A few weeks ago, a man named David said that they’re already here. David was not like others who have said this over the years, because he was an intelligence officer at the US Department of Defense’s UFO research wing. David’s colleagues knew he was a trustworthy man. He had a reputation “beyond reproach,” according to one of his superiors. While working at the UFO research wing, some of his colleagues began to tell David stories about things they had seen. Unbelievable things. Crashed spacecraft. The lifeless bodies of alien pilots. “They’re already here,” David’s colleagues would tell him.
David hadn't seen any of this himself and at first, he found it hard to believe. Either these people are lying to me, having a psychotic break, or this is some crazy but true stuff that’s happening, he thought. But David had known a few of the witnesses for decades. Some were his friends. They were confiding in him. It was risky, because there were powerful people in the military who didn’t want anyone to know what the witnesses had seen. They would accuse David’s colleagues of lying. And if David repeated what they told him they would accuse him of lying.
But David chose to believe them anyway, and tell the world all about what his colleagues had seen in a long interview on an American subscription television network. I watched the interview on my laptop one night, and tried to decide whether I believed David. I looked at his face. He reminded me of Bert from Sesame Street. Not the mean one with the oval face, but the nice one with the round, open, innocent-seeming face. The man interviewing David, though, looked more like Ernie. His name was Ross, and his face was oval shaped and elastic. He had an Australian accent and asked David straightforward questions like: “Let me cut to the quick: You’re saying there's an intelligent species engaging with this planet?”
“Yes, that's potentially extraterrestrial,” David replied.
“Well, let me speak for everyone at home and say that this is quite a shock,” Ross said.
I later discovered, while reading Ross’ personal website, that this wasn’t actually such a shock for Ross. He was a prominent investigative journalist who once worked for 60 Minutes, but then left to pursue UFO-focused reporting, hoping to break, in his words, “the biggest story ever told.” He spoke to many witnesses who claimed, like David’s colleagues, that they had seen UFOs or aliens, and he wrote a book about these witnesses, in which he argued that there are now so many important people—fighter pilots, scientists, politicians—saying “they’re already here” that it is becoming difficult to dismiss them, as we used to.
Some of the people Ross spoke to for his book were witnesses of the Westall UFO sighting, which occurred on April 6, 1966, in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, not far from Monash University, where I studied literature. Back then, the area was still semi-rural, all windswept paddocks, factories, and one-story brick houses occupied by English immigrants, ten-pound-poms, and working class Australians who moved out from the slums of Collingwood and Carlton to be closer to the factories.
Their kids were just regular suburban kids who went to the local school. One day, just before recess, a student ran in from the playground shouting, “flying saucers in the sky.” The children emptied the classrooms and rushed out into the playground. Many of the students, potentially hundreds, saw disc-shaped things hovering above the school, and then take off towards a patch of parkland nearby known as The Grange, where the kids went after school to smoke and make out, and where at least one of the flying saucers was said to have crash landed.
I learned all this from the Westall Flying Saucer Incident Facebook page, led there by compulsive, half-drunk, rabbit-hole, late night browsing impulses. I have always been drawn to people who publicly say they have seen UFOs or aliens. I am attracted to the epistemological havoc the claim wreaks in a life. It strikes me as a conversion of sorts—one day you are a normal person, and the next you are an alien guy. Often, this is a lonely baptism. You are travelling down a dark road alone at night and see something out of this world, and then carry the burden of this vision by yourself. But with Westall, there was an entire cohort of students who claimed to have seen the same thing at the same time, who had a shared reality, and who, years later, established a witness community on Facebook to discuss it. The page had a kind and welcoming atmosphere. As well as offering testimony, witnesses shared photos of their UFO reunions, at which they all gathered at The Grange and drank tea with their grandchildren. They would comment on each other’s photos: “lovely picture” or “Looking good Paul, cute grandson.”
I wrote a message to the Westall group introducing myself. I was not just a random interloper, I said. I was a writer with a longtime interest in UFOs. I often seek out UFO-based reporting assignments. I had once been commissioned by a magazine to spend the weekend with a Harvard astrophysicist who publicly announced that he thought an oddly shaped meteor that passed by Earth in 2017 was actually an extremely thin metallic disc built by an extraterrestrial race, likely extinct, which had flown here from another galaxy, propelled by light radiation emitted from the stars. Some of his colleagues said he had gone mad. Others said he was attention seeking. But the Harvard professor told me, on a hike through a forest in Massachusetts, that based on the available facts, this was the most rational explanation. He went to lengths to distinguish himself from other alien-criers who said that they saw something in the sky, or encountered alien life, or got taken away in a spacecraft. He was not like others who just told you their story and then expected you to believe, like David’s colleagues. He was marshalling evidence, and he wanted to present it in a way that led to scientific consensus, data so irrefutable that anyone could look at it and see the truth, not just the people who happened to be there at the time.
