Schoolyard witnesses in mass UFO sighting demand answers | Australian Story

0:07 The footy season had just started. Me and all my mates were out on the And all of a sudden, we all looked up and there's this object going slowly across the sky. I just shrieked, "There's a flying There's a flying saucer outside." And pupils just stood up and off they And it was just humming. It was just sitting there >> and humming. And I just I couldn't believe it. I was just transfixed cuz I'd never seen anything like that before. [music] It was amazing. And I thought, "No, it's not an airplane. No engines, nothing. It's just sitting above the power lines in the sky." I was mesmerized. I was just staring at them moving around. They were like [music] a shape of saucer and they flew. >> The significance of the Westall case is

1:10 the sheer volume of first-hand [music] eyewitnesses saying the same thing that they did 60 years ago. That's a very compelling case. What frustrates me and I think all the other pupils is the attempts of having it buried. Could we just find out what it was, please? That's all we want. This is what I saw. That's what I saw. You have all these elements to the Westall case that make it a true enigma and and a mystery 60 years later. And it it really just has so many

2:11 interesting and fantastical facets to it. Why not? Every year we have an anniversary at the Grange and most of us go. Hi, everybody. Thanks for being here. Great to see people. Keep coming. It's a chance for us all to get together and uh talk about, you know, what we experienced that day. [music] It's in my head. I can never leave it. I don't care what anyone says. I have one question. Were you there? And they all say, "No." Well, I was and so were all these other witnesses. What have we got to lie about? Nothing. We want an answer. >> A lot of the witnesses really felt like they had been restrained over the years from talking about the story. It was something that couldn't be shared, couldn't be talked about. So, I've sort of kept it under wraps for quite a while cuz you don't you fear of being ridiculed. They got the message very clearly from the school authorities that this was a story that was to stay

3:11 at Westall. We were just all told not to talk about it or we'd get detention. it's all rubbish. Some skeptics have suggested that what was responsible for Westall was just mass hysteria. I don't think it's something that be can be completely discounted, but it's clear they saw something. No matter what happens, I will never doubt what I saw. Of course something must have happened. It's just trying to find the most reasonable explanation without jumping to fantasy. Westall has been co-opted by the hardcore UFO believers as a classic case of alien visitation. Now, if aliens are visiting Earth, so be it. But great, you know, where are they? I hope what might come about from this 60th anniversary is some more official information. We'd all like to see that. In 1966, Westall was a fast-growing

4:11 community on the southeastern edge of To cope with the fast-growing population, there were two newly founded schools, Westall High School and the adjacent primary school. The Westall incident actually happened on the second last day of term. >> We were out in the field. I looked up into the sky and I saw a flying around in a very strange Kind of zigzagging. It was here one minute and then up there the next. That's when the commotion started. I was in science.

5:13 It was coming up to morning recess and [music] all of a sudden this student flung the door open and said, "Mr. Greenwood, Mr. Greenwood, there's flying saucers in the sky. There's things in the sky." And then just took off. Well, we just all looked at each other and started laughing [music] cuz we thought, "Oh yeah, right." And I can remember walking out there and [music] standing and just looking up and all of a sudden I saw them. It wasn't particularly high up, maybe 1,000 ft. Hard to know exactly. It was large, easily visible, circular, silver, and clearly under some sort of It wasn't a helicopter. It didn't have wings. It wasn't an It It was a flying disc, a a two-story kind of flying disc.

6:13 I saw three, but some saw two, some saw one. It depended on where you were in the school. And they moved incredible speeds. Straight up in the air and you'd look and they would be there. And you'd look again and there's one there and there's one over there and oh my god, then they're over the power lines. I was working on the market garden. My back was feeling a bit sore, so I stood up. And right in front of me there was this object in the sky. It was just there. As I was looking at it, the coloring changed becoming translucent at the same I I didn't believe it because it couldn't be happening. I saw what I saw and so did all my school friends, hundreds of us.

