00:1560 years ago, standing on the oval of a suburban Melbourne high school,
00:20hundreds of students experienced something that remains one of Australia's most intriguing
00:25mysteries. They saw strange saucer-shaped objects zipping through the sky. No official
00:33explanation's ever been offered, and of course there's scepticism. But all these years later,
00:38the witnesses still want to know, what exactly did they see?
00:48The footy season had just started. Me and all my mates were out on the oval.
00:55And all of a sudden, we all looked 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
01:35power lines in the sky.
01:38I was mesmerized. I was just staring at them, moving around. They were like a shape of saucer,
01:45and they flew.
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.
02:16This is what I saw.
02:20That's what I saw.
02:41You have all these elements to the Westall case that make it a true enigma and a mystery 60 years
02:49later.
02:50And it really just has so many interesting and fantastical facets to it.
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 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.
03:17Were you there? And they all say, no. Well, I was, and so were all these other witnesses.
03:24What have we got to lie about? Nothing. We want an answer.
03:30A lot of the witnesses really felt like they had been restrained over the years from talking about
03:36the story. It was something that couldn't be shared, couldn't be talked about.
03:40So I've sort of kept it under wraps for quite a while because you fear of being ridiculed.
03:46They got the message very clearly from the school authorities that this was a story that
03:51was to stay at Westall.
03:53We were just all told not to talk about it or we'd get detention. It's all rubbish.
04:00Some skeptics have suggested that what was responsible for Westall was just mass hysteria.
04:06I don't think it's something that can be completely discounted, but it's clear they saw something.
04:13No matter what happens, I will never doubt what I saw.
04:17Of course something must have happened. It's just trying to find the most reasonable explanation
04:23without jumping to fantasy. Westall has been co-opted by the hardcore UFO believers as a classic
04:30case of alien visitation. Now, 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 some more official information. We'd all like to see
04:43that.
04:49In 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.
05:14The Westall incident actually happened on the second last day of term.
05:24We were out in the field.
05:29I looked up into the sky and I saw a disc flying around in a very strange movement,
05:42kind of zigzagging. It was here one minute and then up there the next.
05:47That's when the commotion started.
05:51I 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, what, there's flying saucers in the sky, there's things in the sky,
06:05and then just took off. Well, we just all looked at each other and started laughing
06:11because 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.
06:31It 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,
06:50a two-storey kind 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 straight up in the air and you'd look and they would be there.
07:11And you'd look again and there's one there and there's one over there and oh my god,
07:15then they're over the power lines.
07:19I was working on the market garden. My back was feeling a bit sore so I stood up
07:24and 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.
07:42I 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. It was unidentified,
07:57it was flying and it was clearly an object, it wasn't a mirage. So it got referred to as a
08:02UFO,
08:03an 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
08:14taking photos. And all of a sudden all these little planes come flying through. We were used to planes
08:24because of being so close to Moorabbin Airport. And anyway, they'd fly in and they'd get near the
08:30saucers and the saucer would just go straight up in the air and it was like them playing cat and
08:35mouse
08:35with them, honestly. It was quite amazing to watch. A few of us girls were on the fence and we
08:43were
08:43crying thinking it was the end of the world. Total 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 and 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 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. He said it had
09:43landed beyond the trees. I 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, quite big. And I could
09:59hear a low buzzing sound. I could see two other girls that had gotten there before me. One was crying
10:06and quite hysterical actually. 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. And then when it
10:18turned on that, when it was in that angle, it could go really fast.
10:24I never saw the craft, whatever you'd like to call it, on the ground. But by the time I arrived
10:32at the
10:33spot, the grass was flattened. I walked around to the other side of the school and I noticed these two
10:46jeeps. The jeeps would have arrived, I reckon, probably 10 minutes after the craft had disappeared.
