Deep in the dry, channel-ridden heart of the Australian outback sat a lone building, separated from any note of civilization by hundreds of miles of open expanse. Haphazardly thrown together out of corrugated iron and timber, a glorified shanty at best, the Min Min Hotel existed as a waystation for travelers to stop off after a long, exhausting ride across the endless stretches of sand. 

Although the Min Min Hotel was a dainty little outpost, it has gone down in infamy over what mysteriously emerged next to it one night, a story that parents would tell to their children for years to come. 

Customers at the Min Min Hotel would relax, grab something to eat (usually hard corned beef, or on special occasions, goat chops), have a drink from the watering hole or the pub, and get ready for the next leg of the journey, typically to the nearby Warenda Station.

It existed as part of the Cobb & Co waystation network, splayed out across the outback. While many of the stations around the area didn’t have great reputations, the Min Min Hotel was an especially nasty place. From the overpriced and gut-rotting drinks, to the brawls, the murders, and the cattle rustling, its infamy was well-known across the area. A private cemetery sat at the back of the hotel, an eerie signal for arrivers. 

In February 1924, the Min Min Hotel burnt down. As the story goes, a disgruntled customer set it ablaze one dark night, however, the more likely cause was the wildfires that were documented to have been sweeping the area at the time. 

One midnight soon after the fire, a frightened stockman burst through the front door of the police station of the nearby town, Boulia. After a policeman had calmed him down and offered him a glass of water, the stockman told his story. He had been riding past the charred remains of the Min Min Hotel when a fuzzy, illuminated orb of bright light suddenly rose out of the graveyard. Believing that the heavenly light was a ghost, the stockman frantically fled on his horse, repeatedly turning around to find the light still behind him, galloping the entire 70-mile length into town in under 2 hours. 

While his story was initially not believed by the townspeople, the thousands of confirmed reports in the following years quickly proved that the stockman was right. He was the first confirmed report of the mysterious Min Min Lights of the Australian outback. 

Encounters with the ethereal and otherworldly light have no commonalities other than that they regularly appear just after dark, many of them around Min Min and on the dusty old coach road spanning from Winton to Boulia. Some years many different reports will come in, and some none at all. The lights rise from the ground and dance about 10 feet above the Earth, following the witness or staying in place, sometimes changing to green, blue, or white. 

And so the mystery of the Min Min lights continued for decades. Thousands of tourists a year flock to Boulia and make the drive out to Min Min, pulled in by the fantastical allure of the mystery, staking a reputation well known all over the world for this phenomenon. The town of Boulia even built the “Min Min Encounter Center,” an animatronic-powered 40-minute history lesson on the myths and mystery of the Min Min Lights. 

However, the mystery was finally solved in 2003 by Professor Jack Pettigrew of the University of Queensland. Through his research, he found that it was actually an inverted mirage, otherwise known as a Fantana Morgana, which occurs when light, sometimes man-made, sometimes natural, passes through a cold, dense air mass, trapped against the ground by a warm one. This effect is, with the right conditions and geography, able to refract the light hundreds of kilometers across the flat terrain. 

To prove his theory, Pettigrew picked a day that had the perfect conditions and drove his car 10 kilometers from a group of 6 observers, to such a point where he had dipped under the horizon line. When he flipped on his headlights, even though the light was blocked by the Earth itself, the observers could still see the light. He had created his own Min Min, proving his theory true. 

Today, all that remains of the Min Min Hotel is a splatter of broken bottles, some rusting rails, and one ill-fated customer’s dilapidated grave. Although the shack had lived a miserable and tragic life, what spawned above its graveyard that one night in early 1924 spawned a mystery that would live in infamy and in the minds of the Australian people for years to come. 

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