“This is all an insoluble mystery to me,” said I. “It grows darker instead of clearer.”
“On the contrary,” he answered, “it clears every instant. I only require a few missing links to have an entirely connected case.”
–Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of the Four
A few days ago, I felt almost like Holmes. The 50-year-old mystery of the mass UFO sighting over Westall High School, in the Melbourne (Australia) suburb of Clayton, seemed to be clearing every instant. Add “a few missing links,” and one of the most important and instructive sightings in UFO history would yield its secrets.
But now the Dr. Watson feeling is creeping over me. As if Westall has depths I’d barely suspected.
I posted on Westall four weeks ago, in my review of the 2010 Australian documentary “Westall ’66.” Until I watched the film, I’d never heard of the Westall UFO. It’s indeed flown under the radar–pun more or less intended–as Shane Ryan, the Canberra teacher and investigator featured in the documentary, put it in a 2013 interview. Jerry Clark’s monumental UFO Encyclopedia, the second edition of which was published in 1998 and includes six articles by Bill Chalker on the Australian UFO scene, has not a word to say about Westall.
In my post, I suggested a theory of what happened at the high school that day in 1966, near the beginning of the Australian school year. Here are my thoughts, in a slightly more developed and explicit form:
Yes, something unusual was seen in the sky late on the morning of April 6, autumn in the southern hemisphere. It may have been a weather balloon or it may have been a “target drogue” used by the Australian military to practice air-to-air firing, as two explanations floated at the time had it. Possibly both were involved.
Whatever the object was, it wasn’t especially dramatic. If you and I had been there, we might not even have noticed it.
The witnesses’ view of the object seems to have been blocked for a time by the tall pines of the area called “the Grange,” just to the south of the school. But no, the UFO was not seen to land among those trees; and the idea that it was responsible for flattened areas of grass in the Grange–which one UFOlogist who investigated the sighting said could have been caused by strong winds over the previous week–was conjecture after the fact.
Yes, there was excitement among the students at Westall High (which included the grades that we’d now think of as middle school), and it seems to have been concentrated among the younger kids. The excitement was apparently enough to call forth a special assembly, at which Westall’s stern headmaster Frank Samberle made sure the boys and girls knew there are no flying saucers, and what they saw was just a weather balloon.
But no, the mass stampede from the school into the Grange, so vividly depicted in “Westall ’66”–“all the students were just running all over the place, hysterical”; “like a whole lot of zebras being terrified by crocodiles,” to quote two of the witnesses–didn’t happen.
But then how to account for the memories of the dozens of intelligent, articulate, obviously sincere–not to mention courageous–men and women who’d been Westall students in the 1960s, whom Shane Ryan interviewed in the course of his investigation from 2005 onward? Several of these people tell their stories in “Westall ’66,” and it’s hard not to come away with the impression of a dramatic, multiply witnessed “close encounter of the second kind,” suppressed by military authorities in collusion with the Westall headmaster.
My hypothesis: these recollections are heavily tinctured with memories or fantasies of forbidden adolescent activities at the Grange—a favored place for “illicit smoking and steamy liaisons,” according to Ryan—for which the UFO and its suppression became a tangible representation.
Or, as I sometimes like to put it: the stimulus, the trigger for the UFO was something in the sky. The UFO came from inside.
The mystery of that UFO is a mystery of the human soul. The twists of human memory–not random, not unmeaningful–are an essential part of that mystery.
It’s a testament to Shane Ryan’s open-mindedness and generosity that, despite our considerable differences of interpretation, he reached out to me and guided me toward rich sources of information. These include the page of the Facebook group Westall Flying Saucer Incident–an excellent resource which I’d encourage all my readers to join–and the treasure trove of data posted to the Project 1947 website by veteran Australian UFOlogist Keith Basterfield. This in turn led me to posts on Basterfield’s “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – Scientific Research” blog, arguing for the Westall UFO’s having been a high-altitude balloon and insisting on the crucial distinction between 1966 sources on the incident vs. post-2005 recollections of it.
