Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Martin Willisher, host and we
have another great show for you this evening. I'm excited about it and I
want to welcome everyone. This week's guest is Shane Ryan. I would consider
him like a lead investigator on our researcher into the nineteen sixty six Westall UFO
incident. I has several different names, the Westall Flying Saucer Incident, things
like that, but anyway, it is a school another school. Yard are
citing very very interesting long with a cover up and all kinds of very interesting
things happen throughout that. A little bit of housekeeping first. First of all,
I want to thank everyone that helps out with the show. Anyone can
support the show, and we're also on Patreon as well, and that will
get you a feed to the full two hour shows. There's a feed over
there for that as well as if anyone signs up at podcast ufo dot com.
There's also the feed there and archives that goes way back. So,
as I said, a little housekeeping. I get a lot of email every
week about Alejandro. Everyone's worried about Alandre, which I think is nice.
So I talked to him today. He's doing really well. He's just he's
got so much going on, he's not up to date. I invited him
on tonight as well, but he couldn't make tonight show. He says he's
just not up to date with what's going on in UFOs, hasn't been paying
attention too much. But he said to his listeners of Open Minds, which
I do help him out with. Um. He had a nice interview and
recently he's going to be posting that soon, so keep your eye out for
that. For those of you who listen to the Open Minds show, T
shirts and stuff we do. We have a new new site on our website
actually a merchandise store or whatever you want to call it. There's a link
on podcast ufo dot com that has a great T shirts. There's two different
types of graphics you can choose from and one works really well with dark shirts
and one works with either or light or duck and as well as shirts as
other products over there too, all with the podcast Ufo graphic on the very
nice graphic by the way, and Diane Cash made that beautiful job. So
we also have a blog over at our website, podcast ufo dot com and
that is about guess what. The Westall UFO Charles Leear wrote an article blog
about that incident, so you can read up on that if you want more
information, that's on the website as well. The next three weeks are going
to be tricky for me. Next week, I have a big job in
my career that I actually do and I'm not gonna be able to do a
live show next week, so I'm going to try to figure that out.
So if you're watching live on YouTube or just watch the shows on YouTube,
just click the bell if you're a subscriber, or please do a subscribe and
click the little bell and that will send you notifications of when my show will
be coming up. But I am going to be prerecording. If you are
a podcast listener, do not fret because it'll be out Tuesday nights, same
as always. And I'm not one hundred percent sure if I'm going to be
streaming these shows live on YouTube or not. I'll get that figured out.
I had Chris O'Brien for next week, but he just informed me that he's
on his way to the West coast, so he's not able to be on
the show. So I do not know who my guest is going to be
next week. I'm working on that right now, and I think that might
be I might be out of stuff to talk about, and that's plenty.
And anyway, I'm going to now invite our guests. Welcome to the show.
Shane, Hello, Martin, all the way over there in mine.
It's lovely to see you again. That's right. Yeah, we're doing that
time travel here. You're you're actually in Wednesday, right, Wednesday morning?
Yeah, exactly. And you know it was this month, six years ago
that we last chatted on your show. I can't believe it. Yeah,
de Samba twenty thirteen, six years ago. I can't be label that time
has passed already. I know, I know, and wasn't two. I
was sixteen. Was the fiftieth anniversary, right, that was kind of a
exactly. So when I started this research, I was actually a brunette and
I didn't need spectacles. So you're now looking at what happens when you do
fourteen years of UFO research into one single UFO story. This is what it
does to you. Yeah, well I had a full head of hair too.
You're looking great, ye. So but before we get into that,
also, I just wanted to talk quickly. You're not really that far.
I brought this up a few times with people in California, but you're not
too far from the fires, right. We're very close to where the fires
are happening. So we've had an extremely early start to the bush fire season
in Australia this year. It actually started in the middle of spring. Normally
we don't get really any serious bush fires until late December early January, so
well into summer. So I think what's happening is it's really analogous to what
happened in California in their autumn and when they were getting very bad bush fires
unseasonally. In terms of time and the extremity of the fires that were happening
in California, we're terrible. Of course, we're getting it here now in
Australia, particularly in our eastern states, so New South Wales, parts of
Queensland, parts of Victoria. I live in Canberra, which of course is
in the Australian Capital Territory, which is surrounded by New South Wales, quite
similar to the district of Columbia in America. But we're close to where the
fires are as well, and many of our big cities like Brisbane and Sydney,
Camera are being shrouded with bush fire smoke day in day out. Here
in Camera we're quite high, with the highest city in Australian in terms of
altitude. We sit at about five eighty meters above sea level, so we
tend to have very clear skies here. We don't have much in the way
of heavy industry, and Canberra, I guess a little bit similar to Washington
or Ottawa and so our air who is usually clear and pristine, but we're
getting this bush fire smoke as it blows in from the bush fires nearby.
And apparently the the health people, the medical people are telling us that it's
equivalent to smoking five to ten cigarettes per day when we breathed in this bush
fire smoke, and particularly in places like Sydney, they've been doing this on
a daily basis for a couple of weeks now. So it's it's terrible.
Wow wow, and not as far as the crow flies, probably in the
hundreds of miles night their thousand. So get the volcano right in New Zealand,
yes, so exactly how far away that is from you, but still
that's right. That was terrible and White Island in the Bay of plenty in
New Zealand, and unfortunately most of the people who seem to have been caught
up with that, both in terms of fatalities and injuries, are Australian tourists
and people from other countries as well, of course. But it's just shocking,
terrible, wow, wow, a lot of stuff going on. Well,
where you live is not really too far away from where this incident happened,
is that right? Are you very close? It's certainly closer than Maine.
So I'm in Canberra, and where this incident happened was in Melbourne,
which is the state capital city of Victoria, Australia's second largest city, So
about eight hours drive, but yes, not very far at an aeroplane.
I imagine a little bit faster in a flying saucer, I'm sure. And
that's what we're going to talk about. So let's first of all, I
think, before I get into the internet itself, just I've wanted to find
out did you have an interest in UFOs yourself prior to this case or is
this what kind of led you into the study of UFOs? Are looking at
them? Well, as everyone says, that's a long and convolute story.
Of course. Two hours. I think I think like a lot of kids,
especially boys. I think often boys perhaps more than girls. To generalize
a little bit, I had a little bit of an interest in things like
UFOs and space and and mysterious things. And you know, I can actually
trace it back quite specifically to when I was about twelve or thirteen years old,
and I was wandering through the department store in the city in which I
grew up, in a place called Shepperton, about two hours north of Melbourne
in Victoria, and there was a city of about twenty five thousand people,
and we only had one department store, and the favorite part of that store
for me was the book section. And back in those days, this was
the late nineteen seventies, we didn't have a lot of specialized bookstores back then
in my town. So often if you were interested in reading, you'd go
to this book section in this department store. And I can remember one day
wandering in and on a stand was a series of books World Mysteries, and
one of the titles was about ghosts, and one of the titles was about
monsters, and one of the other titles was flying Sources UFOs, and I
picked it up and was lavishly illustrated all these wonderful color pictures, not photographs,
but there were some photographs, but mainly pictures illustrations. And there were
some what I now know to be quite well known cases mentioned in the book,
like the Kelly Poppins bill case, I think the case that helped to
give rise to the term Little Green Men, and the Thomas Mantel incident.
Thomas Mantel, of course, who'll remember, was shot down chasing something over
the skies of Kentucky. I think it was back in the nineteen fifties.
So there was some of these classic so called UFO cases, and I was
fascinated, and so I bought the one about UFOs, I bought the one
about ghosts. I think I left the one about monsters on the shelf because
I think that was just a little bit too frightening, and I took them
home, and I think that's where it started. And also, of course
at that time on television, there was some classic UFO related TV shows like
Project Blue Book. Do you remember Project blue Book? I think it was
sometimes called Project UFO in America. Yeah, Project UFO, right, that's
right. So when it was televised in Australia was called Project Blue Book and
I watched that, as a lot of people did. And then of course
there was the wonderful program in Searchiles posted by the late Leonard nimoy Yea,
and it was all fascinating to me. And I think part of the reason
it was fascinating for me was my father had passed away when I was one
year old, and I was very much aware of his absence when I was
growing up and my mother raising me on her own, and I was very
conscious of there being this mysterious aspect to life, that there was something potentially
beyond what was immediately obvious to us, that there perhaps was really an unseen
world as well as a scene world. And as a child, I think
I was rather impressionable and impressed by that. But because I'd had a father,
but my father had passed away and he was now gone from me,
I felt, well, there must be this other world where things aren't immediately
visible, and I think that played into where this perhaps all began. But
of course that was when I was a child, and as I grew up
and graduated from secondary school and went to university and started work, those things
got left behind as they do because you get involved in work and all the
demands of being an adult, and so I really sort of pushed all those
things aside and didn't really think about the UFO subject again until I moved from
my hometown Shepherdon and went down to Melbourne to start my university study. And
I went to a university called Monash University, which as it turned out,
is only about five ten kilometers maybe not even that up the road from Westall,
but I had an idea about Westall at the time. But what did
happen was I was doing a bit of university. I started that I was
actually doing a degree in Japanese studies because in the intervening years I'd been sent
to Japan as an exchange student by the Rotary International Rotary Organization and had come
back from living in Japan for a year very interested in Japanese culture, Japanese
language, Japanese politics, and started a degree at Monash University in Japanese.
