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Australian Story - Season 31 Episode 8 -
The Westall UFO Mystery
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The Westall UFO Mystery
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00:1560 years ago, standing on the oval of a suburban Melbourne high school, hundreds of students
00:21experienced something that remains one of Australia's most intriguing mysteries. They
00:27saw strange saucer-shaped objects zipping through the sky. No official explanation's ever been offered
00:34and of course there's scepticism, but all these years later the witnesses still want to know what
00:40exactly did they see?
00:48The footy season had just started. Me and all my mates were out on the oval and all of a
00:55sudden we all
00:56looked up and there's this object going slowly across the sky.
01:02I just shrieked there's a flying saucer and there's a flying saucer outside
01:09and pupils just stood up and off they went.
01:14And it was just humming, it was just sitting there and humming and I just couldn't believe it.
01:20I was just transfixed because I'd never seen anything like that before. It was amazing.
01:27And I thought, no it's not an aeroplane, no engines, nothing. It's just sitting above the power lines
01:35in the sky.
01:38I was mesmerised, I was just staring at them moving around. They were like a shape of saucer and they
01:45flew.
01:48The significance of the Westall case is the sheer volume of first-hand eyewitnesses saying the same
01:55thing that they did 60 years ago. That's a very compelling case.
02:00What frustrates me and I think all the other pupils is the attempts of having it buried.
02:07Could we just find out what it was, please? That's all we want.
02:13What?
02:16This is what I saw.
02:20That's what I saw.
02:42You have all these elements to the Westall case that make it a true enigma and a mystery 60 years
02:49later. And it really just has so many interesting and fantastical facets to it.
02:55Why not?
02:57Every year we have an anniversary at the Granger, most of us go.
03:00Hi everybody, thanks for being here. Great to see people. Keep coming.
03:05It's a chance for us all to get together and talk about, you know, what we experienced that day.
03:11It's in my head. I can never leave it. I don't care what anyone says. I have one question. Were
03:18you
03:18there? And they all say, no. Well I was and so were all these other witnesses. What have we got
03:25to lie
03:25about? Nothing. We want an answer. A lot of the witnesses really felt like they had been restrained
03:34over the years from talking about the story. It was something that couldn't be shared, couldn't be
03:40talked about. So I've sort of kept it under wraps for quite a while because you don't, your fear of
03:45being ridiculed. They got the message very clearly from the school authorities that this was a story
03:51that was to stay at Westall. We were just all told not to talk about it or we'd get detention.
03:58It's all rubbish. Some skeptics have suggested that what was responsible for Westall was just
04:04mass hysteria. I don't think it's something that can be completely discounted, but it's clear they
04:12saw something. No matter what happens, I will never doubt what I saw. Of course something must have
04:19happened. It's just trying to find the most reasonable explanation without jumping to fantasy.
04:26Westall has been co-opted by the hardcore UFO believers as a classic case of alien visitation.
04:31Now, if aliens are visiting Earth, so be it. But great, you know, where are they?
04:37I hope what might come about from this 60th anniversary is
04:40I hope you'll find some more official information. We'd all like to see that.
04:50In 1966, Westall was a fast-growing community on the southeastern edge of Melbourne.
04:59To cope with the fast-growing population, there were two newly founded schools,
05:04Westall High School and the adjacent primary school.
05:13The Westall incident actually happened on the second last day of term.
05:25We were out in the field. I looked up into the sky and I saw a disc
05:37flying around in a very strange movement, kind of zigzagging. It was here one minute and then up
05:44there the next. That's when the commotion started. I was in science.
05:54It was coming up to morning recess and all of a sudden this student flung the door open and said,
06:01Mr Green, Mr Green, there's flying saucers in the sky, there's things in the sky and then just took off.
06:07Well, we just all looked at each other and started laughing because we thought, oh yeah, right.
06:15And I can remember walking out there and standing and just looking up and all of a sudden I saw
06:21them.