Thanks to the gracious support of these two researchers, I’ve found much data that “confirms my diagnosis, as you doctors express it” (Holmes to Watson, in The Sign of the Four).
Also some that goes against it. But we’ll get to that presently.
“Pro” item #1: Basterfield’s notes from a tape recording, transferred to CD by the Special Collections of the library of the University of Arizona (Tucson), of Dr. James E. McDonald’s interview with Westall science teacher Andrew Greenwood, 28 June 1967. (Basterfield, Source 15.) This is a precious resource: a near-contemporary account of the incident by an adult observer. Nearly all the testimony in “Westall ’66” is from people who were students at the time, and what they remembered after a 40-year interval. With a few possible exceptions soon to be noted, Greenwood was the only grownup who actually saw the UFO.
“AG said that a girl student raced into class saying ‘Flying saucer outside.’ She left the room, then 5-10 minutes later it was morning recess time, so AG went outside to take a look. … He couldn’t see the object at first due to the lack of contrast (the kids pointed it out to him).” The object was gray against a blue-gray sky; “if it wasn’t pointed out to you, you might not see it.” (This was the explanation Greenwood gave for the Dandenong Journal‘s inability to find anyone in the area who’d noticed it.)
“The object was airborne at all times,” and although “at one stage the object disappeared behind a tall row of pine trees,” there’s no hint that Greenwood saw it land or come anywhere close to doing that. The landed UFO, the “close encounter of the second kind,” belongs to the psychological rather than the physical reality of the episode.
(Much of Australian UFOlogist Bill Chalker’s argument against a “balloon” explanation for Westall loses its force, once we doubt that the thing was ever seen to come to earth.)
Two other teachers witnessed at least part of the sighting, according to what Greenwood told McDonald: a phys ed teacher named Jeanette Muir, an English teacher named Claude Miller. Significantly, Greenwood made no mention of Barbara Robins, a chemistry teacher who appears in “Westall ’66” as having taken multiple photos of the object, only to have her camera confiscated by Samblebe in the company of two uniformed men from outside the school. (We’ll come back to her in a moment.)
“AG saw students go over the fence while he watched the object.” Yes, a few students must have done that. But if anything like the stampede portrayed in “Westall ’66” had taken place, that surely would have been Greenwood’s most vivid memory of the incident, given that he was among those charged with maintaining order at the school.
Also unmentioned in Greenwood’s testimony to McDonald: the visit paid to his home one week later by two Royal Australian Air Force officers, which he was to describe to Shane Ryan many years later. These officers threatened Greenwood under the Official Secrets Act, threatened to spread rumors he was an alcoholic (“Westall ’66”), threatened him with the loss of his teaching career if he talked about what he’d seen (Ryan in the 2013 interview). More than 40 years after the event, speaking to Ryan, Greenwood remembered that ominous visit. Speaking with McDonald hardly more than a year afterward, he’d evidently forgotten it. Or else he didn’t think it was worth mentioning.
1966 was Greenwood’s first year teaching at Westall. Apparently it was also his last. (In Australia, with its southern-hemisphere seasons, the academic year is nearly the same as the calendar year, running “from late January or early February to early or mid-December.” December-January is summer vacation.) When he spoke with McDonald in June 1967, he was teaching science at a place called Haileybury College.
It’s hard not to think that there were substantial tensions between Greenwood and Samblebe, who was then in his first year as headmaster (Basterfield, Source 24)–under considerable pressure, no doubt, to establish his authority–and that the UFO served as vehicle for these tensions. To which the fledgling teacher soon fell victim.
“Pro” item #2: the chemistry teacher Barbara Robins. On May 9, I posted a query about her on the Westall Flying Saucer Incident Facebook page, and received the following reply from Shane Ryan:
“Several witnesses recall that it was Andrew Greenwood who took the photos, and that the camera was confiscated from him. Andrew says that it was not him. Barbara, unfortunately, is now unwell, and when she was interviewed several years ago by ‘Westall ’66’ director and writer Rosie Jones, she could no longer recall any details of the Westall Incident – only that she had been there that year and that something had happened. So, although there are some witness memories of a camera being taken away, this has not been substantiated.”