10:55It was very quick. And now the men get out and they've got clipboards and whatever. Now,
10:59they're all in green uniforms. But some of them were in camouflage. And then they jumped back in
11:06and took off and went, obviously, down to the ground. There are people who very clearly remember
11:11there being a military presence. I definitely had a line of sight. Yes, I saw everything that went on
11:18over there. One of the army guys came over and spoke to my boss. The guys all started looking at
11:26the
11:26ground inspecting 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 Sambleby, the headmaster, dictated to all the students that what we saw was probably just a
11:57weather balloon. Right? And that we're not to talk to the press or anybody else about what happened.
12:03Okay? 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.
12:23I was taken by the principal to a little interview room where two gentlemen were seated.
12:33I was absolutely terrified. They told me that what I had witnessed wasn't a balloon.
12:45Even 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.
13:09They made me promise not to discuss it. I kept my word to the point where I did not
13:18discuss it with my mother. I did not discuss it with anybody.
13:30When school finished, Channel Nine news team was out the front. And they were asking students if
13:36they'd be interviewed. So 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 and yeah, there I was pointing up into the sky and
13:57telling us,
13:59telling 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, Australian
14:16researchers started asking questions.
14:19I 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, that there were elements of the story that had
14:34probably been
14:35embellished and added onto over time. But what I was interested in was, well, what was at the core of
14:43the story?
14:44There's been a mushrooming of flying saucer clubs. Flying saucers were a big part of the culture
14:50when I was growing up. What do you think they are? They are real, anyway. They come from the other
14:55planets.
14:57There were stories about flying saucers on TV, in the movies, comics. It was something that was very
15:04much part of the zeitgeist at the time. In the past decade, the mounting accumulation of evidence
15:09demands our attention. People 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? So those, in my opinion, deserve
15:29a proper investigation, a deeper dive, because, what is it, a mass hallucination?
15:42This is the science room. So this is the room you were enjoying. Yeah. I've been in contact now with
15:49easily more than 200 people who were witnesses at Westall that day. This is where it started. Yeah,
15:56this is where it started. It's hard to know exactly how many people saw the UFO, but when I met
16:02Andrew
16:03Greenwood, the science teacher, who's now sadly passed away, he was very clear to me that when he
16:09went out onto the sports ground with his class, that there was something like more than half the
16:14student body seeing what he was seeing, and that was more than 300 kids. I was standing beside Andrew,
16:23Andrew Greenwood. He sort of looked at me as if to say, don't run and don't jump the fence like
16:28somebody else we know. You'd already gone. You'd already gone, I know. It's amazing to me that there
16:35is so much commonality across the witness testimonies, and this became very apparent to me very early
16:40on that people were and are telling the same story. So the big misconception is that we have good memories.
16:48We don't. Our brain reconstructs things, elaborates, forgets to include things. There's a very interesting
16:58thing when people get together, there's a group reinforcement of the common story. It's not malicious,
17:05it'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. It was an empty film canister.
17:29Lots of people have memories of photographs being taken, so I tried very hard to find those photos.
17:36But those photographs have never been seen in public. We don't know what became of them.
17:43But there was a possible other photo, taken four days before, on the 2nd of April,
17:49that may have had some connection to what happened at Westall, taken by a man called James Kibble.
17:58James 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 Fox, American filmmaker, was very interested in covering both the James Kibble story and the Westall story,
18:28possible connections between the two. This tremendous flash of light, and I looked up,
18:33and I saw this object, and I pulled it, I had a Polaroid camera, and I pulled this up, hit
18:38myself on my face,
18:41and I took the picture, and I got the photograph here. This is the original Polaroid.
18:46That's it, this is what it is. It looked like it was made out of some form of metal, and
18:52it was engineered.
18:53And being an engineer, I, I was sure it, it was. And that's when I took the photograph, and it
18:59tipped
18:59around, and I could see the bottom, and it looked like it was rotating to me. That was it. And
19:04then after
19:04that, it sort of gave a bounce, and it rocketed away to the north, very high speed. Can you describe
19:11the acceleration? It was like almost insustaneous, like it had been shot out of a gun. Wham, you know.
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
19:29think, well, is that a bicycle bell? Is it a hubcap? And I don't know. I know what James Kibble
19:37told 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
19:54that date from that time. There was a very small article in the Age newspaper the following day.
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