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now. Yeah wow, Well, welcome to episode forty three, Ladies and
gentlemen of Down souths Anomalies for the one and only Untold Radio Network. Of
course, my name is Jay Katz and with me as my beautiful wife Aspasia.
And before we start with our profound guest today, someone we've been trying,
we've working on, we've been dripping water on the head of to get
onto this program. And we are so excited because this gentleman is up there
with John Mack and Richard Dolan, so centered as the most correct moral compass,
and is so calm in his approach to research. It is profound,
that is Shane Ryan. But before we start, we must always say that
we are broadcasting on stolen land. We much appreciate and respect our indigenous culture.
It is the Gatigal people of the Order nation, and we are to
acknowledge Elder's past, present and emerging and why wouldn't you say yes? And
our guest tonight is a teacher, researcher, writer, lecturer, and he
is a parliamentary public servant. He is the lead investigator for one of the
most profound UFO cases in the world, just not the continent. It is
one of the largest eyewitness cases to do with school guards that you could ever
imagine. And we are really humbled and very grateful to have this gentleman with
us. So welcome to down South. Anomally is Shane Ryan. Thank you.
I feel like I can almost leave now. That was such a wonderful
introduction. Thank you so much, as Pascia and Jamie. And I'm coming
to you from the lands of the Nunawall and the Nyambre people's here in Canberra,
and I pay my respects to their eldest past, prison and emerging as
well. And I'm feeling pretty centered, pretty relaxed. I've got my Ukrainian
vodka here master Razing masquerading as Canberra Water Cambra Water. But anyway, I
love you for that statement. That statement is absolutely brilliantly profound jee wiz.
I mean, what do you do as a parliamentary public servant? I'm sure
lots of people would be very cure is to what that role is. Well,
you know, when I was growing up in Shepherd and in Northern Victoria,
way back in the nineteen seventies, I never really imagine that I'd end
up living in Canberra and working in Australia's Parliament House. It didn't exist,
of course in Canberra at that point, not New Parliament House. It was
Old Parliament House when I was a kid. And New Parliament House of course
opened in Australia's bi centennial a year in nineteen eighty eight, and I think
I was probably still at UNI at that point. But anyway, years later
I found myself, as some people sometimes do, ending up living in Canberra
and working at Parliament House. And I work in the area of education and
visitor Services. So it's my job to be one of the happy, smiling,
welcoming, lovely friendly staff at Parliament and we work with all of the
visitors who come in the literally hundreds and thousands of school children. The VIPs,
well everyone's a VIP of course, but sometimes people are technically and officially
VIPs in terms of visitors from embassies and overseas, parliaments and the general public.
And we try to inform and teach people, educate people about Parliament,
how we do democracy in Australia, how the parliamentary processes work when they do
work, which hopefully is most of the time. And it's a privilege to
work in such a place and to live in this beautiful city of Canberra.
You must have met some astounding people, you know. That must be a
very life affirming job, especially when you've got children going into Parliament House it
would be so exciting. And you spoke before to us about the fact that
you had done some teaching with children, so it's a really your wife to
us as well. It's a really found profession. It is very important.
It is so important, you know, Shane. It's an odd thing,
the Westall case, and I know you probably said it a thousand times before,
but for our audience at listening and viewing, I'll get you to run
through the basics about that case. But when I was going to school at
our harm and public school, and I'm very curious if you've had any knowledge
of this there was an incident in my public school that only sort of triggered
me years later into remembering. And we had a couple of football fields adjacent
to the schoolyard. It was lunchtime and all the children were running towards the
paling fence. Now I know really became aware of the absolute, devastatingly incredible
case the westall is. I saw Rosie Jones's documentary. Of course she contacted
us before that because of our film collection that we've got to see if we
had any footage, And I was aware the Bill had made mention of it
in the Odds Files. But it hit me so hard that documentary because it
took me back to this moment where at lunchtime we all raced to those paling
fence with the support beams, and we stood on the support beam and looked
over and in the adjacent field was this large white ball that we were told
later was a weather balloon, but it was hovering way too low and my
memory way too long. It was there for the entire lunchtime, and was
still there when we're all called back into class, And my memory is very
blue because it becomes a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory,
and it didn't appear to be your ordinary weather balloon, and it appeared
to have some form of like windows or portals, and I was confused about
that. So the point that it started me going to the library, now
I must have been between ten eleven years of age. It was coming in
my final years at primary school. And when I started looking at UFO literature,
it astounded me that this was not just a science fiction motif, that
there were credential people throughout the world that were drawn to investigate this subject.
And I think that was the moment that this subject became predominant in my life
and led to a path of research and lecturing and speaking about it. Now,
you had actually mentioned, you know, that incident at school to me
when we first met. Yeah, yeah, so it wasn't so it was
like we met in late eighties, nine ninety and you know, one of
the first things when we did start talking about, you know, UFO is
the subject of UFOs. You know, Jamie did recant that story to me
about having seen something at the school, you know, but he he always
asked every time he meets up with someone from his school days back then,
he always asks them and nobody has ever There was one person, but I
can't even remember who that person was. Yeah, but it's just yeah,
And it's not that it's troubled me, but it's your film, Rosie Jones,
is astounding documentary because I believe that is one of probably the most important
uphological documentary has ever made, so beautifully done and from an Australian childhood the
end of the Baby Boomers. I mean, just the animation takes you back
there, even if it's not about investigating this found case. As a time
capsule on life in Australia as an adolescent in the sixties. It is really
touching. And I've spoken to many other people film historians like Richard Kuiper's the
only Australian variety journalist who was the original producer of Margaret and David. He
felt the same way. It took him straight back to his childhood and his
youth at school. So I can't thank you and Rosie enough for an extraordinary
experience and a brilliant documentary. And I believe that documentary was not easy and
just coming to the final point of my rant there, I'm astounded when I
go up and look on ubiquitous sites like Wikipedia, that there's no mention of
view as a researcher when it comes to this case, and there's not even
a link to Rosie's documentary who wrote that, Well, who are the gatekeepers
of Wikipedia? We've got to find out about Wiki. But I wanted to
make that statement to you that that film, to me, will outlive us
all. It has incredible resonance, and it is a fascinating time capsule on
our lives, and just emotionally that notion at school where you sort of should
I jump over the fence and really look at this or am I doing something
wrong? And then that also the powable authority to tell you that you don't
know what you saw, what you experience. Have you ever been made aware
of a case at our time in public school in the sixties, Well,
I have now, and I'm absolutely and I'm really interested to hear more about
it. But it's interesting because in the course of my research, since west
Or sixty six, a suburban UFO mystery Rosie Jones documentary that you've just talked
about came out in twenty ten, I've been contacted by literally dozens and dozens
and dozens of people with their own UFO sightings from over the years in Australia,
and a good chunk of those have been school based sightings. People contacting
me and saying I've seen something on TV or on line about Westall, but
did you know about this one? And of course it's usually the case that
I knew nothing about that one. And at the moment, I've actually got
a list here of some of those schools school sightings that people have talked to
me about have shared with me, and it's ten schools, not counting Westall,
just in Victoria alone, and four other schools in South Australia and now
one school in Sydney and New South Wales called our Taman that people have mentioned
to me, and to varying degrees, I've tried to chase up information about
some of those. There's one in particular, killer that just came onto my
desk in the last power month also was not Oh hang on, yeah,
just keep going. What's happened? Is Jamie? Okay? Yeah, yeah,
yeah, she's just realized that our our is not plugged in properly coming
and if we lose you just hang there because we'll come back. Okay.
So so right here, where is it. Have you got it? Okay?
Okay, whoa okay? That we did that once another time our it
wasn't the power point wasn't plugged dead and we lost power. It's given me
a bit of hairstyle doing that. How to she fear I'm sorry about.
We were actually holding together our our palette then it all fell the bits on
it. My apologies. Can we resume? Yea, No, It's a
good analogy for human life and how we all are all just hanging in there.
That's right. But I was saying that. Just in the last couple
of months, our new case has come onto my desk. Somebody contacted me
saying, I've read about the Westerll case, but do you know about this
case? Another case. It happened in Melbourne in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne
at a place called Bennett's Wood in the suburb of Burwood, around the same
time as Westall nineteen sixty six or so. With so many elements in the
story that are common to what happened at Westall that it makes one wonder what
on earth was going on in those years. Was there something objectively happening that
people were seeing that links all of these different cases together or is it more
a comment on the subjects themselves, not the subjects in terms of what was
being seen, but what was doing the seeing, what was doing the looking,
And of course I'm talking about us, the people, the witnesses.
