UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

(Illustrated by Nicholas Eveleigh)

THE CLAYTON SOUTH UFO ENCOUNTER

Amysterious event takes place, in a land considered “far away” by most. Hundreds of children witness something they cannot explain, but no one believes them. The few adults present, teachers no less, are coerced into silence. Students vanish into thin air. The presence of a foreign unknown military force. An idealistic American scientist travels to the under side of the world looking for answers, eventually disgraced, he takes his own life. UFO sightings fluctuate, a man reports a UFO sighting and unusual experience, claiming that his car is being sucked into ethereal lights on an isolated road. Three days later, a fatal car accident occurs at the exact location where the strange event took place. You might be thinking I’m describing the events of some sci-fi drama series, only a great many individuals, to this day, would attest that all, if not most of these claims were entirely true. The least disputed detail of all the strangeness, is the sighting of an unidentified flying object, a flying saucer.

It was 11:00 am, Wednesday, April 6th, 1966, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. What no doubt may have presented itself as an ordinary day at Westall High school, would have drastically changed the moment voices began to shout, “look up in the sky, it’s a flying saucer!”

Immediately, a sense of frenzy, fear, wonderment and exhilaration resonated among the students, because as many eyewitnesses will tell you, as they looked to the clear blue morning sky, there was a silver flying saucer performing aerial feats beyond the capabilities of the (publicly known) aircraft of the day.

As hundreds of students charged toward an area nicknamed ‘The Grange’ where a paddock converged onto a grove of pine trees (today a nature reserve) beyond the edge of the school, numerous eyewitness reports claim that the flying saucer actually lowered into the tall grass. Causing a circular impression that remained after the UFO ascended, some noting also a swirling inner pattern. The UFO was not alone in the sky, according to many eyewitnesses, a number of small airplanes (claims as high as 5) were tailing it. (Though there were no reports of any unusual activity made by Air traffic control or the Royal Australian Air force. To this day, the alleged ‘5 pilots’ have never come forward).

There have since been claims that children, one girl identified only as “Tanya” and others that were closest to the unidentified object when it made its descent, passed out and lay unconscious on the ground around it. Eyewitnesses make the claim that even an ambulance attended the scene to see to the students seemingly suffering physiological effects of the experience. It is claimed by one eyewitness, that “Tanya” was never seen again, after succumbing to some physiological effect from the experience, never returning to school after the event on April 6th.

All up, it is believed the aerial chase, the landing and high speed escape/disappearance happened within a window of approximately 20 minutes. 20 minutes, according to most of the vocal eyewitnesses that has profoundly effected their lives.

(Dr. James E. McDonald)

In interviews conducted by American Physicist/Ufologist, Dr. James E. McDonald roughly one year later, he managed to speak with science teacher Andrew Greenwood who was there that fateful day. Greenwood upon realizing the frenzy sweeping up outside among the students, headed outside to get a look at what they were reacting to. Andrew Greenwood described the UFO as a “round, silver object about the size of a car with a metal rod sticking up in the air.” He then remarked that one of the first things to occur after the event took place, was the headmaster instructed all students to return to their classrooms, after which Greenwood said “he [the headmaster] gave the school a lecture and told the children they would be severely punished if they talked about this matter and told the staff they could lose their jobs if they mentioned it at all.”

From there, according to those who tried to speak out about the event, an element of secrecy and suppression arose. Military vehicles were seen around the area, the site was under total lockdown. Ironically, exactly as virtually every film surrounding such an event would have you believe. Men in camouflaged uniforms were reportedly seen by dozens of the eyewitnesses still vocal on the issue now more than half a century on. The unusual thing about men in camouflage is that in Australia during the 1960’s, neither the Australian nor the British had incorporated it into the military uniforms. Suggesting a possible involvement of either a group, outside of a national government, or even the U.S government which did/does have a presence on Australian soil.

There is talk of suppression of information surrounding this incident. I don’t know how things were managed at the time, perhaps due to the nature of news in the 1960’s it simply did not receive the coverage it might if it occurred today. Though, anecdotally, I would have to agree that something does seem unusual about the records. In researching the event through the usual channels, archives of Australian public newspaper records, the entire year of 1966 in Australia seems oddly slim. Searching terms like “UFO”, “Westall”, “Flying Saucer” were actually proving fruitless. So then I changed the search purely based on date.

