Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  After Anne had related her experience, John Anderson took down a book of Australian animals and leafed through it. As he turned a page she exclaimed, ‘That’s it!’

  Andrew Rule writes, ‘The picture she pointed to was of the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, presumed extinct in Tasmania since the late 1930s and, according to conventional science, extinct on the mainland for centuries.’

  * * *

  A Tantalising Tiger Theory

  The presence today of Tasmanian tigers on Australia’s mainland may not be as nonsensical a notion as academic experts insist.

  It’s now largely forgotten that during the 19th and 20th centuries, amateur naturalists not only enjoyed importing birds and animals (some of which became pests) – but also found fulfilment in moving native species from one part of the continent to another. Pairs of brightly plumed Queensland parrots were released into Tasmania to lend colour to the island’s sometimes gloomy forests. They died in the attempt – some shot, others killed by the cold weather. Tasmania returned the favour by shipping deer to Queensland and New South Wales.

  Platypuses were plucked from rivers and relocated to waterways half a continent away. From one end of Australia to the other, nature was tampered with in a way unprecedented in millennia of evolution.

  Although records are sketchy, historians are certain that between 1898-1938, enthusiastic officials introduced more than 20 native species from around Australia into Wilson’s Promontory National Park, Victoria. They did this in the same experimental spirit as when fellow-buffs released Tasmanian brushtailed possums into New Zealand – creating an environmental plague.

  While this eccentric interference with the natural world continued, no Australian plant, bird or animal was safe from being uprooted. It is hard to believe, therefore, that the zealots of ecological improvement would have overlooked the thylacine. Even in the mid-19th century its numbers were decreasing. It’s entirely possible that well-meaning meddlers bought pairs of Tasmanian tigers and introduced them into Western Australia, New South Wales and Victoria, where they are still reported today.

  Michael Moss, an amateur naturalist, combed old newspapers and official records and established that credible tiger sightings near Wilsons Promontory were noted as early as 1915. The creatures might even have been unofficially imported. The Wilsons Promontory management committee was always anxious to introduce and free as many native birds and animals as possible into the park.

  The committee might never formally have approved the release of a ‘pest’ like the Tasmanian tiger – but its correspondence files do show that it exchanged letters with James Harrison, a prominent Tasmanian animal dealer. Harrison had sold thylacines to Melbourne Zoo and other zoos around the world.

  Did he sell a pair of thylacines, to be set loose in the Victorian bush?

  Regrettably he kept no records.

  * * *

  Lost, on a Road Without Shadows

  Inexplicable Events

  The phenomenon, bizarre and frightening, has been reported in most countries of the world – and Australia is no exception. The ordeal (or illusion) begins when a motorist detours onto a stretch of highway that seems deeply unfamiliar, and drives desperately for a long stretch of time before finding an exit. Travellers who say they have been trapped on such turnoffs describe broadly similar experiences, including deep silence devoid of birdsong, and a complete lack of shadows. In Europe and the USA these so-called ‘spectral highways’ are commonly blamed for deaths and accidents. With notable exceptions, most Australian witnesses have been deprived of no more than a day of their lives: albeit a day they will never forget...

  THE NIGHTMARISH EXPERIENCE made absolutely no sense to Kenneth Burnett. All the Katoomba, NSW man knew was that something powerful and profound had touched his life.

  Ken made his ordeal public in the hope that someone might be able to explain what had happened. Nobody could.

  In an address to the Tamworth Historical Society he recalled: ‘My wife and I were travelling on the New England Highway from Tamworth to Armidale. We came to a detour sign which directed us onto a side road.

  ‘The track was very narrow and edged by poplars. Although the sun was well-risen, neither the trees nor the car threw shadows.

  ‘We drove for a seemingly interminable time until we came to what appeared to be a tunnel. But we realised it couldn’t be, because the roof was too low. After driving endlessly through this very long tunnel we came to a road which took us back to the highway. As dusk fell I switched on the lights – but they failed at every curve in the road.

