{"id":246120,"date":"2026-10-29T06:02:33","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T11:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/the-phantom-lighthouse-new-research-explains-one-of-australias-strangest-illusions"},"modified":"2026-10-29T06:02:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T11:02:33","slug":"the-phantom-lighthouse-new-research-explains-one-of-australias-strangest-illusions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/the-phantom-lighthouse-new-research-explains-one-of-australias-strangest-illusions","title":{"rendered":"The phantom lighthouse: New research explains one of Australia\u2019s strangest illusions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>There are two lighthouses on Lady Elliot Island, at the southernmost tip of Australia\u2019s Great Barrier Reef. The first was built in 1873, but was decommissioned in 1995 when the second took over the job of warning ships off the reef. Visitors to the island, however, regularly report seeing signs of a <i>third<\/i> lighthouse. At night the beams of a nonexistent phantom lighthouse are seen far off, shining on the horizon.<\/p>\n<p>This \u201cphantom lighthouse illusion\u201d is so well known it even gets a mention in <a href=\"https:\/\/ladyelliotbook.com.au\/\" target=\"_blank\">the island\u2019s guide for tourists<\/a>. It\u2019s not unique to Lady Elliot Island, either: the earliest known report of this phenomenon was published in 1937, and it documented the illusion off the coast of Brittany in France.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s going on here? One of us traveled to Lady Elliot Island to find out, then we recreated the illusion in a virtual reality environment to make sure we understood what was happening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are two lighthouses on Lady Elliot Island, at the southernmost tip of Australia\u2019s Great Barrier Reef. The first was built in 1873, but was decommissioned in 1995 when the second took over the job of warning ships off the reef. Visitors to the island, however, regularly report seeing signs of a third lighthouse. At [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}