And I like your comments about Rosie's documentary because I mean, I'm in the
documentary obviously, and I'm one of the subjects of the film. But I
didn't know what Rosie's documentary was going to be like until it was made and
then she she shared it with me before it was broadcast on TV in twenty
ten, and I like you, I mean, in a way, the
UFO subject is obviously the subject of that documentary, but it's almost tangential to
the other subjects in that film, which are the time, the era,
the way that society was working, the way that authority work, the way
that Melbourne, Australia looked in nineteen sixty six, the music, the landscape,
the vehicles. And when I saw Rosie Jones finished film as well,
it took me back as well to that era. And I have a really
strong interest in local history, Australian history, and for me very much,
my whole research project around Westall has been very much a local history project.
It's about that oral history, capturing that oral tradition before it's completely lost to
the sands of time. And particularly with a UFO story, often very little
of a UFO story is preserved. Very little is recorded in the newspaper on
TV. Nothing official is often findable about a UFO incident. But the real
what's the word, the flavor, the tenor the the really delicious elements of
the story, of course live in will live on in people's memories. And
that's why I find talking to people recording their memories, recording their experiences,
their emotions, their emotional reaction to what happened at the time, their emotional
reactions to it. Now, that's really important stuff. And I feel like
I've been in a very privileged position to play a small pardon in doing that.
Well, I don't think. I think you're an extremely humble researcher,
and you're meticulous and integrious, and I don't think that that documentary would have
worked without both of you. You carry and guide the listener in the view
through that film so calmly, so patiently, that no matter who you are
or how you're approaching this subject, you have to keep an open mind.
One of the most astounding things for me is that it starts when you're speaking
about your own children as a parent, and it's really important, you know,
how do we judge the credibility of these stories? And nine times out
of ten in the public arena, it's based on supposedly the integrity of the
witness But I really believe that up there with all the technological get gadgets of
an F eighteen super Hornet pilot, that you couldn't get more honest witnesses than
children. Now, people that haven't had children might not agree with that,
but children have no veneer. There's no reason for them to lie. They
have extraordinary imaginations. But when they state something to you that has affected them
emotionally, nine times out of ten they are telling you the truth. And
these are not just single children witnesses. These are multiple witnesses in their hundred
and then backed up in the arena of authority, and authority, especially in
the sixties, always had a tenure of fear embraced around it. That's the
way, that's the system we came from. And as you've stated in the
documentary, in that time it was an extremely English tempered Australian regime which was
very dry and very austerem so children, you know, are not going to
be swayed to saying something that they don't know. But what I think you've
done there is offering witnesses a sense of catharsis and conformation. So it's more
than a documentary to me. It is not just a brilliant time capsule.
It is extraordinary therapy where a community comes together the hell over something that's difficult
to explain and has been ridiculed in the outside world. So congratulations to both
of you. I don't think that documentary would have resonated if it was just
one of you. I think it's in and I mean she's a great documentary
maker on the Cult of the Family and so many other things she's done.
But you both seem to have found an extraordinary chemistry to tell the truth of
this tale, this profound story. Thank you for saying that. I really
appreciate those kind words. And you know, Rosie Jones has a new film
at the moment that's screening is part of the Melbourne International Film Festival called A
Babe The Butterfly Song, where she's explored this interaction between an Australian music maker,
musician and the pup New Guinean one, and it's screening at the moment
in Melbourne as part of that festival. But Rosie has done so much beautiful
work over the years. You mentioned the Cult of the Family and the Triangle
Wars. Before she did westvill sixty six, she did my personal favorite,
the Visions of Yanka Lilla looking at this Anglican church in country South Australia where
the Anglican priest and parishioners discovered what they interpreted as a vision and imprint of
the Mother of Jesus Mary on the wall above the altar in the church.
That was a wonderful telling of that story, you know, however you approached
the reality of the subject matter. It was a beautiful retelling of that story
and the personalities involved. And I think, of course Rosie did something similar
with the west Or story. And you know, I don't know if people
outside of the field of film and television would realize that being a documentarian is
probably the most unrewarding, financially and difficult tapestry you could paint on in the
world of the film. And I believe it took Rosie quite a bit of
time. When she phoned us, it sounded like the production had actually been
going on for quite a long time. Can you tell us what led up
to it and the difficulties? Now, how long that did take for that
thing to actually be shot and completed? Well, Rosie first approached to me,
it was back in two thousand and five, I think from memory,
And what had happened was in two thousand and five, I was having a
bit of a one of my first of many midlife crises, and I was
in between jobs, I think, and I was studying at the time,
and I was working on an idea of writing a book for kids, a
book based on some sort of story that would be really appealing to young adults.
And I remembered this story that I had heard about years before, that
was the Westill Flying Source of Story, and I thought, well, maybe
I'll look into that, because I remember that it was a story that was
based around two schools, had lots of kids as its protagonists, if you
like, and had that sort of science fiction mystery elements to it, and
I thought it would be appealing to young adult and so I started doing some
research into the topic. I got some local media coverage in some local newspapers
in and around Clayton in Melbourne, where Westill is located, and that led
to people contacting me, and it eventually led to a rather large page three
article in the Sunday Age newspaper in Melbourne written by the Science editor of all
People, and it was his take on the story my research into it.
Rosie Jones, of course, being an avid reader of the Age, saw
the story, contacted me, flew up to Canberra from Melbourne. We actually
met at the National Film and Sound Archive around all that wonderful history and heritage,
the Art Deco building the library there, and we talked and she explored
my interest in the story, what I knew about the story, why I
was interested in it, what I wanted to do with it in terms of
my research. She went back to Melbourne and a couple of weeks later contacted
me and said, Shane, are you up for getting involved in the mad,
crazy, cashless world of making a documentary? And she wanted me to
know from the very beginning there'd be no money involved. I wouldn't be being
paid. She didn't think she'd end up making any money, and I'm sure
that's absolutely true, and it ended up being this enormous four year effort for
her and I guess a shoestring budget, borrowing money as all filmmakers do from
various film funders Victorian and Australian, and a lot of hard work and an
enormous amount of time and effort on Rosie's part personal effort. It involved people
wonderful, people like Peter Zakharov as the cinematographer, Mark Tarpey as the sound
recordist. A Carmel mac Alarne was the producer, and Rosie, like me,
got hooked onto the story, obviously the UFO element of the story,
but the human elements of the story as we together met these witnesses, witness
after witness after witness, very down to earth people who had had this profound
experience as children or young adults. Some of the witnesses, of course,
were young adults in their twenties, such as the science teacher Andrew Greenwood and
some of the other people living locally around the schools. And Rosie, liked
me, I think, very quickly realized that whatever was the provenance behind what
had happened at Westall, whatever the truth of it was, something had happened,
and it was something quite unusual, beyond unusual, really, and that
it was something that really had a lasting effect on many of the people who
were there. And one of the elements that Rosie was interested in was one
that I was personally interested in, was why that there had to be from
the beginning and still now after all of these years, silence. Why there
had to be covering up of the story. Why there had to be a
certain amount of pressure apply to the people who were there to keep what had
happened at Westall at Westall and to not let it be known beyond the confines
of that time and that place. And that intrigued me and intrigued Rosie.
I guess I had enough irishness in myself to really react against that and to
want to get to the truth of what had happened and why I couldn't be
talked about all these years later. You know, That's one of the odd
issues here is I was astounded that this case had been silent for so many
years. In many ways, it's allegorious to Roswell and the fact that there
were decades that went past when no one spoke about this being so such a
mass eyewitness case and affecting so many different demographics in age and across the beams
there with science teachers and all of a sudden this thing was silent to really
that documentary and Rosie brought it back to life. You both brought it back
to life again and it's a really really important case. And we're seeing people
like James Fox now with the arial school case in Zimbabwe and just and the
incredible strength of the students against all odds. I mean again, it says
to me, like our soccer team last night, no matter what, you
just keep pushing forward. And some of those young girls were so tenacious and
pragmatic in the fact that they saw what they saw, matter what was brought
down on them, they weren't changing their story. That is so life affirming.
Yes, and I think picking up on that theme of the Matilda's in
the FIFA Women's World Cup for the soccer and that terrible result that we all
saw last night, not really terrible because look when they had already been victors,
but we would like to have beaten our old friends, the English of
course in the soccer. But it's a new beginning for women's soccer and sports
generally, I think in Australia, and we've all loved watching that festival.