  ‘We finally reached our destination at 10 pm. Only then did we realise it had taken us a full day and quite a few night hours to drive just 110 kilometres from Tamworth to Armidale. We both wondered where we could have been for that length of time.’

  THERE WAS MORE. Reluctant to wake the relative with whom they’d been staying, the Burnetts decided to sleep in their car.

  ‘I tried to have a cigarette. But neither my lighter nor matches would work. I then realised there was no oxygen in the vehicle and that we were freezing cold. I managed to open the windows and within a few minutes we were warm again.’

  The following morning Ken Burnett rang the Roads Department and learned that there had been neither a highway detour nor roadworks the previous day. When he and his wife studied roadmaps of the area they could find no reference to a tunnel.

  The Empty Landscape that ‘Stretched Forever’

  A similar experience was described to me in 1992 by Peg Ferneley of Broadbeach, Queensland. She wrote: ‘It happened in 1987. I was with a friend, a sales rep who was driving to Childers. On the way I noticed a milkbar and suggested we stop for coffee. But my friend said we should keep going. Childers was less than an hour away and we could have lunch there around noon.

  ‘That’s when the strangeness started.

  As we drove along we suddenly became aware of a deep silence. No birds were singing and there was no other traffic in sight. My friend, who’d served the same area for 30 years, became puzzled. “This must be a new highway,” he said. “I can’t remember seeing anything like this before.” Neither could I.

  As we drove on and on we became aware that there were no road signs, houses, farms or shops to be seen –just flat country that seemingly stretched forever.

  ‘Midday came and there was still no sign of Childers. We were becoming alarmed. The silence and the emptiness seemed threatening now.

  ‘Then, when our petrol was almost gone, we saw with great relief that there was a town ahead. Starving by this time we stopped at the pub for a meal. But lunch was off – it was 2.30. We’d spent three-and-a-half hours on what should have been a 60-minute trip.

  ‘My friend asked the barman when the new road bypassing Childers had opened. The bloke in the bar laughed and said there was no bypass – and no way we could have become lost, as there was only one highway.’

  VICTIMS OF THE ‘spectral highway’ syndrome sometimes express the belief that they strayed into a world that does not exist. In the opinion of some UFO investigators this may be precisely what happened. Almost every Australian case has occurred on a rural road, with missing time involved. The theorists suggest that motorists lost in anomalous environments may, in possibly every instance, have been abducted, then implanted with ‘screen memories’ (false recollections) to conceal what happened to them.

  In Britain and the USA, incidents involving shadow highways have exhibited characteristics only occasionally reported in Australia [see Deaths on Picton’s Haunted Highway, page 165]. In 1992 British national newspapers reported cases in which motorists had begun detouring to avoid a deadly, and reputedly ‘bewitched’ stretch of freeway in Wiltshire.

  SURVIVORS OF THE TRIP told police and traffic investigators that they had seen ‘a dark foggy road’ suddenly forking away to their right. Drivers, assuming that this was simply a bend in the highway, had swerved across the central grass verge into a hell of oncoming traffic. Bri
tish transport authorities could offer no explanation for the long series of fatal crashes.

  Barbara Davidson, a British Telecom worker, recalled how she had almost driven down the doom-laden road: ‘The moon was up and...visibility good. I was driving particularly carefully because a few days earlier a mother and son had been killed on this section of freeway.

  ‘I knew the road fairly well, but suddenly – and to me quite shockingly – the way ahead was no longer familiar. Part of the freeway seemed to have become blacked out – and a road I’d never seen before swung away to the right. I had an overwhelming compulsion to steer into that road, but a stronger feeling of fear prompted me to keep going straight ahead.’

