ALIEN: The Westall UFO Incident

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Speaker 1 Okay, so humble brag, but I was a pretty good student when I was younger. I always made sure to do my homework on time, study for every quiz, participate in class.

Speaker 1 But there were definitely days where I wanted nothing to do with school.

Speaker 1 I'm sure a lot of you can relate, but I spent plenty of afternoons like staring out the window of the classroom, just sort of daydreaming. hoping, praying that something interesting would happen.

Speaker 1 Thinking like, maybe today's the day, I don't know, but UFO will come down from the sky and sort of shake things up a bit.

Speaker 1 But you gotta be careful what you wish for. Because in 1966, this actually happened at a high school outside of Melbourne, Australia.

Speaker 1 That day, as many as 100 people, including students, faculty, and staff, saw a giant silver saucer the size of a car descend from the clouds and hover over their campus.

Speaker 1 I mean, talk about an interesting school day, right?

Speaker 2 Only it didn't stop there.

Speaker 1 After the event, witnesses had sinister men in suits showing up at their homes late at night, men who threatened them into never speaking a word about it again.

Speaker 1 But thankfully, many of them didn't cower to their intimidation, which is why we have a pretty wild story to share with you today.

Speaker 1 I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is so supernatural.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to So Supernatural. I'm Rasha Pecaro.

Speaker 10 And I'm Yvette Gentile.

Speaker 10 And today we're covering a UFO case that took place over a high school near Melbourne, Australia.

Speaker 1 Back on April 6th, 1966, a student named Graham Simmons is in a chemistry class at Westall High School just outside of Melbourne, Australia. And at first, it feels like a typical day to him.

Speaker 1 You know, probably dreading gym class, worried he forgot his math homework, or wondering if there's going to be a pop quiz in literature. Nothing too out of the ordinary.

Speaker 1 In fact, it's such a normal day that Graham says he's bored out of his mind, like many of us in school, let's be real.

Speaker 1 Then he happens to glance out a south-facing window and he spots something in the sky.

Speaker 10 He's never seen anything like it before. And at first, he's not even sure what he's looking at because it doesn't resemble an airplane or a helicopter or anything else that he could recognize.

Speaker 10 But the curiosity must have been showing on Graham's face. Maybe he even gasped out loud because the other students notice his reaction.

Speaker 10 So they start shifting in their seats trying to get a better look out the window. And sure enough, the other kids in his class also see the strange craft in the sky.

Speaker 10 Even the teacher Barbara Robbins notices it. But she tries to stay professional and keep the students focused on the lesson, which obviously doesn't last for long.

Speaker 10 Because when the bell rings and the class ends a few minutes later, everyone pours out into the hallway and then runs as fast as they can outside.

Speaker 10 There are so many people that filled the yard, the soccer and the rugby fields, the sidewalks and the parking lots.

Speaker 10 I mean, by 11 a.m., just a few minutes after Graham's sighting, a total of 100 or more students, teachers, and other employees are outside. Some reports say there are over 200 witnesses.

Speaker 10 And this includes Graham's chemistry teacher, Barbara, who was sharp enough to actually bring a camera with her and snap a ton of photos of this elusive craft.

Speaker 1 Now, I'd love to tell you exactly what they saw when they looked up, but the reports from person to person are pretty all over the place.

Speaker 1 Some people say the flying object looks long and cylindrical, like it's cigar shaped. Others describe it as looking more like a classic flying saucer.

Speaker 1 One student even says it's emitting heat and she can feel it all the way from the ground where she's standing. She also says it's covered in these purple lights.

Speaker 1 Most reports say it's made of metal and that it's flying without even making a sound. There's no rumbling, no engine, no anything.

Speaker 10 Which if you're a longtime listener, you know is actually kind of standard in these UFO reports.

Speaker 10 They're often described as being completely silent, sometimes emitting heat, and of course, you have those classic descriptions of being saucer. or cigar shaped.

Speaker 10 But one thing that makes the Westall high incident different from the others is that most of the reports say this thing terrified them.

Speaker 10 It instilled a fear that they never felt before. So instead of that awe feeling like most people normally feel, this is quite different.

Speaker 1 A bunch of students panicked when they spotted the ship overhead. They were literally running around, screaming, and some even dove for cover.

