An eerie sight greeted a group of campers when then set up set tents in Outback Australia.
The red dirt, in East Warakurna, near the border of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, had strange circular imprints.
Michelle Gilmore and her family eventually came to realise it wasn’t aliens or some mythical creature roaming the desert – but a caravan of camels.
While Ms Gilmore and her partner had a caravan to sleep in, her mum and brother and sister-in-law were ‘nervous’ the animals would return and trample over their tents during the night.
The group had seen ‘lots of the feral animals’ as they approached the campsite from Curtin Springs, where they stayed the previous night more than 300km east.
The trio set up their tents ‘backing onto a tree so they’d be safe from the camels’.
Another camper at the previous site said they had recently been ‘woken up in the middle of the night by camels stampeding right near their van’, Ms Gilmore recalled in a Facebook post
Campers feared they would be trampled on after spotting these circular footprints at their campsite, which belonged to a flock of camels roaming the area
The family’s chilling encounter unfolded during a 70-day camping trip through the ‘centre of Australia’.
More than 300,000 feral camels are believed to roam the Australian outback.
They were first imported to Australia from India and Afghanistan during the 1840s as beasts of burden for exploration and development in arid areas.
More than 4,500 had been introduced to western and central Australia by the 20th century for use in goldfields during the Gold Rush.
A fast-growing feral population started spreading in the early 1900s after they were casually released when motorised transport became more popular.
Michelle Gilmore and her family were left terrified by footprints around their campsite
The Western Australian government declared feral camels as pests of agriculture in 2007 as they’re grazing causes serious damage to local environmental.
They also directly compete for food with native animals, such as kangaroos and possums, and digest many plants previously not predated on.
During dry conditions, camels are also known be aggressive toward sheep, cattle and other livestock and deprive them of water.