  Fish that Fell From the Sky

  Australians have become accustomed to extraordinary events on their roads. In 1995 motorists on the Sturt Highway, 700 kilometres south of Darwin, braked to avoid a mass of live fish raining from a cloudless (and aircraft-free) sky. Numerous fish lay flapping on the bitumen – but the school’s principal target seemed to be a nearby hotel: the Dunmarra Inn. Fish flapped in the hotel’s parking lot and flailed, dying on the roof.

  ‘The fish seemed to come from nowhere,’ owner Steve Liebelt told the Northern Territory News. ‘People are stopping, just to gape at them.’ Another local man, Dave Fellowes, said he had seen a small crab scuttling across the inn’s forecourt.

  It was the third time in six years that fish had mysteriously descended on the hotel. Each fall occurred on a still, cloudless day. At no time were aircraft in the area.

  Downpours of fish, frogs, crabs and other small creatures have been baffling Australians since the earliest days of settlement. And according to Aboriginal lore, the strange showers were occurring long before Europeans invaded. The American curiosa collector Charles Fort noted than fish rained on Queensland in large quantities during the 1870s. Most of the falls, he wrote, were inexplicably concentrated in and around water tanks.

  Perth’s Bizarre Hovering Car

  In January 2006 British IT news website The Register reported that something exceedingly odd had happened in Perth, Western Australia.

  In a carpark in the suburb of Bicton, near the Swan River, Google Earth’s satellite imaging service had photographed a white sedan seemingly floating above the ground, with a clearly defined shadow beneath it.

  The image had been captured within the past three years – and the aviating auto was no longer there. But its apparent act of levitation prompted considerable levity among the site’s subscribers. Scores sent satirical emails designed to dismiss the picture as illusory. One suggested that the car was a triple-coffin being lowered into a grave; another said it could only be the vehicle used by Harry Potter and his friends. Others more analytically surmised that the ‘car’ was (among other things) a water tank, a pergola – or even an inconveniently placed bus shelter.

  One subscriber was intrigued enough to visit the carpark and take photographs showing there were no structures that could explain the phenomenon.

  As this volume went to press the controversy continued – and the true nature of the hovering car remained up in the air.

  Min-Min Globes Smelt of Ozone

  In November 1979, while sitting in his truck near the Queensland-Northern Territory border, Bruce Cheeseman was startled by a sudden glimpse into the unknown.

  ‘My mate and I had stopped out from Tennant Creek for a rest – and to wait for a second truck that was following us,’ he recalled. ‘Then, just as the other truck was pulling up, some strange lights appeared. ‘We reacted by saying something like “Bloody Min-Mins!”

  ‘The lights seemed to be about three feet in diameter and looked like swirling balls. They changed – apparently with the angle at which we observed them – from misty grey to a hazy blue. When they moved, their colours changed again from blue to green.

  ‘Two Aborigines in the truck behind us were very scared, calling the lights “debil-debils”. Horses that the second truck was carrying on a float became agitated and there was unusual static on our radio – it sounded like a highspeed engine making a buzzing noise.

  As we got closer to the lights a peculiar smell, like ozone, filled our nostrils. The lights stayed around for four to six minutes – enabling a member of our group to photograph them from only 30 feet away. As we closed in on them the lights took off across a paddock and down toward a gully.’

  The men sent the photos to a university laboratory for developing and analysis. As happens to much photographic evidence of this kind, the pictures were lost. It was just another chapter in the centuries-long history of the Min-Min enigma: electrically charged, multiply witnessed by men and animals – but in the end, inconclusive.

  Mystery of the Spinning Sea-Lights

  It was the eeriest, but most beautiful, spectacle Queensland master mariner Norman Fraser had encountered. The time was three o’clock on the morning of 4 November 1997 and he was standing watch aboard the supply ship Ocean Worker, in the Bay of Bengal.

  Without warning, the dark sea began to pulsate, then brilliantly shine as though the sun was rising from the sea bed. As Fraser and shipmate Sam Apaya watched, awed, luminously green patches of light spun around the vessel at increasing speed.