To me, it’s completely inconceivable that Barbara Robins would have forgotten so dramatic and outrageous a happening as this, her camera seized by uniformed strangers with her headmaster’s collusion. I have to suppose that the “confiscated camera”–Greenwood’s? Robins’?–is another feature to be assigned to the psychological, not historical, truth of the incident.
(And the other two teachers mentioned by Greenwood, Jeanette Muir and Claude Miller? In his reply to my May 9 query, Ryan wrote that “Jeanette died before she could be interviewed.“ Miller also?)
“Pro” item #3: Basterfield’s “Source 2” is a report form of the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society, filled out on 7 April 1966 by or on behalf of a Westall student named Joy Tighe. It describes “circular 2 UFOs flying in various directions” at a 45-degree elevation, and speaks of there having been “flattened waist high grass for 10 yds diameter 600 yds from school.” The UFO (singular?) “turned edge & disappeared fast.” Joy Tighe plainly assumed that the flattened grass was caused by one or both of the UFOs.
But if she or any of her schoolmates thought they had seen it come down–wouldn’t her report have made some reference to that?
“Pro” item #4: the mysterious “Tanya.”
She’s remembered by one of the women interviewed in “Westall ’66” as a girl who’d raced after the landed UFO in the Grange, got to it first, saw it landed on the ground. She went back to the school afterward but somehow suffered a breakdown, was taken off in an ambulance. “That was the last time I ever saw her.”
(“I was trying to keep up when suddenly Tanya came racing back towards me, petrified,” runs an even more dramatic version of the story that appeared in April 2016 in the Woman’s Day magazine, the link provided on the Westall Facebook page. “She was screaming and crying, talking gibberish. She ran straight past me like I wasn’t there. … I watched as paramedics tried to get Tanya into the ambulance. She didn’t want to go and put up a fight. I could still hear her screams as it drove away. That was the last time I saw her.”)
A query posted to the Facebook page on April 9 asks “what happened to the girl who ran ahead of her friends and got right up to one of the crafts … fainted, was taken away by ambulance and was never seen again.” There’s a remarkable response from one Lance Brown:
“In that 2 month period I’d been at school Tanya had been quite notorious to say the least. But when she vanished I didn’t relate it to the ufo, more her wild ways.”
Questions posed to this Lance Brown, by Basterfield and by Ryan, seem to have gotten no further responses. My guess is that he figured he’d already said too much, and clammed up. There’s indeed a suppression that operates in UFO matters, but not necessarily of their unearthly, otherworldly aspects. It may be precisely their all-too-earthly aspect, like what the UFO stands for in the fate of this “notorious” young lady–“much faster” than the other girls, as one witness put it–that calls for concealment.
Thus far the evidence that “confirms my diagnosis, as you doctors express it.” It’s a fine diagnosis, don’t you think?
But alas! It was T. H. Huxley (1825-95) who defined “the great tragedy of science” as “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” And there’s other evidence that isn’t quite so cooperative.
Evidence that suggests that what I’ve assumed to be a legend, gestating through the four decades that elapsed between when the UFO supposedly appeared over Westall High School and when Shane Ryan began his inquiries, was in full-blown existence by the summer–sorry, in Australia it’s the winter–of 1966. At the latest.
This evidence appeared in a school publication called The Clayton Calendar for “Term One,” 1966, reproduced as Basterfield’s “Source 10.” A photograph of the publication’s cover, taken from Wikipedia, is posted below.
I’ll talk about this evidence two weeks from now. And see whether my “beautiful hypothesis” is really slain, or if it might respond to resuscitation.
by David Halperin
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Here is a piece from my unfinished autobiography that happened just prior to Westall and which I believe is connected…
One night in February 1966, as I was driving to Surf City with some of my friends, we were suddenly confronted by an extraordinarily bright light that resembled a giant light bulb. We watched it sit stationary in the sky for several seconds and then it quickly disappeared behind the dark silhouettes of some houses in the distance. It was breathtaking, and I was so utterly mesmerised by its presence that I almost drove my car into a schoolyard fence.