In Melbourne, 1966, possibly by coincidence, 1966 draws a blank. So then I started checking other states, in case stories made it to further away Newspapers. When I looked up ‘The Canberra Times’, checking through dates around early April I didn’t find any mention of the Westall UFO event (though perhaps I was just lazily looking in all the wrong places). I did however, find this story, reported in Canberra, about a story that happened in Victoria, approximately 2 hours NW from the Westall incident, mere days after the UFO was sighted at the back of the school:

“MELBOURNE, Monday. — The current world-wide spate of sightings of flying saucers was brought closer to home today by a report by a Maryborough man. Mr Ronald F. Sullivan, a 38-year-old builder of Victoria Street, Maryborough, said he had seen an unidentified flying object on the Bendigo to St Arnaud Road last Monday. Three days later a youth was killed when his car ran off the road at the place where Mr Sullivan said he had seen the object.

Mr Sullivan said, “the headlights on my car were suddenly diverted to the right, for no apparent reason. And if I had followed them I would have run off the straight stretch of road. The fact that I am an experienced driver, and know the district well, saved my life. I managed to stop before I crashed.

Then I saw a display of gaseous lights in all colours of the spectrum in a nearby paddock. The object rose about 10 feet in the air. It later disappeared”, Mr Sullivan said.

Mr Sullivan said he drove on to Wycheproof where his headlights were checked and found to be in perfect order. He went to the crash scene with police on Friday. “We all noticed there was a depression about five inches deep in the freshly ploughed paddock, about 50 feet from the fence. It was about five feet in diameter.” Mr Sullivan said. Police at Maryborough, Castlemaine, Bealiba and Newstead said today they had all heard reports of flying saucers in the area. They have not been able to find the cause of the accident in which the youth, Gary Taylor, 19, of Carnegie, died.”

—THE CANBERRA TIMES, TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 1966

It’s also claimed that the chemistry teacher at Westall High, Barbara Robins, had access to a camera and was hastily snapping photographs of the UFO during the 20 minute frenzy. There are a great many photographs claiming to be taken during this event, but when I cross referenced them (reverse google search) every single one was linked to other UFO sightings, though that is common in many news stories, surrounding issues even outside of the paranormal. It’s been suggested that Barbara Robins had her camera and film confiscated and was coerced into silence.

Ultimately, in my opinion, this is more a story about suppression than anything else. It has endless possible explanations, but these are the top four I could come up with.

Mass Hysteria, somehow something potentially non-existent has been blown way out of proportion. Disingenuous recollections of a misinterpreted reality. This is actually the least likely scenario, in my mind.
Extraterrestrial or Ultraterrestrial life with access to highly advanced technology, presented itself to hundreds of Australian schoolchildren. For whatever reason, some “agency” (government or otherwise) wants to keep it a secret, suppressed knowledge.
Certain groups on this planet have access to technology that far surpasses what is currently available to the masses. Information is power, and the power is being kept from the general people. Those that rule the world don’t want individuals to be self-sufficient and able to thrive off of the nipple of “the system“.
The whole thing was setup. The entire experience was orchestrated. “They” wanted to test how a group would react to something like this, then how they could suppress it.

Some estimations to the total number of witnesses of UFO phenomenon (of varying levels and vicinity of encounters) in Victoria around the 6th of April, 1966 are approximately 300 individuals. 300 individuals that saw “a flying saucer” at a very low altitude. This wasn’t a craft people were squinting to see through the clouds, this was something narrowly avoiding telegraph poles (as one witness claimed). All said and done, in this account of strange events, there is one major thing to ask yourself. Someone in all of this is lying, that much is certain. The question that only you can truly ask yourself is, who? Did the students decide to create some charade? For the fun of it? For fame? They didn’t achieve any, the story barely got out. Or is the reason that seemingly “military” types were involved almost instantly, liaising with the powers that be, because certain people know certain things, that the rest of us are not allowed to understand.