Speaker 1 Like they were worried the ship was going to like start shooting at them or try to beam them up. And you might be thinking, okay,

Speaker 1 they were young, it's understandable that they would be scared. But there are other stories of kids responding to UFOs very differently than these high schoolers.

Speaker 1 Take the so-called Cash Landrum incident. On December 29th, 1980, A seven-year-old named Colby Landrum is in the car with his grandmother and her friend at about nine o'clock at night.

Speaker 1 He sees a flying saucer in the sky, and he's very calm as he points it out and asks the adults what it is.

Speaker 1 And Colby, while he might be a little bit scared, sure, he doesn't scream or panic like our high schoolers in Melbourne.

Speaker 10 And you might also remember our alien implants episode, where we talked about a man known only as patient 17.

Speaker 10 He remembered being abducted by aliens as a boy, but he recalled being almost frozen when he had his encounter. Like he couldn't panic, even if he wanted to.

Speaker 10 All to say, the screaming, the panic, and the strong reactions at Westall are something a bit unique to this case. Not totally unwarranted, but sort of.

Speaker 10 I mean, it's opposite of what we hear during UFO encounters.

Speaker 10 Although I will say, it's not often you have over 100 people seeing a UFO UFO at the same time either, but

Speaker 10 in the same breath, Phoenix Lights, that was a lot of people that saw that.

Speaker 1 You're absolutely right. And while you may think that going through this experience with so many other people would be comforting in a way, it doesn't seem to give anyone a huge sense of relief.

Speaker 1 I mean, one girl is so upset that she needs to be carted away in an ambulance. Afterwards, she never sets foot on the school grounds again.

Speaker 1 She is so traumatized, she literally transfers to an entirely new school somewhere else. But that's not where the sighting ends.
Instead of just zipping away, the flying object dips toward the ground.

Speaker 1 It's going slowly, not crashing, but making a controlled descent. And then it lands.

Speaker 10 There's actually a big grove of pine trees just behind the school grounds. Behind them, there's a grassy area called the Grange.

Speaker 10 That's short for Grange Preserve, and it's not technically part of the school property, but it is open to the public.

Speaker 10 I mean, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if students go there when they just want to cut class. But that's where the craft presumably hits the ground.

Speaker 10 Though no one can say for sure because they don't actually see it land. In fact, a few students run toward the Grange to try and get a better look at it.

Speaker 10 But before they can get too close, this extreme exhaustion comes over them and they literally pass out right there in the grass.

Speaker 10 And they don't regain consciousness until everything is over, which is absolutely mind-boggling when you think about it.

Speaker 2 For sure.

Speaker 1 And after a few minutes, many of the students who are still back at the school see something appear just over the tree line. It's the same ship as before and it's taking off again.

Speaker 1 The craft makes its way into the sky and starts flying off into the distance, but it doesn't escape alone. Now there are five small planes flying behind it, almost like they're chasing the disc.

Speaker 1 Now, I don't know a ton about those particular airplanes, like if they're civilian or military or whatnot, but I do know the UFO evades them for quite a while, darting all around the sky.

Speaker 1 Then it finally disappears after about 20 minutes.

Speaker 10 And you might figure that once the ship flies away, that's it. Everybody goes home, tells their family, never forgets the memory, yada, yada, yada, right?

Speaker 10 But almost immediately after the sighting, like I'm talking 40 minutes later, the alleged cover-up begins.

Speaker 10 That is when a bunch of strangers show up on the school grounds. Some of them are in Air Force uniforms, but other

Speaker 10 are in,

Speaker 10 you guys know what I'm going to say, they are in black suits. So we got the men in black suits again who refuse to tell anyone who they work for.

Speaker 10 And even weirder, they all seem to have the school's principal right there in their pocket.

Speaker 10 So all afternoon and into the next day, students and teachers get called into the office for questioning.

Speaker 10 The principal and the men in suits ask each witness one by one to tell them exactly what they saw.

Speaker 10 Anytime someone admits the object looked like a flying saucer, the men in suits supposedly start mocking them.

Speaker 10 Basically, they act like you'd have to be stupid or gullible to believe in alien spaceships. And remember, They're mostly talking to high school students.

Speaker 10 So whatever's happening must be pretty serious to be intimidating a bunch of teenagers over it. And most of the kids, I mean, they leave these meetings pretty embarrassed and flustered.