Australia had been at war with North Vietnam for some time, my sister Jane had told me that during the 1950s, when the British were testing atomic bombs in South Australia, the sky had lit up so brightly that the glow could be seen almost a thousand miles away, recalling this had me thinking that the bright, pear-shaped glow was from an atomic bomb. By the time that we reached Surf City, my stomach was in knots.
I told others about what we’d seen and when one of them suggested that it might have been a flying saucer from another planet, it made my hair stand on end. My Catholic upbringing had led me to believe that God only made one world. I’d seen movies about aliens and spaceships but I’d never believed that they could actually exist.
A few days later, I was even more unnerved when it was announced on the Channel 9 News in Sydney that several other people in the Bankstown area had witnessed a strange light on the same night as we did. The TV coverage also showed a circular patch of tall reeds that had been depressed into the mud in a perfect clockwise formation, as if by some tremendous force, the reeds were Billt at the base, but not broken. The ‘nest’, as it had been termed, was hidden in bushland near Bankstown Airport and had been discovered by two school kids via their short cut home, close to where we’d seen the light disappear. The report also stated that the area had a particular pungent-chemical smell that seemed to hang in the air and that it had been cordoned off by police to allow scientists to investigate. No further reports were aired, but there was certainly plenty of talk among locals when several more similar lights were seen afterwards.
One night a few months later, while another friend and I were staring southward across the Royal national Park, near the Lucas Heights Nuclear Reactor, we saw two tiny lights follow each other across the horizon from east to west at an astronomical speed. They stopped very suddenly, did a quick little zig-zag and then continued hurtling across the horizon, and then they were gone in a flash. At first we thought that it might have been car lights flickering across an overhead wire, but there was neither a car in sight nor overhead wires. We both felt certain that no man-made craft could have moved at such speed or stopped so abruptly. It sent chills up my spine, and left me curious as to what these craft were and what they might be doing here.
http://oldcropcircles.weebly.com/australia-1966-bankstown.html
Fascinating story, Tom Bird! Thank you for posting.
Looks like you did more research on the fancy little quotes you’ve thrown into your piece rather than research the actual case. How can you just throw away testimony just because you feel like it – and major ones at that? And do aircraft always like to chase balloons around in the sky? And you throw away children’s testimonies just because they are… children?? My brain was never as sharp as when I was around 10 so why throw scores of testimonies away just because they were children? So you can just throw away other major UFO cases in the bin where children were the prime witnesses too like in the African case for instance? I think the real question here is, how much are you being paid for your disinformation services because quite frankly, as an ‘investigator’, you are pure rubbish, and your attention to detail staggeringly deficient.
Kelly Hu, my problem with the children’s testimonies is not that they were children, but that so much time elapsed between their experience and their describing it. A lot can happen to memories over four decades.
This is why the article from “The Clayton Calendar,” which I referred to at the end of my post, is so troublesome for my theory. As I point out, that article suggests that what I’ve assumed to be a long-developing legend of the incident was already in existence a few weeks, or at most months, after the incident happened.
So do I need to jettison my explanation? I don’t think so; and I will talk about that in my coming post.
How much am I being “paid for my disinformation services”? Don’t I wish! Like the rest of us, I’m doing my best to come to an understanding of a baffling enigma which I believe to be of the most immense importance for understanding who we are as human beings.