If you think time will reveal the answers naturally, that the truth will rise to the surface on it’s own accord, like cream, remember this event happened over half a century ago. Many of the eyewitnesses have spent their entire lives waiting to make sense of what they saw, like something would emerge from the woodwork and link the pieces together. That day, unfortunately, has yet to come. Unless something changes, something gives out, the secrets will remain secrets, dormant and unknown.

According to UFO-Hunters.com as of the year 2020, there are over 200220 sightings reported and that number expected to continue to grow as more people around the world continue to more avidly monitor and record the activity of the skies.

On April 25 of 1977, a patrol of 6 soldiers in the desert badlands wilderness of a remote area of Pampa Lluscuma, near Putre, Chile, were settled down in their camp at approximately 4:15 AM when something caught their attention in the star-flecked expanse of sky above. The men watched in awe as two very bright lights descended from the heavens, with one of them silently approaching close to the camp to show that it was a brightly lit violet oval of light with two pinpoints of red light at either end, and another of the objects sinking down behind some foothills in the near distance, its violet glow still visible frosting the hills. The remaining light apparently then dropped down to a low altitude and seemed to just roam about over the desert, casting everything in that spooky glow. The men at first cowered under emergency blankets, but it soon became clear that there was no impending danger, and that these lights were simply hovering over the landscape. And thus would begin one of the strangest UFO encounter reports to ever come out of the country of Chile.

At the time this whole light show was odd enough that they felt it was worth investigating, and the leader of the patrol, a Cpl. Armando Valdez volunteered to venture out towards where the unknown light had sunk behind the hills to check things out. Valdez checked that his weapon was loaded and ready, and trudged out across the parched, scrub infested moonscape towards the unknown as his men warily gazed out towards that eerie glow in the distance. Valdez would not be gone for long, stumbling back into the camp a mere 15 minutes later, but something was obviously very wrong with him. He looked haggard, worn out, wild-eyed, and most oddly of all seemed to have accrued several days of beard growth in just that short span of time, when he had been clean shaven just minutes before. The patrol leader seemed to have some trouble walking, and when he sat down he merely stared off into the distance in a trance-like state and cryptically mumbled “You don’t know who we are or where we come from but we will be back soon” before passing out. When the men searched him, they found that the watch Valdez had been wearing inexplicably showed that a full 5 days had gone by, even though he had only been gone a few minutes.

Valdez and his men

Valdez would awaken from his stupor at 7 AM, and oddly his watch seemed to be frozen in time, still stuck at exactly the same point it had been when he had returned to camp. He was more lucid this time, but try as he might he could remember nothing of what had happened to him after he had left that camp, much less why his watch and beard growth seemed to indicate that he had been gone for 5 days rather than 15 minutes. He would later say of his bizarre ordeal:

The surprising thing was the way it approached us. As soldiers we are trained to deal with any situation. But this phenomenon didn’t seem to have any logical explanation. I would like to regain my memory of those fifteen minutes. I would even like to submit to hypnosis to draw out information about what happened.

The case became a media sensation in Chile, but there was some effort made to stem the notoriety of it all, with Chilean President and Commander in Chief Augusto Pinochet eventually putting a ban on any further interviews with the witnesses, and it then sort of slipped into obscurity until some researchers began digging into the story again. Notably journalist and researcher Patricio Abuselme went about reopening investigations into this strange UFO encounter, interviewing witnesses and Valdez himself for his 2010 book La noche de los centinelas (The Night of the Sentries), which he spent nearly 8 years compiling after extensive digging around. Abuselme says of the project:

This is the case that made Chilean ufology known worldwide. However, no one bothered to conduct a serious, in-depth investigation of the case. I took up the challenge in 2002, and it took me eight years to compile the protagonists’ accounts and reassemble this “impossible story.”

When I started this investigation, I did so in the secret hope of explaining the whole case in conventional terms. And I thought I was well on the way until the main protagonist of the story debunked the cases most controversial aspects – the growth of his beard and the wristwatch’s date change – by providing conventional explanations. The problem is that when I tried to corroborate it with the other witnesses, they provided a version that was mutually congruent, but at odds with the one offered by Valdés. For this reason, the book poses a controversy. If someone is looking for a story of mystics in direct contact with Martians, he or she won’t find it here. What they will find is information, information and more information. The outcome of a detailed journalistic investigation that enables the reconstruction of an intriguing real case that captured headlines over 30 years ago.