Speaker 10 And they don't want to even talk about the experience because they're too afraid of what these men in black are going to do.

Speaker 1 Now, I don't know if the men in suits at Westall High are American or if they work for the Australian equivalent of the men in black.

Speaker 1 But they don't just intimidate people in these one-on-one meetings. That same afternoon, just a few hours after the sighting, the principal calls all of the students into an assembly.

Speaker 1 During it, he tells everyone that they get to go home early, but they can never mention what they saw that day. They can't talk to their parents, their siblings, their friends from other schools.

Speaker 1 They can't even talk to each other. Nobody.

Speaker 10 I mean, come on. How is that possible? You are a teenager, you just saw a flying saucer, and you're supposed to hold all that in and not tell a soul yeah no come on

Speaker 1 well the principal ends up saying that the incident wasn't that big of a deal anyway it was just a weather balloon which give me a break if it was really just a weather balloon why do the students have to treat it like a giant secret I have a teenager at home, so I know how this story goes.

Speaker 1 Like, whenever a bunch of teenagers get together, they happen to rebel sometimes, right? They are probably the last demographic to listen to specific instructions.

Speaker 1 So many of them are like, yeah, right. I am telling every single human I know.
Now, of course, these are the days long before social media, but word of mouth still gets around.

Speaker 1 I don't know exactly who tips off the press, but before the day is over, a bunch of journalists and reporters are gathering outside of Westall.

Speaker 1 So when everybody heads outside to leave for the day, the journalists approach the students and ask if anyone wants to talk about what they experienced.

Speaker 1 But the moment any witness steps in front of the camera, a teacher or the principal is right at their side. They warn everyone not to speak or give any kind of statement.

Speaker 1 When that doesn't work, school officials actually call the police. The officers escort all of the news crews off of the property.

Speaker 1 And once again, they warn the students and the staff not to say a word about what they've seen that day.

Speaker 10 After all that, Graham Simmons, that chemistry student who saw the UFO at the beginning of our story, gets a very odd assignment.

Speaker 10 He's a school captain, so he has extra responsibilities and trusts from the authorities, kind of like a class president in the U.S.

Speaker 10 Which is why Graham is told to patrol the hallways after school is over. If he sees anyone talking about what they saw, he's supposed to shut those conversations down.

Speaker 10 Except while Graham's walking through the empty hallways, he turns a corner and he sees an argument in progress. And it's not between students.

Speaker 10 It's between two men and Barbara Robbins. the chemistry teacher who took the photos of the flying saucer.

Speaker 10 One of the men is in a police uniform and the other's the headmaster of the school. And guess what they want? They want to confiscate her camera.
But Barbara is refusing. I mean, that is her property.

Speaker 10 Those are her photos. And she doesn't have to do anything she doesn't want to do.

Speaker 10 But things are getting heated. And while the argument hasn't turned physical yet, It seems like it's heading there.

Speaker 10 Which again seems like a huge overreaction if she just snapped a picture of a weather balloon, right?

Speaker 10 I don't know for sure if the men actually get Mrs. Robbins' camera away from her, but the fact that they're asking at all is pretty shocking and it is ridiculous.

Speaker 10 After that, the cover-up, y'all, it just gets more aggressive.

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Speaker 1 On April 6th, 1966, an unidentified flying object appears over Australia's Westall High School and is seen by anywhere from 100 to 200 witnesses.

Speaker 1 Afterwards, anonymous government officials swarm the school, questioning witnesses and pressuring them to stay quiet. But one faculty member isn't looking to play by the rules.

Speaker 1 His name is Andrew Greenwood and he teaches science. Now, I don't know exactly how old he is, but it's safe to assume he's fresh out of college because it's his very first year working as a teacher.

Speaker 1 He was lecturing to a room full of freshmen. when the flying saucer first appeared.
He didn't notice it on his own, but then a student ran into his room yelling about a UFO and looking very unsettled.

Speaker 1 In the moment, Andrew figured that they were imagining things or that it was some trick of the light. Still, he could see that the student was clearly very frightened.

Speaker 1 So perhaps in an effort to calm them down, Andrew went outside. He expected to say something like, see, it's just a plane or it's some kind of weird looking cloud, you know, nothing to worry about.

Speaker 1 Instead, Andrew saw exactly what the student was worried about, a flying metal disc about the size of a car.

