The Light That Follows: A Century of Min Min Sightings in the Australian Outback
The Channel Country of far western Queensland is a landscape built for seeing things a long way off. It is flat, largely treeless, cut by shallow braided riverbeds that fill perhaps once a decade, and it holds heat all day and sheds it all night. The town of Boulia, on the Burke River, has a few hundred residents and a very great deal of horizon. For well over a century, people crossing this country after dark have reported the same thing. A light.
The reports are unusually consistent. Witnesses describe a fuzzy, disc-shaped glow that appears to hover just above the horizon line. It is most often white, but many accounts describe it shifting through red and green and back again. Its brightness varies enormously, from a dim smudge no larger than a distant lamp to a light strong enough to throw shadows on the ground. It makes no sound. And then there is the detail that has kept the story alive for a hundred years: it appears to follow. Stockmen, drovers, truck drivers and tourists have all described a light that matched their pace, held its distance, and stayed with them for kilometres. Some accounts describe travellers firing rifles at it, whereupon the light vanished and then reappeared, unchanged, a short time later.
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