people, then splits into two or three and dances above the tree tops,” Ms Norton said. “It’s very spooky and no one knows what it is.” Boulia Mayor Rick Britton said the mysterious lights were the town’s claim to fame. “Everyone has their quirk; Julia Creek has Burke and Wills and Birdsville the races. Boulia is renowned as being the land of the Min Min lights.” The lights were first reported to have been seen above the ruins of the Min Min Hotel, 100km west of Boulia, in 1918. Although, it’s likely to have been seen by local Aboriginal people long before that.

Since then they have been reported in many parts of the outback but glow ground zero is the Channel Country near Boulia.

There are many theories as to what he Min Min lights are. Fluorescent gases released from the barren earth, clouds of bioluminescent insects, a flock of fireflies perhaps, maybe even UFOs.

But Jack Pettigrew, a neuroscientist at the University of Queensland, thinks he’s solved the riddle. “I experienced the phenomenon myself as well as hearing about it from graziers.” He stumbled across it quite by accident more than a decade ago when he was searching for a rare bird that appears only at night near the town. He and his team saw what they thought were the eyes of a fox reflected in their headlights. “We were surprised that the bright spot of light was still there when we turned off the headlights.” 

In his research paper, Mr Pettigrew described the light as having “fuzzy edges in rapid motion like a swarm of bees”, differing colours and that it moved “with a mind of its own”. Caught in the Min Min’s glow, grown men could cry, he said. “They would never be identified but the fear was evident,” he told news.com.au, “It was very scary.” They’re not spirits or UFOs, said Mr Pettigrew, but they are something very strange indeed. He believes the lights are a nocturnal form of the rare Fata Morgana mirage, a phenomenon where ideal climactic conditions can see light travel over vast distances and even cross horizons.

The Fata Morgana is thought to be the cause of a range of strange sightings including startled sailors seeing the Irish cliffs appear in the middle of the ocean and beachgoers witnessing boats hovering above the sea.

Queensland is no stranger to odd meteorological phenomenon. Across the Gulf of Carpentaria the unique Morning Glory clouds, perfectly formed and hundreds of kilometres long, roll across the sky.

Mirages are fairly common, such as when hot road surfaces appear to reflect the sky. But the Fata Morgana only occurs when, unusually, the air is colder on the ground than above. Called a temperature inversion (because air is usually warmer at ground level) under certain circumstances light can be bent across the atmosphere creating projections of images from hundreds of kilometres away that would be otherwise invisible.

Mr Pettigrew tested the theory by driving his car 10km into the desert and parked it behind a small hill to ensure it was completely obscured. “When I pointed the vehicle in the direction of the camp, observers saw a light floating above the horizon.” Sure enough the lights changed colour and trembled. When he switched off the headlights, the apparition vanished. 

He concluded the mysterious Min Min he originally saw was likely to be the projected headlights from a road as much as 350km way. They later found at a road train had passed along that road at the same time. The next morning, Mr Pettigrew saw an even more arresting sight. As dawn broke, in the distance, he saw a row of hills where none had existed before. When the ground warmed up the hills - which in reality were far further away - melted into the ground.

While this wasn’t a Min Min it supported his theory that the area was perfect for various forms of the Fata Morgana. The flat surface and gullies of the Channel Country trapped cold air and threw up less obstacles to block the mirage. Boulia markets itself has the heart of the land of the Min Min light. Notoriously difficult to predict, a museum in the town — the Min Min Encounter — tells the story of the lights.

Mr Pettigrew told news.com.au he wasn’t convinced the town wanted to find a reason behind the lights and preferred it to remain an unsolved mystery to attract tourists. But Mayor Britton seemed to be warming to the mirage hypotheses. “The different temperatures in the atmosphere create something like a house of mirrors, like a submarine telescope,” he said. Neverthless, some townsfolk had other explanations for the light, Mr Britton said. “There was an old character here and he said he’d thought a lot about. In his serious opinion it must be — an emu with a torch stuck up his backside.”

Behind the Secret of the Naga's Fire

It was dusk when the first fireball burst from the Mekong. A glowing pink orb hovered over the chocolaty waters for a split second then accelerated noiselessly skyward, winking out some 100 meters above. Minutes later, another soared from the roiling river. Then some way downstream, a string of four burst into a bruised sky that was looking angrier by the moment. Each tiny eruption was greeted with a jubilant roar, like a kickboxing crowd hailing a series of withering knee strikes. The lights looked a bit like exploding flares, though there was no hiss or smoke, no sparkling arc back to earth. To a cynic like myself, they looked indisputably man-made. But to the believersgathered in the tens of thousands along the riverbankthis was the breath of the Naga, the mythical serpent of Buddhist lore that many Thais believe haunts the broad reaches of the Mekong in Nong Khai province.