Speaker 1 He just knew when he looked at it that it was not from this earth. This had to be an alien spaceship.

Speaker 10 And once the military and the strange man in suit showed up, Andrew was honest with them about what he experienced. Unlike his students, it's not easy to intimidate or silence Andrew.

Speaker 10 He cares, like he truly cares about the truth. He's not willing to play along with this cover-up.
So when they question him and try to convince him that he didn't see what he saw, Andrew pushes back.

Speaker 10 He tells the men in suits that they weren't there and they don't know what happened. And they're certainly not going to gaslight him into thinking it was a weather balloon or a trick of the light.

Speaker 10 And then the officials tell him to keep the story quiet. But again, Andrew isn't having it.
He ignores them.

Speaker 10 He actually contacts some reporters later on and gives a full interview with the local news. I mean, Andrew really wants to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Speaker 10 And he probably can't understand why all of the teachers are going along with the cover-up. And neither can his students.

Speaker 10 So, at some point after the incident, Andrew comes up with a plan with a few of them.

Speaker 10 For some time after the UFO sighting, the military had portions of the school grounds on lockdown, especially the area around the Grange, where the ship supposedly landed.

Speaker 10 Nobody's been allowed to get close to it since. Except the day of the sighting, Andrew and those students sneak around the guards and their fences and get on to the Grange.

Speaker 10 There,

Speaker 10 Andrew sees a round, like a massive round depression in the grass, like something has actually landed there.

Speaker 10 But that's not all they see. A university student named Kevin Hurley sees that the Grange is crawling with military personnel.

Speaker 10 And they're using Geiger counters, which basically means that they're testing in the area for radiation.

Speaker 1 About a week later though, Kevin and some of the students go back to the Grange. Presumably the military is gone by now, but the teens find that all of the grass has either been cut or burned.

Speaker 1 Like the military or someone completely destroyed every shred of evidence of the craft's landing.

Speaker 2 I mean, talk about a thorough cover-up.

Speaker 1 But the officials don't stop at getting rid of the evidence. Their next move is to go even further to intimidate the witnesses.

Speaker 1 Around that same time, Andrew is at home late one night when someone knocks on his door.

Speaker 1 Andrew's first thought is probably something like, who could be visiting me at this late hour?

Speaker 1 But when he answers the door, he sees two men waiting outside. He's never seen either of them before, but one is in an Air Force uniform.

Speaker 1 The other person is in civilian clothes, but I'm not sure if it's a dark suit like the men in black types from before.

Speaker 1 When Andrew asks them who they are, they don't give their names or their job titles. They just say that they work for the Australian government.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he invites them in or if they just keep talking right there in the doorway, but they have a conversation that's basically an exact repeat of his interrogation at the school.

Speaker 1 They ask him what he saw. Andrew, of course, answers honestly.
Then they argue, saying he didn't really see a flying saucer. He must be mistaken.
Except at this point, the conversation takes a turn.

Speaker 1 One of the men tells Andrew that of course he made a mistake and of course he's not trustworthy. Now get this.
These two men go even further and say that no one will believe his story.

Speaker 1 because he was drunk that day at school and just doesn't remember correctly.

Speaker 10 For the record, Andrew claims he doesn't drink when he's at work. I mean, that would be a fireable offense, right? That's just not something you would do.

Speaker 10 Especially, like we mentioned before, it's his very first year as a teacher and he knows that he needs to be on his absolute best behavior.

Speaker 10 So Andrew knows these government officials are trying to, they're trying to break him down. They're threatening him.

Speaker 10 The implication is that if he keeps talking about the UFO, they're going to spread false rumors about him. If people believe the gossip, he could lose his job, maybe even his entire career.

Speaker 10 And you know what? That is enough to finally scare Andrew into silence for nearly 50 years.

Speaker 10 It's decades before he gives any more press interviews or speaks about the sighting in public.

Speaker 1 But circling back to the immediate aftermath of the sighting, there are plenty of other people too scared to come forward.

Speaker 1 No one knows if they'll lose their career just for publicly admitting that they saw something that was unexplainable. The one person manages to uncover just a sliver of truth.

Speaker 1 And I wish I could tell you who he is and exactly what he knows, but I can't. His identity still has not been made public.
In UFO investigator communities and circles, he's known only as Mr. X.