06:25It wasn't particularly high up, maybe a thousand feet, hard to know exactly.
06:30It was large, easily visible, circular, silver and clearly under some sort of control.
06:39It wasn't a helicopter. It didn't have wings. It wasn't an aircraft. It was a flying disc, a two-storey
06:52kind of flying disc.
06:55I saw three, but some saw two, some saw one. It depended on where you were in the school.
07:03And they moved incredible speeds.
07:08Straight up in the air and you'd look and they would be there. And you'd look again and there's
07:13one there and there's one over there and oh my god, then they're over the power lines.
07:18I was working on the market garden. My back was feeling a bit sore, so I stood up.
07:25And right in front of me, there was this object in the sky. It was just there.
07:34As I was looking at it, the colouring changed, becoming translucent at the same time.
07:43I didn't believe it because it couldn't be happening.
07:50I saw what I saw and so did all my school friends, hundreds of us.
07:55It was unidentified. It was flying and it was clearly an object. It wasn't a mirage.
08:00So it got referred to as a UFO, an unidentified flying object, because it met all those three criteria.
08:09A lady named Mrs Robbins, she was my science teacher. She came out with a camera and started taking photos.
08:19And all of a sudden, all these little planes come flying through.
08:23We were used to planes because of being so close to Moorabbin Airport.
08:27And anyway, they fly in and they get near the saucers. The saucer would just go straight up in the
08:33air.
08:33And it was like they were playing cat and mouse with them, honestly.
08:36It was quite amazing to watch.
08:40A few of us girls were on the fence and we were crying, thinking it was the end of the
08:45world.
08:45Total hysteria. It was just incredible.
08:48And then it did a controlled descent down behind some pine trees.
08:55Now, the area was known to us kids as the Grange.
08:58And it was a few blocks behind the school.
09:01That's when a lot of the kids jumped the fence and took off.
09:07I was teaching English three lessons straight, dying to get a cup of tea and to smoke.
09:16I met Andrew Greenwood coming in. He was a science teacher.
09:23And the first words he said to me, I think, was something like, did you see it? Did you see
09:29it?
09:29I missed out on it by minute. So that's exercised my imagination for the last 60 years.
09:37Andrew told me that the kids had gone over the fence to follow the flying saucer.
09:42He said it had landed beyond the trees.
09:45I just ran in the direction of where this one appeared to go down.
09:51And there was this strange thing just sitting there, hovering above the ground,
09:57quite big. And I could hear a low buzzing sound.
10:02I could see two other girls that had gotten there before me. One was crying and quite hysterical,
10:07actually. And the other girl was just on the ground.
10:12And then as I was literally staring at it, it started to rise up very slowly.
10:16And then when it turned on that, when it was in on that angle, it could go really fast.
10:24I never saw the craft, whatever you'd like to call it, on the ground.
10:30But by the time I arrived at the spot, the grass was flattened.
10:42I walked around to the other side of the school and I noticed these two jeeps.
10:49The jeeps would have arrived, I reckon, probably 10 minutes after the craft had disappeared. It was
10:55very quick. And now the men get out and they've got clipboards and whatever. Now they're all in
10:59green uniforms. But some of them were in camouflage. And then they jumped back in and took off and went
11:07obviously down to the ground. There are people who very clearly remember there being a military presence.
11:14I definitely had a line of sight. Yes, I saw everything that went on over there.
11:19One of the army guys came over and spoke to my boss. The guys all started looking at the ground,
11:26inspecting it. They had a bit of trouble trying to get everybody back into class.
11:42It was later that we had the assembly, the special assembly.
11:50Mr Samblebee, the headmaster, dictated to all the students that what we saw was probably
11:56just a weather balloon. Right? And that we're not to talk to the press or anybody else about what
12:02happened. Okay? And that if we did, we would get into real strife with him.
12:09It seemed quite a normal thing of a headmaster who doesn't want to see his school running amok.
12:15No one would have wanted their school to be the centre of a UFO sighting.