But you know, I think the Matilda's theme for me is the Australian element
as it relates to what happened at Westall. But sometimes I talk about the
Three Rs when it comes to UFO stories, and what I mean is Roswell,
Randallsham and Ruar, those three great cases from three different countries from different
years America, England, Zimbabwe, and they all continue into this very moment
that we're sitting in now as enduring mysteries, even after all of these years,
with all the witnesses that were involved in those three cases, and those
three cases are emblematic for lots of others of course, thousands and thousands that
have happened over the years, they still remain unsold. They still remain stubbornly
mysterious, all even after all the energy and the time and the money and
exposure that's gone into them. And Westall is quickly I think joining that league.
I pulife, But as an Australian I remember thinking when I started my
research, I didn't want a UFO incident in Australia to end up like one
of these others in these other countries like America or Britain, or Zimbabwe or
Canada. For me, reflecting on it as an Australian, I wanted to
think, no, if something like this happens in Australia, we are a
society that's open enough, tolerant enough, honest enough, and casual enough and
laid back enough, but we would be able to get to the truth about
something like this happening, and that hopefully the Australian authorities, your Australian government,
intelligence and military circles, would also be open enough to actually enable someone
like myself or someone else to get to the truth of the matter. Unfortunately,
that hasn't yet happened. So in that sense, Wester really has joined
the league of all those other cases. And will it remain so forever I
hope not. I think as a researcher, particularly in a field like UFOs,
you have to be the eternal optimist. You have to think that your
efforts and the efforts of others is actually making however incrementally it's making a difference,
and that by chipping away at whatever the stone is that we're chipping away
at, eventually the stone will crack and crumble, and we'll all discover the
truth and whatever the truth is at the end, we'll be able to cope
with it, hopefully one way or the other. I think in many ways
you have already made an extraordinary impact. And that's like in the statements for
myself to you today. We don't realize, you know how much we've affected
people's lives with a piece of media like this that can be cathartic and can
actually help people. One of the reasons why we got involved we both had
a therapeutic background working with people who have been heavily institutionalized. And I had
an experimental band with people on the spectrum that couldn't play. We couldn't even
turn their cassios on in their nursing homes, and I thought, the only
power I can give them this amplification and let's embrace some realism and no one
will question it. But it's that thing of being able to release. We
all need to be able to release, especially something that troubles us. And
we were shocked at the amount of post traumatic stress and post traumatic stress disorder
from people that witness these things, because how do you integrate this back into
your day to day life. How do you live for an incident like Westville
and then Westall excuse me, and then get up and go to school the
next day. It's sort of your consensus reality has collapsed, and it brings
everything into question about what we're led to believe is the three dimensional world we
live in. And before we go any further, I'm sorry about these bold
statements, but I'm just so excited to be talking to you. Can I
just get you to lay out what the Westall case was about. You have
some people in the States that watch our show and people listening to on audio
videos, So I'll just get you to do that what you've probably done a
thousand times before you become the rock star of Westall. Just keep going back
to your hits. That's right, the best hits, favorite hits, the
only hits. Well, look, I don't mind doing it at all because
every time I tell the story and retell the story, and hopefully I do
it in a way that's correct and fair, and I remind myself of the
elements of the story as well, and it helps me to remember all of
those parts of the story. And of course I do it in a way
that's imperfect. I do it in a way that's not without errors, because
it's obviously a huge jigsaw puzzle, and my job as the researcher as I
see this, to try to put those pieces of the puzzle together in a
way that creates some sort of coherence, but knowing that I will be always
doing it in a way that's not perfect because of the role of memory and
the passage of time, and we all have our biases and I'm no different
from anybody else. However, something extraordinary actually did happen once upon a time
in a place called Westall, within the community of the suburb of Clayton South,
which is about twenty one kilometers southwest of the Melbourne Central Business District,
and at that time, in nineteen sixty six Westall, and there's a lovely
map of Melbourne, which was my home for a while when I moved from
Shepperdon to Melbourne Together University, which is when I first really stumbled across the
west Or story. But west All at that point in time was very much
on the edge of suburbia. It was partly urbanized, partly still very rural.
Lots of market gardens industry was just beginning to take place, the main
residential areas of that suburb still hadn't been laid out, and there were two
schools at the heart of Westall, a primary school called Westall State School and
next door on the same block of land, but a different school, a
secondary school called Westall High School. And on the sixth of April in nineteen
sixty six, which was the second last day of term one, so the
very next day was going to be the last day of school for both schools,
and then it was going to be the Easter holidays and the term break
between term one and term two, so about two weeks of holidays. But
on that second last day, at around ten to fifteen in the morning,
two groups of kids were out on the playing field at Westall High School.
Another group kids were already on recess at the neighboring primary school when something literally
out of the blue flew into their lives, into their airspace, and a
large number of the kids, of course saw it was right in front of
them. Many of the kids not all remember seeing three what they described as
flying sauces, And that's why I often refer to it as the flying saucer
incident, because that's how it was described that's how it was perceived. So
one to three objects supposedly apparently solid, metallic looking silver gray in color,
like a bowl, sitting on top of another bowl or saucer, something of
a dome or a protuberance on top of the upper part of that object,
silent or virtually silent, flying in and then doing the most amazing maneuvers in
the sky, amazing in terms of angles of flight, in terms of speed,
in terms of the lack of noise, and visually astound there because the
shape bore absolutely no resemblance to any known aircraft. And these kids and the
adults knew planes really well because the busiest airport in the Southern Hemisphere civil airport
at that time, was often referred to as the one near the school,
a place called Morabin Airport, and it was only about five or six kilometers
away, and the kids were constantly seeing small aircraft like Cessna's or Piper cubs
doing their training runs over and around the sky above the schools. So they
knew planes well, and they knew that what they were seeing, these objects
were nothing like those planes. And at some point many of the witnesses recall
five what were obviously light aircraft like Cessna's appearing, and it looked as though
the five light aircraft we're trying to chase or track down these UFOs, and
as the light aircraft will get close to the UFO, the UFO would just
fly away at great speed. A lot of the witnesses talked about looking up
the flying saucer as if it was in the sky at one point, and
then suddenly, within a second or two was on the other side of the
sky, as if as if it had blinked off and blinked on again.
That was how it looked to them, And doing all of these maneuvers again
without any sound or very little sound that they could perceive, and again looking
at them visually, nothing about the objects appeared to have any attributes that you
would normally associate with an aircraft. So there were no wings, there were
no tails, there were no flaps, there were no engines or motors.
That didn't appear to be windows. So basically the classic description given by so
many people in so many places of a flying saucer. I think there's a
bit of a shot from the film, isn't it. So this is actually
a drawing that was done by a wonderful researcher and friend of yours and mind,
Bill Chalker, and almost making out his initials down the bottom. Bill
did this drawing as he was or after he talked with one of the witnesses
who appeared in the documentary, a witness called Victor, who himself was a
very gifted artist at the time and still is today, and who drew drawings
of what he had seen. And that particular drawing is Bill's interpretation and of
what Victor had described to him. And Victor was one of the students who
had seen two objects. He saw them up close. He jumped the wooden
paling fence that was on the western boundary of the schools where a lot of
the kids had a massed, and he remembers at least one teacher as well,
and he jumped up on top of the paling fence saw that there were
these two objects that you saw in that picture hoovering just above the grass in
the paddock next to the school. There were some kids who had already jumped
over the fence before Victor did. Victor did the same and walked up to
one of the objects, and he went to put his hand out to touch
one, and then he realized there was heat coming off the object, and
so he drew his hand back, and then one of the objects rose up
into the sky and flew away quite quickly, and then the second object did
the same, and as they did, he could see that there seemed to
be some sort of rotate belt or structure that seemed to be rotating at the
base of the objects that he could make out as they ascended. And then
they flew down to an area called the Grange, which was an old farming
area that at that point was quite fellow, was only being used for bushwalks
and motorbike scrambles and cross country runs. It's now part of it is now
a nature reserve, and that was where a large number of the kids at
the schools saw at least one of the objects fly down behind the pine trees
at the Grange and appeared to descend as if it was landing, and some
of the kids took off. A large number of the kids actually took off
from the high school, not from the primary school, jumped over the boundary
fence, over the ditch the irrigation channel or the sewerage channel that was at
the back of the school in those days, across the dirt road, down
the dirt lane, through the market gardens, chasing their quarry. Because they'd
visually seen the object go down, they knew the area quite well, they
had a fair idea where it would be, and off they went. Not
many of the kids talk about getting down to the area where the object had
seemed to land and find it there, but there were one or two who
say that they did, and they give, of course an amazing description of
being again quite close to the object, one of the objects, at least
as it was sitting virtually in front of them. They often talk about the
kids who have this memory of seeing the object land. Now they're not necessarily
literally remembering that it was sitting on the ground, but as they looked at
it, it was close enough to the ground that they imagined that it was
either sitting on the ground or just hovering gently above it. And there are
a few witnesses who have that amazing memory. And then after all of these
events happened, and the objects were seen to ascend and fly away at great
speed, leaving those aircraft behind in their wake, flying off so quickly that
it made the witnesses perceive the relationship between the flying sources and the planes,
as if the planes were just sitting in mid air not moving because the flying
sources had such speed that they're vanishing. Was so almost instantaneous. And then
over the coming minutes, following minutes and hours, there was this response to
the schools, to the grange by people in authority, police, fire brigades,
ambulance service, civil defense organization and the military, and all of this
happening, unlike most UFO case, is in broad daylight around ten fifteen mid
morning going into the afternoon, in the suburbs of Australia's second largest city,
with literally hundreds of witnesses. So do you know, yeah, absolutely,
do you know if somebody rang all those organizations like you know to response,
yes, well, how did they I don't know. I'm just trying to
work out how they knew to go there and why why would they have gone
there? If they told everybody it was just with the bulls, that's right,
kill response, isn't it. And that's and that's of course, you
know, part of the intriguing element of the story is because unlike most UFO
stories, where there's no response or the response happens, you know, days
later this response. According to some of the witnesses, they remember the military
turning up within a period of about twenty to thirty minutes. And so,
for example, a fellow called Paul, who was working as a market garden
hand at the time. He'd been a kid, a student at Westall High
School the previous year, but he'd left school and was now working for his
neighbor who owned some of the market gardens at Westall. He was in one
of those market gardens down adjacent to the grange, helping his boss and another
fellow co worker pull up carrots or getting them ready for market to take them
to the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, and he witnessed this UFO, this
strange flying source of shaped object coming down from the north from the direction of
the schools, descending towards the grange, and as he watched it, it
seemed to change from having an obvious solid shape and look to it to becoming
more and more translucent, transparent, and eventually virtually turning into a gaseous form
as it flew into the pine trees at the grange. But as it flew
into the trees, the trees didn't react. There was no movement cones leaves
didn't fall off. It literally went into the trees, didn't come out the
other side, and was gone, And within twenty to thirty minutes, as
he remembers it, And of course the remembering of time is such a difficult
thing, and you always have to take these things with a grain of salt.