But very what's the word, I guess it sort of happens stance. I
found a place to live near the university with a lady who was just beginning
to retire from her long career at that time. As an infant welfare nurse
in Melbourne, and she had been for a few years hosting university students at
her home as boarders, both Australian students and students from other countries, and
I was in search of a place to stay, and so I ended up
becoming a boarder at her house, and we became good friends over the years
that I lived with her, and she happened to mention to me one day
that she had a couple of friends who knew about a flying sourcer incident which
had happened up the road from where we were living, again, only about
fifteen kilometers away, at a place called Westall, which I never never even
heard of, And she told me the bare bones of the story. She
didn't know a great deal about it, but simply that this school, Westall
High School, and the school next door, the Westall State Primary School,
had been involved in this mass sighting of a flying saucer, and that hundreds
of people had seen it, kids had seen it, some of the teachers
were involved, some of the local residents were involved, and she knew this
from these friends of hers, and so she told me the story, and
we actually I remember doing this. We actually did a drive in her car.
We went over to Westall and we drove around the perimeter of the school,
and we didn't know what we were doing or what we were looking at,
of course, we were just going for a drive. And then we
drove back home to her house where I was living, and pretty much forgot
about it, except for the fact that at some point afterwards I came across
a book by an Australian author, a fellow called John Pinckney, who had
a long career as a newspaper reporter and an author in Australia. And John
also had a strong interest in UFOs and the paranormal and things that were a
little bit unusual, mystery stories, unsold murders, people who had disappeared,
and he penned several books over the years on that topic. And I happened
to pick up one of those books, this is the one actually called a
Paranormal File by John Pickney, and I opened it up and lo and behold,
there were a couple of sections in the book about Westall, like this
one the saucer that shocked a school and just a few pages two and a
half pages, and then there was another small section students punished for discussing the
Westall UFO, and so I read these sections in his book, and of
course it confirmed some of the details that my friend had heard from her friends.
And that was the end of it for me, because I was working,
I'd done some university and then I went back over to Japan to live
and did some more university study there and completely forgot about the Westall story.
Just didn't think of it at all until years later, many years later.
In fact, it was two thousand and five when my friend who had told
me this story had actually by that stage passed away, and I was looking
around for a story to write a book about. I was having an early
midlife crisis, I think, and I wanted to pan a book about something
I've had some roll by the way, that's right, And I was particularly
interested in writing a book that would be read by children and young adults,
teenagers. And I don't know how it came into my mind. It popped
into my mind, and I don't know from where or how I remembered this
story, a story about a UFO incident that had happened at a couple of
schools, and I had been witnessed by all of these people, young people
and some adults, and I thought to myself, well, a lot of
what I've heard, not that I had heard very much about it, is
probably not true. It's probably partly an urban legend, and there must have
been accretions to the story and things that had been perhaps made up, not
maliciously, but just as these things happen over time. So I thought,
well, I'll do a little bit of research, and I set up a
Yahoo groups website. This is way back before social media, before Facebook,
when Yahoo Groups is one of the main ways that you could make contact with
people over the interne and in my innocence and naivety, I set up this
Yahoo group's website, put it out into cyberspace and to see what would happen.
And some people noticed it, and I got some people contacting me about
the story. And I actually had a couple of articles posted printed in a
couple of the local newspapers around Westall and that led to quite a response from
people, people who did actually as I was hoping they would, remembered the
story and had actually been involved in the story. And one witness led to
three, and then three led to six, and six led to twelve.
And it went on like that, and then the science editor of the main
broadsheet newspaper in Melbourne, a newspaper called The Age, saw the story and
he for some reason was quite interested in it, and he contacted me,
and that led to an almost full page article back in two thousand and five
about the Westall story, and from there it just sort of bloomed and blossomed,
and more people contacted me. But and that eventually led to a filmmaker
in Melbourne by the name of Rosie Jones, a very accomplished filmmaker, seeing
that story because she's a reader of the Age newspaper and she happened to come
across the article, she contacted me. She flew up to me to Canberra
from Melbourne. We sat down, I remember we had our meeting in the
National Film and Sounder Archive building in Canberra was very a lovely building and a
lovely setting, very appropriate for Rosie as a filmmaker, and I simply told
her the story as I understood it and what my interest was, and she
went back to Melbourne, thought about it for a couple of weeks, contacted
me and said, Shane, it's an interesting story and I'm interested in it.
From a couple of angles, would you be interested in participating in a
documentary film about it and about your research in it? And again, in
my innocence, in my naivety and perhaps lack of modesty, I said,
sure, that sounds like a wonderful idea, and that's what led to the
two and ten film being broadcast on the Australian sci fi channel Westill sixty six.
Oh yeah, subourbon ufome Mystery. I believe that's up on YouTube if
I'm if I'm not mistaken now, I believe it is because I think I
watched that a while back. We only have about two minutes before we're going
into the break, so we just have to keep that in mind. But
I did want to start talking about the story itself. Was April six or
something like that, nineteen sixty six. Yeah, but again we only have
about a minute, so I think what I'm going to do is, hopefully
I'll just go right into the break now and we'll talk about the incident itself
when we come back. So hanging everyone, We'll be right back right after
these messages. And so at this time I usually talk about a different,
different topic, and so I am wondering if you can talk about the UFO
groups that are in I know there's the Victoria group. I actually interviewed some
representatives from that, had a great time with them and Phoenix last year they
were there and not last year, a few months ago in September. I
had a really wonderful time with that group there. And but are there a
lot of other like active groups on UFOs? There are some. I think
the era of the UFO groups is not as strong as it once falls,
so I think obviously, going back to the nineteen fifty sixty seventies and the
early part of the nineteen eighties, there were a lot of UFO groups based
in the various states of Australia and often they would meet in the state capital
cities, which in Australia, unlike the American tradition, all of our state
and territory capital cities are the largest cities and so that's where most people live,
and so other meetings were generally held there. And of course they were
I mean, they were very much into UFO research, but they were also
they were social groups, they support groups, and they were bringing in a
little bit like a service club or a church or some other social organization.
They were very much about coming together, talking about the latest sightings, discussing
research, but having a cup of tea and a scorn and a cake and
maybe doing occasional occasional excursion and going on a field trip. And with the
passage of time and the advent of social media and the Internet, and that's
all broken down a little bit, which in a way is a little ad
but the groups still exist. They've morphed a little bit over the years into
different formats. But of course the group you mentioned, the Victorian UFO Action
Group in Victoria based in Melbourne, it's in a way replaced an earlier organization
which had existed previously to that. There's another group in New South Wales and
in Queensland. Perhaps smaller groups in Tasmania and South Australia and Western Australia.
But a lot of the way people communicate these days is of course like this,
like we're doing over YouTube and the Internet and Facebook. But I think
those groups still have an important role to play and I've certainly appreciated the support
the Victorian UFO Action Group have shown me in recent years. They've very much
taken on the West Still story is one of their celebrated stories. Yeah,
and some of the members of the group are researching it as well, and
they've always been very supportive of me and have organized a couple of events over
recent years to talk about it. Right. I think when I was meeting
first with Ben Hurrell and a few other people in Phoenix, they someone message
messaged you right away because I had your old email address. I had been
trying to reach you and it was not you were not getting the emails,
and so that's what actually made this connection. And here we are, all
right, everyone, welcome back my guests this evening is Shane Ryan from Australia.
We're talking about the westall Ufo Incident or westall Ufo has many names,
like I mentioned, and let's talk about the incident exactly what happened. It's
it's it's quite amazing actually, the amount of witnesses and all that. So
if you would go over exactly what happened in April six, eighteen sixty six,
sure, Martin, thank you for that. It's an important incident because
it did happen, as you mentioned, on the sixth of April in nineteen
sixty six, and unlike I guess most UFO incidents, this was unusual in
that it happened in broad daylight. It was about ten fifteen in the morning
when it first happened, and it happened in front of literally hundreds of people.
