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.

Read next

The Marfa Lights

East of this west Texas town, lights have been watched since 1883: basketball-sized spheres that hang over the desert, split, merge and go out. The cowboy Robert Ellison recorded the first, taking them for Apache campfires. University physicists showed in 2004 that a good share of them are headlights on Highway 67 refracted through layers of warm air. A share — but not all, and it cannot account for the sightings that predate cars.