But within a time frame, around twenty to thirty minutes, he remembers
this small convoy of army vehicles turning up in the farm adjacent to his boss's
market garden. A couple of lorries with canopies over the back, a couple
of land rovers, and these soldiers jumping out of officers. Where would they
have come from? Good question, Well, is there is you know,
a station where there they would be stationed somewhere and a call would go out
and then they'd have to drive barber. Is there like a barracks or you
know, it's like hell, you know exactly. I mean, it's a
UFO story. So nothing makes sense, of course, nothing fits together.
But no, there were army barracks in Melbourne, in the suburbs of Melbourne,
in several suburbs relatively nearby, but all of those Army barracks were actually
Army reserve barracks. They weren't permanent army barracks, and so no one was
particularly not in numbers, stationed at any of those barracks. So really the
closest permanent large army establishment at the time would have been somewhere like Victoria Barracks
in the city, so again about you know, probably something like a forty
five minute drive from So the fact that these vehicles and soldiers turned up so
quickly, lens I guess, leads one to believe that somehow something had been
seen earlier than what had happened at Westall. The word had gotten out either
that or someone somewhere within the military or somehow tracking what came down at Westall.
Otherwise, it doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially when they
said it was a weather balloon, and so they don't dispatch a whole bunch
of military people to go and what check out a weather bone. You know,
that's true, and unless you know, unknown to us really as we
look back at it now as researchers and historians, there was some sort of
rapid intervention team that had been assembled for such a thing, and that's exactly
what responded that day, we don't have any evidence really for such a thing,
not in Melbourne, not at that time, so that part of the
story is still rather mysterious, of course. But the witnesses who were there,
like Paul and other witnesses who were at the school, who saw the
military turning up in the street in front of the high school, coming onto
the grounds of the school, walking up and down the corridors at the school,
the memory, the fact that there, that those sort of people were
there is it's not a matter of argument for them. They remember it so
clearly. And of course for them it was daunting, and it was and
it was threatening, and it was so unexpected. That's just astounding. It
resonates with me. I did a program for Rodeo Iron the nineties called to
Catrifying stamp. I went out to the Nulla bar and Mundrabilla and you know
the Noles case out there of the family of four that were picked up off
that air highway in that area. You know, it's been disputed many times.
Lots of really good researchers have actually said, well, they hit a
cattle ramp. It's quite amazing to me that you can blow a tire on
the Nulla bar and within a very short amount of time, all of a
sudden, federal police appear, and federal police with American accent changed your tire.
It's just it, credulity just sort of goes out the window and you're
left scratching your head. Because I've heard people that I have respect for as
researchers just go, you know what, I can tell you something, Shane.
There is no cattle ramps out there. That is the driest, harshest
land, and there's no way you can graze cattle on it, and that
that land is covered in strictnine because you know, back in the eighteen hundreds
they would told that you can resolve your indigenous problem anyway you wish. You're
out of sight, out of mind. So it's not somewhere where you can
graze cattle easily. And so yeah, I mean I shouldn't extrapolate too much
from those points, but it's a point of frustration where you just go,
something else is occurring him. And when we look at this map, I
think the grange it's very oblique when I pulled this up, but we're sort
of dead center in there around the grange. Now, Maravin airport has been
you know, brought up many times and it features heavily in the Frederick Glenti
case. You know. So it's an interesting area. It's an area again
and we might do this without much clarity, but you could deem as an
area of strange high strangeness, and events like this are not well, events
like west All are uncommon, but anomalous events in that area seem to be
fairly ubiquitous at times. And especially I've spoken to many truck drivers in that
area and these are tough people that are working really hard schedules and there are
certain truck stops they will not stop for the amount of enormous experiences they have.
The might start off as a minmon light signing and turn into a massive
viewer foe encounter. Yes, absolutely, And as I mentioned earlier, since
Westall came out as a documentary and the other pr that's been around the Westall
story since then, of which there's been quite a bit on TV and newspapers
and magazines and so on, I've been contacted by so many people with stories
and lots of stories that come from even that part of Melbourne, Eastern Suburbs,
Southeastern Suburbs, particularly in the days back in the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties
when the place hadn't yet become as urbanized as it has now, and there
were still lots of tracks of land where people would go bush bashing, or
ride scramble bikes or go for country drives, and people would see things,
and lots of people have contacted me over the years. But just to get
back to us Basia's question about how did people know about what had happened at
Westall and respond so quickly one of the teachers who was at Westall High School
at the time, she said to me. She was an English teacher at
the time. She's since become quite a well known children's book author, and
she doesn't have much time for the west Or story herself. She didn't see
anything herself physically, however, she did tell me that a couple of the
girls had come up to her who had seen something and they wanted to ring
and tell the media about it, and she gave them those two girls permission
to run down to the Westall shops and to make a phone call from the
public the phone booth. She couldn't, they couldn't. They couldn't do it
from the school, they couldn't use the school phone, and so off they
went. They went down to the phone booth. I've seen the phone booth
connection at the Westall shops. It's still there. And that's where apparently Channel
nine was called from, because in those days phone booths were First of all,
there were phone booths everywhere everywhere, phone directories and you could look up
the number for Channel nine and ring and that's what they did. And I
eventually tracked down one of those two girls, Eileen, and she confirmed,
yeah, yeah, I was one of the kids who ran down to the
phone booth and running Channel nine. And that's how Channel nine responded quite quickly.
But it took me years to realize that even though I knew from very
early on the name of the journalist, the TV reporter and the cameraman who
did the story that went on the Channel nine news that night in Melbourne and
read by that wonderful famous news reader Sir Eric Pearce, I never, I
never, And that film, that film from that new story is gone.
We can't find it. Roses looked for it. I looked for it.
Channel nine says they looked for it, that you were one of her last
great hopes, but no one seems to find it. But what I never
knew was that there had been another cameraman, a Channel nine cameraman, who
had arrived there first before the reporter and the other cameraman, and he had
arrived there very quickly, and he had a camera. He lived nearby.
