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cryptic-64 · 2 months

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The Min Min Lights

The story of the Min Min lights comes from Indigenous Australian culture, first recorded near the now-abandoned Queensland town of Min Min.

A Min Min light is described to be a medium circular ball of fuzzy light, like a swarming ball of buzzing bees, usually white but sometimes reported to be green, yellow, red, and even blue.

These mysterious balls of light like to move and almost dance around somewhat erratically, up, down, left, right, backwards, forwards, even at odd angles. They have even been reported to split into two, equally as big, identical lights!

They are known to bob around erratically, and when you approach them they begin to retreat before eventually disappearing into the outback.

Now this is actually a personal encounter my grandfather had on his property with, what he believed to be, a Min Min light.

My grandfather lived on a massive property in a small outback town in western Australia, and it was surrounded by two massive 7ft fences, so there was an exterior fence and an interior, which was to protect the livestock from things like dingoes, foxes, snakes, lizards and wild dogs. And for extra protection, late every evening my grandfather and one his workmen would walk along these fences and place traps for rabbits and any other animal they may catch by the fence.

So they would collect their traps and grab a little oil lantern each, and the workman would walk the inner fence and my grandfather would walk the exterior fence, gradually placing traps along the way.

They would stop, put down the lantern, set the trap, pick up the lantern and keep walking, repeating the process every couple of metres. They would always keep in line, side by side a few metres apart, through the fence, but it was always so dark they could only keep track of each other's position by the small dingy little oil lantern they carried.

So this one evening they are doing their usual routine, stopping, putting down the trap and then picking up and moving on. They do this over and over again, occasionally looking over to make sure they are keeping up, but they had done it so many times now that they hardly had to check in to keep pace anymore. So my grandfather had placed a few traps on his own and looked up to confirm the workman’s lantern position only to find his lantern was 5 or so metres ahead.

The workman must have gone on without him.

My grandfather grabs his things and tries to hurry to catch up, he looks down to watch his steps so he doesn’t trip over a branch or rabbit hole, and when he looks back up he sees the workman’s lantern has moved another 5 metres or so away.

My grandfather is utterly confused but quickly stops to set the trap before wordlessly continuing to try and keep up with his workman.

However this time, he watches as the glowing orb of the lantern suddenly leaps into the air before landing on the ground, 5 metres away. My grandfather stopped in absolute shock.

Had the workman just thrown his lantern?

But if he did, why didn’t it smash and set the whole area on fire?

Once again the light leaps into the air, landing another 5 metres away.

Now my grandfather was sure that the workman wasn’t able to lay his traps in that time so he tries to walk over and approach the fence and the workman, but before he can reach the fence, the orb suddenly leaps completely over the 7ft fence to his side, again, 5 metres in front of him.

This makes my grandfather freeze in place. What was going on?

All of a sudden the voice of the workman calls my grandfather, “Oi why are you going so far ahead? I can’t keep up!” His voice called from behind my grandfather.

My grandfather quickly spun around to see the workman was indeed about 15 metres behind him, with his lantern in his hand.

In that moment he realised the light he was following was not the workman’s lantern, and when he looked back it was completely gone.

It wasn’t until years later when he learned the story of the Min Min lights from local elders, who believed these were the spirits of mischievous aboriginal entities appearing to trick the white people into getting lost in the outback, did he realise what he encountered. Although some also believe they may appear to guide people lost in the outback, home again.

#creatures #cryptid #eerie #creepy #australia #indigenous australians #aboriginal culture #scary #true story #mythical creatures #magic #interesting #trending

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dougielombax · 4 months

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Its been 56 years since Harold Holt disappeared.

I like to think he still pops up occasionally when nobody is looking.

Like a cryptid.

#dougie rambles #personal stuff #harold holt #political crap #australia #disappearance #auspol #australian politics #politics #cryptid

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fayeandknight · 1 year

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I spent a long time crying in bed this morning.

It started out over one thing and quickly became everything. This tsunami of grief over things that cannot be changed or undone. I cried until my pillow was soaked and I thought I would drown in it all.

