Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast

For over 130 years, mysterious glowing orbs have haunted Australia's remote Channel Country, following travelers for kilometres, splitting into multiple lights, and moving with apparent intelligence. First Nations peoples knew about them for millennia before Europeans arrived. Scientists have studied them. Thousands have witnessed them. Yet the Min Min Lights remain one of Australia's most enduring mysteries.

In this episode, we journey into the vast emptiness of outback Queensland to explore a phenomenon that exists at the intersection of science and the unexplained. From drovers frozen in terror as lights pace their horses through the darkness, to modern researchers capturing footage on smartphones, the Min Min Lights continue to puzzle and fascinate.

We hear from witnesses whose encounters left them genuinely frightened, or strangely privileged. We examine the groundbreaking scientific research that claimed to solve the mystery through atmospheric refraction. And we discover why even the scientist who explained the phenomenon admitted it was "literally hair raising" and that some aspects remained genuinely mysterious.

Whether atmospheric mirage, ancestral spirits, or something else entirely, the Min Min Lights remind us that even in our technological age, some mysteries persist in the remote places where darkness still holds secrets.

Sources:

• Pettigrew, J.D. (2003). "The Min Min light and the Fata Morgana: An optical account of a mysterious Australian phenomenon." Clinical and Experimental Optometry, March 2003.
• Research by Dr. Curtis Roman (Larrakia man, Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies, Charles Darwin University)
• Dreamtime stories collected in "Gadi Mirrabooka" by June Barker
• D.B. O'Connor, "Light of the Min Min" (poem, December 20, 1934)
• Michael (December 2022, near Noorindoo - video documented and verified by journalist Ross Coulthart)

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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A wildlife photographer wakes up at home, downloads his photos, and finds something impossible: a picture of himself sleeping in his tent, taken at midnight with his own camera. Someone entered while he slept, stood inches away in the darkness, and photographed him. Then they vanished into the Victorian High Country without a trace.

Between 2008 and 2020, six people disappeared from Victoria's Alpine wilderness, all within sixty kilometers of each other. Two were found in 2024 when an airline pilot was convicted of murder. But four remain missing, their bodies never recovered despite massive searches using helicopters, drones, and cadaver dogs.

Throughout every investigation, one name kept appearing: the Button Man. A hermit in his seventies who lives alone in the mountains for months at a time, hunting with spears, wearing buttons carved from deer antlers, appearing silently at campfires without invitation. He camps at The Crossroads, a high point where he can watch everyone entering his territory. He was the last person to see one victim alive. He knows every hiding place in thousands of square kilometers of wilderness.

Hunters describe him materialising from morning mist without making a sound. Campers wake to find him sitting at their fire, uninvited, watching with a penetrating stare that makes experienced bushmen uncomfortable. Hikers report the persistent sensation of being observed from ridgelines they can't see. Hidden firewood supplies vanish, taken by someone who was watching when they were cached. Boot prints circle tents in patterns that appear and disappear without continuing.

Is he a harmless eccentric transformed into a monster by fear and speculation? Or does he know exactly what happened to four people who walked into his wilderness and never came home?

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

Sources - Life and Crimes with Andrew Rule Podcast

February 2025. Excavators dig three meters into the former Castalloy factory site in North Plympton, Adelaide. They're searching for three children who vanished sixty years ago, based on testimony from the factory owner's son who claims he saw them enter his father's property and never leave, and two brothers who say they were paid to dig a grave-sized hole here days after the disappearance.

Professor Maciej Henneberg works with archaeological precision. The soil reveals disturbed earth, a pit matching the exact dimensions describes. Evidence that something was buried here. After decades of searching, perhaps the Beaumont children will finally be found.

But the excavation ends with no remains. Only questions.

This is Part Two of our investigation into Australia's most haunting missing persons case. We examine three major suspects including millionaire Harry Phipps, who lived 300 meters from where the children were last seen. We explore why three excavations using cutting-edge technology found grave-like anomalies but no bodies. And we uncover a disturbing pattern: seven years after the Beaumont children vanished, two more girls disappeared from Adelaide Oval under strikingly similar circumstances.

Sixty years of searching. Over one hundred suspects. Three children still waiting to be found. And uncomfortable questions about who was protected and why.

Content warning: This episode discusses the disappearance and presumed murder of young children, and examines systemic failures in their protection.

Sources - The Beaumont Children (Parts One & Two)

• Whiticker, Alan. Searching for the Beaumont Children (2006)
• Whiticker, Alan and Stuart Mullins. The Satin Man (2013)
• Mullins, Stuart and Bill Hayes. Unmasking the Killer of the Missing Beaumont Children (2024 edition)
• The Beaumont Children: What Really Happened (Channel Seven, 2018)

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

On Australia Day 1966, three children boarded a bus to Glenelg Beach in Adelaide and never came home. Jane (9), Arnna (7), and Grant (4) Beaumont were seen by multiple witnesses playing with an unidentified man at the beach, laughing, comfortable, clearly trusting him. They were seen buying food with a one pound note their mother hadn't given them.