He lived in the neighboring suburb of Dingley, literally a ten minute drive from
Westall he's still there today. And his camera didn't have sound, so we
only had film, but he filmed enough. He filmed the kids from a
distance. The school wouldn't let him talk to any of the students, but
he remembered, even after all of these years, the effect the kids were
showing, the effect on them emotionally, their reactions to what they had seen
and experience, And he got a feeling for how big a story this was,
breaking news, if you'd like, we'd call it now. I guess
that he rang up Channel nine, rang up his boss and said, please
send out a crew, send out a reporter, send out a cameraman with
sound. We need to cover this. And so it just goes to show,
you know, you can spend years and years researching something and then still
not have uncovered a really important essential element or character piece of the jigsaw to
the story, like the original Channel nine cameraman who after all these years had
never come forward, had never made contact with me, but still had these
amazing memories of what he had filmed and seen this film. What happened to
the film. It formed part of the news story that night, so it
formed part of the visual story. The other story, the other film with
sound, was later added and it aired on the news that night, right,
but we don't know where it is now. The film's gone. And
there wasn't there at some stage and we knew David Lyle and there that was
running Channel nine for a while. Yeah, and no it was nine,
And wasn't there a story that they actually came across the can but the film
was missing. There was a search done in the archives. Now I can't
remember now whether it was the Channel nine archive library in Melbourne or in Sydney,
because sometimes film would go from one to the other, and so I
literally can't At the very moment, my computer is not working properly. I
can't remember this computer. I mean, I can't remember which archive it was.
But one of them was searched a canister was found which had labeling on
it that referenced the Westall story, but it was empty. And there had
been a story that had floated around for years, and I still really don't
know what the genesis of the rumor, if you like. All the story
was that the then owner of Channel nine, Frank Packers, of Frank Packer,
the father of Kerry Packer, of course, had asked for the film,
demanded at the film be sent up to Sydney from Melbourne, and that
that had been demanded on the request of a federal government minister through Frank Packer,
and then from there the film was then passed on to somebody or somewhere,
and Ross Coulfhart, of course, who's had a very long interest in
the Westall story for a long time and has done a few things in relation
to UFOs you may have noticed over the last few years, and of course
included the west Or story in his wonderful book in Playing Site, and is
a great friend of the west Or story and has become a friend of the
west Or witnesses as well. He contacted the Packer family and of course he
has some contacts with them through his previous roles with Channel nine through sixty minutes
and so on in a current affair. And unfortunately, none of the surviving
members of the Packer family had any memories of that story or what might have
happened. So if it ever did happen in that way, it must have
been kept very quiet. Yeah, I'd say so he could have. You
know, there there's so many things that you can assume. But my wife
and I are film historians, and we've given back to the ABC more loss
television than just about anyone in the country. And you know, we know
that out there in that gray world of the underground film collector that they turned
into and the BBC's doctor who will actually you know, tell you the truth
about that, they have turned into the greatest the world's gratologists arts. So
I always, like yourself, hold out hope that something like that could just
reappear one not being somebody's you know, collection, private collection, because a
lot of a lot of that stuff from television stations back in the day.
They used to be sent to the furnace because they didn't have the room to
turn copyright. Yeah, and copyright, but they but you know, news
stories, their own news stories. I mean, that's a lot of footage
to hold onto. You can't store it all, so they used to send
it to the furnace. But the the sixteen millimeter film buffs would, yes,
they would. They knew all the guys that drove those trucks, and
they would pay them and they would They would not send them to the furnace.
They would sell them to these guys. And this is how a lot
of our you know, television culture has survived because of those people. Otherwise
it would have all been burned and we would have nothing. We have a
sixteen mil print here in extraordinary documentary that Roger Climson did in nineteen seventy five
on Channel seven that has some remarkable firsthand witness cases here in Sydney and the
Greater Australia. One day we'll have to sit down and show you that believe
it or not factual fiction. It's called Here's My Heart Drive, There's My
Wife. There's actually no other print of this. There's no other copy of
this film we're aware of. It's like a fifty minute, like a television
hour. Kevin Arnette, you'd remember the wonderful Kevin Arnette. That Kevin Arnett
was the guy who he was he was that he used to I used to
see him on John Lane. He used to go on show and he used
to always do stories that are on on you know, UFOs and goes.
He was like it was like, that's right. That was his name,
Kevin Narnette. Yes, Wow, you've triggered a great memory for we were
trying to think of it. I was trying to think of his name the
other day and I just couldn't think of it. Could you just go down
to that little news story there, because I'm just showing you a case that
this Bill Chalker has spoken about extensively. But this was two days before We're
still wasn't it? What's that right? The headlights being flat? We're at
al right? Okay, got it? Oh Ron, it is up there.
So that was the famous Burks flat case from Victoria, Central Victoria,
the fourth of April act in sixty six. So yes, just two days
before the westvill incident. And the main witness in that case, a lovely
fellow called On Sullivan, was actually included in Rosie Jones Westall sixty six documentary
because of the timing. Obviously, it happened in the same week, so
close to what had happened at Westall and Ron's now unfortunately passed away. But
Ben Hurl from the Victorian formerly the Victorian UFO Action Group and now UFO VIC
he along with the Victorian UFO Action people have done recently over recent years a
wonderful revisit and retelling of that bent headlights at Burke's Flat Story and so there
was, of course you talked to wonderful researchers who have been at this for
such a long time, like yourselves and Keith Basterfield and Bill Schalker and others
who remember that. You know, the years around nineteen sixty six we were
quite a flat years. There were so many things happening. There were the
famous Tuty cases up in North Queensland around Uramo and Tully. There was of
course the taking of the polaroid photograph, the controversy or polaroid photograph in Deep
Dean in Ballwin in Melbourne by James Kibble. That was just that was on
the second of April nineteen sixty six. So many things happened around that time,
and Westall was part of that of course, But because of the numbers
involved at Westall, Westall really stands out at such an unusual case, and
the connection with television is so interesting for me because I've spoke too that recently
found first Channel nine cameraman Ray the original, the other cameraman that I've known
about for such a long time, and the journalist, a very well known
journalist for Channel nine call Gordon Lead who started off his career in Melbourne and
then moved a year or two later to Channel nine in Perth. And I
spoke to both of those men and they both had clear memories what had happened
at westall the stories that they had covered as young reporters and camera operators.
But they both said to me when I raised the issue of what on earth
has happened to the film? Where did it go? And they didn't tend
necessarily towards the conspiratorial because they said to me so often, as you've mentioned,
so much stuff just got thrown out. And at Channel nine in Melbourne,
unfortunately, in I think it was the eighties, there was an enormous
flood that happened at Channel nine studios in Richmond that took out a big chunk
of their archive. Stuff just got ruined. And it's possible, it's possible
that that's what happened to the Westall film, but I live in hope of
course that s something survived because Kevin Arnette years later did a segment on Westall
and interviewed one of the original witnesses, Marilyn Eastwood, who was the young
girl featured on the front page of the Dandynong Journal, local newspaper at the
time in April nineteen sixty six. She was a primary witness. She was
one of the kids who tried to give an media interview to the Channel nine
crew that arrived that afternoon and ended up getting detention for it. Kevin Nnette
interviewed her and that apparently not only was filmed but aired presumably on Channel nine.
It may have been a segment on the Don Lane Show, but now
it can't be found. However, there are memories Bill Chalker and I think
George Simpson remember that when Mike Willisy was hosting a Current Affair, he did
a story on a UFO gathering that happened in Mount Gambia that I think happened
around the same time as an eclipse that was happening over Australia, and a
couple of people like Bill and George remember some of that original or Channel nine
westall footage from nineteen sixty six being spliced in to that later a current episode,
but now that can't be found either. That gives hope, though,
and that makes me think that in those days too, they would always make
safety prints, two or three safety prints of something, even a news story,
just in case something happened, because film was brittle, and your keeproscope
in this stuff. So the possibility of it being still out there is question.
Someone's in someone's elf. I mean, we were uncovered, and I
think we can just let it out, the cat out of the bag.
I mean a lot of that ABC archival material we've found underneath Abduls on Cleveland
Street by a little boutique company that was renting to the public talkie talkie company.
And when they all came to an end, and people who were involved
in that, I think they worked out that maybe Dad or I've been circumventing
the truck with the slab of beer from the atom of going to the Furtus.