7:13 It was unidentified. It was flying and it was clearly an object. It wasn't a mirage. So, it got referred to as a UFO, an unidentified flying object cuz it met all those three criteria. A lady named Mrs. Robins, who was my science teacher, she came out with a camera and started taking photos. And all of a sudden all these little planes come flying through. We were used to planes because of being [music] so close to Moorabbin Airport. And anyway, they fly in and they get near the saucers. The saucer would just go straight up in the air and it was like they were playing cat and mouse with them, honestly. It was quite amazing to watch. A few of us girls were on the fence and we were crying thinking it was the end of the world. Total hysteria. It was just incredible. And then it it did a controlled descent down behind some pine trees. Now, the area was known to us kids as

8:15 the Grange and it was a few blocks behind the That's when a lot of the kids jumped the fence and took off. I was teaching English, three lessons straight, dying to get a cup of tea and a smoke. I met Andrew Greenwood coming in. And the first words he said to me, I think, were something like, "Did Did you see it? Did you see it?" I missed out on it by minute. So, that's exercised my imagination for the last 60 years. Andrew told me that the kids gone over the fence to follow the the flying saucer. He said it had landed beyond the I just ran in the direction of where this one appeared to go down. And there was this strange thing just sitting there hovering above the ground. Um quite big and I could hear a low

9:17 buzzing sound. I could see two other girls that had gotten there before me. One was crying and quite hysterical, actually, and the other girl was just on the ground. And then as I was literally staring at it, it started to rise up very slowly. And then when it turned on that when it was in on that angle, it could go really I never [music] saw the craft, the whatever you'd like to call it, on the But by the time I arrived at the spot, the grass was flattened. >> I walked around to the other side of the school and I noticed these two jeeps. The jeeps would have arrived, I reckon probably 10 minutes after the craft had disappeared. It was very quick. And then the men get out and they've got clipboards and whatever. Now, they're all in green uniforms.

10:19 But some of them were in camouflage. And then they jumped back in and took off and went obviously down to the There are people who very clearly remember there being a military I definitely had a line of sight. Yes, I saw everything that went on over there. One of the army guys came over and spoke to my boss. The guys all started looking at the ground, inspecting it. >> They had a little bit of trouble trying to get everybody back into class. It was later [music] that we had the assembly, the special assembly. >> Mr. Sampleby, the headmaster, dictated to all the students that what we saw was probably just a weather balloon. Right? And that we are not to talk to the press or anybody else about what

11:21 Okay? And that if we did we would get into real strife with him. It seemed quite a normal thing of headmaster who doesn't want to see his school running amok. No one would have wanted their school to the center of a UFO sighting. [music] I was taken by the principal to a little interview room where two gentlemen [music] were sitting. I was absolutely terrified. They [music] told me that what I had wasn't a balloon. Even at that young age, I disputed that That's when they changed their tactic. They intimated that we don't want this getting out there into the media. They They wore dark suits, white shirts,

12:23 >> and skinny ties. They made [music] me promise not to discuss it. I kept my [music] word to the point where I did not discuss it with my mother. I did not discuss it with >> When school finished, Channel 9 news team was out the front. And they were asking students if they'd be So we told them what we saw. And then this man appeared. He was a policeman. And he said to the cameraman and to the "You stop filming and you go away." We all watched the news at 6:00 and yeah, there I was pointing up into the sky telling us >> telling my story.

13:23 >> After the Westall incident, it kind of fell off the map, it went dark. It wasn't talked about until many, many, many decades later where some researchers, Australian researchers, started asking questions. I was particularly curious about the Westall story because hardly anything had been written about it. >> I presumed the story was, at least in part, urban legend. That there were elements of the story that had probably been embellished and added on to over time. But what I was interested in was, well, what was at the core of the story? There'd been a mushrooming of flying saucer clubs. Flying saucers were a big part of the culture when I was growing up. What do you think they are? They are real anyway. They come from the other There were stories about flying saucers on TV, in the movies, comics. It was something that was very much part of the zeitgeist at the time. In the past