Hi David, while I welcome your take on the Westall story I think your dismissal of my response to the balloon HIBAL connection is hardly sustainable and fails to consider implications of the testimony of people like Joy whose testimony was collected in 1966 by the VFSRS. While the connection to a UFO “coming to earth” is still circumstantial, it is largely consistent with information that has been gathered by subsequent investigations. The school magazine story engages with the discovery of a physical trace site and I’ve interviewed the author. Still there are weaknesses such as a lack direct correlation between object seen and ground trace found. However your dismissal of such testimony does a disservice to the testimony of many in this affair. I find your argument of myth making hard to sustain, despite the fact of much of the evidence being uncovered in the last decade. Much was found in the years 1966 and 1967, and in the decade that followed and beyond that. The quality of that information seems to my humble eye to be the stuff of much more than hysteria, story telling and myth making. It is easy to make such assumptions when you haven’t researched it in depth, nor directly with witnesses, nor on site. I have and I find your analysis flawed in many ways. However you are entitled to have your view, just as we are entitled to respond to it – all in the eye of the beholder.
Bill, I very much appreciate your comment. I wonder if I might push you a bit further on a few of your points:
(1) Do you disagree with my statement that much of your argument against the balloon explanation loses its force, once we doubt that the object was ever seen to come to earth? That is, if you were to be persuaded that no one actually saw the object land, would you stand as firm against the balloon explanation as you do now?
(2) As I read Joy Tighe’s VFSRS report, she plainly assumed that one or both of the UFOs touched down in the Grange but didn’t see either one do that; otherwise she’d have said so explicitly. Do you read it differently?
(3) If we’re to trust Keith Basterfield’s summary of what Andrew Greenwood told James McDonald in 1967, the UFO was “airborne at all times.” I infer from this that he didn’t see it land and knew of no one who had. Is there a different way to construe his testimony?
(4) But as I said in my post, the Clayton Calendar article is a thorn in my side. Here the UFO does seem to descend, and the transformation of the Westall student body into a “surging mob,” unmentioned by Greenwood or the Dandenong Journal, is made explicit. This piece was certainly written shortly after the event, so I can’t claim that the passage of many years had distorted the writer’s memories.
Yet the article strikes me as rather strange. Why would a 5th-6th grade publication of Brown’s Road State School have printed a piece by a boy who was no longer a student there, about an event that happened at a different school? The language–“came alive with excitement … I was among the surging mob”–sounds adult, not like something written by a person in the 11-16 age group. Did your interview with the author shed any light on these incongruities?
(5) Do you have any thoughts on the tension between those who spoke of one object (most witnesses) and those who reported two (Joy Tighe, Victor Zakry)? This is a pretty significant difference, and it’s not easy to think of perceptual distortions that might have given rise to it.
I did not and would not use the term “hysteria” in connection with the Westall event, partly because the word seems to me pejorative, partly because I don’t really know what it means or how it explains anything. Nor would I call it “myth making,” unless it were entirely clear that I’m not using “myth” in its conventional meaning of “falsehood” or “bunk” but in its Jungian sense of a collective dream rising from our shared unconscious, bearing messages we normally prefer to ignore. Which is what I believe UFOs are, and which does not diminish their integrity or significance but vastly enhances it.
So much research in psychology and neuroscience has proved that memory is indeed a trickster. It’s not reliable. Over time memory alters, and there is some evidence that every time a memory is accessed, it changes a bit. There’s also the issue of when cognitive development in human beings is finally completed, which has been shown to be late adolescence. So these child witnesses were too young for reasoning, logic, even pattern recognition to have been fully developed. Given the age of the child witnesses when the event occurred and the time elapsed since since it, their recollections can’t be taken as literal truth.This is Ufology’s biggest problem and its Achilles heel. It relies too heavily on beliefs about witnesses’ powers of observation as well as the inviolability of memory that science has proven to be untrue in the last couple of decades. Ufology has buried it’s head in the sand to avoid the uncomfortable truth that our memories are essentially after the fact embellished reconstructions, not microsecond by microsecond accurate recordings. Ufology can continue to deny this truth, and it no doubt will, but denying it doesn’t stop it from being so. Meanwhile, absent the object seen floating in the sky everything else would point to this event being a case of mass hysteria in a group of children.
Purrlie, I agree with the general thrust of your argument. There are a few points, though, on which I might dissent.
