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I could not resist a little blog about Min Mins before bed-time. My thoughts were set in train by a book I came across called Great Australian Mysteries by John Pinkney.
The classic Min Min is orange in colour and the size of a small balloon. It bobs along for a time, then vanishes. But Min Mins exhibit a much wider range of behaviours. They may hover in one spot for a long period of time, frequently they chase cars or men on horseback, often they are seen wandering around over cattle.
That is why I mention them here - because they do act like they are very much alive, and if so then surely there cannot be an animal more cryptic in nature. There have been times when they have been seen to congregate in large numbers and that is very animal-like behaviour.
Quoted in the above book is a Frank Silcock who documented more than 500 incidents. For instance there is the Lanahan family in Queensland, who every winter in the 1950s saw a 5-metre Min Min flying around above their stockyard terrifying the animals. On one occasion someone took a shot at it and it shrank to the size of a small red coal, then minutes later
inflated to 5 metres again.
The change in size reminded me of an incident I recorded long ago on the Forteana list, perhaps back in the primenet days. A friend named John Brennan saw a Min min along Middlebrook Road near Millaa MIllaa. At one stage in the encounter it hovered in front of him and shrank to a tiny size, at which point he did what he does to catch flies - he lashed out and snatched it out of the air. Now that is a close encounter!
Another encounter related by Pinkney involved a Bega farmer in 1976 who heard a loud high-pitched whistling noise. He searched and found a bright yellow football-sized globe of "something" behind a boulder. It was 15cm off the ground and over a 5-second cycle went from yellow to orange and back again. There was no sense of heat but "when I tried to get closer I
could feel my skin tighten and all the hair on my body stand up...It was like trying to walk into a very strong wind." He tried to poke it with a branch but it just slipped away, "like two magnets opposing each other". The noise was unbearable, then it turned green and faded away as did the sound, leaving "a sweet sickly smell".
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