Speaker 1 I do know that he's an Australian government employee and he works in a division at the time that was called the Department of Supply.

Speaker 1 They're in charge of making military equipment for the government. And supposedly, Mr.
X does engineering work for them involving airplanes and other aircraft.

Speaker 1 Well, a few days or weeks after the Westall incident, X's superiors order him to investigate the event. He spends a year learning everything that he can.

Speaker 1 He travels to the high school regularly to question the students and teachers who saw the craft. It's also possible that Mr.

Speaker 1 X investigates some other UFO sightings from around that time because get this,

Speaker 1 the Westall encounter wasn't an isolated incident.

Speaker 10 So just four days earlier on April 2nd, 1966, a man in the Melbourne area saw something strange hovering above his front yard.

Speaker 10 I don't know exactly where he lived in Melbourne, but it's safe to say it wasn't too far away.

Speaker 10 Turns out, he went outside and snapped a photo of the unidentified flying object and then sent those pictures to the local paper. I'll be honest.

Speaker 10 The images are really grainy and a little hard to see, but with that being said, I can definitely see that it is something that looks like a disc shaped with a dome on top and a flat bottom.

Speaker 10 It also looks shiny or reflective like it's made of metal.

Speaker 10 It definitely isn't an airplane or a hot air balloon like they're trying to get you to believe because there's no basket, there's no wings, there's no visible engines.

Speaker 10 But this isn't the last time something word happens in that exact area.

Speaker 10 Two days after that sighting on April 4th, a construction worker named Ron Sullivan is driving through a wooded area in the state of Victoria, which is where Melbourne is located.

Speaker 10 Again, I don't know how far it is from the school, but while driving, Ron saw lights in the trees up ahead of him.

Speaker 10 They weren't headlights or street lights, but they were more brilliant than anything he'd ever seen before. They weren't on the road and they were set back in the woods.

Speaker 10 In spite of all the brush and the branches, the light was bright enough that everything within a 10-foot radius was completely illuminated.

Speaker 10 And as Ron got closer to the source of light, he felt his car starting to drift toward it.

Speaker 10 And it's not clear to me if he was too distracted to stay on the road or the light was actually pulling him in like a magnet, because we have heard many stories, a flying saucer is near.

Speaker 10 There's this energy right that draws you closer to it the point is that suddenly he found himself driving into the forest he actually came dangerously close to hitting a tree but at the last second ron cranked the steering wheel and got back on the road understandably the near miss had him feeling very unsettled So, I mean, Ron's next move was to just get out of there as fast as he could.

Speaker 10 But then just two days later, on April 6, 1966, that same, well, I don't know if I want to say same, but that UFO is spotted over West Hall High.

Speaker 1 So basically, that would mean that there were three UFO sightings over the course of six days and all in the general vicinity. I mean, come on, there's no way that that could be a coincidence.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if Mr. X investigates all of them, but I do know that in 1967, Mr.
X gives his report to his boss and he never hears another word about that report again.

Speaker 1 The government never releases it to the public. They won't even acknowledge that Mr.
X's investigation existed. They're treating this incident like it's top secret.

Speaker 1 In fact, The contents of that report still haven't been released to this day. It's been almost 60 years and whatever secrets Mr.
X learned, they're apparently too explosive to discuss even now.

Speaker 10 But it seems Mr. X anticipated this exact reaction.
Before he turned in his report, he made a copy of it just for safekeeping because he says he's afraid.

Speaker 10 He thinks something might happen to him because he knows too much. So he tells his wife basically, hold on to this.
And if ever I get into some kind of mysterious accident, release it.

Speaker 10 But he also says that if he dies of natural causes, he wants his wife to destroy the file. It's too sensitive to leak for no reason, which definitely sounds kind of contradictory, right?

Speaker 10 But it does seem like it was his only insurance policy. And so Mr.
X does eventually pass away.

Speaker 10 I don't know the exact cause of his death, his age, or really anything about his passing, but I do know that apparently his wife doesn't think that his death was suspicious.

Speaker 10 But according to her son, who witnessed the whole thing, she follows his instruction to destroy the report.

Speaker 10 She takes it into the backyard and lights it on fire. All of his hard work just poof goes up in flames.
And to this day,

Speaker 10 nobody knows exactly what Mr. X learned about the Westall incident.
At least not anyone who doesn't have top secret clearance.