So initially it was in front of the two classes of kids who were
doing physical education classes on the sports ground at Westall High School and Westall by
the way, it's about twenty one kilometers south east of the Central Business District,
the center of Melbourne, so at that time in nineteen sixty six,
a suburb u an area but on the fringe, so it was partially suburban
and rapidly becoming more so. But it was also partially still country, semi
agricultural, so mixed in around the houses and some of the factories and shops
that were being built were still market garden areas, farms, and so it
was a mixture of both city and country. But it was an instant that
happened in front of a large number of people. Initially those two groups doing
pe on the sports ground, but then when the recess bell went that then
involved literally almost the entire population of the school coming out onto the sports ground
and witnessing what the other kids had been seeing five or ten minutes previously,
and before the recess bell went, one of the students who was doing physical
education on the sports ground came rushing in to the classroom that was being a
class being taught by Andrew Greenwood, who was one of the science teachers at
the school. He was up a young teacher, was his first year of
teaching, he was only about twenty one years old himself. And a girl
rushed in from the class saying, mister Greenwood, mister Greenwood, there are
flying sources outside, flying sources outside, and of course the classroom erupted into
pandemonium, but Andrew brought the class back under control. He told the student
to not be silly and to go back out to the sports granted to close
the door, which he did, and he brought the class back under control.
But it was literally only about five minutes later that the recess bell went,
and Andrew Greenwood's interest was actually piqued, as you would imagine, and
so we actually went out to the sports ground and the class followed him,
and lo and behold, he actually did see what all the other kids had
been watching for the previous five or ten minutes, and he saw one Andrew
Greenwood or one flying saucer shaped object up in the sky. Now, as
I'm talking about this incident, is always a little bit difficult because it's hard
for me to know whether to use the singular or the plural. Because even
though most of the witnesses and so far I've actually been in contact with one
hundred and seventeen people who the flying saucer or flying saucers, there is a
smaller group, a subset of that nineteen people that I've been in contact with,
so nineteen out of the one hundred and seventeen who are adamant, there
were more than one, and they remembered them being two or three. So
it does seem to me that there was more than one. But it's true
to say that most of the witnesses remember saying one. And Andrew green would
have certainly one of those people. But as he went out, most of
the rest of the school joined him on the sports ground, and there were
kids literally hanging off the perimeter fences off the school on the western side and
the southern side, looking up at the sky, trying to get a closer
look at this object. And the object that most people remember seeing was in
that classic flying source of shape that were so used to people talking about,
particularly from that era from the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, And so
they describe it as being like a bowl on top of another bowl, or
a bowl on top of a plate. Some people even describe it as a
tea cup on top of a plate, which I guess is a very British
or Australian way of describing the saucer. But don't mean there was a handle
on the cup, but it was like a cup or bowl shape on top
of another bowl or plate shape. And that it was metallic looking, that
it was silver or gray in color. But it didn't seem to be making
any sound, or if it did, it was a very very low humming
sound. There didn't seem to be any obvious windows or port holes, no
obvious rivets or scenes or joins. And that it was flying without any of
the attributes you would normally associate with a flying object. So no tail,
no fins, no wings, no strings or ropes, no propellers, no
engines. So something very mysterious. And you have to remember that there was
a very busy airport called Marabin Airport, only five kilometers away from the schools.
At that time, Marabin Airport was Melbourne's second airport, and it was
actually by flight number a number of flights, about the busiest airport in the
Southern Hemisphere at that time. And there was almost no possible time you could
be at westall at the schools or elsewhere and not here or at least or
see aircraft flying above doing the circuits and bumps training exercises that planes often do.
And the kids were very, very used to seeing those planes, and
those planes were mostly training aircraft, so aircraft like cestenas or piper chieftains,
maybe chipmunks, so that sort of light aircraft. But what they saw this
day was nothing like that, nothing like that at all. And the kids
observed the object or objects flying around, going from one side of the sky
to the other, moving so quickly it was as if the kids the witnesses
couldn't quite tell was it blinking off, vanishing and then blinking on and reappearing
at the other end of their sky the vista that they could see, or
was it just simply flying so quickly from one side to the other that looked
like it was doing that. It ascended, descended, again no sound.
It would make the range angular turns that nobody could had ever associated with aircraft.
And then at some point five actual aircraft flew in, and most of
the witnesses who remember seeing these aeroplanes remember them simply as being ordinary light aircraft,
like listeners. They might not have been cestons, but there was something
like that aircraft that they were well used to seeing. And these planes were
trying to chase these flying objects. And the planes would get close to one
of the objects, and then the UFO would move away effortlessly and go to
another part of the sky. The plane would do the long banking turn that
planes need to do, making the sound of the engines that planes need to
do, and try to get closer to one of the objects again, and
then the object or objects would move off again. And so this what was
described in the newspaper reports at the time. It's like a cat mouse exercise.
Went on for several minutes. And then at some point after this,
at least one of the objects went down to an area called the Grange,
which was an old rural property which had an old house on it, but
had a large area of land, and on part of that land was a
large grove of pine trees, and the kids at the school just called that
area the pines. They knew it well because they often went over there for
their cross country running, for their excursions when they went looking for frogs,
and the local kids used it as their local playground. And this object flew
down to that grove of pine trees and was seen to disappear behind the trees,
and it sat behind those trees for something like perhaps ten minutes, may
have been fifteen minutes, it's hard to tell the exact time, but it
was something of that nature, enough time, in fact, to give a
certain cohort of the kids time to jump over the boundary fence, over a
ditch a channel that was between the fence and the unmade street road at the
back of the school, over that road, through the market gardens, down
a dirt track, down towards the grange, chasing this quarry, chasing this
object which they had been watching in the sky high low, left, right,
fast, slow, and it came down and they wanted to find it.
And it was an extraordinary thing in a way, because we're talking about
school children in the nineteen sixties, aged between about twelve and fifteen, who
knew about the worst thing you could possibly do at school was to leave the
school's grounds permission of a teacher or your parents without a note, because it
was dangerous, because you were crossing a road, because you were going into
the bush, because you didn't have permission. But there was a group of
them, and so I guess they felt like they had a little bit of
support and a little bit of courage, and off they went, and a
certain group, a small group, according some of the witnesses got there in
time down to the grange to see one object, either sitting on the ground
or just perhaps a little bit above the ground. And one of the witnesses
talking about getting down there and seeing four kids, a couple of boys,
a couple of girls, and the boys were a little bit further back from
the object, the girls were a little bit closer, and the girls had
been affected somehow by the object. One had fainted and was still on the
ground. One was sort of dusting herself off and still getting up. And
this witness then watched the object left up from where we had been. It
went up into the sky a few meters, turn into a vertical plane and
then shot off fast up into the sky. Joining one or two others that
were still up there, and then at great speed, the three objects flow
away again in that vertical plane, flying off so quickly that hardly anybody could
notice where they had gone to. So this was not your normal start to
the school day at Westall High School. Right right before we move on,
let me just ask a couple of things. So you just mentioned that they
just flew off with the three objects, but there's still confusion between some of
the witnesses whether there was one object or multiple objects, even though this thing
flew off together with those other three. Well, Martin, it wouldn't be
a flying source of story if there wasn't confusion. No, you're right right.
If you have clarity, then it can't be a UFO story, can't
be a finified flying source Insider. That's true. That's true, and I
think we know that from some of the other perhaps better known historical incidents from
over the years, which we're all still talking about after all of these years
and trying to nut out the finer details. But it's true. In a
sense, there's some confusion. It's not really confusion, I guess from the
perspective of someone trying to understand it like me as a researcher, it can
be a bit confusing, but in the minds of the witnesses, there's not
much confusion, because you were either a witness who remembered seeing one and one
only, or you were a witness. And it's a smaller number that I've
been in contact with, And of course there's lots of people who were witnesses
potentially that I've not yet been in contact with, who saw two or three,
and so those people are either adamant there were three, for example,
or their adamant there was only one. And mostly those people are happy to
admit that they saw what they saw, but what they saw, of course
was conditioned by where they were standing, when they got to where they were
standing, what else was happening around them, and of course the and of
course their memory and the frailty of their memory, and so most people are
adamant about what they saw, but they're happy to admit that there may have
been other people who saw something slightly different. The interesting element to that aspect
of the story is that there also there were one hundred and sixty five people
I've been in contact with who remember seeing the circles left behind in the paddock,
in the grassy field by whatever these objects were, and so a larger
number than saw the actual flying sources, which makes sense because there was more
time for people to go down after school, local residents and see these trace
marks what in fact had been left behind apparently by these objects. And off
that group of one hundred and sixty five, there are twenty five who remember
seeing more than one circle. So as a proportion, it's almost the same
percentage of people who remember seeing more than one flying saucer as opposed to one
flying saucer. So there's certainly evidence that there are certainly a group of witnesses
who remember seeing more than one trace mark, more than one circle, which
would seem to indicate that perhaps there was indeed more than one object involved.
