UFO sightings — Australia
UFO sightings — Australia. 5 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
Cape Otway and Valentich's Last Transmission
On 21 October 1978 a twenty-year-old pilot, Frederick Valentich, was flying a Cessna 182 alone over Bass Strait south of this cape and told Melbourne control that a large object with four bright lights was accompanying him. His last words were "it is not an aircraft"; then seventeen seconds of metallic scraping on the air, and silence. Neither aircraft nor body was found. Five years later a cowl flap from that production run was recovered off King Island; it could not be tied to his machine. The official finding is that the cause is unknown. Disorientation and inverted flight, and a staged disappearance, have both been considered; neither has been shown.
Wycliffe Well, the Roadhouse UFO Capital
A roadhouse on the Stuart Highway in the middle of the Northern Territory — fuel, a campground and a pub — which has declared itself Australia's UFO capital. Reports have come from here since the 1940s, when an army camp stood nearby, and never stopped. The owners have taken an enterprising view: the walls are painted with green figures, models stand at the door, and the bar keeps a folder of cuttings and a book for visitors to write down what they saw. The honest part of the explanation is the sky. This is some of the darkest, clearest air on the planet, satellites and fireballs are visible to the naked eye, and the route to Pine Gap — the joint American-Australian facility, about whose work little is known — passes nearby.
Tully and the Nest in the Lagoon
On 19 January 1966 a farmer named George Pedley drove his tractor past a lagoon near this Queensland town and, by his account, saw a grey craft about nine metres across rise out of the reeds. A circular patch of about the same size was left on the water, the reeds flattened and twisted into a spiral. The nest was photographed, the police took a statement, and several more such circles were found in the district within a week. Botanists explained them as a combination of a whirlpool and the root structure of the reed, which floats up as a disc when it tears from the bottom. The explanation is convincing — but outside Australia the case is remembered as the world's first circle, long before the fields of Wiltshire.
Westall and Two Hundred Schoolchildren
On the morning of 6 April 1966 pupils and teachers at two schools in the Melbourne suburb of Westall — between two and three hundred people by various counts — watched a grey-silver disc cross the sports field, drop behind the trees by the grasslands, and lift away a few minutes later. It is the largest sighting by number of witnesses in Australian history. The pupils were assembled that day and told not to discuss it; several of them said for decades afterwards that men in uniform had come to the field. Explanations from a weather balloon to a test aircraft have been offered. In 2013 a playground shaped like a flying saucer was built in the park where it came down.
The Min Min Lights
A town deep in Queensland that gave its name to the lights seen on the roads of the burnt west: glowing spheres that follow a car or a rider and keep their distance for hours. Aboriginal people described them before Europeans arrived. In 2003 the physicist Jack Pettigrew showed experimentally that under a temperature inversion a light source beyond the horizon can appear as a nearby object — an elegant explanation that does not cover every case.