Speaker 10 The only record of his findings is in that original report. A report that to this day, officials say does not exist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, totally seems like a cover-up to me.

Speaker 1 But here's what makes this story different from other UFO accounts. The Australian government doesn't dismiss the Westall witnesses or their testimony forever.

Speaker 1 In fact, in 2014, which is 48 years after the incident, they publicly admit, Yeah,

Speaker 1 there was something in the sky that day. The people who saw it were totally telling the the truth.
I'm paraphrasing, of course.

Speaker 1 And they promised to share what they know about the Westall UFO incident once and for all.

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Speaker 1 In 2014, Australian officials make a shocking announcement. They're going to release all of the information they have on the 1966 Westall UFO incident.

Speaker 1 Then they publish a report that says the unidentified flying object was, dun dun dun, a balloon.

Speaker 1 So according to them, they are admitting it wasn't a weather balloon. It was an experimental military balloon.
It was loaded up with equipment that could test radiation levels in the atmosphere.

Speaker 1 just so they could collect important data for their top secret nuclear programs.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 10 The military released a ton of these balloons throughout the 1960s. They were launched in northwestern Victoria, about 350 miles away from Westall High School.

Speaker 10 But in April of 1966, one of them supposedly blew off course and ended up drifting all the way to the school grounds.

Speaker 10 Well, since it was part of a top secret government program after all, military officials didn't want any eyewitnesses coming forward.

Speaker 10 So allegedly, they sent all of those Air Force officers and men in suits to silence them because they needed to protect their military secrets. The TLDR is: yes, there was a UFO incident that day.

Speaker 10 And yes,

Speaker 10 100%,

Speaker 10 there was a government cover-up. But it all had nothing to do with aliens.

Speaker 1 I'm going to say what all of us are thinking right now. I know what my sister and I are thinking.

Speaker 2 This

Speaker 1 still sounds like a cover-up to me.

Speaker 1 I do not, not even for a second, buy this experimental balloon explanation.

Speaker 1 First of all, it's helpful to remember that most of the eyewitnesses described either a flying saucer or a cigar-shaped craft.

Speaker 1 And okay, you might be thinking maybe they were wrong, maybe they did see a balloon and mistook it for a flying saucer, but we're talking something like 100 or 200 people witnessing this and none of them thought that it looked like a balloon.

Speaker 1 I mean, how can that many witnesses be wrong? Plus, There's one alleged photo of the incident that's made its way to the press and online.

Speaker 1 It hasn't been confirmed as authentic and no one knows who actually took it. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt.

Speaker 1 But I've seen this photo and it clearly shows a disc covered in lights hovering high above the treetops.

Speaker 1 And those top secret test balloons, on the other hand, looked like ordinary hot air balloons with baskets and big white tops. They were also supposedly covered in bulky wires and tubes.

Speaker 1 So it's unlikely to think that this sleek saucer could actually be from that same experiment.

Speaker 1 And a ton of witnesses, including Andrew Greenwood, the science teacher, say they absolutely know what they saw. It was broad daylight and the skies were clear.

Speaker 1 and they would have known if it was something ordinary like a balloon. Balloons don't send a hundred or more high school students into a panic.

Speaker 1 They don't race off into the sky so fast that airplanes have a hard time keeping up with them like those five planes that were darting all after it for 20 minutes.

Speaker 1 And they don't radiate that much heat. In fact, Mr.
X's son has come forward to say his father didn't think it was a balloon either.

Speaker 10 This cover story might feel very similar to some listeners, and y'all might know where I'm going with this.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 10 right after the Roswell crash in 1947, officials also tried to claim that that wreckage was a weather balloon.

Speaker 10 Afterwards, they changed their story to say it was a balloon loaded with top-secret military equipment.

Speaker 10 The tech was supposed to monitor sound waves from nuclear devices Russia was testing at the time.

Speaker 10 Sounds to me like 19 years after Roswell, the Australian government took a page right out of the Americans UFO cover-up playbook. First, right, you pretend nothing happened.

Speaker 10 Then you say it's a top-secret experimental balloon, all in an attempt to convince people they didn't really see what they know they saw.

Speaker 10 But I want to be clear, even if there is a cover-up, which, okay, we know there is a cover-up. that that doesn't automatically mean the UFO was an alien ship.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 10 there are other vehicles that government higher-ups might wanna hide, like experimental military planes. Okay, this particular theory comes from Ross Coultard.