14:25 decade, the mounting accumulation of evidence demands our attention. >> People see things all the time around the world. I mean, it's a global But to have a mass sighting in broad daylight, it's more rare, right? So, those, in my opinion, deserve a proper investigation, a deeper dive because what is it? Is it a mass hallucination? >> This is the science room. So this is the room you were enjoying? I've been in contact now with easily more than 200 people who were witnesses at Westall that day. This is what all started it all. >> Yeah, this is where it started. It's hard to know exactly how many people saw the UFO. But when I met Andrew Greenwood, the science teacher, who's now sadly passed away, he was very clear to me that when

15:27 he went out onto the sports ground with his class, that there was something like more than half the student body seeing what he was seeing. And that was more than 300 kids. I was standing beside Andrew, Andrew Greenwood. He sort of looked at me as if to say, "Don't run and don't jump the fence like somebody else we know." >> You lay it after we You'd already gone, I know. It's amazing to me that there is so much commonality across the witness testimonies. And this became very apparent to me very early on that people were and are telling the same story. So the big misconception is that we have good memories. We don't. Our brain reconstructs things, elaborates, forgets to include things. There's a very interesting thing when when people get together, there's a a group reinforcement of the common story. It's not malicious, it's just the way we

16:29 I desperately wanted to track down that original Channel 9 news footage which aired that night and which had interviews apparently with the And the film couldn't be found. It was an empty film canister. >> Lots of people have memories of photographs being taken. So I tried very hard to find those photos. But those photographs have never been seen in public. We don't know what became of them. But there was a possible other photo taken 4 days before on the 2nd of April that may have had some connection to what happened at Westall, taken by a man called James Kibble. James Kibble had never spoken in public, on TV before. So this is a print >> from the original photograph taken by James Kibble. This is his handwriting he

17:30 sent to me. This was taken just a few kilometers away prior to the landing at the school. >> James Fox, American filmmaker, was very interested in covering both the James Kibble story and the Westall story and the possible connections between the There was a tremendous flash of light and I looked up and I saw this object full but I had a Polaroid camera and I pulled this up, hit myself on the face, I took the picture and I took the photograph here. >> This is the original Polaroid. That's it. This is all there is. It looked like it was made out of some form of metal and it was engineered. And being an engineer, I was sure it was. And that's when I took the photograph and it tipped around like I could see the bottom and it looked like it was rotating to me. That was it and then after that it sort of gave a bounce >> and it rocketed away to the north very high speed. Can you describe the acceleration?

18:30 It was like almost instantaneous. Like it'd been shot out of a gun. Bang, you know. When I look at this photo, I think, "Wow, it's a great photo." But of course you can look at it and think, "Well, is that a bicycle bell? Is it a hubcap?" And I don't know. I know what James Kibble told me. I'm just not in a position to know, of course, one way or the other. >> Even though the news footage doesn't exist anymore, there are actually newspaper articles that date from that There was a very small article in The Age newspaper the following day. And it should be just here somewhere. There it is. It was tiny [music] and really didn't give any extra details except to [music] say

19:32 there'd been a weather balloon launched in Melbourne that morning. And [music] given the wind on that day, it's possible that the thing that was seen at Westall was that weather balloon. So that's a a weather balloon. It's definitely the wrong shape, isn't it? Yeah. It wasn't a weather balloon. It had some elements of the shape and color of a weather balloon and it was silver and and circular in looking up from underneath. But nothing hanging underneath it as a Now if we were to invoke the principle of Occam's razor, which basically says the simpler explanation is often the best one to choose, then the weather balloon is a very likely candidate. But that's not to write off and discount what they're saying. It's just not enough for us to make a proper There's no evidence that actually was a

20:33 weather balloon. There's no mention of the weather balloon being collected [music] and being identified. When I looked into the weather data for that day, it actually didn't stack up at all. The winds as [music] predicted and as reported actually blew in the opposite direction. The Dandenong Journal was the only newspaper that covered the story. For me, I found that really surprising. So this is the first article, but it was really in the follow-up article that [music] we got a little bit more information about what happened. There were some interviews with a couple of the kids and Andrew Greenwood, the science teacher. He never spoke about it again publicly until James Fox and I and others were able to encourage him to speak on camera for the first time. But he didn't want his face to appear. Two older men, one in uniform, asked for my description of what I had seen. I was then told that I hadn't seen anything, that um

21:34 I'd made it all up, possibly because I was drunk, and that they would have to report that fact to the education department and I would lose my job. I was told that I would be prosecuted and that I had to keep quiet about it. Why did I have to keep quiet? I I heard reports that he had been threatened and told that his reputation was on the line. He went very quiet. I think it cost him to say what he had to say. Others might have been more circumspect, we knew he had seen something. So many witnesses had seen five planes. >> In the Dandenong Journal's final article, they were going very hard trying to find the five pilots. The five [music] planes seem to be somehow connected to the UFOs. And they tried very hard to find those pilots, but never did.