Life can be so unfair in that it doesn't owe you an explanation or clean, logical, narrative. But if life doesn't owe me an explanation, then I don't owe it one either.

Anyway that's how I ended up spending several hours in the persevere with the dogs in my Mothman onsie.

#dogblr #faye day dawning #corgi #australian cattle dog #forte #belgian tervuren #hiking with dogs #it was snowing so we had the trails mostly to hours for most of the time #Mothman onsie adventure #sometimes you need to be the cryptid in the woods #and that's okay

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pleb-the-original · 10 months

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Day 4: Bunyip

(I am on a roll recently. Then again I really wanted to explore more of Dreamtime. The way it works here is that all time exists simultaneously. Every day goes by linearly so there is a present, but the past and future are played out at the same time as the present. It's only a matter of when your brain can remember. And attempting a paradox gets you booted out. I haven't been able to do much in there other than Rainbow Serpent shenanigans but maybe someday.) To explain Dreamtime would be like trying to explain to an amoeba what a dog is. The concept and existence would be so completely alien to the amoeba that they simply just cannot understand. Yes, all time exists simultaneously in Dreamtime. Every visitor will see their actions in the past and the future. But to a native, our lives are so irrevocably different from normal ideas of existence that only paltry metaphors can explain. But I joined under Titivillus for a reason and so I shall attempt to explain. Time for us is both linear and cyclical. I will experience a day just the same as any other person. But the past and future, I’ll be able to see them too. That is why most of us in Dreamtime are nomadic. Things get complicated when you run into each other pretty often. Sometimes I find past selves of me and we have a little chat. Sometimes future selves come by to chat as well. We can’t ever talk about too much, oh no. The rules against paradoxes work against us as well, any attempts and I would be booted out. Sometimes it can be quite convenient. I can tell whether a hunt goes well or not depending on when I can calculate that a fish I see in a river no longer has any future selves. Other times the disorientation hits hard. Especially the one day where I found the original iteration of me. The one that initially moved into Dreamtime when the colonizers came and we had to flee. That experience outside has been the key to helping me explain, because I too used to only experience time linearly. Now every time I go on a walk I have to ask my neighbors when they’re from. But I would not trade it for a thing. There’s a comfort in such certainty. Heck, sometimes I have to make things harder for myself. For example, as I write this I have the completed form right next to me. However I can’t open it of course, paradoxes. Maybe I should come out every once in a while, especially after what I hear about how the world is coming to accept us now. But this bunyip will always be loyal to this land. I don’t even have to find a me from the future to confirm.

#cryptid #cryptidinjuly2023 #cryptidinjuly #writing #creative writing #prompt list #writeblr #fantasy #bunyip #dreamtime #aboriginal australian folklore

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toast-part-two · 2 years

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Whales of the Great Salt Lake

(TW animal death, animal cruelty, thalassophobia)

[Image ID: A black and white stylized whale image. The whale is breaching the surface of the sea and is blowing a spout of water into the air. Its tail is coming out of the water in the background.]

Hey y’all welcome back to another cryptid post. The cryptid energy of this creature doesn’t come so much from the creature itself, but it’s location, the Great Salt Lake.

As the leftover dregs of the massive prehistoric saltwater Lake Bonneville which drained about 15,000 years ago, Utah’s Great Salt Lake is a natural wonder.

[Image ID: a map of the former Lake Bonneville laid over the state of Utah and spreading into Nevada and Idaho, and about half the size of the state of Utah. It covers the area of the Great Salt Lake, only a fraction of the size in comparison.]

With a salinity six times that of the ocean, the Great Salt Lake is a death trap for anything other than bacteria, a couple algaes, and brine shrimp, aquatic invertebrates the size of a pencil eraser. A few freshwater streams flow into the lake, providing lagoons for select fish and shorebird species, but the lake itself its mostly inhospitable.

This makes the claim that several Australian whales, (known to exceed 50ft in length,) are alive and well in the Great Salt Lake, (about 42 feet at it’s deepest,) pretty hard to believe.

