Last month, I put up a two-part post on “The Stranger,” the hit Australian TV series of 1964-65, and its possible influence on the dramatic UFO incident at Westall High School in Melbourne on April 6, 1966. (“Dramatic,” at least, as recalled by some of the participants. Others were unimpressed; I’ll get to that in a moment.)
Since then, I’ve had a few additional thoughts on “The Stranger,” on its links with Westall and with mid-1960s UFOlogy. The first seems to me fairly solid, and worth pursuing by those with a sociological bent.
The others–well, they’re curious coincidences, possibly no more. Or possibly indicators of a Zeitgeist, shared in ways that are hard to put one’s finger on.
(1) Last November, Australian UFOlogist Paul Dean put up an important blog post dedicated to the written testimony of Hazel Edwards (formerly Hazel Moir), who taught English and mathematics at Westall in 1966. (There’s a lively and at times heated discussion of this testimony on the Westall Flying Saucer Fan Page.) In her letter to Paul, Edwards was emphatic: “there was no UFO landing at the school that day.” Rather, “the real story is the success of a migrant community and their desire for a common history and the reactions to the UFO story is part of that.”
Migrant community? According to Edwards, that was what Westall was: “a new migrant community.”
About one student, presumably the notorious “Tanya,” Edwards wrote in her letter: “One student did leave a month or so after this, and that fact was picked up by one correspondent who claimed she vanished. Not so. Genuine transfer to another school which happened a lot with a transitory migrant camp community as parents got better jobs elsewhere.”
The “migrant” references baffled me, provincial American that I am. (Can anyone recommend a book for me to read about Australia in the 1960s? There are shelves of books on “The Sixties”–but in the US. I wouldn’t assume that the decade impacted Australia in the same way.)
Paul had to fill me in on the background: that in the 1950s and 1960s Australia actively encouraged immigration, and was flooded with newcomers. He sent me a link to a Wikipedia article on the subject:
“Hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans migrated to Australia and over 1,000,000 Britons immigrated with financial assistance. The migration assistance scheme initially targeted citizens of Commonwealth countries; but it was gradually extended to other countries such as the Netherlands and Italy. The qualifications were straightforward: migrants needed to be in sound health and under the age of 45 years.”
Wikipedia gives the figures: 1,253,083 new immigrants in 1949-59, 1,445,336 in 1959-70. I gather from Paul’s comments that Melbourne and Sydney (where “The Stranger” was set) were major magnets for the newcomers. “For a while,” he wrote me, “Melbourne was the second largest Greek city on earth (after Athens obviously).”
A new dimension to the Westall story, thanks to Hazel Edwards! But also a new dimension to “The Stranger.” That’s what “The Stranger” is all about, isn’t it? Migrants in need of a new home find it in Australia, are welcomed by the natives.
There’s room for all–Britons, Greeks and Italians and Central Europeans. Even ETs from the planet Soshuniss. The scene of the flying saucer landing at the Sydney Town Hall (above), human and ET shaking hands, says it all.
And so “The Stranger” and Westall High are linked, not just by some of the details of their stories, but by a theme fundamental to both. Which may help to explain why “The Stranger” was so popular. And why what happened at Westall, happened.
(2) OK, that’s pretty straightforward. But what follows isn’t.
Namely, why does the flying saucer that puts in its appearance in episode 2 of “The Stranger” look so much like the UFO seen at Socorro, New Mexico, by patrolman Lonnie Zamora on April 24, 1964? Not identical, to be sure. But compare this artistic rendering of what Zamora described with the saucer in the Sydney Town Hall scene, or in this contemporary newspaper article–or better yet, watch for yourself the scene at the end of episode 2, where the saucer’s legs are plainly visible as they aren’t in the still photos–and tell me there isn’t a distinct resemblance.
My first impression was that the creators of “The Stranger” must have modeled their UFO after the Socorro sighting. Only one problem with that explanation: episode 2 of “The Stranger” was aired on April 12, 1964, twelve days BEFORE the Socorro incident. And obviously the elaborate prop must have been constructed weeks or months earlier.
To make the problem yet more complex, on the same day as Zamora’s experience but several hours earlier, a young dairy farmer in Newark Valley, NY, named Gary Wilcox encountered–or so he said–a UFO very much like Zamora’s, albeit without the legs. It was “egg-shaped, 20 feet long, 16 feet wide, and four feet high” (Jerome Clark, in The UFO Encyclopedia). He also met the beings who emerged from it, four-foot-tall humanoids who claimed to have come from the planet Mars, which can’t possibly have been true.
Wilcox gave every sign of sincerely believing his story–which, it seems, he began telling to family members and friends before he knew anything about what happened at Socorro. And there’s no way that either he or Lonnie Zamora can have managed to watch “The Stranger.”
So: how to explain the resemblance?
(3) The theme of forgetting, and recovering one’s memory, is fundamental to the opening episodes of “The Stranger,” as you can see from the plot summary in my earlier posts. (The kids to the “stranger”: “Don’t you want to remember anything about the past?” The “stranger” to the kids: “How can I be sure? … Perhaps I was not very happy before and this is why I forget everything?”) Hypnosis is also a theme in episode 1, though less central to the plot: the “stranger’s” power over his recalcitrant students is repeatedly called “hypnotic.”
In April 1964, when these episodes aired, Betty and Barney Hill were undergoing hypnosis with Dr. Benjamin Simon in faraway Boston, and in the process recovering their memories of their forgotten abduction by the UFO. But at that time, no one outside Dr. Simon’s office can have had any idea of what was going on–certainly not the people responsible for bringing “The Stranger” to the Australia airwaves. The Hills’ experience only became public knowledge with the appearance of John Fuller’s Look magazine articles in the fall of 1966, and his book The Interrupted Journey that same year.
Coincidence? Or Zeitgeist?
Assuming I had any idea, in concrete terms, of what the word Zeitgeist really means.
by David Halperin
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For me, Zamora’s story has always been intriguing, mainly for the fact that the account is so different and unexpected as compared with the typical UFO sighting. My belief is that any attempt to logically explain what the aliens are doing or how their craft operate is futile and naive, just as utterly ridiculous as a human from 10,000 years ago trying to explain how a fighter jet works or any other type of modern technology.
We cannot know what abilities they have, and more than likely, we wouldn’t even have the ability to understand it even if they attempted to teach us.
Yes, Zamora’s sighting continues to baffle me. And what you say about the futility of trying to explain alien behavior makes sense. But once you’ve said that, you’ve deprived the ET hypothesis of any explanatory power it might have. To say, “UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft” comes to the same thing as saying, “We don’t know what UFOs are.”