Westall, Australia 1966: Hundreds Witness a UFO in a Schoolyard

On a clear autumn morning in Melbourne on Wednesday 6 April 1966, the day was like any other for students at Westall High School in the suburb of Clayton South. Around 11 am, as morning recess was starting, groups of students were on the oval finishing up sports activities while others were in classrooms. Everything was routine until a girl suddenly ran into a Year 9 science class and shouted that there was something unusual in the sky. A young science teacher ran out with the students and looked up. That moment would be the start of one of Australia’s most talked-about unexplained sightings.

The first thing people noticed in the sky was a strange object that did not look like any normal plane or balloon. Witnesses described it as a disc-shaped craft with a smooth, metallic surface, roughly the size of two or three cars. Some said it was silvery or silver-grey, others remembered a slight purple tint in the sunlight. It hovered low in the sky quietly, without the sound you would expect from engines. Some said it appeared to tilt or change shape slightly as it hovered.

As more students poured out onto the school grounds to see what was happening, the object slowly moved across the sky toward a wooded area known locally as The Grange, a field with a row of tall pine trees just south of the school and near the Westall State School. Witnesses saw it disappear behind the trees, and excitement spread as hundreds of people ran to follow it or get a closer look.

The crowd included not just students but teachers and a few nearby residents. Some witnesses reported that while the main object descended behind the trees, up to five small light aircraft appeared and seemed to circle or chase the unknown object while it was in view. Whether they were truly chasing it or just nearby was debated, but many onlookers distinctly remembered the planes doing loops around the craft before it vanished.

For about twenty minutes in total people watched the strange aerial visitor. After hovering near the ground and behind the trees, the object rose suddenly toward the northwest and quickly disappeared from sight, leaving whispers and shouted questions in its wake. Those who had run toward The Grange reported seeing the grass where it had been pressed flat, flattened so evenly it looked unnatural. Some said the grass seemed scorched, others simply saw a perfect circle of pressed down grass.

Off the school grounds, a few non-students also saw something unusual that morning. A young man named Shaun Matthews, who was on school holiday at the time and spending the morning in The Grange area, said he saw the object as it crossed the horizon before it dipped behind the tree line.

After the sighting, things took a curious turn. Within days uniformed men believed by some witnesses to be from the Army or the Royal Australian Air Force were seen at the site. Eyewitnesses said they watched as soil was taken away from the supposed landing area, and later the field was burned, either by officials or the farmer who owned the property, to keep people from entering. Local police were also present in the days that followed, and the local newspaper, The Dandenong Journal, ran front-page stories about the sightings in its issues on 14 and 21 April 1966.

But despite all this, the official line from the school that same day was oddly dismissive. The principal called an assembly and told students and staff that they had not seen anything unusual at all and not to discuss it. Parents who spoke to their children were told the same thing, and many witnesses felt that they were being quietly instructed to keep silent about what they saw. Some years later, one of the teachers who witnessed the event, Andrew Greenwood, made public statements about the sighting and said he believed the object was not just a normal aircraft or balloon, and that he had been urged to drop the subject by people he believed were from official channels.

Over the decades the story has grown in the telling, with reunions of those who saw it, documentaries made about the incident, and even calls for a fresh government inquiry. Skeptics have suggested mundane explanations, such as a misidentified high-altitude balloon being tracked by light aircraft, but supporters of the UFO interpretation say that with over 200 witnesses and physical marks on the ground, what happened that day remains unexplained and deserves further study.

Today the Westall UFO sighting stands as one of the most famous mass sightings in Australian history, remembered not just for the unusual object in the sky but for how a quiet suburban schoolyard turned into the setting for something that many who saw it still find impossible to explain.

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