“Do you believe my hypothesis,” he asked me.
“I think I’d like to,” I said.
“Trick question!” he cried, leaping into the air impishly. “Science has nothing whatever to do with belief.”
He is still, to this day, searching for evidence. The last I heard he was scouring the Pacific Ocean for some rock or molecule that will prove him right.
*
The next morning, I received an automated message saying that I needed to seek permission from a man called Shane, the page administrator, to post on the Westall Facebook group. I messaged Shane, who sent me his number, which I promptly dialed. Shane said he couldn't talk right away, because he had to pick up his wife from work, but we could speak the next day. I asked if 11am was ok.
“I’ll have to cancel my pedicure,” Shane said.
“Oh,” I replied. “Don't do that.”
“That was a joke. 11am will be fine.”
The next morning, over the phone, Shane told me his story in an adroit and soothing manner. It began when he was a student, studying Japanese at Monash University, and living at a boarding house in Waverley that was run by a woman named Elva. Shane was fond of Elva. She was a fount of endless suburban gossip. One afternoon, Elva mentioned that a friend of hers had a son who went to a school nearby, and that he had, along with several of his friends, seen a flying saucer descend from the sky. Shane and Elva went for a drive to the school in question. They had a look around, saw nothing of note, and then drove home. Many years later, Shane was brainstorming ideas for a children's book when Elva's story came back to him. He could see in the Westall story the motif of childlike openness to mystery.
Shane began working on the book but found that there was little publicly available information about the sighting. Shane placed an ad in the Westall news asking locals if they remembered anything about that day in 1966. Very quickly several witnesses got in touch and told Shane what they saw. They connected him to other witnesses, who he interviewed one by one. Most of them had never spoken to anyone about this before, for fear of being ridiculed. Shane set up a Yahoo forum where they could meet one another and share recollections. It seemed that everyone was glad to be finally talking about this, after so many years, so Shane organised a reunion at the Westall Tennis Club in 2006. Many of the witnesses, who hadn't seen each other since school, hugged and spoke about their lives. Channel 9 News was there. The witnesses pointed at the sky. “That’s where it came down,” they said. “Just over there by the power lines.”
After the reunion, more witnesses came forward to tell Shane what they saw. To date, he has spoken to 136 primary witnesses and another 185 who saw strange circles or burnt sections in the paddock where the UFO was said to have landed. Shane keeps these testimonies in a spreadsheet. The sheer number impresses and perplexes him. If there were so many kids at the time who saw this, and were speaking about it after, why was nobody listening?
*
Joy was there that day. She told me, over the phone, that it was “the most amazing day—I was very excited, not frightened at all.”
Joy was in Year 8. She was sitting in science class when a kid ran in shouting about flying saucers. Joy, who was only 12, young for her year, but gregarious and popular, burst out laughing. But then, at recess, she went outside and saw three disc-like objects hovering above the oval. There were dozens of other kids in the playground, and a few teachers, too. Everyone was gazing up at the sky, which was bright and blue. They were pointing. Some were screaming. So, I'm not going mad, Joy thought. They see it too.
The UFOs were tailed by several light airplanes, which seemed to be trying to get closer. “The little planes would come in and as soon as they did, the UFOs would just dip and go left and right, a bit like cat and mouse,” Joy said.
Then there was a flash of light, and the spacecraft took off towards The Grange. Some kids leapt the fence to follow it. Joy was standing with the science teacher, Mr. Greenwood, who warned her not to go. They went back inside, and the students gathered in small clusters to recapitulate what they had seen.
The principle called an assembly and told the students that they were being hysterical. “You didn't see anything,” Joy recalled him saying. “And if you speak there’ll be consequences.” His warning was made more ominous by the fact that the corridors of Westall Secondary School were now creeping with official-seeming men in army gear and black suits.
Joy didn’t seem to care much about consequences, though, and when school got out, she happily recounted what she saw for a Channel 9 News reporter who was loitering out the front of the school. That evening Joy was on the news. The next day, she got detention.
“What did your parents think?” I asked Joy.
