australia – Museum of the Weird

Posted on October 30, 2013 by MOTW Admin

PLESIOSAUR PHOTOGRAPHED OFF AUSTRALIAN COAST?

David “Crusty” Herron snapped this photo of what he dubbed "Lost Nessie" from a distance of about 600 feet from shore. — David “Crusty” Herron snapped this photo of what he dubbed “Lost Nessie” from a distance of about 600 feet from shore.

Last Friday, the scene from Magnetic Island off the northern coast of Australia must have looked like something straight out of The Lost World. Beachgoers were treated to the sight of what appeared to be a long-necked sea going creature straight out of our prehistoric past.

The strange looking object moving in the water was extraordinary enough to get the attention of numerous eyewitnesses, many wondering just what it could be.

Plesiosaur? Sea serpent? Or could it be something more mundane and explainable, like a piece of driftwood or a sunken boat? You decide.

From The Australian:

The strange sea sighting has created quite a buzz on the island, with locals desperate to know: just what is lurking in the water?

One of them is marriage celebrant David “Crusty” Herron, who photographed it from a beach about 200 metres away.

“It was bobbing up and down in the water and at first I thought, what’s that?” Mr Herron told AAP.

“Someone yelled out ‘it looks like a Loch Ness monster’.

“I’ve never seen anything like it – it could be anything. We are all wanting to know what it is.”

James Cook University biology professor Glen Chilton says while new and old creatures are constantly being discovered, even near the Great Barrier Reef, it’s unlikely to be a strange aquatic beast.

“It’s probably a piece of a tree or piece of a boat which has somehow broken away,” he told AAP.

Australian cryptozoologist and self-proclaimed “yowie man” Rex Gilroy is keeping an open mind. “It’s hard to say from the photo,” he said.

Mr Gilroy, who has authored books on mythical creatures, says he’s aware of about 800 sightings of reptilian creatures with long necks and football shaped heads.

Some of those were from the Magnetic Island and Townsville area, he said.

The most recent was in October last year when a fisherman saw a creature with a large grey coloured body protruding from waters off Magnetic Island, he said.

When asked if it could have been the remains of a dragon boat that supposedly sunk there in the recent past, the man who photographed the creature, David Herron, refuted it and compared the beast to a plesiosaur. Here’s “Crusty” being interviewed by News 7:

SOURCE: http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/19578903/has-loch-ness-monster-migrated-to-nth-qld/

Posted on January 11, 2013 by MOTW Admin

ENORMOUS WALL OF SAND HITS AUSTRALIAN COAST

Brett Martin, a tugboat worker, captured this amazing photograph of the incoming dust tsunami.

Check out these amazing photos coming out of Australia today. They depict an enormous wall of dust and sand carried by a cyclone as it approaches the coast of northwestern Australia.

MOTW-2013-01-10-Sandstorm_2 — Dwarfed by the enormity of the dust cloud, these ships are about to be overcome.

These are not Photoshopped, folks. Just another reminder of the power and grandeur of mother nature. These truly awe-inspiring pictures depict a category-three cyclone as it carries tons of sand particles picked up by strong winds in the Indian Ocean.

MOTW-2013-01-10-Sandstorm_3 — Terrifying, yet beautiful, the dust storm is about to reach the Australian coast.

SOURCE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2260560/Wall-sand-whipped-Tropical-Cyclone-Narelle-hits-Onslow-Western-Australia.html

Posted on August 7, 2012 by MOTW Admin

AUSTRALIAN X-FILES RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC

Australia has released documents 30 years that describe many encounters with UFOs.

Here comes some interesting info out of the land down-under!

By law in Australia, any government documents 30 years old must be released to the public and there are a few folks scouring those documents for anything interesting, and boy have they found something good!

The Age over in Australia writes:

It is probably the closest Australia has come to scrambling fighter jets to intercept a UFO.

Documents that have just become available under the 30-year rule at the National Archives of Australia reveal how two RAAF Mirage jets were placed on the second highest level of alert to determine the cause of unidentified radar contacts seen on screens at Mascot.

The ”X Files” viewed in Canberra also give details of other unexplained sightings, some of which are supported by witness statements to police.

In the Sydney alert, the papers stamped ”restricted” tell how operation ”Close Encounter” was launched by No.3 Control and Reporting Unit at RAAF Base Williamtown near Newcastle on June 30, 1983, after the phenomenon was first noticed earlier in the month.

Senior air controllers at Mascot said the contacts were mostly located between 70 and 150 nautical miles north of Sydney at ”alleged speeds of 1100-6500 km/h that suggested high altitude”.

The papers state that no scramble was to occur in the round-the-clock operation unless confirmation of any reported tracks was made on the radar screens at RAAF Williamtown or any radar other than Sydney.

At the same time, three senior air defence controllers were dispatched to Sydney to investigate and plot every contact and ”control interceptors against these contacts if a reasonable chance of interception presented itself”. But then one of the defence controllers, a squadron leader, asked whether a comparison had been made of the contacts on the screens of Mascot’s Area Approach Radar Centre and those in a ”workshop across the corridor”. Soon after, tests showed that the ”unidentified objects reported by Sydney were generated entirely by radar interference known colloquially as ‘running rabbits’ ”.