Interestingly, it has come to light in recent years that the story has indeed changed somewhat, with Valdez coming forward on an interview with Terra.cl. to claim during his research for his own book on the matter titled The Shadow of the Truth, that in retrospect he knew that he was never really abducted by aliens at all, although the strangeness with the watch and the beard was all true. Wait, what? Valdez, by this time retired from the military, would give some shocking comments on the affair that had kept people on their toes looking for answers for decades. However, he far from writes it all off as a fiction, rather being very cryptic about what actually happened. He would say in this interview about his hypnotic regression and the insights he gained:

I’ve been fully involved in developing my book and furthermore, looking into my experience, since I wish to be as factual as possible in my story. Truly, I wasn’t abducted. This is the reason for sensitive nature of what I’m putting forth in the book. Some important background details are being released. Look, it’s really complicated to explain all of a sudden. That’s the reason behind my trip to Putre, my scientific studies and the book I’m writing, because it’s all very complicated. I would say that I knew immediately how things had happened. What I’m explaining in my book [is making known] the reasons for which certain items went off on another track. Indeed. I didn’t think at first that I’d been abducted, although the matter of the growth of beard is true, as well as the subject of my wristwatch. But for this reason I have taken to writing the book to explain the reasons behind all of these things.

My story and explanations have been accepted to a certain extent, and I have told them certain things and in a certain manner. There are many who hold points of view different from my own and I don’t have to deny that there are contradictions. But as I said, the story is mine and they have not influenced me at all regarding my book. In fact, there are those who may agree or not agree with my book tomorrow, and will not stop what I’m doing. There are mixed items. The term UFO today is contaminated by another type of thing, and I prefer to speak in terms of FANI (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). I think that in my experience there is a bit of everything–a good measure of paranormal phenomena, strange effects, lights, many things acting in unison and this is what I am showing in my book, although it’s been hard for me to convey on paper what I felt, what I experienced and what really happened.

It doesn’t make much sense to be honest, and making it even more confusing was an interview Valdez did with researcher Carlos Vergara, which was translated by Mexican UFO researcher Scott Corrales. It is a bit of a confrontational interview, with Valdez being typically cryptic and constantly plugging his book, and here is an excerpt:

– Were you abducted?

– In the context, I would say no…. In other words, had I been abducted, I would have been sucked up and taken by a spacecraft somewhere else. But I will make the truth known in my book.”

– Excuse me, Corporal Valdes. Cut the book talk and tell me something more solid.

– No, no, no. That’s not what its about. I’m not trying to promote myslef. All right, what do you want to know. Ask me and I’ll tell you.”

– Where the hell were you those fifteen minutes?

– I can tell you that I was always present and looking at my men. I even heard everything they said.

– So what’ll it be then? Were you abducted or not?

– I can’t tell you yes or no. I have a truth, but it’s a long story, son. The whole phenomenon must have transpired here on Earth. The truth is harder to explain than a lie. If I said that I went to another galaxy, it would be easier. This is harder to believe.

– I don’t believe you…

– You see? I only want to be at peace with myself. You want the truth? I was never abducted! But another phenomenon occurred.

– What phenomenon?

– Something very close to home, having to do with Earth. And it happened to me with a purpose I have just come to realize. I speak of future things in my book. They call it eschatology…

What in the world is he talking about? It seems in a sense that Valdez is just as confused about what happened as anyone else, and for all of this we are no closer to any real answers as to what he encountered out in that desert wilderness, if anything. was he abducted or not? What does he think really happened? What is the meaning of his beard growth, the weirdness with the watch, and the fact that five others all witnesses the UFOs that kicked off the whole thing? It is hard to say, but it is certainly known that Chile has been rather a hotbed of UFO sightings over the years, so it seems that there could be something genuinely strange going on here. As to what that might be is anyone’s guess, and the Valdez Chilean UFO Encounter remains just as enigmatic as it always has been.