12:22I was taken by the principal to a little interview room where two gentlemen were seated.
12:33I was absolutely terrified.
12:38They told me that what I had witnessed wasn't a balloon.
12:44Even at that young age, I disputed that fact. That's when they changed their tactic.
12:55They intimated that we don't want this getting out there into the media.
13:02They wore dark suits, white shirts and skinny ties.
13:10They made me promise not to discuss it.
13:15I kept my word to the point where I did not discuss it with my mother.
13:19I did not discuss it with anybody.
13:30When school finished, Channel 9 news team was out the front.
13:34And they were asking students if they would be interviewed.
13:37So we told them what we saw. And then this man appeared.
13:41It was a policeman. And he said to the cameraman and to the reporter,
13:46you stop filming and you go away.
13:53We all watched the news at six o'clock.
13:55And yeah, there I was pointing up into the sky telling my story.
14:05After the Westall incident, it kind of fell off the map. It went dark.
14:09It wasn't talked about until many, many, many decades later where some researchers,
14:15Australian researchers started asking questions.
14:20I was particularly curious about the Westall story because hardly anything had been written about it.
14:27I presume the story was, at least in part, urban legend.
14:32That there were elements of the story that had probably been embellished and added onto over time.
14:38But what I was interested in was, well, what was at the core of the story?
14:44There's been a mushrooming of flying saucer clubs.
14:47Flying saucers were a big part of the culture when I was growing up.
14:51What do you think they are?
14:53They are real, anyway. They come from the other planets.
14:57There were stories about flying saucers on TV, in the movies, comics.
15:02It was something that was very much part of the zeitgeist at the time.
15:06In the past decade, the mounting accumulation of evidence demands our attention.
15:14People see things all the time around the world. I mean, it's a global phenomenon.
15:18But to have a mass sighting in broad daylight, it's more rare, right?
15:25So those, in my opinion, deserve a proper investigation, a deeper dive.
15:32Because, what is it, a mass hallucination?
15:42This is the science room.
15:44So this is the room you were enjoying.
15:46Yeah.
15:47I've been in contact now with easily more than 200 people who were witnesses at West Hall that day.
15:54This is what all started it all.
15:56Yeah, this is where it started.
15:58It's hard to know exactly how many people saw the UFO, but when I met Andrew Greenwood,
16:03a science teacher, who's now sadly passed away, he was very clear to me that when he went out onto
16:10the sports ground with his class, that there was something like more than half the student body
16:15seeing what he was seeing. And that was more than 300 kids.
16:21I was standing beside Andrew, Andrew Greenwood. He sort of looked at me as if to say,
16:26don't run and don't jump the fence like somebody else we know.
16:30You lay it off and you'd gone.
16:32You'd already gone, I know.
16:33It's amazing to me that there is so much commonality across the witness testimonies.
16:38And this became very apparent to me very early on, that people were and are telling the same story.
16:45So the big misconception is that we have good memories. We don't. Our brain reconstructs things,
16:53elaborates, forgets to include things. There's a very interesting thing when people get together,
16:59there's a group reinforcement of the common story. It's not malicious, it's just the way we are.
17:11I desperately wanted to track down that original Channel 9 news footage which aired that night
17:16and which had interviews apparently with the witnesses. And the film couldn't be found.
17:23It was an empty film canister.
17:29Lots of people have memories of photographs being taken,
17:32so I tried very hard to find those photos. But those photographs have never been seen
17:39in public. We don't know what became of them. But there was a possible other photo,
17:46taken four days before on the 2nd of April, that may have had some connection to what happened
17:52at Westall, taken by a man called James Kibble. James Kibble had never spoken in public on TV before.
18:04So this is a print from the original photograph taken by James Kibble. This is his handwriting he sent to
18:12me.
18:14This was taken just a few kilometres away prior to the landing at the school.
18:21James Foxx, American filmmaker, was very interested in covering both the James Kibble story and the Westall story and possible
18:28connections between the two.