“Oh, they were supportive at first,” she said. “We got visited by the UFO Society. I have no idea how they got our address. We didn't even have a telephone in those days. An American man called Paul interviewed us at the kitchen table. And he came with this glamorous blonde lady. They came back the next day as well and took us to The Grange to take a photograph of me at the landing sight. It was so much fun, just this step outside my regular life.”
But five weeks later, the fun ended. Joy’s father came home from work one afternoon and said there was to be no more talk of UFOs in the house. Life had to return back to normal.
“Why was that?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Joy said. “He worked at a government aircraft factory, so maybe he knew something. Maybe he had been warned and wanted to protect us. But whatever it was, he put his foot down and that’s sort of how it went. We stopped talking about it, then it was the Easter holidays, and that was that.”
*
Not long after speaking with Joy, I received an email from a guy called Charlie, a UFO myth-busting blogger who had seen my message on the Facebook group, and had reached out, unprompted, to encourage me to maintain a healthy skepticism in relation to the Westall witnesses. There were grave inconsistencies between their accounts, Charlie said, and most of the testimony was “mythology that's developed in the intervening decades.”
Charlie's first point was certainly true. Witnesses differed on how many craft they saw, what colour they were, if they landed, and where they landed. There were also some witnesses who saw or experienced something that day totally at odds with what others recounted, most of whom had been silent at the time, but were now choosing to speak up.
Like John, a retired truck driver, who told me that while jogging through The Grange alone he saw the spaceship land and a humanoid creature walk out. Or Tom, the owner of a typewriter repair shop, who posted on the Facebook group about how he was walking in the city that day, many kilometers away from Westall, and that at some point in the morning, perhaps when the UFOs were hovering over the school, he and everything around him froze, “like a pause on a video tape machine.”
When I raised these outlier cases with Shane, he told me that he had a principle to take what people told him at face value.
“It’s not my job to reject people’s accounts because they’re unusual,” he said. “I collect them, record them, hold them in that creative tension.”
Charlie found this to be a distinctly unsound approach to UFO research.
“Shane calls himself a witness advocate to justify this uncritical platforming, but this approach will never lead to the truth,” Charlie wrote to me. “These witnesses are his friends now. He has a huge emotional vested interest in keeping the flying saucer option alive.”
On his blog, Charlie offered an alternative explanation for what happened at Westall. It was based on the research of a man named Keith Basterfield, another UFO researcher. Basterfield discovered that there was a high-altitude balloon program in Mildura in the 1960s that sent huge translucent balloons into the stratosphere hauling behind them tons of scientific gear. Sometimes, these balloons would get blown of course and land hundreds of kilometers away, at which point a light plane would have to locate and retrieve the heavy equipment.
One such balloon was launched on April 5, 1966, and was spotted some 40 km northeast of Westall early the next morning. Basterfield hypothesised that what the children saw was this balloon and its payload crash landing, followed shortly after by the retrieval aircraft.
But what about the cover up? Why wouldn’t the Westall students simply have been told that this is what happened at the time? On Charlie's blog, he explained that while the Mildura balloon program was not secret, there were occasionally “special launchings” that had sophisticated NASA equipment in the payload. In 1966, an extension of this program was being negotiated between the Australian and US governments, and a crash landing near a school may have compromised it. In other words, there was a cover-up, but not of aliens—just that “a 300 kg payload containing US government instrumentation almost fell on the heads of Australian school children,” and that despite this, the program continued to drop heavy cargo all over Australia for another 15 years.
Charlie's prosaic explanation seemed credible to me, so I replied to his email asking if we could meet up or speak on the phone, to discuss it further.
“Given the toxic environment of ufology, I've chosen to be anonymous,” he replied.
“What do you mean by the toxic environment of ufology? Toxic how?” I wrote.
Charlie said that the UFO subculture had become polarised into communities of true believers and skeptics. The Westall community, he said, made no room for any skepticism. To be a part of it one had to be a witness or, like Shane, an unquestioning believer.
“They are a suspicious and highly defensive bunch,” he wrote.
I appreciated Charlie's balloon hypothesis, but he lost me here. There seemed to be, among the Westall community, a broad acceptance of alternative viewpoints, if they were made respectfully. In fact, Shane and Keith Basterfield (the man who proposed the balloon hypothesis) were good friends, bound by their shared obsessive interest in the Westall mystery despite their diverging interpretations.