It's hard to be definitive. Of course, my job as the researcher is
to strive to be definitive. But obviously I've got to hold all of these
parts of the jigsaw puzzle together somehow, and to find as many of the
common denominators as I can, and for those common elements to tell the thrust
of the story. Right. So, another thing you mentioned early on was
that there was no apparent rivets porthole seems anything like that. So that seems
to indicate that it was seen rather closely. Would you be able to tell
us what is the guess of the closest that someone was able to view the
object? Sure? Sure, Obviously measurements are a tricky thing, and particularly
after the passage of all this time. But there are several witnesses remember being
very close to the object. Is one witness who features in the documentary Westill
sixty six, who was the one sole person that we know of that I've
been in contact with. He says there were a couple of other boys who
did what he did, which was jumped the western boundary fence where there was
a massive kids and at least one teacher viewing the object. He says there
were two objects at that point landed or almost landed in the paddock next to
the school. He remembers there being a bit of a space between the bottom
of these two flying sources and the grass, and he got so close.
This witness his name as Victor. By the way, Victor got so close
to one of the objects that he could feel heat coming off it and put
his hand up towards it. To touch it, but thought about a thought
not to do that, had second thoughts about doing that because he could feel
the heat coming off, and so he back, and so he took his
hand. Probably a smart move, that's right, if he was to do
it now. He said to me the other day that he'd probably put his
hand on and hang on for dear life, and probably not on the outside.
But he didn't do that. He was at that point, what thirteen
years old, I think, And so he took his hand back, and
then he took a few steps back and walked back towards the fence, and
as he did, one of the objects lifted up and flew down towards the
grange. The other object, he said, flew up and didn't go down
to the grange, but went up into the sky and went high in the
sky and stayed there. So he was very close. Another witness a lady
by the name of Terry. She was the witness one of the students who
had gone down to the grange and saw the four kids in front of her
between her and the flying saucer, and saw the two girls affected by the
flying saucer fainted in the ground on the ground, and she estimates that she
was probably within about five meters maybe ten meters off the flying saucer, again,
close enough to be able to get up view of it, so much
so that when it lifted up and before it turned into the perpendicular the vertical
axis, she could see what appeared to be bluish purplish colored lights on the
bottom, rotating in a fashion pulsating as it lifted up. There were other
witnesses who were on the sports ground at the time before the Flying sourceer went
down to the grange who they felt they were so close to the object,
they felt as though it was coming down in front of them, and they
were so petrified, thinking that the object was actually going to crash or going
to land on the sports ground in front of them. And there were a
set of goal posts Australian rules football goal posts on the sports ground, so
you can imagine some goal posts, and a couple of the witnesses referred to
the Flying Source of being almost at the top of those goal posts. So
we're only talking there about what would that be maybe ten meters or so above
the ground where they were standing. And some of the kids watching this happen,
we're afraid they were petrified. One of the girls talks about wedding her
pants, being so scared, being so taken aback about what was happening in
front of her, wedding her pants, rushing off to the toilets, taking
refuge, taking cover from what she thought was about to happen on the sports
ground. And so some of these witnesses were pretty close. So it was
this like a group trauma. I mean, was everyone or were some people
fascinating in and some were traumatized. And I don't want to talk about Tanya,
I believe it is too but but is that what was happening. Was
it a mixture or was it everyone was scared? No, I don't think
everybody was scared at all. It was certainly was a mixture. So it
was very dependent upon I think where people were when they were there, and
of course most importantly I imagine how they were as people, their personalities,
their demeanors, and so a lot of the witnesses, most of the witnesses
talk to me about the finding extremely exciting. It was exciting. It was
something that they remember very very fondly. They remember it as being the most
incredible thing that's happened to them in their lives as a memory, it's the
strongest memory that they ever have, probably up there with having children. But
there are certainly some witnesses who have talked to me about it being traumatic,
that it was scary, it was frightening, that was worrying for them.
And I guess one wonders how many of that particular cohort, that subset of
witnesses perhaps have decided not to talk to me, or to come forward or
to talk talk to other people because for them it was that sort of experience
for whatever reason. And it's perhaps the students, the children, and perhaps
the older adults for whom it was more of an exciting incident who have decided
to talk more about it and to be more open about it. And what's
a scoop with what happened with Tanya? So there is a student who was
at the school by the name of Tanya, and there are several witnesses who
remember her as being somehow connected with the flying incident. So some of the
people remember that she was the girl who ran into the science classroom being taught
by Andrew Greenwood and sliding the door back and shouting out there are flying sauces.
In the sky flying sauces in the sky, and some people are very
clear that it was her. Other people are not so clear and just remember
it being a female student or a student. But for those who remember it
being a specific student, they do usually name it as this girl Tanya,
and one of the other witnesses remembers very clearly Tanya being one of the students
who raced down towards the grange in chase of the flying saucer, and this
witness, a lady called Jacqueline, raced after her and also tried to race
down to the grange, but Tanya apparently was a very fast runner, faster
than Jacqueline, and about halfway down towards the grange, Jacqueline noticed Tanya coming
back in the opposite direction, back towards the school property, screaming hysterical,
and Jacqueline tried to grab her and hold her and ask her what was going
on, but she was too upset. She was too she was too hysterical,
She was frightened by something and broke her grip and raced back towards the
school. So Jacqueline at that point decided not to go any further and to
turn around him and to go back towards the school, and when they got
back to school, Jacqueline remembers, she's not absolutely sure about the passage of
time, but she remembers not very long afterwards, an ambulance being at the
school, Tanya being attended to by the ambulance officers, and Tanya being taken
away in the ambulance. And there are a couple of other witnesses who have
that same visual memory, and there are some other witnesses who heard that that
was the case. And one of the witnesses, Terry, who I mentioned
before, thinks it was Tanya who was down at the grange fainted on the
ground, having been affected by what she had seen close range to the flying
saucer. So that's Tanya's story, and the other aspect of Tanya stories that
two of the witnesses, Jacqueline and Terry, who were both friends with Tanya,
separately went around to Tanya's house. They knew where she lived, they'd
been to her house before. Her house wasn't very far from the school,
and knocked d'antanya's door to see how she was. Natanya wasn't there, her
family wasn't there, and in fact, a stranger that neither of these girls
had ever met before hand to the door and told them that Tanya wasn't there,
had never lived there, There was no one there by that name.
But both kids had been to that house before. Wow, you never heard
that part of it. Yeah, yeah, So they knew that that was
Tanya's house, They knew that Tanya's family lived there, and yet there was
this strange lady at the door saying sorry, no one here by that name.
And neither Jacqueline R. Terry ever saw Tanya again. She didn't return
to the school and it wasn't until years later apparently that some of the other
kids as young adults, met up with her later, but she was not
seen at the school again. Now Tanya's being hard to find, it's possible
that a lady with her name has been found. Rosie Jones, the filmmaker
for Westall sixty six, believe she has been in contact with her, but
Tanya doesn't really want to talk about the story. She confirms that she was
there at Westall High School, that she remembers the Flying Sorcerer incident, but
not other aspects of the story, and Rosie, as a professional filmmaker,
of course, has agreed to protect this lady's privacy and to honor her her
request not to be involved anymore or to be interviewed, and so that's where
that aspect of the story currently sits. Wow, wasn't that amusing? So
I was not also aware that they found her as well. All right,
well we're at our real break at the fifty five, so we're going to
go into the break, So hanging everyone. We'll be right back right after
these messages. All right, welcome back. This is Martin Willis and my
guest is Shane Ryan. We're talking about the Westall UFO and a very interesting
case, and we're also going to be talking a little bit later on about
other UFO cases in Australia. There's a lot going on, there has been,
and actually I've talked about this before, but Australia is my third largest
listening base, and that's really saying something of a country with twenty six million
compared to other major countries, so a lot of listeners in Australia, and
I have to figure out a way to get there. I've always wanted to
go to Australia, so one of these days I'm going to have to figure
out a reason to be there, I suggest Quantas Martin Quantas. Okay,
So we were talking about Tanya. I don't know her last name. I
don't know if I've seen her last name anywhere. But did she ever give
a reason for why she vanished and never came back to school and that whole
thing? Did she ever give any part of that detail? So, unfortunately,
there's nothing publicly available in relation to the rest of Tanya's story, And
as I mentioned, Rosie Jones has agreed to honor her desire for privacy,
and so we simply don't know really much more about her story. It would
be nice to know some more for me. Obviously, it's an interesting element
to the story and people do latch onto it, and that's understandable. But
from a recent which is perspective, because it's being very difficult to confirm many
of those elements that other people have talked about in relation to her, it's
hard for me to take it any further. And I guess for me as
well as the research, because I have so many other witness accounts on my
books, there's lots of other things for me to delve into and to talk
about, and there are some things so I haven't yet mentioned, of course,
and so it's an interesting element to the story, no doubt about it.