It all went down there and it was buried underneath the road. So
I was driving Mission Beat then and I actually in my lunch break between picking
up streak affected homeless people I would be. I can remember getting a couple
of homeless people in the van and was covered in film reels. I'm going,
you just have to deal with this, just hold on type to those
film reels. So we were pulling things out from there so it can end
up in the wild as places. That gives me incredible hope and you know,
we will be heat seeking missiles and keep an eye out ourselves. Now
that we've reached this point, can I just ask you, Shane, when
when you started you and Rosie started the documentary, did you put a call
out for people to come forward to be interviewed about Westall or how did you
get onto all those witnesses? That's right, so even before Rosie made contact
with me, I had started that process, of course, and had already
amassed a reasonable number of witnesses. And that was through the group really early,
right, yeah, before social media like Facebook, of course, so
I did Yahoo groups and because that's all that was available for me, it
was very much a learning process. I was putting these feelers out into cyberspace
and trying to see if anybody would pick up on the story. And people
did, but you know, it was the local newspapers it was that article
in the Sunday Age which led to the number of witnesses sort of slowly mushrooming,
if you like, from two to four to eight and twelve and fifteen
and that sort of thing. And then I organized a reunion, the very
first reunion of Westall Witnesses in two thousand and six for the anniversary of the
and we had that at the Westall Tennis Club Hall down by the Grange and
Westall, and I had some local people helped me, and one of the
most amazing helpers was a man who at that point, I guess was in
his seventies, who had lived in Westall all his life, and who had
a couple of kids who had been at Westall State School as primary school kids
at the time, and who had come home with the story. And he
was so intrigued by not only the elements of the story but the effect it
had on his two kids that he decided to go down a couple of days
later to where apparently the flying saucer had come down at the grange, and
he took a mental note of where he was standing and where he saw this
huge circle of flattened grass at the grange, and the two huge high tension
power pylons that he could see closer to the schools from where he was standing,
and he made that mental note just in case in years to come he
would need to tell people where it was that he was standing that day,
and so when we filmed him for Westill sixty six, that's what he did,
and he took us back to the actual spot as close as he could
make it. Obviously the landscape had changed quite a lot over the years,
but he use that memory of where he had gone that day and what his
kids had told him, and so Norm was his name. He's since gone
to God, unfortunately, but he was such a great help to me to
getting that reunion up and running and getting the hall as a location. And
Norm bless his heart, had actually written a letter to Kevin Arnette. Back
to Kevin Arnette at that point in time had a column in the New Idea
magazine and the column was always asking for contributions. Do you have any stories
about strange ghosts? Yawi UFOs and Kevin Arnette wrote in, and he had,
and he kept the letter that he sent to Kevin Arnette, and it's
this beautiful two page document of what his memory was of what had happened at
Westall, what his kids had told him, and asking Kevin Arnette if he
would consider taking it up as a story now. He didn't ever get a
response except one that said thank you very much. Nothing became of it that
he was aware of, except that we later found out that Kevin Arnette did
do a story with one of the witnesses. So all of these wonderful connections,
but that original first reunion in two thousand and six was the first of
several that would happen, and that would eventually gather more and more people and
raise the raise in people's consciousness the fact that the strange event had happened and
that it was okay if people wanted to to talk about it now. Right,
how many witnesses at the end of the day do you attribute to this
event? Well, Jamie, I'm glad you've asked me that question, because
right next to me, I have this wonderful set of cheat notes, which
is a document which I have which I annotate every now and again because I
have to update it with the number of witnesses, because I tend to get
a new witness or a contact these days, after all these years probably about
one every two or three months. Wow. But at the moment, I've
got one hundred and thirty six witnesses who were witnesses to the flying saucer or
flying sorcers at one hundred and thirty six. Twenty two remember seeing more than
one, and most of those twenty two say there were three that they very
adamant about that they saw. One hundred and eighty five who saw the circle
or circles that were left behind, and there's a lucky number of seventy six,
a subset number of seventy six people who saw both the flying saucer and
the circle or the trace marks left behind. And I know from the records,
the official records, that there were about four hundred and eighty five students
at Westall High School at the time, and I've been in touch now with
about two hundred and twenty six of those kids, and so almost half,
and so I'm very conscious that there's a whole cohort, maybe another two hundred
and fifty people who were at the high school still not mentioning the ones I
haven't contacted at the state school. And I've been in touch with fifty seven
of those primary school kids but there's still a big chunk of both of those
cohorts I've not been in touch with, and I just know that there's a
whole lot of other stories out there. There will be people who remember it
differently, who won't remember it at all all, and there'll be people who
have other aspects, possibly quite important aspects to the story that no one has
yet heard. And even though the vast majority of people I've been in contact
with have been very gracious, have been very patient, and have been very
cooperative, and almost going beyond that, they say to me, Shane,
I'm so glad you've contacted me, because at the time we were told not
to talk about this. They asked me, is it okay for me to
talk about this now? Or they'll say I've tried talking about this over the
years, but I get shut down. Even people within my own family or
work colleagues just look at me strangely when I tried to tell them what I
saw at west All that day. But there are some people, not many,
but there are some people who don't respond. And there's another smaller cohort
of people who who respond, but for them, they don't want to talk
about it very much. There's an element of the story, whatever it is,
whether it's fear or a sense of ridicule or something traumatic perhaps, and
they don't want to go very far into it. And so like with human
beings anywhere, like with any group of witnesses, it's a real mixed bag.
Sure, but what you've done is an incredible community service and an extraordinary
historical service. And for the world of people researching the anomalous, which is
made up by a large number of people who've experienced a glimpse of another perception
of reality, this is a profound service that touches lives and gives people a
sense that they weren't going mad, they genuinely experienced something. And you know,
this story should be a massive worldwide story. In many ways, a
story like this good turn consensus reality around. And one of the people at
the time that fascinates me that you brought into that documentary with extremely high credentials,
one of the leading astrophysicists of the time was James McDonald, a very
straightforward, extraordinary human being. Andrew Fuller has done a great service in putting
this book out Firestorm, who fought against such opposition to actually looking into this
phenomena from a scientific perspective. And look, this is not going to last
long, I don't think, but let's see if we can get a bit
of this up thanks to eyes on UFOs, Eyes on Cinema, and you
must know this fifty eight minute there was a moment where he actually interviewed our
science teacher virtually at the time. So let's just add that to the streams.
Stay a discussion with mister Andrew Greenwood in connection with the west All sighting.
So we'll just feel what it's about here. It's light. That's a
heck of a chair, but I guess we can great. Yeah, I've
read some of the material that Paul and here and set me sorry not a
bit about it, but the data grass you know, I'm going to remove
it from there because people can go to the side of it, and we
need to put a link up to Whistle as well. But it's on YouTube,
no no where. Rosie is still selling DVDs out there with extended footage
I believe that's right, thirty minutes of extra footage in a video book.
And there's also a couple of study guides that we're developed by the Australian Teachers
of the media to accompany the documentary. The documentary can be can be rented,
can be high or can be purchased, can be straight as well.
Yeah okay, yeah, but make sure if you're interested in this topic yourself.
For the filmmaker, it's not just me having a look, because I
know there's a lot of boodlegging out there and you can easily watch that,
but you need to watch the extended version, and you need to make sure
that the filmmaker gets some little returning documentaries balance in effort. Now, just
digressing back to James and McDonald him. You know, the one thing that
really strikes me odd is that you know what is happening today in the media
that we're all aware of and ross behind a whistle blower David Gruce there.
I mean, let's go back to nineteen sixty seven when McDonald was out here,
that he was supported financially by the Office of Naval Research in the US
to study the UFO phenomena. It was not the reason he was out here,
but he was looking into atmospheric disturbances that could have led to the breakdown
of the ozone layer there or whatever. But he was a highly credentialed individual.
And I can remember you've probably seen this as well, and I don't
know whether it was with Bill Peach from the ABC that there was a reasonable
interview, but right at the as McDonald leaves the studio and Bill Peach steps
onto a supercar corner operated ride and makes completely light of the situation, which
is really distressing that you've got someone winting of that incredible credentials. And I
have to thank Rosie in both of you for including him in that documentary.