As a Utah resident myself, I’ve always had a soft spot for these whales. We’ve all had an uncle or neighbor spend a night out on the lake looking for them, and occasionally sightings of them still get published on blogs and Facebook posts. They of course never existed in the first place, but it’s still a fun story.

It began way back in 1890, when a local paper called the Utah Enquirer began documenting the efforts of one James Wickham to provide the budding economy of the newly settled Salt Lake Valley both with a novelty tourist attraction, and a cash crop of whale meat and oil. As whales are extremophiles, known to thrive under immense water pressure and in freezing temperatures, James believed the incredibly salty Great Salt Lake to be no match for them. The Utah Enquirer claimed that James began his project back in 1875, but records of this initiation could not be found.

The June 24th, 1890 article goes as follows.

“Intelligent newspaper readers have not forgotten the inauguration 15 years ago by Mr. James Wickham, a scientific English gentleman of the whale industry in the Great Salt Lake. As considerable time was required for the development of the experiment, the subject has passed out of the public mind but it has by no means been forgotten by naturalist or capitalists interested in the whale fishery.

The whale is the largest and probably the longest lived animal. They have been known to grow 100 ft in length and live to the age of 400 years. It is a mammal, or, in other words, suckles it's young. The project of Mr. Wickham was greatly assisted by this fact, for the difficulty that would attend the obtaining of whale eggs in the deep seas is at once apparent. It was only necessary to obtain a pair of whales in order to begin the propagation of animals under domestication. The southern or Australian whale was selected as the best suited to the Great Salt Lake. The greater part of two years were occupied off the coast of Australia by a vessel sent especially for the purpose and continued efforts to capture the young whales without injury. The feet, however, was at least accomplished, and the beasts, each about 35 ft long, were shipped to San Francisco in 1873 in tanks built expressly for them. 50 tanks of seawater accomplished their overland shipment to ensure plentiful supplies of the natural element.

Mr. Wickham came from London in person to superintend the "planting" of his Leviathan pets. He selected a small bay near the mouth of the Bear River connected with the main water by a shallow straight half a mile wide. Across this strait he built a wire fence, and inside the pen so formed he turned the whales loose. After a few minutes inactivity they disported themselves in a lively manner, spouting water as in mid-ocean, but as if taking in by instinct or intention the cramped character of their new home, they suddenly made a beeline for deep water and shot through the wire fence as if it had been made of threads. In twenty minutes they were out of sight, and the chagrined Mr. Wickham stood gazing helplessly at the big salt water.

If the Great Salt Lake were in Asia it would have been called a sea. It is 75 miles long and from 30 to 40 wide, so it is easy to perceive how readily the whales could vanish from sight. Though the enterprising owner was of course, disappointed and doubtful of results he left an agent behind him to look after his floating property.

Six months later Mr. Wickham's representative came upon the whales 15 miles from the bay where they had broken away, and from that time to the present they have been observed in intervals by him and the watermen who [sic]ply the lake spouting and playing.

Within the last few days, however, Mr. Wickham cabled directions to make careful inspection and report the developments, and the agent followed the whales for five successive days and nights. Discovering that the original pair are now 60 ft in length, and followed about by school of several hundred young, varying in length from 3 to 15 ft. The scheme is a surprising and complete success, and Mr. Wickham has earned the thanks of mankind.

Catching whales in the Great Salt Lake and following that business on the dangerous Greenland Coast are two different things. The enormous value of the new industry can be better appropriated by remembering that a single whale produces 20 tons of pure oil."

Article can be found here

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a modified train car. A large window on the side shows a young whale floating inside the train. There is a building behind the train on the left side, and some trees on the right.]

Claims that whales live up to 400 years and also lay eggs notwithstanding, the legend sparked to life again in the twenty-first century with the appearance of the image above. This photo depicts one of the whales in its train car bound for Salt Lake City. I’d love to believe the photographic evidence as much as anybody, but unfortunately this image was debunked in 2019 by the Utah news outlet Deseret News, who tracked down the creators. They revealed in an interview that this image was used to promote their business of preserving old photos.