But I have to put it into the context of all the other elements,
and particularly if it's difficult for me to drive that research avenue any further,
then there's not really much I can do. It's as any UFO researcher
will know. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make
a drink, and we have to accept the frustrations and the limitations. We
can research what we can research. We can only go on the amount of
information that people are prepared to give us and do the best we can with
what we are given. Right now, the aftermath of this case is almost
just as interesting as the case itself, So why don't we go into that
aspect of it. That's true, So the aftermath is as interesting as the
actual incident itself because and I always talk about this as a Flying Sorcerer incident.
I talk about that because it's nostalgic, because that's the terminology the vocabulary
of the nineteen sixties, and some people, of course don't like using that
terminology because it's loaded and carries baggage and all of that is true, but
I stick with it because I love the nostalgia of it, and because that
was the terminology that was used by a lot of the witnesses at the time
when they saw this object, these objects, that's how they describe them.
Of course, it doesn't tell us very much about where they were from,
why they were there, how they were being flown, who was inside,
what was inside, if anybody, if anything, and all of that remains
mysterious, and of course that's something we all want to know. I mean,
that's another the mystery, of course, and I want to know all
of those things as much as anybody. But another aspect to my research,
and I guess it was the aspect I thought I would be able to be
more successful with because the other stuff is a little bit harder to the soul
is to work out who responded to this incident, Why did they respond to
it, Why did they respond to it in the way that they did,
Why was there a secrecy, a veil of secrecy it seems, lowered over
this whole story, And why were so many people given the message, either
overtly or covertly, that this was a story, a happening that wasn't to
be admitted to that wasn't to be talked about. And of course it's from
talking to so many of the witnesses over the years that have been able to
put the pieces together that there was such a large response. The police responded,
the Royal Australian Air Force responded. It seems that elements of the Australian
Army were involved, The Civil Defense Organization responded. Two separate fire brigades from
separate fire departments were involved, The Ambulance Service was involved at least for one
student, and there were possibly other elements of the Australian and Victorian state governments
that were involved as well, and at a seemingly very high level, all
for something that was written off at the time as being probably a meteorological balloon
that had been blown a little bit off course and had been cited by some
excitable children at a couple of the schools in the fringes of it. But
it wasn't about that at all. It was something else. And so it
was that response and the cover up and me trying to work out what those
people who responded to this incident found, what they discovered, what they wrote
up into their reports, what went into the archives. What was all that
about, and why couldn't it have been divulged at the time, Why couldn't
it have been shared with the media. Why I couldn't have been shared with
the people who were invold, who were there on the ground, And why
after all of these years, more than fifty years has passed, fifty four
years, is there still not a scarrick of paperwork in any of the publicly
accessible archives government archives about this story. And I, over the years,
as you would imagine, filed quite a few Freedom of Information applications, requests
for information. I've got some of the paperwork here, but to the National
Archives of Australia, to the Australian Department of Defense, to the Victoria Police,
to the Victorian Department of Education, the department responsible for running the schools,
and all of those responses from these people and from others have come back
saying either we've looked, we've searched through all our available records and there's nothing
there, or because it's so old, we don't have to or because it's
so old, any archival material that we may have collected has, under the
requirements of federal legislation, gone to the National Archives of Australia, and the
National Archives of Australia have already told me they have nothing. Wow, so
there's this problem. We know something happened, we know there were people on
the ground there in uniform and in civilian clothes, and yet not a single
piece of documentation apparently exists two to explain that. And so that's the other
aspect. That's what's so mysterious about this because even with cases, better known
cases perhaps that people have been looking at over the years, like Rosswell or
Randall Sham, there's documentation, there's information. But for Westall, I guess
a little bit like in a way another incident which happened around the same time
in Pennsylvania, the Kecksburg incident. You'll remember that something obviously happened. The
police were there, the fire department was there, the Army turned up,
there was some media there, and yet there's nothing to be found in the
government archives about that story. I but so it's a little bit akin that
sort of incident. And when you actually make contact with some of the people
who were there in uniform, their responses are very very interesting. And there
haven't been many that I've made contact with. There have been a couple of
firemen who remember it clearly, who remember responding, and there is baffled by
anybody as to what it was and what they saw that day, but it
certainly happened. They were there. But there's one surviving police officer who was
there that day. It took him many years to admit it. He always
denied it. But about two or three years ago, a journalist who I
had arranged to contact him. He still lives in the house by the way
that he lived in back in nineteen sixty six. He's still there. He's
a man now, I believe in his eighties. He's not very well,
but he finally admitted in a telephone call with this journalist that he'd been there,
that yes, he was part of the Victoria police response, but he
wasn't prepared to talk about it. And one of the high school witnesses is
actually a family friend of this man. This witness her parents were a friend
with this police officer, and when this witness's father passed away, this former
police officer was at her dad's funeral and she had been trying for years to
talk to this man Jack about what he had seen that day and why the
police were there. What were they doing? What did they see? And
she went up to Jack at the end of the funeral and she said to
Jack, Jack, would you please just tell me what happened at Westall that
day? What was it that we all saw? And he said to her,
her name is Sue, He said, Sue. And if I tell
you, what will you do with the information. And Sue said, Jack,
it's just for me. I need to know. It's for my own
sanity. I need to know. I know you know something. Please tell
me. I won't tell anybody. And Jack looked at her and said,
Sue, I don't believe you. He wouldn't spill the beans. And this
was at this poor lady's dad's funeral, father's funeral, as I said,
but dad's funeral, so very emotional time for her. But she felt it
was a time to bring it up with him. And I tried talking to
him on the telephone. And so, whatever it was, whatever was said
to him, as a young police officer, probably who was on the periphery
of the event, in a way, he still feels the need to keep
silent. That's amazing. And what about the sailance sailancing of the media,
did that happen as well. It looks as though it did happen because Melbourne
had several daily newspapers at a time, and one was a broadsheet newspaper,
the Age, which I mentioned earlier, and it carried a very small article
the next day documenting that there'd been a flying source of citing at a school
in Westall and that it may have been explained by a meteorological balloon flying over.
And that was the extent of the article, seen by hundreds of students
and teachers, but it was probably perhaps a meteorological balloon. There were three
not broadsheet newspapers. But what's the opposite of broadsheet, you know what I
mean? Less serious newspapers, not broadsheet newspapers, newspapers that perhaps had a
bigger following in terms of readership, And a couple of those newspapers in particular
were known for carrying stories about UFO incidents, about flying sources, and of
course there were such stories in those years in the nineteen sixties. None of
those newspapers carried a single sentence about this incident. So it seems as though
somebody perhaps made a phone call to what to the editors of these newspapers and
said for national security, this is a story not to be reported, or
if it is to be reported, in the way the Age did, in
that very truncated way, and with an explanation, a possible explanation given for
what it was that everybody saw. And a few days after the incident,
one of those broad shit, one of those newspapers carried a cartoon lampooning UFOs
and people seeing UFOs. But fascinatingly, on the very day after the Westall
incident, and this is perhaps it might be just a coincidence or an example
of Australian humor, I don't know, but it was actually sorry in the
afternoon newspaper that day, the sixth of vapers are the same day as the
incident happened. In one of those newspapers called the Herald, there was this
wonderful article, an advertisement really about how the defense of Australia is in very
good hands, the Royal Australian Air Force, Australia's aerial defense is in their
hands. And it's an ad about the various ways in which the Royal Australian
Air Force is keeping Australia's air safe and defended from threats, and there's radar,
and there's the jets, and there's the surface to air missiles. And
this happens on the very same day as the rest of incidents. So a
wonderful coincidence. Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. Now, wasn't there
I remember when we talked before. Wasn't there a teacher that took a bunch
of photographs of the flying sericer or one of them? And what was the
deal with that? So there are several witnesses who recall that one teacher took
photographs, and some of the kids remember that it was the female science teacher,
Miss Robbins. Others remember that it was the male science teacher, mister
Greenwood. And I've been in contact with Andrew Greenwood over the years and have
had a face to face meeting with him, and he says it definitely wasn't
him. He didn't take photographs, so it doesn't look as though it was
him. The other teacher. She's still alive, but she's very unwell.