  ‘Before long the patches had formed huge, rotating wands of green light in the water,’ Norman Fraser recalled. ‘The curved spokes turned from a central hub at more than 80 cycles per minute.’ The spinning light-mass was visible as far beyond the ship as the eye could see. Mr Fraser took careful notes of what he and Sam Apuya had witnessed.

  The stretch of ocean in which this astonishing display appeared is well known for its bioluminescent organisms. But the organised immensity of the rotating pattern poses a puzzle that science has not begun to solve.

  Lightwheels of the type Norman Fraser described have also been seen off the coast of Western Australia – and were recorded by mariners for centuries. Author K.I. Gitelson observed one in 1909 while aboard the ship Bintang in the Indian Ocean. He recalled ‘waves of light moving across the surface of the sea from west to east. Gradually they took the shape of long rays rotating clockwise. These rays were not straight, but concave’.

  The previous year the captain of a Russian trading vessel had noted: ‘Suddenly an unusual light, white and green in colour, broke out under the stern and soon occupied most of the ocean’s surface. The light-pattern was oval in shape and moved for some time with the ship, then gradually separated from us and flew ahead at great speed, shining brightly.’

  An Australian Reflects on Mirror-Matter

  Wheels spinning in seawater fade into salty insignificance when compared with the strange substance an Australian scientist believes he and a Netherlands colleague have found within our solar system.

  In an interview with BBC News (13 November 2002) Dr Robert Foot of Melbourne University reported that close-up observations of asteroid Eros by the Shoemaker probe indicated that it had been splattered by so-called ‘mirror-matter’. He conducted his research in partnership with the University of Amsterdam’s Dr Saibal Mitra.

  The mirror material – thought by some scientists to be possible evidence of a parallel universe – seems to be a looking-glass reflection of normal matter. For every known particle, the theory suggests, there is a ‘mirror particle’ that restores the cosmic balance. Foot and Mitra surmise that mirror-matter would produce its own light – but it would be invisible to us. ‘There could be mirror-matter stars, planets and galaxies out there,’ Dr Foot told the BBC.

  He theorised that the material had measurably affected our space probes. Analysis of the trajectories of the Pioneer spacecraft launched in 1972 showed both were being slowed by a ‘tiny, unexplained force’. Dr Foot suggested that the drag of mirror-matter might be responsible. ‘How else can you explain that both Pioneers, on opposite ends of the solar system, experience the same force pushing in the same direction?’ he asked.

  He surmised that the material might even have struck Earth – pointing to thr
ee possible events: the mysterious Tunguska explosion of 1908, which destroyed vast areas of Siberian forest – and low-velocity fireballs that struck Spain (1994) and Jordan (2001).

  Adrift at the Dentist’s

  No selection of inexplicable Australian events would be complete without the classic testimony of pharmacist Percy Cole.

  A shy, private man, Cole was embarrassed by the very thought of any kind of publicity. But a professional colleague to whom he had confided his exceptional experience ultimately persuaded him to share it with the world. By doing so, the colleague assured him, he might be adding in a small degree to the sum of human knowledge.

  In the late 1930s – several years after the transforming events occurred – Percy Cole agreed to speak to paranormal researchers Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington. They published his measured, meticulous account in a book titled The Phenomena of Astral Projection.

  Percy Cole had suffered from bad teeth for most of his life. A dentist, following the fashion of the day, advised him to have them all removed and replaced by dentures. Several nights before the procedure the pharmacist had an electrically vivid dream in which he met a doctor in military uniform and a woman dressed as a nun. The woman handed him a square of paper that resembled a prescription. When he asked what it meant the physician interjected, ‘You have mitral regurgitation.’

  Percy Cole woke, troubled by the dream. He sensed that his unconscious mind might have warned him that something was wrong with his heart. He consulted a specialist who discovered a slight murmur. But there was nothing to worry about, the physician said. Cole would be more than fit enough to undergo the dental operation. To calm the pharmacist’s fears the specialist promised to administer the anaesthetic himself.