18:30This tremendous flash of light and I looked up and I saw this object and I pulled it. I had
18:37a Polaroid camera and I pulled this up and hit myself on my face.
18:41And I took the picture and I took the photograph here. This is the original Polaroid. It looked like it
18:50was made out of some form of metal and it was engineered.
18:53And being an engineer, I was sure it was. And that's when I took the photograph and it tipped around
18:59and I could see the bottom and it looked like it was rotating to me.
19:03That was it. And then after that, it sort of gave a bounce and it rocketed away to the north,
19:09very high speed.
19:10Can you describe the acceleration?
19:12It was like almost insustaneous, like it had been shot out of a gun. Wham!
19:23When I look at this photo, I think, wow, it's a great photo. But of course, you can look at
19:29it and think, well, is that a bicycle bell?
19:33Is it a hubcap? And I don't know. I know what James Kibble told me.
19:40And I'm just not in a position to know, of course, one way or the other.
19:49Even though the news footage doesn't exist anymore, there are actually newspaper articles that date from that time.
19:59There was a very small article in the Age newspaper the following day, and it should be just here somewhere.
20:07There it is.
20:07It was tiny and really didn't give any extra details except to say there had been a weather balloon launched
20:16in Melbourne that morning.
20:18And given the wind on that day, it's possible that the thing that was seen at Westall was that weather
20:25balloon.
20:28So that's a weather balloon.
20:31It's definitely the wrong shape, isn't it?
20:34Yeah.
20:37It wasn't a weather balloon. It had some elements of the shape and colour of a weather balloon.
20:42And it was silver and circular in looking up from underneath.
20:47But nothing hanging underneath it. There's a payload.
20:51Now, if we were to invoke the principle of Occam's razor, which basically says,
20:56the simpler explanation is often the best one to choose,
21:01then the weather balloon is a very likely candidate.
21:04But that's not to write off and discount what they're saying.
21:08It's just not enough for us to make a proper conclusion.
21:12There's no evidence that it actually was a weather balloon.
21:16There's no mention of the weather balloon being collected and being identified.
21:20When I looked into the weather data for that day, it actually didn't stack up at all.
21:25The winds, as predicted and as reported, actually blew in the opposite direction.
21:34The Dandenong Journal was the only newspaper that covered this story.
21:38For me, I found that really surprising.
21:40So this is the first article, but it was really in the follow-up article
21:44that we got a little bit more information about what happened.
21:47There were some interviews with a couple of the kids and Andrew Greenwood, the science teacher.
21:55He never spoke about it again publicly until James Fox and I and others were able
22:01to encourage him to speak on camera for the first time.
22:04But he didn't want his face to appear.
22:07Two older men, one in uniform, asked for my description of what I'd seen.
22:11I was then told that I hadn't seen anything, but I'd made it all up, possibly because I was drunk
22:19and that they would have to report that fact to the education department and I would lose my job.
22:25I was told that I would be prosecuted and that I had to keep quiet about it.
22:30Why did I have to keep quiet?
22:34I heard reports that he had been threatened and told that his reputation was on the line.
22:39He went very quiet. I think it cost him to say what he had to say.
22:43Others might have been more circumspect, but we knew he had seen something.
22:51So many witnesses had seen five planes.
22:57In the Dandenong Journal's final article, they were going very hard trying to find the five pilots.
23:06The five planes seemed to be somehow connected to the UFOs.
23:13And they tried very hard to find those pilots, but never did.
23:20Basically, the newspaper was saying the trail had gone cold. Nobody would talk to them.
23:26The school wouldn't talk. The Moorabbin Airport wouldn't talk.
23:30And that they suspected that somebody had actually put pressure on the school.
23:37The fact that the story seemed to have been shut down by somebody would make me think
23:42it's more likely to have been military involvement or government involvement.
23:47Do you know, like, where it came from?
23:49Well, I wish I did.
23:51Did it look new or did it look like old and rusty?