Unfortunately, and Rosie Jones was able to have a chat with her several years
ago, and because of her illness, even though she was able to confirm
that she was at Westall as a teacher and she remembered something about a kafuffle
involving flying sources. She didn't have any more memories than that, so she
and her son, who were able to be in contact with simply weren't able
to confirm that aspect of the story. But the witnesses who remember it,
they remember that a teacher took photographs using the school's camera. There was only
one camera back in those days. The school had a single camera. It
was the school camera. Nobody else had cameras, and of course kids didn't
have access to cameras in those days. And she took photos, or someone
took photos. And when the Royal Australian Air Force officers came to the school,
which they did, they came to the school apparently that day, some
say the following day, And some witnesses have memories of the camera and the
film inside the whole thing being handed over to these Air Force officers, and
of course the film the camera perhaps never seen again. Wow. Wow.
And what about the more or less the silencing of everyone was there? I
don't want to say threats, but there were there a sort of like stern
well, maybe threats is the right word, not to talk about this.
That's right. Some people talk about that. A lot of the witnesses talk
about there being this assem. That afternoon an assembly organized by the headmaster,
mister Samblebee, and it was held in the quadrangle that afternoon, and everybody
was told that they hadn't seen flying sources. There are no such things as
flying sources, and they weren't to talk about it, and they certainly want
to talk to the media, because the media had started gathering out the front
of the school, and several students had in fact already tried started giving TV
interviews and those interviews were very quickly abruptly interrupted. One of the students,
Joy very clearly remembers. She remembers it in a very tactile way, talking
to the Channel nine interviewer, the camera operator there and this man in a
blue uniform she'd never seen before. She remembers him as being a police officer
or perhaps an Air Force officer because of the blue uniform, coming up,
putting his hand on her shoulder and saying this interviews over, you're not to
talk about this, get back into school. He then turns around, talked
and to the media people says get out of here. This interview is over
and that was it. She goes back into school. She gets given detention
as one or two of the other students were also given detention who had tried
to speak to the media. One of the students gave an interview with the
local newspaper, the Dandynong Journal. The Dandylong Journal newspaper was the one that
broke the story at the time, and so it was front page news for
a couple of weeks running in this local newspaper, and thankfulness this newspaper still
exists today and we have access to their archives. She gave an interview,
as did Andrew Greenwood with the newspaper, and she got detention as a student.
And Andrew Greenwood was definitely wrapped over the knuckles by his headmaster. And
for Andrew Greenwood that was a bit upsetting as a news student, a teacher
rather a relatively young teacher. But more upsetting for him was when about three
days later he had the knock on the door at home. He answered the
door. This was after we'd come home from work, and there were two
people, one in an Air Force officers uniform, one in civilian clothes,
and they wanted to talk to him, and he thought, well, that's
interesting. They're wanting to talk to me about the UFO to take down details
of what I'd seen. And his mother was home at the time, and
she sat in a separate room, and he sat down with the two government
people. They weren't interested in what he'd seen. They didn't want to know
any details, and in fact, they said to him, we want you
to be quiet about this. There are no such things as flying sources,
and we don't want you saying that you saw one. And he remembers saying
to the f force officers, or hang on a minute, If there are
no such things as flying sources, why does it matter if I say that
I saw a flying sourcer? Interest to you? And why are you at
my house? And the tone turned rather negative after that, apparently, and
they said to him, mister Greenwood, if you talk again about this like
you have done with the local newspaper, we'll make sure you don't teach in
this state again. We'll tell the newspapers that you're not coping as a new
teacher, that you're taking alcohol in the morning with your breakfast cereal, and
you'll never teach again. Unreal unbelievable. Were there more? Were there more
threats like that or a similar to that. I mean, you said there
was the assembly and at that point they were told not to talk about it.
But I mean, how can you stop kids from talking about it,
you know, to their parents and and things like that. I mean,
that's just going to happen, you know, I mean, they can't really
stop. You know, they must have known they couldn't stop that. I
think that's true. I think if you put yourselves into the shoes of the
school principle, the administrators, it was a reasonable thing in a way what
they did, because they were trying to obviously not just protect the reputation of
the school, but they were very much I think trying to protect the reputation
the well being of the students because they could see, I think that this
could very easily get out of hand, that there'd be more media, that
the school could get overrun with onlookers, sightseers. And this was the second
last day of the school term. The next day, very conveniently for the
school and for the story going Underground, was the last day of school term.
It was the last day before the Easter school holidays, and so there
was a two week break then, and so the school really only had to
survive another twenty four hours or so before everybody went away for at least two
weeks. The story did die down and people did move on with their lives,
but there were a whole lot of people, of course, who never
forgot what they had seen. But yes, there were some other people who
were called into the headmaster's office, and one of those students, Jacqueline,
talks about the memory of being grilled by these two people in dark suits with
short cropped hair, or nearly everybody had short cropped hair in those days,
but short cropped hair, looking very serious as if they were from the government,
and they were grilling her about you. They were saying, do you
really want us to believe that you saw little green men? Do you really
want us to believe that you saw aliens? And she was saying, no,
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I saw this object.
I'm not saying I saw this I saw this object. I saw it
close. It had this effect on my school friends. It was oval shaped,
it was it made no noise, It flew like I've never seen any
other object fly. And she got so upset, not just with their questions
and the pressure they were putting on her as a fourteen year old girl,
but she was upset with her head master who was in the office with her
with them and him not coming to her. Aid, I see him not
defending her, and so she ran out of the office crying, and she
ran home. Her home wasn't very far away. She ran home balling her
eyes out because of this experience that she'd had with these men. Wow,
that's amazing. So you've mentioned that you still basically are you still working in
this case. I mean you still, like even now talking to witnesses.
So I'm still working this case, Martin. Somebody's going to do the dirty
work, and that's me at the moment, has been for the last fourteen
years. And some other researchers have looked at the case, of course long
before I came along, and there are other people still interested in it,
obviously, but I'm very actively working the case. We've had some very interest
leads relatively recently, for example, and the leads are both promising and incredibly
excruciatingly frustrating, As is often the case with UFO story leads. A gentleman
has come forward the grandson of a man who he says was at Westall that
day working for a federal government department called the Department of Supply. And this
man also had the job to be the personal protection officer and driver for the
then Prime Minister of Australia, and whenever the Prime Minister of Australia was in
Melbourne, so not here in Camber, but in Melbourne, he would be
the driver and security man for this prime minister. His name was Harold Holt.
And this man has come forward saying that his grandfather told him out of
the blue one day about the Westall UFO case and how he was there,
and how it was about time the truth came out about it, for the
sake of everybody, for all of the witnesses, that the truth be known
about what happened at Westall. And this man talked to his mother and to
aunt, the daughters of this grandfather, and they refused to talk to him
about what happened about what they heard from their father, what he saw that
day at Westall, what his involvement was. All they have been prepared to
say to him is that he was never the same again. His demeanor changed
after Westall, and so unfortunately that the man, the grandfather, has long
since passed away. But the man was given some diaries by his grandfather,
and in his diaries he remembers reading an account of going out to Westall,
who was there, what he saw? And unfortunately, of course, in
true faux story style, those diaries have now gone missing and they can't yet
haven't yet been found. But hopefully this man, going through his grandfather's papers
and other information, and hopefully talking again with his mother and his arts,
will be able to give us some more information about what his grandfather's involvement was.
Another witness in a way has come forward recently, posting on Facebook saying
that he knows the pilots that were in the airplanes that day, that they
came from Arabin Airport, the nearby airport, and he knows one of the
pilots in particular who gave chase to the flying saucer and tried to follow it
but couldn't because it flew so fast he just left him behind, but he
tried to follow it, And that this pilot is still alive. Of course,
he's elderly, he's living in a nursing home, is unwell. In
far north Queensland, a long way from where I am. But this man
so far, even after many efforts I've made, isn't prepared to divulge the
name or the location of this pilot. Wow, that would be really amazing.
And has as you've as you have gone along? Have you well?
By the way, I'm putting the lines open here now if anyone wants to
call in, because I do want to you know, change topics coming up,
but I do want to give the listening audience an opportunity to talk about
this case. So that number is eight five five four seven two five four
eight three, and that's up on the screen and YouTube. And I forget
where I was going, and I started out one question and shifted gears into
the phone call. Well that's okay, Martin. If I could just mention
very quickly if anybody wants a lovely pressy a summary off the whistle store.
Several years ago, the wonderful British researcher Philip Mantle was the editor of a
rather short lived series of UFO magazines called UFO Matrix, and it became a
terrible headache controumer for Philip unfortunately, but the several issues of the magazine that
came out were very very good, had wonderful production values, and in one
of them, this one here UFO Matrix is the first part of a article
about the UFO for the west or UFO incident, and it continued in the
next edition and you can see there's some wonderful artwork here, not necessarily to
be related to the Westall incident specifically, but if you can get your hands
on those magazines UFO Matrix, they came out of the United Kingdom, but
they were very widely available several years ago. That's a good place to go
to. Also, the City of Kingston, which is the local government area
that incorporates Westall, the Kingston City Council, on its historical website pages,
it also has an article penned by me about the Westall story, and so
that's also a very good summation of what happened way back then. Interesting.
