LEIGH SALES, AUSTRALIAN STORY PRESENTER: Hello. 60 years ago, standing on the oval of a suburban Melbourne high school hundreds of students had an experience that remains one of the most intriguing mysteries in Australia’s history. They saw strange saucer-shaped objects zipping around the sky. No official explanation has ever been provided and of course there’s scepticism, but all these years on, the witnesses still want to know: what exactly did they see?
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: The footy season had just started, me and all my mates were out on the oval and all of a sudden, we all looked up and there’s this object going slowly across the sky.
TANIA VASSIE, WITNESS: I just shrieked, ‘There’s a flying saucer, there’s a flying saucer outside’, and pupils just stood up and off they went.
MARILYN SMITH, WITNESS: And it was just humming. It was just sitting there and humming, and I just, I couldn’t believe it.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: I was just transfixed because I’d never seen anything like that before. And it was amazing.
PAUL SMITH, WITNESS: And I thought, no, it’s not an aeroplane. No engines, nothing. It’s just sitting above the power lines in the sky.
TERRY PECK, WITNESS: I was mesmerised. I was just staring at them, moving around. They were like a shape of a saucer and they flew.
JAMES FOX, FILMMAKER & UFOLOGIST: The significance of the Westall case is the fact that there were so many people, the sheer volume of firsthand eyewitnesses saying the same thing 60 years later that they did 60 years ago. That’s a very compelling case.
TANIA VASSIE, WITNESS: What frustrates me, and I think all the other pupils is the attempt of having it buried. So, could we just find out what it was, please? That’s all we want.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: This is what I saw.
TERRY PECK, WITNESS: That’s what I saw.
GRANT LAVAC, WESTALL RESEARCHER: You have all these elements to the Westall case that make it a true enigma and a mystery, 60 years later. And it really just has so many interesting and fantastical facets to it.
(Gathering at The Grange)
Marilyn Smith addresses crowd: Hi everybody, thanks for being here, great to see people keep coming.
MARILYN SMITH, WITNESS: Every year we have an anniversary at the Grange and most of us go. It’s a chance for us all to get together and talk about what we experienced that day.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: It’s in my head. I can never leave it. I don’t care what anyone says about it. But 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.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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.
I’ve sort of kept it under wraps for quite a while because you don’t fear of being ridiculed.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: They got the message very clearly from the school authorities that this was a story that was to stay at Westall.
TERRY PECK, WITNESS: We were just all told not to talk about it or we’d get detention. It’s all rubbish.
GRANT LAVAC, WESTALL RESEARCHER: So some sceptics have suggested that what, what was responsible for Westall was just mass hysteria. I don’t think it’s something that can be completely discounted. But it’s clear they saw something.
RICHARD SAUNDERS, AUSTRALIAN SKEPTICS INC: 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.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: In 1966, Westall was a fast-growing community on the south-eastern edge of Melbourne. 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.
TEXT TITLE: April 6, 1966
TANIA VASSIE, WITNESS: We were out in the field. I looked up into the sky and I saw a disk flying around in a very strange movement. Kind of zigzagging. It was here one minute and then up there the next. That’s when the commotion started.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: I was in science. It was coming up to morning recess and 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 because we thought oh yeah, right. And I can remember walking out there and standing and looking up and just looking up and all of a sudden I saw them.
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: It wasn’t particularly high up, maybe one thousand feet, hard to know exactly. It was large, easily visible, circular, silver and clearly under some sort of control.
TANIA VASSIE, WITNESS: It wasn’t a helicopter. It didn’t have wings. It wasn’t an aircraft. It was a flying disc, a two-story kind of flying disc.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: 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.
PAUL SMITH, WITNESS: 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 colouring changed, becoming translucent at the same time. I didn’t believe it because it couldn’t be happening.
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: I saw what I saw, and so did all my school friends, hundreds of us. 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, because it met all those three criteria. A lady named Mrs Robins, she was my science teacher, she came out with a camera and started taking photos.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: And all of a sudden all these little planes come flying through. We were used to planes because of being so close to Moorabbin Airport. And anyway, they fly in and they get near the saucers. And the saucer would just go straight up in the air. It was like they were playing cat and mouse with them, honestly it was quite amazing to watch.
MARILYN SMITH, WITNESS: 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.
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: It did a controlled descent down behind some pine trees, now the area was known to us kids as the Grange. And it was a few blocks behind the school.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: That’s when a lot of the kids jumped the fence and took off.
CLAUDE MILLER, FORMER ENGLISH TEACHER, WESTALL HIGH SCHOOL (NOW SECONDARY COLLEGE): I was teaching English, three lessons straight, dying to get a cup of tea and to smoke and met Andrew Greenwood coming in. He was a science teacher. And the first words he said to me, I think was something like, ‘Did you see it, did you see it?’. I missed out on it by minutes. So that’s exercised my imagination for the last 60 years. Andrew told me that the kids had gone over the fence to follow the flying saucer. He said it had landed beyond the trees.
TERRY PECK, WITNESS: 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 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 on that angle, it could go really fast.