There's an incredible archives out there of James that has now been sequested into a
library in the States. Look it up because his level of research at that
time is just astounding. And I think about doctor James and McDonald a lot
because I just imagine how things might have been different now after all of these
years, if he'd survived, if he hadn't passed away not that long after
he came to Australia in apparently tragic circumstances. And he was such a gifted
man, and you know, obviously like anybody, he had his flaws and
his troubles, but he brought the most energy, the most incredible energy and
level of commitment and smart intelligence to this subject, and he just wanted to
tackle it scientifically in the same way that any other question would be tackled by
science. He wanted to do it in a very a very proper, sincere,
but open way, and to get away from that ridicule, get away
from the stigma, and say, this is an issue. It's something that's
happening in the real world, it's involving real people. Let's study it like
we would study anything else. Absolutely, and just like yourself, he had
a very calm and clear approach to things. He was a true gentleman and
you can hear that in his interview, just an incredibly inquiring mind. And
I get a feeling that they were just getting worried that this gentleman brought so
much credentials and information into the public lighte that things were just getting a little
dodgy. Now, can we go up to our moving or go down to
our moving bits and pieces? You know, it's very how do you feel
about what is occurring just briefly, Shane in the media right now with Ross
Coulter and our Leslie Keene and all that stuff around David Grosh and you know,
from our perspective as being therapists and dealing with people with addiction issues and
all sorts of other baggage on board Bard in light of what's come up with
our sort of journalists out of the Intercept, there can Clippenstein, I'm going
to get that wrong, that name wrong. I actually went into complete shock
over that because I heard an interview with John Grumall, Junior of the Black
Vaults, which you'd be aware of him with it is incredibly clear centered individual
and in that Ken just at one point said, well, the guy was
drunk and he had mental issues. And look, you know people who suffer
I mean, he had many tenures out there in the battlefield, and you
know post traumatic stress, post traumatic stress disorder. These I mean, these
people are veterans and they're going to suffer incredible moments that traumatize them. And
I bet you can our journalists from the Intercept has had a few nights on
the ether as well and been drunk before. And you know, you can't
define somebody by a moment, and you can't define people by self medicating either,
and it doesn't mean what they're saying is wrong whatsoever. So I'm really
shocked at that approach. That's taken on whether it's a smear campaign or whether
it's just a young journalist from a very edgy new online newspaper trying to get
the inside scoop on the dirt. But I also think that the last thing
that needs to be brought up is the notion of people being on the spectrum
and trauma that they'd suffered in life. And a lot of that conjecture sounds
to me as if it's hearsay going from his wife's testimony to public police and
medical records, and that's the wife opinion in the moment of stress in a
family issue, and if people were honest, probably happens to the majority of
us over the course of life, whether we're come from an incredible position that
david'send or not. And the echoes with what happened to James McDonald all those
years ago. You know, this very gifted academic professor and he fronted up
doing his job at a congressional hearing in Washington to talk about matters relating to
his field of science, atmospheric physics, and he was ahead of his day
in many ways talking about the effect, the possible effect of you know,
off climate change and the effect of ozone in the atmosphere. But he was
talking, you know, he was presenting a congress when one of the congressmen
brought up the issue of but aren't you someone who's researching little green men?
And there were these peals of laughter and embarrassed silence. And he got a
lot of critique, of course, from some of the more well known debunkers
who were around at the time. And he paid a very very heavy price
for his academic, natural, very understandable curiosity into this issue of UFOs but
these other but so all of that got conflated, and his reputation was smeared,
and apparently because of his personality, it would affect anyone. Of course,
took that very much to heart and felt very offended by people who should
have known better, people who were credentialed as other scientists or politicians what we
would call playing the man and not playing the ball. And I see that
exactly what's happened recently in relation to David Rush and this article in the intercept.
Because I didn't realize it was a crime to have an illness, that
it was wrong, or any physical illness, and what on earth does it
have to do with the information that he's coming forward. Well, you know,
in this Dayana, especially the way we there's all these campaigns out there,
especially aimed at men, to talk about you know, having having if
they have a mental illness, that it's okay, you know what I mean
that that it's it's it's just a natural thing, and not to to ridicule
them and make for a more you know, an environment where they can come
out and be open about these things so they don't internalize and then you know,
commit suicide, which is what happens a lot of the time because they
can't go anywhere or they feel they can't speak about it. This person is
just you know, set that back so far back, it's just ridiculous.
What he's doing is actually should be wrapped over the knuckles for having done that.
And they all struggle with mental illness, aren't we. I mean,
a yes, to a certain extent, is on the spectrum, and I
would debate the fact that post traumatic stress or post traumatic stress disorder is even
on that spectrum of what we concur to be things like schizophreni or bipolar disorder.
It is a natural reaction to be taken out of your environment and put
into something that's so devastating, so frightening. And you know it used to
be called shell shock. I mean, my grandfather came back after putting his
age up in the First World War and had shell shock. Became a great
and he wore poet because of the tragedy of someone at at any age experiencing
the side of people dying on the battlefield next to you. And I think
that, you know, there should be some respect for your veterans and some
caution used, because one day, Ken, someone will look into your background
and pull up something that isn't that significant to you, but can be played
on in the sensationalist market of this news. And I think it's just a
one way to me, it's Ken getting his identity as that edgy journalists built
up. It doesn't distract from David's testimony. And just like the courageous and
I emphasize that word extremely, the courageous people that came forward to say that
Westall is something they can't explain, but they cannot get out of their lives.
And sometimes I talk to witnesses, we both do they might have experienced
something for less than a minute, but thirty forty years later they are still
troubled by what they experienced. Now, that's not an hallucination, that is
not a drunken moment in life, that is not a drug affected moment in
life. That is something that has pierced the heart of the human condition.
When based in a reductionistic society that says that that cannot exist. So I
think it's really important that we step back and take a good look at it
ourselves before we start judging others with what could be just purely sensationalism and exploitation
for the medium. Can we quickly play before we say goodbye to this extraorary
gentleman that I want to dive. I want to dive through the camera and
huk, And he's probably going, thank god, he can't do that,
because come, come, come come, I just feel so mostly attached to
you, and you are just a fantastically humble and generous with your time.
Let's play the trailer for Roses docom. We will put a link up.
That's it there. The sixth of April nineteen sixty six started just like any
other day in the city of Melbourne. Then something very strange appeared in the
sky above the suburb of West Or hasn't been explained to this day. This
boy came running in, say, mister Grahwood, mister grahwad these things in
the sky, These these things in the sky. We looked at and we
just saw this source of type thing taking off. It wasn't a plane,
it wasn't a balloon, it was nothing like that. A lot of the
kids took off towards where it seemed to go. All the students were just
running all over the place, hysterical. We're to a high school as a
teaching situation ceased. My girlfriend and I said, on the fence, climbed
the fence the school boundary, and we were crying. I think it was
the end of the world, all right, isn't that? And Rosie Jones
are such a gifted filmmakers. Really, my time with Rosie and how she
handled me, how she managed to extract not a performance, but how she
managed to extract a information from me, and how she got me to move
through the landscape and to interact with the witnesses. And the only reason I
know anything about the Westall story, and this is something that I didn't discover
until years and years into my research, is because one day an eleven year
old boy who had been at Westall State School that day, went home and
told his mum and dad, who lived in Westall, about what he had
seen, and some years later that mum and dad became friends with a lady
that I ended up boarding with when I first moved down from Sheppard and to
Melbourne as a university student. A lady who had been an infant welfare in
that part of Melbourne for a thousand years. Everybody knew her. She knew
all the babies, all the mums, all the dads. She'd been given
the award of the Citizen of the Year for the City of Waverley, the
local government area in which she lived. And I boarded with her as some
other students had done over the years, and while I was going to university,
and she told me the story about what had happened at Westall, and
she knew that because that little boy's mum and dad were friends of hers and
had shared that with her. Years later, I eventually stumbled upon the information
that one of the hundreds of witnesses in my list that I've been in contact
with was that little boy, and that he had this connection with my friend.
The lady I had lived with for several years, and I never knew
of the connection, didn't know I knew his mum and dad, I knew
the lady who was my friend. And then he said to me, Shane,
and did you ever hear about what Alva? Alva was my friend I
boarded with. Did you ever hear about Alva's mum story what she saw at
the time, Because apparently around the same time, in the suburb of glen
Waverley, just up the road from Westall, my friend's mum, who was
a very straight laced, strict conservative Christian Protestant Christian lady, stared out the
window in her kitchen one day and at the back of the house, over
the backyard, behind the back fence were these high tension power lines pylons,
which of course were part of the network that connected with the ones in the
grounds of the schools at Westall, and she saw sitting there in mid air
a floating flying saucer and inside two beings, little germanoid type beings, but
they weren't human beings staring out looking at her. And I have absolutely no
recollection of my friend Elva ever mentioning that to me, but I presume Elva's
mother mentioned it to her, and I had to sort of sit back in
my chair and wonder, what on earth was the connection then with what happened
at Westall, because it was around the same time, literally just up the
road. What do you make of all these pieces of the puzzle and all
these different connections that you make around them. It's fascinating, and it is
and it's been a real blessing in my life to stumble across this story and
to be welcomed into the lives and hearts of so many of the people who
were there, and people like yourselves who are connected with this phenomena in different
ways as well and are interested in the story too. So I thank you
very much. Well, we can't thank you enough. And I believe,
at the end of the day, if we can actually term part of the
anomalous world to be that God particle, that God particle directed you to be
the custodian of this valuable information because you would not exploit it, and you
would take care of the eyewitnesses and make sure that their credibility and their story
remained intact. How rare it is for an independent research of finance by their
own hand with a family to raise and a job to do apart from this
is able to put together such an astounding work. This is and I know
you've spoken them. One day there will be a book out there. That
book needs to be out there. I know that down in the grains that
there is a flying sources shaped into a place set down there. I believe
there should be some statues, especially of the young ladies that were tenacious and
spoke to the meter and have held strong. It should be a statue dedicated
to you and Rosie down there as well, because you are just brilliant,
astounding people. And all we can do is sit back in or at your
research and realize that all of us need to raise our game and take into
consideration what great work you have done. We just admire it deeply, and
we also thank you for coming on Onshold Radio because if anyone would look at
the analytics around you in the media, it's thousands, hundreds of thousands approaching
millions. And when you look at the analytics of down South Anomally from the
Untold Radio network, it's in the hundreds. So really it's an astounding act
of generosity to give us your incredible time today. Shane and you know,
I just want to ask you at the end there, you know, the
wife and I have noticed that in this whole range of phenomena you could put
under the umbrella of anomalous, you know, going even over the notion of
the Yowee sightings and the UFO signings, and you spoke very interestingly before about
these objects that we're still jumping. And we've got a lot of film in
our building. We can analyze old UFO footage and we notice, you know,
we're looking at eighteen twenty four frames a second. You've always got what
seems to be balls of light attached to these solid objects, and those balls
of light will appear maybe in one or two frames, and then disappear,
and eight frames later they're there within a fraction of a second, a nanosecond.