First, I certainly agree that distortions of memory are an essential part of the Westall story. I don’t believe, though, that these distortions are random, accidental, or without meaning. On the contrary, I think they may lead us to the heart of what the episode meant for those involved in it, and must be listened to with care and respect.
Second, what you say about “the time elapsed since seeing it” is true for the post-2005 testimonies–but not for the article in the Clayton Calendar, which is uncomfortably close to the later accounts and different from, say, what Andrew Greenwood told James McDonald in 1967. This suggests there’s something more going on than the inevitable blurring of memories with time.
Third, in my response to Bill Chalker I’ve indicated why I’m uncomfortable with talking about “hysteria,” mass or otherwise, in connection with events like Westall. It seems to me to dismiss rather than to explain–or, better than “to explain,” to understand.
Many, many thanks for posting!
I think your description of the memory has been born from a limited perspective. Yes you are correct to a degree but certainly not entirely by any means. For example, some people have photographic memories and I am one of them. I can only judge from my own experience, but I acknowledge the fact that if I can recall things like watching a recorded movie then so too can others. The bottom line is – there were a lot of sightings of UFOs during 1966 in Australia, including the three that I clearly saw myself. Now whether they were from elsewhere or man-made is the still unanswered question – certainly not whether they exist.
The subject of ‘memory’
consider Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus : How reliable is your memory? / TED Talk
“When supplied with just a few details, our brains can create vivid memories of events that never took place, including the feeling that we had “always” remembered this.”
Note also that :
“The state supreme courts of New Jersey and Massachusetts mandate that judges instruct juries that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable.” “Remembering a Crime That You Didn’t Commit” by Douglas Starr in New Yorker March 5, 2015
And a real eye-opener : PBS NOVA documentary “Memory Hackers” 2/10/16
Motivation is extremely important in regard to memory – how is one involved ‘with the story’ ? In court someone may lie simply to help a friend, but they do know they’re ‘making things up’.
At this point for me, Greenwood’s account ‘then and now’ holds up – and everything from the ‘unnamed source’ is BS (re Pro” item #1).
If Greewood was visited by the two air force officers, it seems perfectly reasonable that he wouldn’t mention this to McDonald – the simple mention of an ‘Official Secrets Act’ and a visit from ‘military officers’ would be enough to seal most lips.
Pro” item #2: re the chemistry teacher Barbara Robins – why she is unable to remember -we really don’t know, and cannot assume that she is able to recall any events … there are reasons related to age and mental and physical health that would account for ‘loss of memory’ ( and here is a perfect place to toss in a ‘conspiracy theory’ to spice things up , yet nothing is factual ).
There’s something curious about Claude Miller – is he trying to keep his affair with Barbara a secret ? Perhaps he holds the key to a box of photos? But at this point -nothing to mention.
Jacqueline becomes a psychologist and advisor to a government Minister- that’s impressive – can I believe her story – yet it’s not the whole story and yet again another event investigated too late ….
What’s really curious is the number of times ‘officials’ are saying ‘don’t talk about it cos it ain’t real’ – which is ridiculous as Greenwood points out to the ‘goons’. I actually ‘trust’ this guy’s memory – and although I do not have ‘photographic memory’ I have different ‘kinds’ of memories that are strangely clear, often for no particular reason – and I think this might be true for the majority of folks.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve listened to the podcast and found Ryan to be a credible investigator, yet this doesn’t make the event a ‘real Flying Saucer’ for me , but the event is one of the most interesting cases even though we won’t find an actual FS …
Thank you for your comment, Mike! I would add a hearty “Amen!” to your last paragraph, both about Ryan and about the tremendous interest of the case.