Squadron leader K. Keenan, in his six-page report, said operation Close Encounter cost 66½ days of overtime, 1000 kilometres was travelled by a staff car and a C130 Hercules transport aircraft ”may have been diverted to Sydney airport” to deliver one of the defence controllers.

He wrote: ”The lines of communication, extending as they did across the width of an entire corridor, seem to have been insufficient for the purpose.”

He added rather dryly: ”Fortunately there was no temptation to launch aircraft and add to the fuel bill occasioned by use of the RAAF Datsun.” A cautiously worded statement was released as a result ”in a manner that would not embarrass departmental personnel” which blamed ”random atmospheric conditions”. Other reports in the X Files give details of an ”unidentified physical feature” of circles on Milo Station at Adavale, Queensland, in 1982. The file refers to photographs that apparently were taken, but they were not among the papers.

Constable Geoffrey Russell, from the local police station, visited the site and wrote a report for RAAF Base Amberley near Ipswich. The officer saw depressions in the ground and thought they were caused by a motorcyclist doing donuts but then dismissed the idea.

He wrote: ”I strongly feel this [is] no hoax even though I do not know the cause of this ‘feature’.”

GIANT WOMBAT FOSSILS FOUND FROM OVER 100,000 YEARS AGO

Giant Wombats once roamed what is now Australia.

Paleontologists in Queensland, Australia have unearthed fossils of what just might be the biggest, cutest thing ever… well, almost cutest. I mean, did you see those mini-mammoths we talked about a few weeks ago?!

BBC News writes:

The find, in Queensland, Australia, of about 50Diprotodons – the largest marsupial that ever lived – has been called a “palaeontologists’ goldmine”.

The plant-eating giants, the size of a rhinoceros, had backward-facing pouches big enough to carry an adult human.

The fossils are believed to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old.

Lead scientist Scott Hocknull, from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, said: “When we did the initial survey I was just completely blown away by the concentrations of these fragments.

“It’s a palaeontologist’s goldmine where we can really see what these megafauna were doing, how they actually behaved, what their ecology was.

“With so many fossils it gives us a unique opportunity to see these animals in their environment, basically, so we can reconstruct it.”

The “mega-wombats” appeared to have been trapped in boggy conditions while taking refuge from dry conditions, Mr Hocknull added.

The pigeon-toed animals were widespread across Australia about 50,000 years ago, when the first indigenous people are believed to have lived, but they first appeared about 1.6 million years ago.

It is unclear how or why they became extinct, but it could have been due to hunting by humans or, more likely, a changing climate.

The remote desert site contains one huge specimen, nicknamed Kenny, which is one of the best preserved and biggest examples ever discovered. Its jawbone alone is 70cm (28in) long.

FUNERAL TURNED PARTY WHEN DEAD MAN ‘WOKE UP’

These stories are all too common in the world of the weird. You’d think people would be a little more sure and positive that their loved one is dead and gone before planning a burial.

I guess I would believe he was gone too after being in this vehicle when it crashed.

9 News writes:

A man pronounced dead following a car crash by Australian paramedics who then left the scene has been discharged from hospital after making a remarkable recovery, a report said Friday.

Daniel Huf, 30, was trapped upside down in the wreckage of a Porsche in a Melbourne suburb and was declared dead after being treated at the scene on April 1.

He was reportedly left in the car for up to an hour as police began their investigations until emergency services officials began removing what they thought was a corpse and discovered a feeble pulse.

GIANT CRAB IS GIGANTIC, AND STILL GROWING!

"Claude the Crab" here, weighs in at an astounding 15lbs!

Three very lucky Tasmanian King Crabs were plucked from the pot this weekend in Australia, for when a worker of the Sealife aquariums spotted the ginormous beauties at a market, she had to save them!

Claude, shown above, and 2 other of his friends will get to live the rest of their days out in a nice relaxing, and what could even be called luxurious, environment that the Sealife crew take great lengths to ensure, for all their aquatic creatures.

The Sun writes:

The Tasmanian King Crab was snapped up alongside two others for £3,000 by a SeaLife worker during a trip to Australia.

The one pictured was named Claude and is 15in wide while weighing 15lbs.

He will grow to 30lbs and could produce up to 20lbs worth of meat — or 325 crabsticks.

He and the other crustaceans — a delicacy Down Under — are being quarantined before going on display.

One will go to Weymouth, another to Birmingham, while a third will be sent to Berlin, Germany.

Rob Hicks, SeaLife’s head marine biologist, said: “They are such impressive creatures we thought that it was worth the cost and effort of flying them half-way round the world to so they can flourish in an aquarium display.

“They had a stopover in Hong Kong and arrived with us a week ago.

“It took them a few days to get over the jet-lag but now they’re feeding happily and don’t seem any the worse for their trip.”