TANIA VASSIE, WITNESS: I never saw the craft the, whatever you’d like to call it, on the ground. By the time I arrived at the spot the grass was flattened.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: I walked around to the other side of the school and then I notice these two jeeps. The jeeps would have arrived, I reckon, probably 10 minutes after the craft had disappeared. It was very quick. And the men get out and they’ve got clipboards and whatever. Now they’re all in green uniforms but some of them were in camouflage and then they jump back in and took off and went obviously down to the Grange.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: There are people who very clearly remember there being a military presence.
PAUL SMITH, WITNESS: 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.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: They had a bit of trouble trying to get back everybody back into class. It was later that we had the assembly, the special assembly.
MARILYN SMITH, WITNESS: Mr Samblebe, the headmaster, dictated to all the students that what we saw was probably just a weather balloon, right, and that we’re not to talk to the press or anybody else about what happened ok and that if we did, we would get into real strife with him.
CLAUDE MILLER, FORMER ENGLISH TEACHER, WESTALL HIGH SCHOOL (NOW SECONDARY COLLEGE): It seemed quite a normal thing for a headmaster who doesn’t want to see his school running amok. No one would have wanted their school to be the centre of a UFO sighting.
TANIA VASSIE, WITNESS: I was taken by the principal to a little interview room where two gentlemen were seated. I was absolutely terrified. They told me that what I had witnessed, was it a balloon? Even at that young age, I disputed that fact. That’s when they changed their tactic. They intimated that we don’t want this getting out there into the media. They wore dark suits, white shirts and skinny ties. They made me promise not to discuss it. I kept my word to the point where I did not discuss it with my mother. I did not discuss it with anybody.
MARILYN SMITH, WITNESS: When school finished, a Channel nine news team was out the front. And they were asking students if they’d be interviewed. So we told them what we saw and then this man appeared.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: It was a policeman and he said to the cameraman and to the reporter, you stop filming and you go away. We all watched the news at six. And yeah, there I was, pointing up into the sky and telling us, telling my story.
GRANT LAVAC, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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 Australian researchers started asking questions.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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 what well was at the core of the story.
News story: There’s been a mushrooming of flying saucer clubs.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: Flying saucers were a big part of the culture when I was growing up.
News story: What do you think they are? They are real anyway, they come from other planets.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: There were stories on TV, movies, comics. It was something that was very much part of the zeitgeist at the time.
News story: In the past decade, the mounting accumulation of evidence demands our attention.
JAMES FOX, FILMMAKER AND UFOLOGIST: People see things all the time around the world. I mean, it’s a global phenomenon, but to have a mass sighting in broad daylight with hundreds of people it’s more rare, right. So those, in my opinion, deserve a proper investigation, a deeper dive because what was it, a mass hallucination?
Terry: This is the science room — this is the room you were in, Joy?
Joy: Yeah.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: I’ve been in contact now with easily more than 200 people who were witnesses at Westall that day.
Joy: This what started it all.
Terry: Yes, this is where it started.
JAMES FOX, FILMMAKER AND UFOLOGIST: It’s hard to know exactly how many people saw the UFOs, but when I met Andrew Greenwood, the science teacher who’s now sadly passed away, he was very clear to me that when 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.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: I was standing beside Andrew because he sort of looked at me as if to say, ‘Don’t run and don’t jump the fence like somebody else we know’.
TERRY PECK, WITNESS: It’s too late, I’d already gone — You’d already gone, I know.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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.
RICHARD SAUNDERS, AUSTRALIAN SKEPTICS INC: The big misconception is that we have good memories. We don’t. Our brain reconstructs things, elaborates, forgets to include things. And there’s a very interesting thing when people get together, there’s a group reinforcement of the common story, the common thread. It’s not malicious. It’s just the way we are.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: I desperately wanted to track down that original channel Nine news footage which apparently aired that night, and which had interviews with the witnesses. And the film couldn’t be found. It was an empty film cannister. Lots of people have memories of photographs being taken. So I tried very hard to find those photos and those photographs have never been seen in public. We don’t know what became of them. But there was a possible other photo taken four days before, on the 2nd of April that may have had some connection to what happened at Westall, taken by a man called James Kibel. James Kibel had never spoken in public on TV before.
JAMES FOX, FILMMAKER AND UFOLOGIST: So this is a print from the original photograph taken by James Kibel. This is his handwriting he sent to me. This was taken just a few kilometres away prior to the event, the landing at the school.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: James Fox, American filmmaker, was very interested in covering the Westall story and the possible connections between the two.
EXCERPT, PHENOMENON DOCUMENTARY, JAMES FOX:
James Kibel: This tremendous flash of light and I looked up and I saw this object and I pulled, I had a Polaroid camera, and I pulled this up and hit myself on the face. And I took the picture, and I got the photograph here.
This is the original polaroid?
That’s it, yeah.It looked like it was made out of some form of metal, and it was engineered. And being an engineer, I was sure that it was. And that’s when I took the photograph and it tipped around and I could see the bottom, and it looked like it was rotating to me. And that was it. And then after that, it sort of gave a bounce and it rocketed away to the north, very high speed.