Hi David. The passage of time in a case such as this – fifty years old this year – and the well-accepted vagaries of the human memory where, for instance, it is recognised that each time we remember an event we literally “re-member” it (putting together the constituent parts of the event in a slightly different way so that it makes sense to us), are important and should form part of the framework for our attempts to understand an event such as this. This is why it has always been my intention to make contact with as many people as possible who had a connection with this story – as teacher, as student, as parent, as local worker, as local resident, as police officer or other emergency service responder, as journalist etc – to compare and contrast the similarities as well as the differences in their accounts, so as to try to come to some common and broadly acceptable understanding of what actually took place. Ultimately, this would still involve some degree of interpretation and bias on my part, as a researcher – not matter how careful or committed to being objective and open-minded – but that of course would be true of anyone. As I contacted witnesses over the past eleven years, I was often struck by two things. One, how few had ever spoken about what they had seen or experienced at Westall that day, or if they had, how many had learnt not to due to ridicule or disbelief, sometimes at the hands of their own spouses, children or family members, at the time, or since; and two, how much commonality there seemed to be in the accounts of what had happened, while allowing for logical differences due to variations in location and age etc at the time. Oh, and one more thing really struck me, and that was how many people remarked on my serious, open and respectful approach to the story – their story – given how many of them had been told at the time, by people in authority such as teachers or people in uniforms or parents, not to talk about what they had seen. Now that I have been in contact with a total of 101 witnesses who say they saw a UFO or flying saucer at Westall that day, and 149 who say they saw a circle, or circles, in the paddocks where they had never seen such things before, and underneath where the objects were observed hovering or descending, I feel less like giving too much weight to Carl Jung’s theory on why people see UFOs – at least in this particular case. Which is not to say that Jung, or you, or anyone else is wrong, in general, but potentially so in this case. And it is also not to say that I know what flew over and down at Westall that day, for I do not, but it does seem to me that something did, that it appeared to be solid, “mechanical” and under intelligent control, and that it bore no resemblance to any known (then or now) human-manufactured aircraft or other airborne object. Now, as time permits, I will attempt a response to the points you very validly have raised above. Cheers, Shane.
I will not speak for Bill Chalker, who I am sure will want to make a response too, but for my own part, I would say this, first of all in response to your first point above: there are witnesses who say they saw an object on, or very close to, the ground, and in two separate locations, where other witnesses attest trace marks (mainly circles) were later (within seconds, minutes and hours) found. Several students say thew saw the UFO(s) – yes, most saw one, but some [about 15%] saw two or three = descend over the western boundary fence of the school towards the paddock which was there; a student Victor approached two of the UFOs which were there; a student’s parent saw a UFO in or near that same location; a woman in a nearby printery saw one or two UFos sitting in that same location, with high school students milling around it from her first floor (that’s second floor in the US!) location. In addition to the large number of witnesses who saw the UFO fly over and descend behind the pine tree grove at The Grange, one Westall High School witness, Terry Peck, ran over there and arrived in time, with other students, to see the flying saucer lifting off; two other students, one primary, one secondary, from other local schools, who were off school that day, and at The Grange, separately, also saw the UFO either on the ground or close to it, and lifting off and flying away. As so many students had seen where the object had descended, they had a good idea of where to run to, and so many of them were able to find the location of the circle(s) – again about 15% of my witness respondents remember there being more than one circle, usually two or three. Similarly, other witnesses, including local adults (residents and workers), were able to guide the fire truck which turned out to the location of one of the circles. These onlookers became very agitated, apparently, when a police officer, also present at the circle, tried to suggest that the circle was a hoax, arguing with him that they had seen what caused the circle. And there are other accounts too which relate to a landed or hovering object at The Grange or closer to the schools, which space does not permit here. Given all of this, I see no compelling reason to doubt that something did in fact come down, just so that we can consider a HIBAL balloon solution. I am happy to entertain a HIBAL hypothesis, as Keith Basterfield knows, but not at the expense of the evidence which seems to indeed exist which probably points elsewhere. [To be continued…]