Further investigation by Deseret News revealed that there never was any Mr. James Wickham or his crew of biologists, no record of them anywhere other than the Utah Enquirer.

And in a final blow to the story’s credibility, the Utah Enquirer published a denouncement on July 22, 1890, about a month after the original story ran, saying “It would be impossible for any whale to exist in the waters of the Great Salt Lake.”

Full text here

Despite the fact that whales do not and cannot exist in the Great Salt Lake, sightings continue to crop up. The most famous instance of this continued phenomenon happened almost a decade ago, when a twelve-foot humpback whale reportedly appeared in a field in Farmington Utah, about ten miles from the Great Salt Lake.

[Image ID: A dead whale lying on its side in a grassy field. Two men in the top left look down at it.]

Inconsistency in whale species aside, the image above brought a renewed fascination and belief in the Whales of the Great Salt Lake, (one I admittedly got caught up in,) before being debunked again by Deseret News in late 2015.

The Great Salt Lake, like most places in the world, is full of oddities and legends both real and made up. The lake boasts tales of pterodactyl sightings and mosquitos the size of helicopters. A troup of animals that escaped their traveling circus and were left to wander the desert. A creature with the head of an alligator and the body of a horse that charges at campers, and Pink Floyd, the flamingo that escaped Salt Lake City’s Tracy Aviary and spent a few seasons on the lake hanging out with swans and seagulls.

[Image ID: A flock of birds on the Great Salt Lake, both in flight and on the water. Most are black and white California Gulls, but there is one pink flamingo flying in the right center of the image. Mountains are visible in the background.]

(You guys should look up the story of Pink Floyd the flamingo it’s pretty great.)

Lake Bonneville is theorized to have been a thousand feet deep, and to have drained into the Pacific Ocean. Fossil evidence suggests that sea life would migrate up the channels and swim above what is now desert and mesa and scrubland, and maybe even down in what would become the Great Salt Lake 15,000 years later. Maybe whales joined them. Maybe, for a brief moment in time, Utah had whales.

But, if that ever was the case, those whales are long dead by now. It is with a heavy heart I must conclude that there are no whales in the Great Salt Lake. Even so, it’ll always be my favorite local legend <3

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hydrogenjukeboxphoto · 2 years

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👁️

#eyes #eye tree #black and white #photography #australia #australian gothic #cryptid tree says 👁️

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dragoncreator312 · 2 years

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“The Burrunjor Pokemon”

Tyrantrum/Midnight Lycanroc/Hawlucha/Cobalion

Rock/Dragon

(Comes in 8 different colors)

#digital art #fanart #pokemon #cryptid #cryptozoology #pokemon drawing #artists on tumblr #pokefusion #pokemon fusion #cryptids #burrunjor #australian #living dinosaur #tyrantrum #midnight lycanroc #hawlucha #cobalion

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blogparanormal · 20 days

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Paranormal (Data Dump) 2C

* It was daytime and I was at home. I was at the computer in my home. This computer was in my bedroom. I used my computer to record audio clips to get EVPs. I plugged in my cell phone to a speaker box while the computer recorded the session. I was using an application on my phone to induce hearing spirit voices to see what I could record. My closet has slide open doors. I do not like to close them and usually leave them open. The closet is next to the computer. I recorded nearly two hours of content in this session. After recording, I listened to the recorded audio and analyzed it. I was around the 30 minute point of the recording when I noticed something in the closet that did not belong. I saw a see-through article of clothing in an area where I had no clothes hanging up. It was a woman’s dress. It was the bottom half of a dress torn at a 45 degree angle. What was most impressive was the detail of the torn dress. I could see a five petaled flower pattern all over it. There were hundreds possibly thousands of repeated five petal flowers on this garment. Everything about the dress was gray-scaled out and clearly did not fit with its surroundings. I knew immediately there was a ghost in my closet. I could see the wall through the dress. I waved at it and said “Hello, how are you doing?” After I did this, the ghost moved about 7 feet out of the closet and behind my computer chair. The ghost did not stop moving and headed to the center of the closet then though the wall. I called out to it “Please come again!” I never saw that ghost again. Did I spook the ghost? How do I induce more moments to see more ghosts, more of the time?