James Fox: Can you describe the acceleration?
Mr Greenwood: It was like almost instantaneous, like it had been shot out of a gun, wham, you know.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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 from the handlebars of a bicycle? Is it a hubcap? And I don’t know. I know what James Kibel told me. And 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 time.There was a very small article in The Age newspaper the following day. It was tiny and really didn’t give any extra details except to say that, uh, there’d been a weather balloon launched in Melbourne that morning and given the wind on that day, it’s possible that the thing that was seen at Westall was that weather balloon.
TERRY PECK AND JOY CLARKE, WITNESSES: So that’s a balloon. It’s definitely the wrong shape, isn’t it? Yeah.
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: It wasn’t a weather balloon. It had some elements of the shape and colour of a weather balloon, and it was silver and circular in looking up from underneath, but nothing hanging underneath it as a payload.
RICHARD SAUNDERS, AUSTRALIAN SKEPTICS INC: 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 conclusion.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: There’s no evidence that it actually was a weather balloon. There’s no mention of the weather balloon being collected and being identified. When I looked into the weather data for that day it actually didn’t stack up at all. The winds, as predicted and as reported, actually blew in the opposite direction.
The Dandenong Journal was the only newspaper that covered this story. For me I found that surprising. So this is the first article, but it was really in the follow up article that 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. And 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.
EXCERPT, PHENOMENON DOCUMENTARY, JAMES FOX:
ANDREW GREENWOOD, FORMER SCIENCE TEACHER, WESTALL HIGH SCHOOL (NOW SECONDARY COLLEGE): 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 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. After that, I was told that I would be prosecuted and that I had to keep quiet about it. Why did I have to keep quiet?
CLAUDE MILLER, FORMER ENGLISH TEACHER, WESTALL HIGH SCHOOL (NOW SECONDARY COLLEGE): 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. But we knew he had seen something.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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 that seemed to somehow be connected to the UFOs. And they tried very hard to find those pilots, but never did. Basically, the columnist and the newspaper were saying the trail had gone cold. Nobody would talk to them. The school wouldn’t talk, the Moorabbin airport wouldn’t talk. They suspected that somebody had actually put pressure on the school.
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: 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.
Grandchild: Do you, like, know where it came from?
Ken: Well, I wish I did.
Grandchild: Was it new or did it look like old and rusty?
Ken: Well, I thought it was pretty new looking.
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: It was 1966, the Cold War was on. The space race was on. It was a time of rapid change. I thought it was something scientific, technological.
ABC news, 1966, reporter: A day of wild excited scenes of welcome for President Johnson of ticker tape.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: There were lots of theories for what had been seen at Westall. 1966 was definitely a time of a very burgeoning relationship between Australia and the United States.
ABC news, 1966, Lyndon B Johnson, US President: We believe it is right that the strong should help the weak to defend their freedom.
LT CL NEIL SMITH (RTD), MILITARY HISTORIAN: Our alliance with the Americans was a particularly strong one, and we had something of a dependence, dependence on each other, not only in terms of personnel, but also of equipment.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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. So both of those places were trying to progress experimentation with different sorts of aircraft.
The threat of nuclear attack was very much on peoples’ minds. There was a program called HIBAL 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 that were devised to measure again the presence of nuclear fallout.
RICHARD SAUNDERS, AUSTRALIAN SKEPTICS INC: Some of those balloons got away. Did it happen that one of these sophisticated balloons drifted down to Melbourne? It could have. Why not? It would explain possibly the appearance of government officials at the school.
GRANT LAVAC, WESTALL RESEARCHER: There hasn’t been any supporting evidence to confirm that hypothesis to date, but that’s one that’s been put forward.
LT CL NEIL SMITH (RTD), MILITARY HISTORIAN: I had never heard of what had happened at Westall until a journalist approached me and asked me as a as a historian and a researcher, to see what I could find, particularly with my defence 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 expertise.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 within the hour on that day.
GRANT LAVAC, WESTALL RESEARCHER: I don’t discount that it could have been top secret military technology that was being tested or trialled, and an operation went not according to plan, but again, where’s the evidence to support that? That’s what we’re trying to find. I’ve submitted many, many Freedom of information requests over the years, trying to get some documentary evidence.Unfortunately there has been no explanation by the Australian government or the Australian Department of Defence as to what was seen in the skies above Westall High School.
KEN STALLARD, WITNESS: 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 weren’t there because it’s pretty unusual, I guess, looking back from 60 years later.
TANIA VASSIE, WITNESS: It’s okay to talk about it now. You know, saying, look, we saw something that was so different all those years ago. At my age now, it doesn’t matter if somebody thinks that I’m a little bit loony. It has no relevance. I know what I saw.
JOY CLARKE, WITNESS: We’re all telling the truth, we don’t make anything out of this. I know what I saw and, you know, end of story. And I’m not accountable to anybody but myself.
SHANE RYAN, WESTALL RESEARCHER: 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, something real. And like all the witnesses who were here that day, I too just want to know if there’s a truth to be revealed, I think it’s time to reveal it. And I think we as the public can handle it.