David J. Halperin, in response to your second point above: yes, Joy did not see the UFO actually land at The Grange. In fact, no one actually saw the UFO land at The Grange from the vantage point of the schools, as the UFO flew behind the pine trees, as if it was descending, and vanished from view. The witnesses presumed, reasonably, that the UFO was coming down to land, or at least descend towards the ground. Joy Clarke’s older sister, Sue, took Joy down to The Grange where they found a large circle of flattened grass. They also encountered men in green fatigues and blue uniforms, who they took to be army soldiers and police officers (but who could have been air force personnel, Joy says). [To be continued…]
David J. Halperin, in response to your third point above: yes, Andrew Greenwood saw the UFO while it was airborne, and not landed; he did see the UFO as it flew towards and over The Grange area. I don’t think we can necessarily infer that he did not know of anyone who had seen the object on the ground, as apparently there were students who did, and it would not be outrageous to imagine that he had heard of this, and maybe even spoken to such students – but I am not 100% certain of this. He did, it seems, know of the circle(s) at The Grange, and some students have told me he went down there after school and saw them there, but I think he either doesn’t remember that or disputes it (I will have to double check my notes on that one!). [To be continued…]
David J. Halperin, in response to your fourth point: please keep in mind that “The Dandenong Journal” had great trouble in getting anyone to talk to them about the incident, especially after Andrew Greenwood and student Marilyn Eastwood did speak to the journalist and they were both reprimanded for doing so. After that, most people clammed up and obeyed the headmaster’s demand that nobody speak to the media – either staff or students. In addition to this, the incident occurred on the second last day of Term One. The following day the school term ended and fifteen days of holidays (Easter long weekend and school holidays) ensued making it very difficult for the newspaper to contact staff or students about what they had seen. Two weeks later and with the new term starting, the “news cycle” had already moved on. Regarding “The Clayton Calendar” article, authored by Westall High School student Geoffrey, he had been a student the previous year at Browns Road State School (later Clayton Primary School) one of the feeder primary schools for Westall High School. His former Grade Six teacher knew him as a good student, good with words (hence the expressions in the article you mentioned) and trusted him, and so asked him to pen an article, probably via his sister, Karen, who was still at Browns Road and who was an editor for this class magazine. It has been said that the teacher who organised this, Adrian Waugh, was also reprimanded for allowing this article to be printed! I have stayed in touch with Geoffrey, and he stands by what he saw and what he wrote; he doesn’t know what it was, but he does know what he saw…and it remains a mystery to him. [To be continued…]
David J. Halperin, in response to your fifth point above: about 15% of the 101 witnesses (that I have been in contact with) who saw a UFO at Westall that day, saw more than one, some say two, some say three. While this variation in the number of UFOs may seem a little untidy – and believe me, I like things to be tidy and ordered! – it does not trouble me too much. I consider it to be a reasonable outcome of certain witnesses coming on to the scene at different times, and from different physical vantage points. Most of those who say they recall more than one UFO, mention that one was more prominent than the other(s), perhaps because that one was larger, or because it was closer to them. Interestingly, 15% of the 149 circle witnesses recall more than one circle too – again mostly saying there were either two or three circles. As much as I would like all the witnesses to be saying exactly the same thing, in this strange area of research one quickly learns that it is the reed that sways in the breeze that doesn’t break! Having said that, a modicum of insanity goes a long way in this ufological endeavour you and I are seemingly engaged in! 😉
Shane, I am immensely grateful not only for your meticulous investigation, but for your warm collegiality! Thank you so much for these comments!
Shane Ryan is quite right not to be too concerned about discrepancies of detail from witnesses to the events of 1966. These days, our courts recognise that inconsistent detail doesn’t make witnesses unreliable. There is a growing acceptance that the recall of extraordinary events – in crime, for example – shouldn’t be expected to be perfect. There was a time when judges gave direction to Australian juries to consider child witnesses as given to flights of imagination but that is a thing of the past. Gone are the days when aggressive defence lawyers could – with impunity – brazenly pick holes of peripheral inconsistency in the testimony of children. Granted there is a spectrum of details in the accounts of what happened in 1966 but the gist of event – as a broad narrative – is quite consistent.
OK, Geoff. But can you think of any other multiply witnessed close encounter report in which the witnesses couldn’t agree on how many UFOs were involved? To me, this is a pretty major inconsistency that can’t be brushed aside.