You know, this is probably a little bit of an odd question, but
it seems to me when there's an encounter like this, some of the people
that go through and encounter change. I think you mentioned that about the police
officer, but there's like there's maybe some type of change that they've noticed as
anyone talked about anything like that or any type of message they thought they were
getting. That's another thing you often hear about. And I know it's no
one saw any type of being or anything, but I'm just wondering if any
any claims along those lines were ever made. You had to mention the B
word, didn't you. You had to talk about I was really trying to
try to stay away from that, Martin. I'm happy to stay with human
beings, but that's a bit of a challenge. A lot of the time,
there are I'll be honest with you, and there's not much in relation
to witness accounts talking about beings, but there are some. There are,
and there are a couple of witnesses who have talked about seeing beings associated with
the Flying sour at Westall, only a couple, and they talk about the
beings as being very humanlike coming out of the craft, we're in close fitting
uniforms, a little bit like astronaut uniforms but not astronaut uniforms, and then
seeing the being the person going back into the craft. So it's not a
prominent part of the story, but I'll admit to you that it's there,
and of course my job as the researcher is to receive the stories except tried
to put them into a context and to keep an open mind. But in
terms of people being affected, you know what, with all of this terrible
stuff happening at the moment in relation to climate change, and here in Australia,
we're currently experiencing what many people believe is the worst drought since the European
settlement of Australia in seventeen eighty eight. Terrible drought out a drought. It's
the worst drought in human memory, in human records since European settlement, at
least, lack of rainfall, high temperatures, the terrible bush fires that are
happening, and it makes me think about that other wonderful school based incident which
happened in nineteen ninety four over in Zimbabwe and in Rua, and the message
that those kids got from the beings, from the people that they saw and
received some sort of communication from that really hasn't happened in the Westall story.
But I think some witnesses have talked to me about how what happened that Westall
opening their minds to perhaps a larger reality or a different reality, a change
in perspective, a greater openness, and certainly perhaps a little bit of suspicion
around how governments work, how bureaucracies work, how secrets can actually be kept
from people, and being a little bit more sensitive to that. How about
that? That's really interesting Again. I just want to say the lines are
open eight five four seven two five four eight three. Sometimes we get cervicalls.
Sometimes no one calls in, so we never know what's going to happen.
Now about James Fox, who was there as this, there's a segment
phenomenon has film coming out. We have a phone car coming in now.
I'll take that in a minute. But you got to meet with James.
He's a great guy, isn't He is a wonderful fellow, full of energy,
full of excitement for a fashion and I met his lovely wife Rebecca and
their beautiful son Ali as well. So he came out two years ago and
we spent the best part of a week together in Melbourne and we filmed at
Westall, both at the primary school, which we haven't talked a lot about.
There were a lot of witnesses at the primary school and James and I
actually addressed in a gathering of the kids at the primary school and met one
of the primary school witnesses who's now on staff at the primary school. And
we filmed at the high school as well. Down at the Grange. We
had quite a few of the Westall witnesses there, and we actually did some
filming with some other people associated with the Westall story and the people who had
not really ever been filmed before. I had not really spoken in public before,
and I'm remaining hopeful. I don't know, of course, this is
up to James and his team, but I'm remaining hopeful that at least part
of that will be indeed featured in his upcoming film The Phenomenon. Yeah.
I can't wait for that to come out. Okay, so we have a
call. We have Dale. Dale is calling from Arizona. Welcome to the
show. Dale. Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you love
being a part. All right, great, you have a question for our
guest today. Um. Actually, I was just calling in and talking to
Race just kind of rekinnel of friendship. I apologize it's kind of a probably
a glitch on the system. But what's what's the discussion, Nate? I
Fay's a great he'll say. Okay, and I'm sorry, did you have
a question for our guests? I'm sorry I don't because I haven't been paying
attention. Okay, all right, I was. I was just calling him
for race, all right, okay, all right, Well, well thanks
for the call. You can call calling him back in another time. All
right, all right, So we have another caller coming coming aboard here in
a minute. They're just hopefully he's going to be screening that a little better,
and uh, sorry about that everyone, And so Mike will be on
the line here in just a second. He's calling from Cincinnati. I think
that's where he's going from. Mike, Welcome to the show, Yes,
sir, well, hi Martin. I wanted to ask him if he's talked
to I believe he said one hundred and seventeen witnesses. How many folks in
ours estimated witness this that day. It's one of my questions. Sure,
thank you, that was a very good question. So, yes, I
have been in contact with one hundred and seventeen people who were witnesses to the
flying surcer or flying sources. One hundred and sixty five who saw the circles
the ground marks left behind, and of that there's a subset of about seventy
people who saw both the flying saucer and the circles. In terms of the
total number. Andrew Greenwood, the science teacher at Westall High School at the
time. He's on the record as saying about three quarters of the school population
was out on the sports ground witnessing the event as it unfolded. And there
were about five hundred and eighty five kids at the school at the time and
about twenty five staff, so something like six hundred people in total, and
three quarters of that roundabout were witnesses at the high school. And so I've
always said to people you can quite safely say it was something that was certainly
in the hundreds. It was two, three, four hundred people. One
can't be of course absolute about this, but it was that sort of number
and so pretty significant. And remembering broad daylight in the suburbs of Australia's second
largest city, so significant, very significant. Another thing, when you held
up the newspaper that did publish the story and you turned it around to the
backside, I believe it was another story you were trying to point out.
I saw the headline said who were the five pilots? Was that related?
So that's this one here, So this is the second article that appeared in
this newspaper is related, Yes, So who were five pilots? That's the
new paper asking the story. Who were the five pilots that were seen?
Who were piloting the planes that were seen flying flying Sourcer at the time.
So five planes, five pilots, who were they? Efforts were made at
the time to work out where the planes had come from, who the pilots
were. That all drew blanks. No one could work out who they were.
One of the teachers at the high school at the time made a phone
call within thirteen minutes of the incident happening to the airport, the local airport,
and they were given short shrift, given no information at all. One
final question the two girls that were affected by being closed to the UFO,
was that for an effect of the thing taken off? Do you know,
were they knocked back or fainted because it was leaving at that point. So
that's something that's not known. I don't know. Obviously, the timing is
a little bit hard to ascertain. When one of the witnesses arrived on the
scene, the object was apparently stationary just above the ground, and one of
the girls was still on the ground, one was recovering. And then a
few seconds after that, it seems the object began to ascend and then tilted
into the vertical plane and took off. So it sounds like it happened before
it was lifting off, But I'll be honest with you, it's hard,
of course, to be again completely absolute about that. Well, thank you
very much for taking my call. Pleasure, Thank you, are You're very
welcome. All right, Mike, So we have another call coming in and
I think we're all set to take Andy from Connecticut. Welcome back, Andy,
Hi, thanks for taking my call. Guys, great show as always.
I just wanted to ask real quick if your guests was able to get
a sense from all of the people he's interviewed, how many feelers though they
were definitely intimidated by the military or police at the school, and if they
feel that any US military people were involved, how clear is their memory of
that event? Answer off the alright, Andy, thank you very much.
Thanks guys, Let's make it more international, Let's get the Americans involved,
because that's always trouble, isn't it. But I'm sorry, um. In
terms of intimidation, the majority of the sense of intimidation or threat really,
I guess was mediated through the the school authority. So it came ya the
headmaster, all the deck, the headmaster, or one or two of the
executive teachers. So it was really coming through the school. And you can
understand why that may have been. As I mentioned before, they were trying
to keep a lid on things, trying to protect the safety the welfare of
the students as well as the staff and the school. But there are witnesses
a lot of witnesses who talk about at the assembly there being an extra presence.
It wasn't just the headmaster and the staff. There were people there in
uniform, there were people there in suits. People remember it differently, some
people remember both. And these were people who had never been at the school
before. Some people talk about their being military people walking the corridors of the
school. And the message was given at that assembly, either directly from these
government people or through the headmaster that they would keep that they were to keep
quiet about this, that it was nothing to do with flying sources, that
it was perhaps some secret government program and it wasn't to be discussed. It
was something experimental and they were to keep quiet. So a lot of witnesses
talk about that. Again, another aspect of the story is what happened when
the kids went home, and it was a varied experience. For some of
the students. When they went home, they were received, the story was
received with open hands. Their parents wanted to know, they wanted to hear
all about it. For other kids, it was a different experience. Their
parents wanted nothing to do with this story, or they were simply uninterested.