22:38 Basically, the newspaper was saying the trail had gone cold. Nobody would talk to them. The school wouldn't talk. The Moorabbin Airport wouldn't talk and that they suspected that somebody had actually put pressure on the school. >> The fact that the story seemed to have been shut down by somebody would make me think it's more likely to have been military involvement or government involvement. Do you know like where it came from? Well, I wish I did. Did it look new or did it look like a little rusty? Well, I thought it was pretty new It was 1966. The Cold War was on. The space race was on. It was a time of rapid change. A day of wild excited scenes of welcome for President Johnson in Sydney. There were lots of theories for what had been [music] seen at Westall. 1966 was definitely a time of a very burgeoning relationship between

23:39 Australia and the United States. We believe that it is right that the strong should help the weak defend their freedom. Our alliance with the Americans was a particularly strong one and we had a something of a dependent dependence on each other, not only in terms of personnel, but also in of equipment. Melbourne as a city was a very busy place in terms of government research and development and not very far away from Westall, there was the government aircraft factories and the aeronautical research laboratories. Both of those places were trying to progress experimentation with different sorts of aircraft. The threat of nuclear attack was very much on people's minds.

24:41 There was a program called Highball and it was a cooperative program between the Australian government and the American government's atomic energy commission to send up these very large high altitude balloons to measure the presence of nuclear fallout. Some of those balloons got away. Did it happen that one of these sophisticated balloons drifted down to It could have. Why not? it would explain possibly the appearance of government officials at the school. There hasn't been any supporting evidence to confirm that hypothesis to date, but that's one that's been put forward. I had never heard of what had happened at Westall until a journalist approached

25:41 me and asked me as a as a historian and a researcher to see what I could find, particularly with my defense background. I don't really know, of course, what those three UFOs were. I have a high degree of confidence, however, that they were part of a research and development project which was underway in Australia. I personally believe it could have been a United States project which they were developing here in conjunction with us using our I am reasonably confident that what happened at Westall on that day was that something certainly went went wrong. That would account for the rapidity, incredible rapidity, of the troops, if I can call them that, who responded you know within the hour on that day. I don't discount that it could have been top secret military technology that was being tested or trialed and an operation

26:46 went uh not according to plan. But again, where's the evidence to support that? That's what we're trying to find. So I've submitted many many Freedom of Information Act requests trying to get some documentary evidence, but unfortunately, there has been no explanation provided by the Australian government or the Australian Department of Defense as to what was responsible for what was seen in the skies above Westall High School. I guess I'm lucky to have had the chance to see it, but you know, bit of a sliding doors moment. Didn't affect me in any way. You know, no one came and beamed me up. Certainly, there's ongoing interest in the story from people who were there cuz it's pretty unusual, I guess, looking back from 60 years later. >> It's okay to talk about it now. You know, saying, "Look, we saw something that was so different all those years At my age now, it doesn't matter if

27:46 somebody thinks that I'm a little bit loony. It It It has no relevance. I know what I saw. We're all telling the [music] truth. I know what I saw and you know, end of story. And I'm not accountable to anybody but myself. So where we are now is the UFO playground at The Grange. I actually suggested to the local council that it might be a good idea to put something here, some sort of commemoration of what had happened all those years ago. History is something that's really fragile. And so having something physical here then creates an opportunity for people who have come afterwards to know that something happened that day, something mysterious,

28:47 something real. And like all the witnesses who were here that day, I too just want to know if there's a truth [music] to be revealed, I think it's time to reveal it and I think we as the public can handle