23:55Well, I thought it was pretty new looking.
23:58It was 1966. The Cold War was on. The space race was on. It was a time of rapid change.
24:05A day of wild, excited scenes of welcome for President Johnson in Sydney.
24:11There were lots of theories for what had been seen at Westall.
24:171966 was definitely a time of a very burgeoning relationship between Australia and the United States.
24:23We believe that it is right that the strong should help the weak defend their freedom.
24:36Our alliance with the Americans was a particularly strong one.
24:40And we had something of a dependence on each other, not only in terms of personnel, but also of equipment.
24:51Melbourne, as a city, was a very busy place in terms of government research and development.
24:57And not very far away from Westall, there was the government aircraft factories and the aeronautical research laboratories.
25:07Both of those places were trying to progress experimentation with different sorts of aircraft.
25:17The threat of nuclear attack was very much on people's minds.
25:23There was a program called Highball and it was a cooperative program between
25:29the Australian government and the American government's Atomic Energy Commission
25:34to send up these very large high-altitude balloons to measure the presence of nuclear fallout.
25:45Some of those balloons got away.
25:47Did it happen that one of these sophisticated balloons drifted down to Melbourne?
25:55It could have. Why not?
25:58It would explain possibly the appearance of government officials at the school.
26:03There hasn't been any supporting evidence to confirm that hypothesis to date,
26:09but that's one that's been put forward.
26:19I had never heard of what had happened at Westall until a journalist approached me
26:24and asked me as a historian and a researcher to see what I could find, particularly with my defence background.
26:31I don't really know, of course, what those three UFOs were.
26:38I have a high degree of confidence, however, that they were part of a research and development project
26:43which was underway in Australia.
26:47I personally believe it could have been a United States project,
26:52which they were developing here in conjunction with us, using our expertise.
26:58I am reasonably confident that what happened at Westall on that day
27:03was that something certainly went wrong.
27:06That would account for the rapidity, incredible rapidity, of the troops, if I can call them that,
27:13who responded within the hour on that day.
27:18I don't discount that it could have been top secret military technology that was being tested
27:25or trialled and an operation went not according to plan.
27:31But again, where's the evidence to support that?
27:34That's what we're trying to find.
27:38So I've submitted many, many Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to get some documentary evidence.
27:44But unfortunately, there has been no explanation provided by the Australian government or the Australian
27:49Department of Defence as to what was responsible for what was seen in the skies above Westall High School.
27:59I guess I'm lucky to have had the chance to see it, but, you know, a bit of a sliding
28:03doors moment, didn't affect me in any way.
28:05You know, no one came and beamed me up.
28:08Certainly, there's ongoing interest in the story from people who weren't there, because it's pretty unusual, I guess, looking back
28:13from 60 years later.
28:16It's okay to talk about it now, you know, saying, look, we saw something that was so different all those
28:23years ago.
28:25At my age now, it doesn't matter if somebody thinks that I'm a little bit loony, it has no relevance.
28:33I know what I saw.
28:36We're all telling the truth.
28:41I know what I saw and, you know, end of story.
28:45And I'm not accountable to anybody but myself.
28:57So where we are now is the UFO playground at the Grange.
29:02I actually suggested to the local council that it might be a good idea to put something here,
29:09some sort of commemoration of what had happened all those years ago.
29:17History is something that's really fragile, and so having something physical here then creates an
29:22opportunity for people who have come afterwards to know that something happened that day, something
29:28mysterious, something real. And like all the witnesses who were here that day, I too just want to know.
29:37If there's a truth to be revealed, I think it's time to reveal it, and I think we, as the
29:43public, can handle it.
30:15It's time to reveal it, and I feel like we're going to be, as the public, can与 that as well.
30:16But with the community, our community, the community, are being able to find out what we've been through now.
30:18We've worked hard to do now.
30:18We've been here for a long time, and we've been here for a long time.
30:19We've been here to this week, today.
30:19We've been here for a long time.
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