Speaker 10 He's a ufologist and he's been studying the Westall incident for years. Based on the information he's seen, he doesn't think the flying craft was an alien ship.
This is what he thinks.

Speaker 10 He thinks it was an American plane that was running tests in Australian airspace. Okay, I mean, the U.S.

Speaker 10 and Australia are allies, and it's not unusual for Americans to test their equipment in and around Melbourne.

Speaker 10 In the 1960s, in particular, the military was very focused on developing pilotless drones, and they ran a ton of test flights all over Australia.

Speaker 10 And it's possible that one of those drones may have drifted over West Dall High, touched down, and then taken off again.

Speaker 10 None of the students or teachers who spoke to the men in black specified that they were Americans, but those officials could have been working under orders from the US government.

Speaker 10 With that being said, most of the West Doll witnesses who saw the thing firsthand seemed to agree that they absolutely think it was an alien spaceship.

Speaker 1 And I also think it's worth mentioning, the Australian government has a pretty bad track record when it comes to UFO incidents.

Speaker 1 On this show, we've talked a lot about American officials silencing or intimidating witnesses, covering up evidence, spreading misinformation, that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 Well, Aussies are apparently guilty of it too. For decades, Australian officials have been investigating UFO reports.

Speaker 1 They don't always intimidate witnesses or threaten to blackmail them, but they're pretty quick to reject people's testimony.

Speaker 1 They've only ruled that about 3% of reports are due to quote-unquote unknown causes. The rest are just dismissed as a satellite or Venus or an airplane.

Speaker 2 I don't buy it.

Speaker 10 Okay, so the ufologist we just mentioned, Ross Coulthart, he believes the Australian authorities are covering up the UFO sightings on behalf of the United States.

Speaker 10 Or as another ufologist named Clark Watson puts it, this is a quote, Australia is subservient to America.

Speaker 10 I think we've just placed ourselves in a subservient position and been instructed this isn't a topic to talk about. There's two possible reasons for why they do that.

Speaker 10 Option one is that the Americans are running military tests. like we covered before and the australian government is hiding the evidence to protect the U.S.
military secrets.

Speaker 10 Option two, they're covering up visits from little green men. And it's a lot harder to come up with the motive for this theory.

Speaker 10 I mean, I'll admit, still, there is a long, and we're talking long history of American officials hiding UFO sightings. We know this for a fact.

Speaker 1 100% true. And while it seems like Australian officials are letting the Americans try to cover up the the truth, it's not exactly working.

Speaker 1 I mean, in the first four months of 2025 alone, there were five official UFO reports in Australia, which I know it may not sound like much, but that makes Australia the 13th most active country for UFO sightings in the entire world.

Speaker 1 And that's not counting all of the unverified and unofficial reports. You know, those rumors you see on TikTok or Instagram or that deep dive you go on on Reddit.

Speaker 1 Those, you know, never end up getting fully investigated. I mean, take what happened in early October 2024.
For a full week, people all across Australia's western coast saw strange lights in the sky.

Speaker 1 At least three people recorded it on video and shared the clips online. Clearly, witnesses are still coming forward to talk about what they've seen.

Speaker 1 We wouldn't even be able to make this episode if not for all of the eyewitnesses who've gone public over the years.

Speaker 10 That's right. And we have to give a huge thank you to all those people who speak up.
But I think it's safe to say there are a lot of people out there who believe in UFOs and are desperate.

Speaker 10 I mean, I'm talking desperate to find proof that they exist. not just in the United States or Australia, but everywhere.

Speaker 10 And the good news is that we live in the era of social media, camera phones, and instant communication. In the 1960s, it was possible to intimidate your witnesses into silence.

Speaker 10 But these days, a video or a photo can go viral and make it around the world before government officials have a chance to react or even respond.

Speaker 10 Which means the proof we are chasing may not be far.

Speaker 10 It could be gathering ever so quietly just out of sight, waiting for the moment the world is finally

Speaker 10 ready to see it.

Speaker 1 This is So Supernatural, an audio check original produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at SoSupernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com.

Speaker 1 Join Yvette and me next Friday for an all-new episode.

Speaker 1 So what do you think, Chuck?

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