“The Stranger” and the Westall UFO – Does Life Imitate TV? (Part 2)

“We shall forget all about this meeting, yes?  We will say nothing to anyone about it.  Please?”

So speaks the mysterious “stranger”–real name unknown, even to himself; called “Adam” after the “new man” of the Bible–to his three young friends, midway through episode 2 of the 1964-65 Australian TV series “The Stranger.”  He’s underestimated the kids.  The next we see Peter, Jean and Bernard, they’re on a train, following “Adam” into the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, to find out what this very strange “stranger” really does on his weekend hikes.

I’ve described the plot of the show up to this point in my last post.  I’ve posed the question: was there any connection between the broadcast of this wildly popular TV drama in 1964 and 1965, and the 1966 UFO incident at Westall High School in Melbourne?

In “The Stranger,” aired in two series of six half-hour episodes apiece, extraterrestrial mystery and adventure are bound up with the life of an Australian high school.  (Jean and Bernard are the headmaster’s children; Peter is a friend and fellow-student.)  The first episode was broadcast at 6:30 on Sunday evening, April 5, 1964, early enough for even young children to have watched it.  Two years later almost to the day, on April 6, 1966, a strange event happened at Westall High which left some of the students convinced that a UFO had landed in a wooded area just off the school grounds, and that they’d seen it up close.

Coincidence?  Or had “The Stranger” become part of these students’ awareness, shaping what they experienced–or remembered having experienced–of their own UFO?

Here’s how episode 2 continues:  Hardly are the three young detectives off the train, than they spot the headline in the local paper:  FLYING SAUCER SCARE.  Mysterious lights, not explainable as earthly aircraft, were seen in the sky the night before.  Something very peculiar, they realize, must going on.

In the next scene they’ve exchanged their suitcases for backpacks.  The boys’ school ties are off and their collars open for the first time–Jean, however, still in her skirt–as they clamber up a remote wooded mountainside, hot on “Adam’s” trail.  They stumble across traces of his presence: a library sticker from their school (where “Adam” is now a teacher); the remains, still warm, of a campfire lit with a piece of the school’s note paper.  On that paper, they find the strange writing they recognize from “Adam’s” radio.  “No more talking!” Peter warns as they press onward.

And then they see it.

First “Adam,” beside a burning campfire, staring with intense and anxious expectation, his radio set up to receive some signal.  Then, nestled among the trees, a flying saucer that seems to have just landed, resting on its extended legs.  (Photo and description in an article in the Australian Women’s Weekly on April 29, 1964, a few days after episode 4 was aired.)

Bernard (terrified):  “What is it?”

Jean (equally terrified):  “Peter, what on earth is it?”

A door slides open on the side of the craft.  A man dressed in jacket and tie steps out.  He straightens his jacket and trousers; he cries out in some unknown language.  “Adam” responds by racing off somewhere, it’s not clear where.  The man hops back inside the saucer and the door closes, leaving the three teenagers staring, baffled.

And so, with a musical flourish, episode 2 ends.

That’s all I’ve watched; it’s all that’s been uploaded so far to YouTube.  In subsequent episodes it’s revealed that “Adam” is an alien from a planet called Soshuniss, sent to Earth to find a new home for his people.  Soshuniss is apparently becoming uninhabitable; hence the longing evident in “Adam’s” lyrical descriptions of the loveliness of nature in the Australian bush.

This feels a bit like The War of the Worlds, where the Martians invade Earth because their own planet is doomed.  But it would seem that the intentions of the Soshuniss-people are not hostile, and the teenagers decide to help them find a new home.

“In the second series,” writes Tammy Burnstock in her “Curator’s Notes,” “the children have to enlist the help of the Australian Prime Minister … when Peter is kidnapped by the aliens and taken to their planet.”  Eventually all three of them make the trip to Soshuniss, in a meticulously designed flying saucer that (says the writer for the Australian Women’s Weekly) includes “lights flashing on and off, controls that seem to work, and a ‘soshunoscope’ that does indeed work. A ‘soshunoscope’ is an instrument that allows you to see clear pictures of places you are approaching and people you are talking to in distant lands.”