Then they vanished completely.

This is Part One of a special two-part investigation into Australia's most haunting missing persons case. We examine the events of that scorching January day, the witnesses who saw the children with a man they appeared to know, and the devastating realisation that three children had disappeared from a public place in broad daylight in front of dozens of people.

How is that possible? And what happened in those crucial first hours when the investigation began?

Part Two explores the decades-long search, the suspects, and a disturbing pattern that connects this case to another Adelaide tragedy seven years later.

Content warning: This episode discusses the disappearance and presumed murder of three young children.

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

In 2022, scientists announced they'd finally solved Australia's greatest cold case. After 74 years, the Somerton Man had a name: Carl Webb. Case closed, right?

If only it were that simple.

Three years later, South Australian Police still won't confirm the identification. Webb's entire family somehow failed to recognize their missing brother when his face was plastered across Australian newspapers. His wife was living 89 miles from where he died, with no idea he was dead. And for eighteen months before his death, Carl Webb simply vanished from existence with no employment, no address, no trace.

Here's the really unsettling part: knowing WHO he was has made everything else MORE mysterious. Why did he remove every identifying label from his clothing but leave items marked with his brother-in-law's name in his suitcase? How did an unlisted phone number end up in a book of Persian poetry found near his body? And if this was suicide, why stage it like an intelligence operation?

Sometimes solving one mystery just reveals how many others were hiding underneath. Join us for "The Somerton Man: The Next Chapter"

The code found in the Rubaiyat:

WRGOABABD
MLIAOI
WTBIMPANETP
MLIAOI
IXOSMANE

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

Strewth - Australian Mystery Podcast - Series 1, Episode 4

Deep in Far North Queensland rises a dark anomaly that has claimed lives for over 150 years. The Kuku Yalanji people call it Kalkajaka "the place of the spear" and have warned for forty thousand years that the mountain keeps its dead.

When Charles Grayner vanished while tracking his horse into the granite boulder maze in 1872, it began a pattern of mysterious disappearances that would earn this geological formation a reputation as Australia's Bermuda Triangle. Ten years later, Harry Owens disappeared under strikingly similar circumstances. Then George Hawkins followed his own safety rope into the mountain's heart... and simply ceased to exist.

Recent research by historian Bev Shay offers compelling explanations rooted in the harsh realities of frontier life. But questions linger. Why do the documented cases share such eerie similarities? What explains the mountain's persistent effects on visitors even today?

Join us as we explore the documented disappearances, the rich traditional stories of the Kuku Yalanji people, and the ongoing mystery of a place where rational explanation meets enduring enigma. Sometimes the most honest answer is that we still don't know everything.

Content note: This episode discusses historical disappearances and respects the cultural significance of Kalkajaka to traditional owners, the Kuku Yalanji. The site is protected and access is restricted for safety and cultural reasons.

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

April 6, 1966. 11 AM. A suburban Melbourne school. Over 200 students and teachers witness a silver disc hovering above their playground, then shooting away at impossible speed. Within hours, men in suits arrive. Students are told to stay silent. TV footage mysteriously vanishes from network archives.

Nearly 60 years later, the Australian government still blocks access to thousands of files about that day. The witnesses - now grandparents - have never changed their story.

What flew over Westall High School? And why are authorities still covering it up?

Dive into Australia's most compelling UFO mystery on the latest episode of STREWTH - where we explore the cases that still defy explanation.

"Strewth" - where Australia's strangest true stories come to light.

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

STREWTH - Episode 2: Stranger than Fiction

A True Australian Mystery Podcast

In 1930, struggling novelist Arthur Upfield sat around a campfire in the remote Western Australian outback, discussing with fellow workers how to commit the perfect murder, purely as a plot device for his detective novel. When three men subsequently disappeared and their remains were found burned according to the exact method Upfield had described, police didn't just investigate the obvious suspect, they investigated the author himself.
Decades later, historians uncovered an even darker truth, transforming this tale of fiction inspiring reality into something far more sinister.
This is the extraordinary case of the Murchison murders, where the line between imagination and reality, between individual crime and systemic brutality, becomes terrifyingly thin.

Title Music - by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

Cinematic Mystery Piano by TheoJT - https://freesound.org/s/611048/

Sound effects

Lultju Eve Atmos with Fire - Long Version by kangaroovindaloo -- https://freesound.org/s/396480/

Australia Outback Birds by EduFigueres -- https://freesound.org/s/562111/