And in my experience, the witnesses were never defensive when I questioned their accounts. They were generally good-humored, self-deprecating, keenly aware of how odd they sounded. When I asked John, for instance, how he felt if people didn't believe him regarding his alien sighting, he said: “Listen mate, I know I sound mad or like a dickhead. But it’s just what I saw.” Joy told me she doesn't mind if people are skeptical, just as long as they are friendly about it, which isn’t always the case. Several years ago, she said, she was interviewed by the comedian Arj Barker for The 7pm Project, and was made to feel like a fool.
“Was Arj Barker rude?” I asked.
“No, he was lovely,” Joy said. “But Carrie Bickmore said something about how she doesn’t understand why UFOs would go to Clayton, because you can’t even get a salad sandwich there.”
(I later fact checked this and found that it was in fact Jo Stanley, not Carrie Bickmore. And her claim was about rye bread, not a salad sandwich. Though I would concur with Joy that Jo Stanley’s tone was disparaging. So, in sentiment at least, Joy’s recollection was accurate.)
*
I was hoping to have one of the witnesses take me on a tour of The Grange, but they were all busy with their lives. Instead, I went with George, a ufologist who is working on a book about Westall. He happened to be on annual leave.
“What’s the first thing you notice about this place?” George asked me at the park. He was wearing a San Francisco Raiders beanie, bright blue sunglasses, and stood with his hands jammed in his pockets.
“The UFO?” I asked, pointing at the UFO-shaped play equipment in the distance.
“What?” Gary asked. “Oh that. No. The council put that in a while back. There’s a little control panel inside so you can go up there and pretend like you're flying it. It's pretty nifty. Pretty fun.”
But that’s not what Gary was talking about. He told me to look up. Surrounding us stood very large and thin pine trees that bent here and there in odd positions. They looked to me like giant, genuflecting mystics engaged in some unusual prayer ritual.
“Notice how, right up there, they all seem to open up,” Gary said. We walked over. I looked up and saw how here the trees all bent outwards, as if they were making space for something.
“This is where one of them touched down,” Gary said, pointing at a patch of grass beneath the tree clearing. “You see it?” I did see it. A circular path that was clearly shorter than the rest of the grass, and brownish.
“They’ve been trying to regrow that spot for decades now. But nothing will grow there. Nothing.”
It was freezing, so Gary and I went to a McDonalds to keep talking. (It was between meals, so I resisted the urge for fries. We ordered mochas.) He told me, with a kind of breathless enthusiasm that is rare in men in their 50s, about various UFO investigations he’s currently working on. I asked Gary if people judge him when he tells them about his research. “Listen I’m the type of guy who rides a scooter,” Gary said. “Not a motorised one. Like the one you have to push. I basically just don’t care what people think.”
Gary took a sip of his mocha, paused, and then told me, in a more serious tone, that, yes, people judge, but it is often concealing their own deep fascination with, or direct experience of, UFOs. Years ago, his wife was at the toy library with their young child, and told one of the other mothers about Gary's UFO research.
“She just burst out laughing at my wife, right there in the toy library. That was hurtful.”
But then, not long after, Gary ran into this same woman somewhere in the neighborhood, and she took him aside and confessed, in hushed tones, that she had once been in her garden and had seen a huge triangular spacecraft fly overheard.
“It was the size of the MCG,” Gary said, excitedly. “And it didn't make a sound. Incredible right?”
What struck me was how Gary wholeheartedly believed this woman, who, only days earlier had humiliated his wife in a toy library. People could tell him things that no one else would believe and he would believe them, based only on their word, without needing to see any further evidence. Come to think of it, Shane shared a similar trusting instinct. And for that matter, so did David, the US intelligence officer. Each were willing to stake a claim about reality based on witness testimony alone, and in the process upend their lives and potentially be seen as insane. There was something that struck me as pre-modern about their faith in the good word of others—and also childlike. An openness to mystery? A guilelessness? Sure. But, also, maybe, a disenchantment with the world as it is—modernity, adulthood, an empty, lonely, amoral universe headed for entropic collapse.
Could extraterrestrial faith be the solution to civilization and its discontents? Was I ready to take the leap and join this enchanted community? To become a loyal custodian of the oral tradition? I had a nice time with the Westall witnesses. Their reunions looked wholesome. When they told me about what they saw, I didn't doubt that this was their truth, but I couldn’t quite figure out a way to make it mine, too. I was unable, honestly, to put my full faith in them. I couldn’t become a co-creator in their new, and frankly more interesting, reality. I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t just play along. In the end, I needed, like the Harvard astrophysicist, to see what they saw for myself. Something more than just an oddly hued patch of grass. And if I did, I would tell you all what I saw. And of course, you’d believe me. Wouldn’t you? I wouldn’t just make something like that up.