They didn't want to hear about it at all, and discussion with them the
family around the dinner table just didn't happen. And that seems to have been
experience for most of the witnesses that at the time or afterwards their story was
met with ridicule or disinterest. And in a way, you can the standard
because I think we all have the experience, any of us who have children.
Our kids often come home or they come into the room and they're talking
about something they've seen or something that's happened, and almost our initial reaction,
I think as an adult, is to be skeptical, to be disbelieving.
Because they're kids. It's sort of a natural reaction, So in a way
it's understandable. But in relation to an incident like this, a story like
this, it's very very unfortunate, right right. I want to move on
to other Australian cases, So but I will say that we'll still take calls
if someone wants to talk about this case. And that number again is eight
five five four seven two five four eight three, and so what are well,
would you consider this the top UFO incident in Australia or does something else
trump that it's half the grade these things. Of course, in terms of
it being a mass witness sighting, it's certainly the biggest mass witness daylight sighting
of at least one, probably more UFOs, And so it's right up there,
Martin, and I think in terms on the international at the international level,
it's right up there in terms of a mass witness daylight sighting, and
also taking into account their response to it by the government authorities. And when
this story became better known through Rosie Jones documentary Westill sixty six and the other
media that's covered the story over the years. Every time there's something on TV
or in a newspaper or in a magazine, I get contacted by new witnesses
to this incident quite often, and sometimes witnesses to similar incidents. And so
over the years, I've gathered this small collection of other school based sightings that
have happened in Australia. And one of them happened only about twenty kilometers away
two years later, in another Melbourne school, another high school, and there
was a small article about it. A journalist from the Age newspaper went to
the school to talk to the kids about becoming a journalist, about journalism,
and he got to the school gate and all the kids wanted to talk about
was the UFO that they just seen holding about school flying over the school.
And so that's what he ended up writing about the next day in the newspaper.
And then that story was gone, it was lost. Nobody else ever
talked about. It was never reported again. I stumbled across it going through
the newspaper archives, made contact with some of those people who were there that
day through Facebook, through email, was able to gather information about that story.
And so there were some other similar stories like that, not many,
I don't think, but I'm cautious when I say that. Now. Ever,
since Preston Dennett came along with that wonderful book that he's just published about
school based UFO stings, and he blew my socks off with how many that
he had discovered. I can't believe it. I know it was a hundred
something, wonderful, wonderful and some of them I did know about, but
most of them I did not. And I think he's done a terrific job
unearthing the number that he has done, and there are probably more out there
that he hasn't found, but he's done a wonderful job. And so it's
really this important subset I think, within the UFO phenomena of sightings, and
like Preston asks out loud, as he did on your program a few weeks
ago, what does it mean? Why do UFOs appear above schools? Why
is there this interaction between the kids and the UFOs? Are we supposed to
take from that? And of course it's an open question, but it's a
fascinating one, and for me, my eyes were really opened when again I
made a trip to Sydney to talk to the UFO Research New South Wales organization
at one of their meetings several years ago, and one of their members walked
up to me and said, Shane, do you know about the UFO sighting
that happened at the school called Crestview Elementary School in Opa Locka, in Florida,
in the suburbs of Miami in nineteen sixty seven. I said, no,
I know nothing about that. I'd gone to the meeting to address the
members about the Westall story. And he showed me this book, this wonderful
book you probably know about Martin, written by the Lorenzens back in the nineteen
sixties called UFOs over the Americas. And there's a whole section in the book
which details the Crestview Elementary School incident, which happened exactly a year to the
day, the sixth of April nineteen sixty seven, a year to the day.
And there are so many elements of the story. And it was an
incident which happened over three days, and not many people know that Westall also
was an incident which involved several days. I didn't know the sightings. There
were sightings, yes, by several witnesses in the day and the following days
up to the following weekend, of the same shaped object over Westall by the
same kids. And the same thing happened at crescue in the suburbs of Miami,
and so many other elements, the air force going to cresscue, the
police, the flying sources descending and descending behind pine trees on the other side
of the road from where the school was. Ground marks being found in the
field near the school, circles, discolored grass, kids being told not to
talk about it, the science teacher at the elementary school being one of the
protagonists at the Crest View sighting just like it Westall, it's almost as if
it's almost as if our minds are being played with in some way, that
someone somewhere has this wonderful sense of humor. And of course, as human
beings, we like to see patterns in things. We like to put the
pieces together and discover patterns where perhaps patterns don't really exist. But when you
see coincidences like this involving dates and ages of kids and people, and it's
hard not to get a little bit curious about it all. Yeah, and
especially if they would follow our calendar, Who knows what their calendar would be
to be when you we have a run ran As calling from Minnesota. Hey,
Ron, welcome to the show. Hi Martin, I'm glad to be
here, but you have a life showed a minute. Thank you, and
hello Shane, hellove and I had a question for your Shane and maybe from
Martin two. Both of you can answer it. Out of all of your
investigations of this subject or topic, have you ever seen one in real life?
And what do you think or who do you think they are? Oh,
mast and you should definitely go first with that one. Okay, Well,
just to let you know, we only have about four minutes left,
so we have we're in a tight Well. Yeah, I had a sighting
I actually have talked about a number of times. I hate to be redundant,
so i'll i'll about it. Was. It was I would I consider
kind of a boring sighting, but it was a flying saucer. I mean,
as close as you can say to what I saw was a perfect disc
in California several years ago, and it was you know, I tried to
report it and I didn't know who to report it to, and all that
stuff wasn't anything fantastical, but it still the thing that baffled me the most
was the no sound part of it. I couldn't understand that when it was
moving and all that. But Shane, go ahead. Did you ever have
any type of sating in a sense? I did? A few years ago.
I traveled to a country town about two hours from where I lived here
in Canberra, where my grandparents had been married, and I was going to
visit the church where they were married to have a look. And as I
was driving, as I was getting closer to the town, I saw this
series of round white light discs. There was sort of a bit fluffy high
up in the sky in a formation, racing across the sky. And as
I was traveling along the road in my car trying to keep looking at them
as I'm driving and looking out the window and out at the windscreen, and
I stopped the car at just before the town I was going to and stop
the car at this rest spot where there were people serving coffee, and I
got out and I could still see them in the sky flying over. And
I talked to the people who were there, and they hadn't noticed them,
and they didn't seem to be paying much attention to them, even after I
pointed it out to them. You know how these mysterious things sometimes happened with
UFO encounters. So they were UFOs because they were flying and I couldn't identify
them, never seen anything like it before. But who knows what they were?
Yeah, I have the same I have no idea what they were.
But thank sright, are you going to reach right? All right? Yeah,
that's going to be it for a cars for us tonight. We only
have a few minutes left, so I think with that a few minutes there.
The interesting part I think about this is the aftermath, and that's still
after fifty years, people come forward and talk about it. And I was
just also wondering were there any other type of like a farmer or anything like
that that said they saw this thing as well, this incident besides, you
know, school children and teachers there were so excuse me, there were a
lot of There were residents in the Westall area who were also witnesses, and
one of them had been a student at Westall High School a couple of years
earlier and was working as a farmhand. He was only sixteen years old at
the time, but he was working as a farmhand in the market garden adjacent
to the grange with his boss, who was a man in his late twenties
I think at that point, and another man in his early twenties, and
they witnessed the flying source that coming down towards the pine trees at the grange,
and Paul, who was the witness, says, it wasn't in It
didn't look in the same way as the kids have described it over the years.
For him, it looked as though it was something being projected into the
sky, and it was solid to begin with, and then as it traveled
down towards the grange, towards the pine trees, it began to change and
became gradually more translucent and then eventually almost transparent, with these colors blues and
purples and greens in the midst and it flew into the grove of pine trees,
and the pine trees didn't move, and the flying saucer, the object
didn't come out the other side. It just vanished. And something just like
this happened the crestfew a year later, and all three of these boys and
men saw this, and then they saw the kids from westvill High School coming
and rushing down, chasing whatever it was that they had seen the same object,
presumably, And then twenty minutes later, two army trucks and two land
roads full of about twenty soldiers turned up in the neighboring paddock with trucks full
of equipment and started looking for what they had seen and started investigating. And
so there were other witnesses. It wasn't just the school kids and the teachers
at the schools. Well, we are totally out of time. Thanks so
much. It was fun as always talking to you. I really appreciate it.
And you take care, thank you, and take care of yourself.
Thank you. All right, all right, everyone, So that is it
for the show this evening. And as I mentioned, if you are listening
to this show on YouTube, you want to click that bell next to the
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