Locals know the phenomenon as bung fai paya nak (Naga fireballs), which have been bubbling up from the mighty river on the late autumn night of the full moon at the end of the Buddhist Lent for as long as anyone can remember. "I've seen them since I was a little girl," says Pang Butamee, 70, who lives in a flood-prone hut on the river's edge. Nearby is Wat Paa Luangan elegant, 450-year-old temple and one of the most popular spots to watch the fireballs. "I've seen them come up from the river, and also from canals and dams," she claims. "My mother and father saw them, and their mothers and fathers. And I've seen the Naga too. It was like a huge, silver snake swimming down the river. I saw it when I was 13 years old."

Nong Khai's Naga has become the Mekong's Loch Ness monster. In this sleepy province in the heart of the Isaan region 620 kilometers northeast of Bangkok, where men are men and bugs are food, just about everyone is happy to regale you with tales of monster sightings or giant, snaking tracks left in the riverbank's mud. Some locals brandish grainy pictures of what could be anything from a log to a boat, and swear it is evidence of the outsize serpent. And then there's that postcard: ubiquitous and eye-catching, of a band of U.S. service members purportedly stationed in the area in the early 1970s, staggering under the weight of an eight-meter-long, silvery, eellike fish. Locals swear it's genuine, and say all of the men in the photo met with messy ends. One oft told story holds that the fish itself disappeared on its way to America for scientific study.

If the fireballs, however, are a hoax, it is one conceived and perpetuated on a grand scale. According to Phrakhru Pichai Kitjaton, abbot of Wat Paa Luang, the temple houses written records of monks witnessing fireballs hundreds of years ago. And each year, anything from 200 to 800 of the fiery orbs are sighted along a 100-kilometer stretch of the river. "Are they real? Does it matter? Faith is the thing," he says, with a Mona Lisa smile.

One man not prepared to take the fireballs on faith is Nong Khai doctor and self-taught cosmographer Manas Kanoksin, who has spent 11 years trying to prove his theory that the fireballs are a natural phenomenon caused by pockets of methane bubbling up from the riverbed.

With mad-scientist intensity, he deluges me with data and baffles me with charts for hours. His hypothesis is that the Buddhist Lent full moon coincides with the period when the earth is passing closest to the sun. The sun's pull of gravity, he says, combined with a higher degree of UV radiation increases the concentration and volatility of oxygen at ground level that could cause existing methane escaping from the riverbed to spontaneously ignite. "In fact, it's not only one night per year," he insists. "The fireballs occur over several nights in October, and again in May when the earth swings closest to the sun again."

"Am I obsessed? Maybe," says the doctor, "but I am absolutely convinced that my theory is correct. If the fireballs are fake, the hoaxers would have to be more than 100 years old for a start. They'd have to be able to navigate a dangerous river in the dark, dodge the Thai and Lao patrol boats, and be incredibly good at keeping a secret."

Dr. Manas' principal detractor is Professor Montri Boonsaneur, who teaches geological technology at Khon Kaen University and was in charge of an underwater survey prior to construction of the nearby Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge. He says it's impossible that bubbles of methane could form in the river's rocky bed or survive its turbulent flow." I don't want to say the fireballs are man-made, but they're definitely not natural," he says.

The pair have engaged in a series of fiery debates on the topic, and their rivalry is a source of amusement for localsmost of whom are content to believe in the phenomenon's supernatural provenance. Next year, new combatants will enter the fray. Scientists from Bangkok's King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi say they plan to settle the mystery once and for all. They have developed a submarine robot capable of probing the river's depths and reporting back to a land-based control center. But "some things are better left alone," warns Pang, the 70-year-old riverbank resident. "Don't try to put the Naga to the test. He will become angry."

She might be right. Within 15 minutes of my first fireball sighting, thunderhead clouds that had been threatening ominously suddenly bore down with full force. The heavens opened, and fierce gusts of wind turned the rain horizontal. At Wat Paa Luang, the fireballs were forgotten in the stampede for shelter. A soaked mass of humanity huddled under flapping tents, as the booms and bangs and drawn-out rumbles of the tempest sounded more and more like the admonitions of an irate demigod.

Source: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,391567,00.html