The second series ends with the UFO landing, in peace and amity, on the steps of the Sydney Town Hall.  From now on, I gather, we and the Soshuniss-people will share this planet.

A boy or girl who was 10 on April 5, 1964, when the “stranger” made his appearance on the headmaster’s doorstep, would have been 12 at the time of the Westall UFO incident.  He or she might have been a student at Westall High; an Australian high school, at least back then, went down through what we’d call the middle grades, and the students most deeply involved in the incident seem to have been 12 at the time.  Kids who watched “The Stranger” would surely identify with Peter, Jean, and Bernard, high school students just a few years older than themselves.  Their takeaway from the series would have been: through their courage, pluck, and smarts, a trio of attractive, well-behaved, kind-hearted teenagers can step through the door into outer-space adventure.

Fast-forward to April 6, 1966.  Late that morning, something unusual–possibly a weather balloon, possibly a “target drogue” used by the Royal Australian Air Force for aerial target practice–was seen in the sky over Westall.  Hundreds of students and a few of the teachers watched it from the oval outside the school buildings.  At one point the object went behind a tall row of pine trees, part of a wooded area off the school grounds called The Grange, notorious among Westall students as a place for “illicit smoking and steamy liaisons.”  (Unlike the boys’ school in “The Stranger,” Westall was co-ed.)

The youthful crowd went wild.  They imagined the UFO might be landing in The Grange, and ran–or at least, many of them did–to encounter it.  “Lots of the children,” as one Westall teacher described it, were “leaping the fence, going to look for it.”  Some afterward claimed to have seen the UFO, or indeed two UFOs, on the ground.  Others remembered running through The Grange in pursuit of the object–and they remembered the fate of one girl, named Tanya, who was unfortunate enough to overtake it while it was landed.  (According to the story, which I’m quite sure never happened as reported, she suffered a breakdown, was taken away in an ambulance and never seen again.)

It feels like a re-enactment of the climax of episode 2 of “The Stranger,” shifted from the wilds of the Blue Mountains to a patch of wilderness embedded in the city of Melbourne.  (See the photo, above.)  It’s no strain on my credulity to think that at least some of the kids “leaping the fence” into The Grange imagined themselves as Peter, Jean, and Bernard of two years earlier, racing through the woods toward an encounter with a landed flying saucer.

But did they also imagine the saucer itself?  Within a year after the Westall event, and possibly much earlier, a teacher there heard “all sorts of reports of different things” from the students–“one girl said that she’d seen the thing on the ground, that it was this sort of shape, with windows around it and all the rest of it, but I really don’t know how much faith we can put in her story.”  The teacher, Andrew Greenwood, was skeptical.  Yes, there was an airborne object; no, “we were never sure at any stage that it was anything but airborne,” although “some of the children say–“

Here Greenwood’s voice on the tape-recorded interview sinks into an unintelligible murmur.  It’s clear enough, however, what he heard them say: the UFO had landed.  They had seen it.  Their close encounters with the UFO, vividly recalled after more than 40 years, fill the 2010 documentary “Westall ’66.”

To what extent did “The Stranger” shape those students’ memories as well as (if you accept my conjecture) their anticipations of encountering the UFO?  Through what alchemy of the unconscious was that accomplished?

“Westall ’66” perhaps gives a clue.  A woman is shown going to a hypnotherapist, in classic alien-abductee fashion, to recover her memories of April 6, 1966.  They remain elusive.  “The more I try to see it again the harder it becomes.  I can see bodies but I can’t see people, faces.  But I can still see the trees and the–it was–yeah.”

What was she “seeing” in her trance?  The real-life trees of The Grange?  Or the fictionalized trees of the Blue Mountains in “The Stranger”?  Had the two merged in her mind, creating a landed UFO (“the–it was–yeah”) just off the grounds of Westall High?

If so–might they have merged in others’ minds, even without benefit of hypnosis?

And must we add “The Stranger” to the complex web of factors that, together, created the “Westall Flying Saucer Incident”?

by David Halperin
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