Return Of The Rottnest Monster? Mysterious Radar Anomaly Raises Stir In Australia

You know it’s weird news when the Australian Broadcasting Corporation transposes the ‘i’ and ‘e’ in weird¹.

About 18 miles away from a tiny island called Rottnest is a radar anomaly winding its way through the Indian Ocean. Neil Bennett of the Australian weather bureau spotted the anomaly yesterday, leaving everyone stumped.

“The radar that we use are there for the detection of precipitation, it’s basically just a beam going out and hitting the rain droplets or ice particles from hail”

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Of course, our Australian colleagues have given this mystery a humorous name that sounds vaguely oriental, the Rottness Monster. Everyone is having a bit of fun with the story, check out the RottNessMonster hashtag for a giggle.

This isn’t the first time people were abuzz with strangeness off the coast of Western Australia. 80 years ago, five months after The Surgeon’s Photograph made waves, a real Rottness Monster was discovered along the shoreline. One Mr. L.C. Timperley described it as such:

Its length was about 12 feet and its weight about eight hundredweight. It was about four feet wide immediately behind the ears and measured eight feet between the two flippers. The two main flippers were roughly two feet long and about 20 inches wide. In front and behind them were smaller, narrow flippers. The body was covered with white hair, which resembled soaked wool and was about six inches long. The mouth was about a foot long and was shaped like a quarter-moon. There were no teeth, but the lips could be made out. The head was bull-nosed, and stood nearly two feet high. The tail was about 4 feet 6 inches long and resembled more than any thing else a kangaroo’s tail. At its narrowest part the body was nine inches in circumference. The flesh was cream coloured and when cut it had the appear ance of tough tripe.

Mr. Aldrich, Chief Inspector of Fisheries, wrote up a report suggesting the carcass is of a whale. Timperley respectfully disagreed, pointing out the creatures tail was tapered, lacking flukes, nor showing any injury where flukes may have been attached before the creature’s death. An employee of the signal station on the island, Alf Stewart, suggested it could be a foetal whale. It appears no physical evidence remains of the globster, leaving the case open to speculation.

But wait, there’s more! Rotness Island also has its share of UFO sightings. You can’t talk about unusual radar anomalies without mentioning UFOs!

Me (Xavier) and my sister (Anais) were walking down a road in front of our unit on Rottnest Island.

We heard a faint buzzing noise and looked up in the sky and saw a small cluster of black dots, to small to be planes.

We dismissed the experience as imagination until the next day when we were walking exatly the same thing happened.

From then of we kept our eyes and ears open to see if we could hear the noise again, but when it did happen again the noise was even fainter and there were only one or two.

Later my sister said she saw a alien hovering over my bed one night.²

And, more than forty years ago, a shapechanging object was spotted over the site. Here’s some choice excerpts from the 2008 report.

The object appeared to have a clearly defined disc typed shape and a bright orange/red light source appeared to emanate from inside the object and shine through the skin of the object into the surrounding air. It also had a black panel in the centre at the front. I could see what I took to be the skin of the object and it entered my mind that I would like to fire a rifle to see if the bullets would bounce off what could have even have been a very thin metallic object. Although this was unlikely, due to the strange appearance of the object. At the same time as this was going through my head I felt as though I was in communication with something. At about the same time my wife was excited and said that she would like to go on it.³

High strangeness abounds on this tiny isle off the west shore of Perth. What’s your wild guess on the source of the ‘S’? Tell us at Facebook, on Twitter, or in the comments below.

MORE GREAT STORIES FROM WEEK IN WEIRD:

1. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-12/wierd-s-in-the-sky/5255808 ↩

2. http://www.ufoevidence.org/sightings/report.asp?ID=11463 ↩

3. http://www.rense.com/general70/repo.htm ↩