On 20 January 1988 the Knowles family were driving at night across this treeless plain in southern Australia when, by their account, a bright light appeared ahead on the highway. Then, they said, the car was lifted off the road, the cabin filled with black dust and a burnt smell, and their voices went unnaturally high; after a while the car dropped back onto the surface and they drove on with a blown tyre. At the roadhouse at Ceduna the police examined the car: dents in the roof, a black film inside and out. Samples of the film were analysed; the results disagreed. One explanation is a pressure surge from an oncoming truck on an empty road combined with panic. The family never withdrew their account.

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Dulce and the Underground Base

A town on Jicarilla Apache land near the Colorado line, known in the subject for one story: that a seven-level underground laboratory operates beneath Archuleta Mesa, where humans and aliens run experiments together. The story has a single source — a businessman named Paul Bennewitz, who decided in the early 1980s that he was intercepting alien transmissions. It later emerged that officers at Kirtland base, worried that he was picking up real military signals, had spent years feeding him fabrications, until he was hospitalised. Half the modern mythology of underground bases descends from that. Dulce itself is a quiet town where nobody has ever found anything of the kind.