So we've always thought that there seems to be an incredible consistency over the
range of anomalous phenomena. Then in a way links all these things together.
And one of the things that links them together strongly is that a lot of
people feel that there is some conscious relationship. They cite a min Mien light
and they feel that that minin light is actually there for them. People see
an object in the midst of the CBD no one else is looking up.
They seem to feel that that object is doing something for them. And I've
always extrapolated if I was going to go towards a hypothesis, I think the
word alien or even coming in from another star system, we could be completely
wrong. If it has that personal connection to us, Is it us?
Is it part of us? How can it relate to us so personally and
so profoundly if it doesn't understand us, and it seems to understand us a
lot more than we understand it or ourselves. I often like to say to
people in a way, because there are so many explanations for the anomalous,
and we all have our interpret pans based on how we were raised and the
cultures we grew up in and what we've studied and all those sorts of things.
But you know, people talk about the supernatural and the power on normal,
but there's really only the natural and the normal, and it all has
to be connected, and it's just super or power because we don't yet have
a handle on it. But it's all part of the one fabric that we
call the universe or life or time, and it's interesting that issue of consciousness
that you raised, because just literally two weeks ago, I was talking to
a woman who's now in her sixties working on our mind site in Western Australia,
driving one of those big mining dump trucks. But in the nineteen sixties,
she was a nine year old girl standing on the sports ground at a
primary school in Melbourne, not West but another one, and she had this
extraordinary UFO sighting an object that was only about one hundred and seventy meters away,
she described as being like two or three times the size of her dump
truck that she drives, and it was hanging in mid air, silent,
and there were lots of kids there and teachers because it was recess time.
They were watching it in broad daylight. And she said, Shane, I
don't know why. I don't know why. But then and now still I
had the sense that it was watching me and watching us, and that it
was conscious that we were there, and that it was almost showing itself to
us. I don't know why, why did it pick us? But it
was showing itself to us for a reason, and I wonder, I don't
know. Of course, I don't have the answers I only have the questions,
but I wonder if something similar was happening at Westall. I just wonder.
And I think it's the wondering that we have to do. That's what's
the important thing. It's the wondering. It's the questioning, and not so
much getting hooked on the answers, although the answers are important. I want
answers as much as anybody, but it's that sense of wonder and that sense
of staying open to what could be because maybe none of us really know what
it is that we're looking at. It's something still beyond us, but it
has to be, I think, connected to us because we're all connected,
we're all part of the same world, the same universe. There has to
be at some level a connection. Yes, yeah, And I think it's
a wonderful opinion. And we should. We've all got our own reality tunnel.
As you said, we've all got our own biases. The last thing
we need to be doing is throwing shade on other people, unless they're harming
other people with aspects of sensationalism. But we should all stand back from this
phenomena and be in awe of it. And as a teacher, as a
parent, you'd be really aware that it's not a matter of coming up with
an answer, it's a matter of triggering the human imagination and making that imagination
grow, and making you realize that we are in a profoundly beautiful, extraordinary
situation and if we have support and love that we can't be any luckier than
more. We are right in this moment, absolutely, and it is an
absolutely profound privilege to say thank you for your time today, and much love
and respect to you. If you're ever in Sydney, come and see the
dysfunction of what people call hoarders buried alive, and that is my wife and
I in our archives. The door will be always open before you. If
there's any research we can help you with, I doubt it. I think
you're just a remarkable researcher. But let me say at the end, I
hinted to you in an email that possibly we have another witness, And two
weeks ago we've got a couple of brilliant brothers that are directors of a movie
I could have feeling you could really enjoy called Late Night with the Devil,
which is a film based on satirizing the late night TV host like Dong Lane
and all those moments with Doris Stokes and all those bits and pieces. Yes,
but their father actually live right near Marabin, and even though he's in
his eighties and one of the sons is quite skeptical and goes, Dad,
you're near an airport, You're bound to see odd things. He has some
stories. Yes, So when we get a chance, and we didn't get
a chance, we would have loved to have thrown him right into the thick
of things with this sum But when we get a chance interview him, we
will interview him, and we will make sure the we get that information in
your hands, whether it's relevant or not. It's just another great way.
And you know what, like yourself, I really enjoy talking to people.
I love being in their company, and every time I talk to certain individuals,
I'm inspired. It gives my life a lot more depth and warmth.
And you have brought us so much of that today. So thank you for
being part of Untold Radios down South Anomalies. Thank you Jamie, and thank
you Escocia. Sending love back to you as well. Thank you. And
I better go and see what my school aged children are doing now. Yeah,
it just quickly shows shame what you were knitting there, because it always
gets me down when you're distracted. But I want to see you what you
completed in that time of the interview. Is it finished night, Well,
no, I'm just but I'm making little you know, she knits when she
djin Wow is that a doily? It's a square. I'm making a cot
cover. Yeah. They need to be more Nittes in the world. Absolutely,
and sheep as well, of course. Yeah. We love you deeply.
Thank you, thank you, Sane, thank you. I will let
you know when this is on lovely. Yeah, and that's great, Thank
you so much. And if you've got a website for people to go to,
maybe that's quickly what we need to do. So anymore I would if
anybody wants to contact you about so anyone can contact me. Yeah, through
the Westall Incident Flying Source west All Flying Source or Incident Facebook page. It's
on Facebook. I'm on Facebook, but people can contact me through that page.
And there's a whole stack of information there in terms of links, videos,
articles, photos, maps or related to the west Or story. Lots
of posts from me but other people as well, including posts from people who
were there at Westall. So that's the best way. I think that's more
information that they can look at. Okay, let's hope that young men hasn't
torn the lounge to shreds. All right, we'll speak to you very soon
and take good care. Maybe just take shin out. We need to play
sat scorn, which that they're just darling. We've got that coming up on
the top of the Sasquatch. Yeah, all right, San, thank you
so much, so much, soon again, thank you. All right,
Okay, all right, where am I that one there? Now? We
have to make sure that people are aware to go online, that this is
not just you're there in the States checking this out, but you can actually
go online and experience the entire It's an amazing documentary. I'm pronouncing that wrong.
I'm turning into plauns. Let's go with it. Let's just go hit
it, all right, we'll be back next week. We'll come back after
God, I've got to go and pick up my grandson. Are you ready
to uncover the mysteries of Bigfoot? Join us for Squatch kan Idaho twenty twenty
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twenty twenty three. Step into the Unknown. Please excuse me there,
I think we're a little tied up to that interviewed. I was really wrecky
with squatscong but it is so important. I think you've got one. Excuse
me, don't forget to have a look at this. You felt you were
throwing countering Weird has had pressed and up numerous times. He's great books,
so many great books, and I think actually untold Radio I had him up
recently as well. He did drive in Flowing Sorce. Yeah. Really that
should be turned into a movie. It should be you know my name Shake
Kat's My beautiful wife. Aspasia has knitted a doorly whilst interviewing Today the One
and at Least from Westall sixty six. You killed me. You know what.
I love you, but I also love our lists and our watchers.
Take good care. We'll be back next week to something you know with a
banger. I think we do. We bang every week. What a thing
to say.