There was a day when I saw a ghost. This ghost was not your typical kind of ghost. The sun was setting and I needed something to eat. My dad told me he was going to get pizza. My dad left and I took out my cell phone. I used an application called “Murmur Box.” I tried to see if I could get spirit voices in live time. This entertained me until my dad got home with the pizza. My dad opened the door with a pizza box in his hand. I eagerly grabbed a plate for myself and waited for my dad to open the box. My dad opened the box; I reached in, and slapped a slice of pizza on my plate. When I did this grease splattered all over the place. I brought my plate to where I always sat. Before taking a bite, I turned on a different application called “Ghost Radar.” I invited the spirits in to come to my exact location and enjoy spending time with me at dinner. I chomped down on a slice of pizza as oil and grease oozed out of the slice. I got eight blips on my screen. This was amazing because I have only ever had one blip on it at a time. The blips seemed to move around and surrounded me. I was astonished to see when I looked up. There was a ghost standing in the dining room! There was a man with a long beard; a fat nose, wide cheeks, a hat, miner’s clothes from the 1800s, gloves, and boots. His eyes were solid gray. In fact everything about the man was solid gray like a statue. Unlike other ghosts, I could not see through the man at all. He had a pot belly and was 5 to 5 ½ feet tall. My eyes widened. I looked at him as he looked at me. He turned 90 degrees to his right and floated strait into the wall that went into the pantry. I got out of my seat to see if the ghost was in there. I saw nothing. I went to the other side near the garage. I saw nothing. I did not know where the ghost went. Where did the ghost go? Will it ever come back? My dad called to me “Are you going to finish your pizza?” I replied “I will be right there.” I never saw that ghost again. *

One afternoon I was inside the house. I was in the kitchen preparing myself a pepperoni sandwich. I would use two slices of Italian bread, slices of large pepperoni, pecorino-romano cheese, and brown mustard. It was an Italian lunch. I was putting my brown mustard on when a royal blue human shaped ghost appeared near me by the butcher-block in the kitchen. I am nearly 6 feet tall and this royal blue ghost was equally tall. It walked past me as if it didn’t see me. It walked around the counter and passed the table. I followed it. It walked through the doorway of my parent’s room. I went into the bedroom and I watched the ghost walk through the wall. This meant the royal blue ghost could see objects and avoid them. However it still walked through a wall. Why did this ghost show up in the kitchen? Where was it going? Did this ghost want me to see it?

One night I was on my usual walk. My hope that night was to see UFO. I ended up seeing something else. I walked down the sidewalk away from my home. I came to an intersection. It was on the same side and corner that I was on. It came out of the bushes, but made no sound. It was a royal blue ghost. This ghost was about my height. The royal blue ghost came on the sidewalk in front of me. It got to the edge of the road and paused. I could not believe my eyes when I saw what happened next. It turned its head right, then left. It crossed the road at the crosswalk as if it was alive. When it got to the other side of the crosswalk, it headed off-road into palm trees and bushes. It then disappeared. Did I just see a ghost being safety conscious of cars? Like a person who lost their appetite, I decided not to cross and turned around and walked somewhere else. What would have happed if I crossed the road that night?

It was late afternoon. I wanted some animal crackers as a snack. I left my bedroom and headed to the kitchen. Once in the kitchen, I opened the closet door. There I saw it. It was an open bag of animal crackers. Somebody opened the bag. That somebody was me. I opened the animal cracker bag a few days ago. I poured the recommend serving size of animal crackers into a bowl. Then I put the bag back where I found it. I turned to my right. I must have been lucky. At that moment I saw a humanoid ghost float down the hallway leading to the garage and into the kitchen. It passed me heading towards the far side of the kitchen then disappeared. I could tell from the masculine face shape and hair cut it was male. The appearance of this ghost reminded me of ginger ale soda. The whole ghost was this color. I did not see a ghost like this again until 2018. Where did it come from? What made this ghost appear in this unusual color?

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