The Min Min light

The Min Min light is the Australian outback's great ghost light, and Boulia, in the Channel Country of western Queensland, calls itself its home. Travellers there have long reported a fuzzy, disc-shaped light hovering just above the horizon, usually white but sometimes shifting to red or green and back, sometimes dim, sometimes bright enough to throw sharp shadows. It seems to have a mind of its own. It approaches, retreats and approaches again, keeps pace with moving cars, and vanishes when fired on, only to come back. Folklore warns that anyone who chases the light and catches it will never return to tell the tale.

The lights are older than the name. Stories about them run through several Aboriginal cultures from before colonisation, and some Indigenous people say sightings grew as Europeans pushed into the outback. Some people interviewed by the anthropologist Curtis Roman described pairs of lights moving like eyes in snake-like curves, near water or where water once lay, and saw in them a rainbow serpent moving people along and reminding them it was still there. The name itself is uncertain. It may come from a language of the Cloncurry district, or from the Min Min Hotel in the small settlement of that name, where a stockman reported the light in 1918. Reports now stretch from Brewarrina in New South Wales to Boulia, and across to the Pilbara, where the Ngarluma people know them, but most come from the Channel Country.

Science has offered one compelling answer. In 2003 the University of Queensland neuroscientist Jack Pettigrew, who had seen the light while studying the nocturnal letter-winged kite in the Diamantina region, published an optical explanation: the Min Min is a Fata Morgana, an inverted mirage. On hot days and cold nights a dense layer of cold air settles on the flat ground and works, as he put it, like a giant fibre-optic light pipe, carrying light from a campfire, a homestead or a car's headlights tens or even hundreds of kilometres over the horizon. To a lone observer with no sense of the distance, a single light hanging in the dark can be terrifying. Sightings peak in midwinter, when the air is stillest. Pettigrew apologised to outback people for explaining it, arguing that understanding the light might enhance the experience rather than explain it away.

Boulia has embraced its visitor. The town has a Min Min Encounter attraction, and a sign in the main street, put up by the shire council in the interest of tourism, warns that the light has been approached but never identified.