Shiners

Glowing eyes peer at you from the darkness. A human form darts around in the shadows. Don’t worry! It’s probably aliens.

Eye shine is a pretty big staple in folk lore. From demons with glowing eyes all the way through to Big Foot peering at you from the tree line at night. Most spooky stories and fairy tales love to add that detail to their fantastical descriptions. A lot of that is do to the fact that glowing eyes are not a human trait but an animal one. Nocturnal animals have a tapetum lucidum, which helps them gather from light sources around them making their eye sight better in the dark. No human has this ability, even though claims have been made before. So when creating stories long ago, to give a demon such a power helped to further push the idea that they are not human.

Knowing such things hasn’t stopped the occasional story from cropping up online about a human caught with eye shine. These stories are easy to fabricate but they are also much harder to actually disprove. What is interesting about these cases are a few things that I will try to get through in a somewhat orderly fashion:

• There are real physical disorders that can cause or at least simulate eye shine on camera
• The majority of cases are similar in their stories and videos
• The majority of cases are centered in the Middle East and Asia
• Talking about the cases have nothing to do with Big Foot (there is A LOT of Big Foot eye shine stuff out there)

As I said in my first bullet point, there are certain circumstances were eye shine can be perceived on camera. Not accounting for “the red eye effect”, which is simply light reflecting off of your retinas, humans can be stricken with an ailment that replicates eye shine. Leukocoria is a medical symptom that can occur in response to other sometimes life threatening conditions. Most of the conditions are rare. All forms of Leukocoria, almost always lead to blindness if left untreated. Which gives at least some credibility to Shiner stories online. If this person is actually afflicted with leukocoria, how are they wandering around in these deserted areas in the middle of the night? The condition certainly does not give us humans super sight at night, but actually gives us the exact opposite. Finding a person wandering through the woods with night blindness could never be confused with an apex predator stalking it’s prey.

If we don’t account for the boat load of cases of people tramping out into the woods and catching the eyes of deer on footage, you are left some actually compelling evidence. One of the more favorite videos online is that of a naked man chasing the car of a rapper while seemingly high on PCP (which is probably why he was nude). While the drugs would also account for his seemingly super human speed, it certainly does not explain his reflective eyes. And lest we forget one of the first videos to have surfaced online back in 2006 hails from Spain. In the video a group of men are convinced they have stumbled upon a fallen angel or demon in the woods.

When not looking for Bigfoot, almost all the videos featuring Shiners are said to be demons. They are humanoid in shape, looking almost exactly like an actual person. However, something always seems to be slightly off with their appearance. Either their faces are distorted, missing noses, ears, or mouths. Their limbs are elongated or misshapen. They also generally tend to have mannerisms similar to that of an animal. The Shiners will usually growl, hiss, or roar when approached, scaring any brave adventurer away. They are seemingly already “alien” in appearance making the jump to the conclusion almost too easy.

Most of the evidence I have seen seems to come from Non-English speaking countries with the majority of stories and videos hailing from Iran and India. While there are plenty of eye shine stories from the US and Australia, they all come with a Bigfoot tag. The Iranian videos generally seem to suspect witches or demons for the unusual creatures that they find along desolate highways in the night. A car load of pals pile in and joy ride through the countryside in the evenings only to unfortunately stumble upon a dastardly witch growling from the shrubs. I am aware that a lot of the videos very well could be hoaxes, but there are quite a few convincing ones out there if one is inclined to seek them out.

In India the Shiners are lumped in with your typical ghost tag. Abandoned buildings in the middle of nowhere seem to be crawling with derelicts that all seem to share one creepy characteristic, their eyes reflect light. Ghost hunting is dangerous business on a good day. The normal trip sometimes has to contend with a territorial homeless man or the occasional junkie but for those dangers to also be other worldly is downright terrifying. Pro tip: You should always scope out your perspective haunt before plunging its depths in the darkness. It should be taken as seriously as if you and your cohorts are robbing a bank.

One common thread between these two countries, the main exporters of eye shine videos, is that they both share a common theme in their folklore. The Jinn. A Jinn (or genie) is an inter dimensional being that has the capability to be seen as good or evil. There is much debate between what a jinn actually is since they are seen in almost every religion under the sun and their origins have disintegrated over time. There are some mutually agreed upon characteristics that bind them all together, however:

• They can take the form of humans or already resemble the form of humans and can instead take the form of animals.
• Jinns are not immortal. They can eat, drink, (sometimes)age and even birth children
• They can possess a human in much the same way a demon can
• They are often the reason people suffer from sleep paralysis

One fact of note is that in the case of a formless or animal jinn taking the shape of a human is that they don’t completely take human form. They retain a lot of their animalistic traits and their bodies are often misshapen. So, to recap, the stories of sightings seem to be consistent with an inter dimensional entity that has precedence in lore that is incredibly ancient. It would make sense that their characteristics would share similarity with other extraterrestrials that I’ve broken down already in my little bestiary. Demons, ghosts, and vampires are all very old stories and while they might even have been inspired by the jinn, it is also just as reasonable that they are aliens from a similar place in the universe. Perhaps, they are even from the same planet and are merely different races of the same alien species.

Much like the similarities we as humans share with other, we also have genetic differences that come from the environments of our evolution. Different illnesses, strengths, immunities, dietary needs, and even body structures and features are all products of where we’ve been and where we come from. So, logically, we could see scary stories with similar monsters and not have it necessarily be the product of a lack of originality. It could in fact, instead, be the result of different people coming into contact with different races of the same species from the same planet.