strangest thing you seen while playing with your lights?

mine was just a 20 minutes or so ago i was walking thru woods with a sub lumen flashlight and i see something huge and white it was a huge boat . i have no idea how it got all tge way back there there is so many trees

raggie33 said:

mine was just a 20 minutes or so ago i was walking thru woods with a sub lumen flashlight and i see something huge and white it was a huge boat . i have no idea how it got all tge way back there there is so many trees

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"I seen so many things I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is, I don't wanna see no more" youtube,com/watch?v=rKaQzQAlNn4

Animal eyes, at night, on the street in Prescott. They were coyotes. The sight was eerie. No problem, because they were not dangerous animals.

richbuff said:

"I seen so many things I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is, I don't wanna see no more" youtube,com/watch?v=rKaQzQAlNn4

Animal eyes, at night, on the street in Prescott. They were coyotes. The sight was eerie. No problem, because they were not dangerous animals.

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i hear so many crazy sounds i live on a lake that they call death lake they say its haunted

A rabbit. Specifically an albino rabbit, merrily hopping along on my neighbor's horta (micro-farm where greens and vegetables are cultivated, no direct English translation). Bunnies are not native to my neck of the woods (we have pacas and preás and capybaras, not rabbits), nobody that I knew of raised any, and this was in a zone near an urban natural reserve completely enveloped by urban zones on all sides.

Later I found out another neighbour, some weird toothless dude that talked too much and whose property is a dump of questionable legality, decided to just buy rabbits to raise as livestock. Doesn't seem like it went far, as they broke out and just roamed the neighborhood. I never saw the white bunny again, only a smaller brown one that also disappeared about a week later. Probably became food for the wild boas that haunt a creek close by.

A raccoon dragging away a pack of my tortillas on a camping trip. I followed it over to a tree and it dropped the tortillas and climbed the tree to get the higher ground. I told my brother to stay back and leave the tortillas. That raccoon was ready to attack. We backed up to camp and left it alone, at least for the most part. I came back and placed a motion sensor lantern on the ground to annoy the raccoon and keep it out of camp. It seemed to have successfully annoyed the raccoon as it was knocked over face down by morning. I guess the raccoon had had enough.

On another trip camping, a mountain lion jumped over a sign coming into my camp with me less than 20 feet away. I set my Fenix P3D Q5 on strobe and it took off running. I got lucky.

Actually, the strangest thing I've seen while using my lights was bear food retrieval tactics. On a backpacking trip to Kearsarge Lakes in the Sierra Nevadas, someone in our group wanted to get a picture of a bear so he mixed oatmeal and fish guts and scattered it around camp to lure them in without telling us. The first bear came into camp blocking off the only door to his tent while staring at me from 20 feet away right after dark. I yelled wolf and blew a whistle to get everyone's help. I had never seen a bear before. Everyone got out of their tent where they were playing cards and shined their lights into the surrounding woods. The first bear had left after I blew the whistle. We watched as the bear's eyes circled our camp just out of range of our flashlights. The best lights back then were incandescent minimags and L.R.I. photon flashlights (around year 2000). The bears circled the camp as a spread out group and sent in one bear through the center of camp to look for food. Once that bear was spotted, it took off running back to the bush and another came in from a different direction to replace it. Once the bear found food, all of the bears pounced on our camp. I saw one bear reach over a five foot tall boulder to get food from on top. We used camera flashes to scare off the bears temporarily one at a time. Who knew bears employed flanking maneuvers and diversionary tactics to obtain food?

Red gator eyes in the weeds in the lake behind my house; haunting.

Not Strange exactly but certainly unexpected, I saw some spot lights in the sky about 1km away (maybe some outdoor event?) a few weeks ago, so I grabbed my LEP and joined in, the lights suddenly shot over my direction and before long we both doing patterns in the sky together, a sort of follow the leader for a while, then lots of circles and sine waves etc... it was great fun!
I had a similar thing happen at the beach at night about 15 years ago, I had a powerful green laser (ilegal here now) and was playing over the sea with it, then suddenly someone across the harbour about 3 miles away joined in with a red laser! it was the coolest thing ever and really unexpected.

I shined a light across a lake in the fog. it was a Vinh modded thrower. As I went up and down thru the modes, about half mile away, i saw an amber porch light flashing. I flashed my light in sequence and they flashed back in sequence. I tried another sequence and they flashed back the same way. Love the way those bug lights cut through the fog

In November at a campground in Independence, CA, I shined a 35 watt Power on Board H.I.D. spotlight up into the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains (from the desert below). Someone up near a mountaintop shined their headlight back in my direction. From the 15 or so second runtime on turbo and the bluish tint of the beam, I could tell it was a Petzl Myo XP headlight. That had to be at least 10 miles away. I found out from the rangers later that there was only one person hiking up there at the time.

This thread is cool - discovering a means of nonverbal communication with someone else miles away using only light.

Vemice said:

Red gator eyes in the weeds in the lake behind my house; haunting.

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I was finishing a hike by headlamp about a month ago, had already seen a bat and a bobcat, and saw a pair of red eyes. Couldn't remember...red eyes? I was on a plateau where there was signal, so asked my phone, and it started talking about alligators.
I was like, "Great, now we've got alligators...that climb trees"

I was looking at this big moth and decided to get a better look with my light and it's eyes glowed red. I ain't gonna lie, it startled me more than I care to admit.

Yep !

Moth eyes glow RUBY RED !

Spider eyes glow EMERALD GREEN !

# Truth !

For maximum effect,
hold your flashlight just above your eyes.

Forgot to mention the redneck 4th of July I witnessed while playing with my lights. I was out walking around using a dim brinkman 2AA l.e.d. flashlight (bright for l.e.d. at the time) while on a church youth group trip off Pole Line Road near Ocotillo Wells, CA. Our nearest neighbors about 1/4 mile away had been drinking and started shooting off fireworks. I got a front row seat to the display from over the nearest hill. Then they ran out of fireworks and got creative. They put 5 gallon propane tanks in a ditch one at a time and blew them up by firing at them with shotguns. It was awesome and the best 4th of July display I'd ever seen. It was scary feeling the warmth of the explosions and ducking to avoid shrapnel though.

Little disclaimer: I did not know who those propane shooters were and did not get close enough to find out. I do not condone doing this as it is dangerous and likely illegal. Do not try it. You could get someone killed.

Northern Wisconsin
Big Black bear

Not playing. Foot-patrol at my 3rd shift job. I see movement at the far end. Light up the creature assuming it might be a stray cat. Nope! Opossum just lazily plodding along. That was over a year ago. Maybe two. He's still out there. Women leaving the office building late at night still stop by to report that they saw a "monster" plodding along outside. I tell them I'll go and check on it.

I see them all the time. They're so ugly they are cute. Strange eye shine too.

Opossums are chill, I like them.

Couple years ago, a friend and I went for a night hike on a local trail. It was lightly raining, I had a Princeton Tec headlamp on. I looked out in a field and saw a few dozen eyes looking at me, just the reflective dots of eyes of large animals. At the time, I had a Surefire A2 clipped to my pack. I grabbed it, and pressed the button all the way down, blasting the incan lamp. It was a herd of deer bedded down. There must have been 8 or 10 all hunkered down in a big field.