Posted on 04/06/2003 7:47:59 AM PDT by yankeedame
Look, up in the sky, it's a bird poo, it's a plane, it's a trick of the eye
By Richard Macey
April 7 2003
They have been blamed on flying saucers, evil spirits and mythical beasts. The "Min Min lights" appear in the night sky, dancing above the horizon, sometimes chasing victims along dusty roads.
Boulia Shire Council, in western Queensland, self-proclaimed home of the mystery, even boasts a Min Min Encounter Centre, a $2 million shrine to the mystery.
Every year it attracts thousands of visitors wanting to view its high-tech simulation or buy Min Min lights T-shirts, fridge magnets, key rings or stubby holders.
But now a scientist has apologised to Boulia for not only explaining the mystery - but saying he can create them. "I know they are going to be upset," said Jack Pettigrew, a neuroscientist. "I have apologised."
Professor Pettigrew, director of Queensland University's Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre, first saw the lights more than 10 years ago. He said they often resembled a fuzzy ball, up to half the size of a full moon.
"They are extremely alarming," he said. "They follow you. There can be red ones and green ones. They dance a lot and sometimes they split in two." However, they were not magic.
"They are caused by temperature inversions. You need a hot day during winter that's followed by a cool, clear night."
Temperature inversions occur when a dense layer of cold air is trapped below warmer air and are well known for catching brown smog in the Sydney basin.
In the outback, inversions work like a lens, bending car lights, the moon, bushfires and other lights over the horizon.
"The atmosphere acts like a big fibre-optic light pipe. It looks very close but it can be hundreds of kilometres away," Professor Pettigrew said.
He even claimed he had "put on a Min Min show" by driving into the outback when conditions were right and turning on his headlights. Colleagues 20 kilometres away suddenly saw a fuzzy ball of moving light.
The chief executive of Boulia Shire, Kelvin Tytherleigh, agreed the lights were important to the local economy. But he doubted that the explanation, published in Clinical and Experimental Optometry, the journal of the Optometrists Association of Australia, would harm interest.
"A lot of people have tried to explain it," said Mr Tytherleigh. "Some say it's luminous vegetation birds have eaten. Some say it is caused by natural gasses seeping from fissures in the ground. We invite every scientist in Australia to come and have a look."
He said the $12 family entry fee to see the centre's light show would be waived at Easter as a "special" incentive.
Yeah, they can really look spookie, but it's significant that the didn't become common until electric lights and the automobile.
SO9
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